Why T’ai Chi Chih

Student of Fredora Powell

When I mentioned to a lady at a Christmas party that I am taking T’ai Chi Chih, she dismissed it with the comment, “We did it for awhile, but it was boring.”

“The more slowly you do it,” I wanted to tell her, “the more interesting it becomes.” Instead, I just let the words sit in my mouth and thought about them, and it occurred to me that the very quality that had made T’ai Chi Chih boring to the lady and her husband is the one that gives T’ai Chi Chih its cachet: T’ai Chi Chih requires you to change your way of perceiving balance, space, and movement, in order to let its beauty unfold.

I had come to T’ai Chi Chih as an outsider, curious as to what substance there was to this strange dance I had seen in clips on television. Clearly, there was something to it, given the obvious concentration on the faces of the participants, but I wasn’t sure that the whole thing wasn’t just an affectation of some kind.

In the first five or six sessions, I quickly recognized the physical benefits of T’ai Chi Chih, for it focuses effort precisely on the muscles one needs for strong posture, standing, and walking – the muscles around the knees, thighs, and calves and feet – and also on the upper back muscles in the area where the arms and shoulders meet, which, I had already learned in yoga, are so crucial to healthy posture.

But to appreciate the strength aspect of T’ai Chi Chih is to appreciate only its surface layer. When I “got” this part, I immediately responded by trying to do the movements too athletically. This made me feel awkward. My legs got overly tired. I lost my balance repeatedly. It felt “stupid” to do T’ai Chi Chih. Though one never realizes it at the time, these are the very ways that T’ai Chi Chih humbles you, when you do not yet understand it.

Have you ever driven a car on a long trip and found that you feel more confident and in control of the car afterward than you usually feel? All you’ve done is to point the car in a straight line for hours, but, somehow, you are now more sensitive to small shifts in the car’s direction. You can make finer corrections sooner than normal. You have a “feel” for the car’s movement.

With T’ai Chi Chih, you can achieve that same kind of “feel” for your own body. Like the car, it’s carrying you and all of your parts in the direction you have chosen. Like the car, it cannot steer straight on its own. It has a tendency to trend away from the straight and narrow, but not only to the left or to the right: Your body has far more complexity about it, and many more directions into which various parts can lean and diverge from balance and conformity to your will-of-the-moment. T’ai Chi Chih teaches your body convergence. It brings all the parts together around a gyroscopic center. It brings you down, into a truer contact with the ground, where your body’s own gravity can gather around you into one whole.

The magic of the mechanical gyroscope is that it always brings itself back to upright, no matter how you might toss it around. It somehow “knows” what “up” and “down” are, and what “balance” is. T’ai Chi Chih teaches you to find the gyroscope within you. With slow-motion movements involving the shifting of weight from one leg to the other, you learn to get the “feel” of how the various parts of your underpinnings relate to one another in each different instance. You get to “know” where balance is now, and now, and now, as you continuously change position, so slowly that you achieve the same fine corrections with shifting your body weight that you did when driving the car down the highway.

In equally slow motion, you synchronize choreographed movements of your hands and arms to the shifting of your weight. The positioning of arms versus legs has a certain clockwork precision. But there the similarity to clocks begins and ends, for, in T’ai Chi Chih, the movements of all of your parts are organically continuous, all connected to the gyroscopic center: As with the planets in relationship to the sun, your hands and arms neither lead nor follow, but are cosmically connected to your center by an invisible bond. In achieving this bond, an extraordinary softness, or relaxation, of hands and arms is required, in order to allow them to meld with the whole.

When you start getting all of this right, a good silence envelops you, altering the quality of the surrounding space. The silence is such that, as you move your arms and legs, it can feel as though your very bones are wrapped in cotton batting. The progress of your movements is so slow that you become aware of, sometimes fascinated by, the more finite nuances in the movements of your hands … so slow that each action, no matter how smoothly and evenly performed, seems to have multiple parts. Your sense of your body’s weight changes, or goes away entirely.

These are the gifts of T’ai Chi Chih – inner balance, inner quiet.