Working The Tan T’ien

The full significance of Antonia’s recent Santa Barbara T’ai Chi Chih retreat only revealed itself when I taught my own class the following week. During the retreat, she invited us repeatedly to drop right into our tan t’ien. Every answer to every question she posed was tan t’ien.

Before that my teaching emphasized form and weight shift, allowing the heel to raise, turning the waist, straightening the back leg, keeping hands at heart level, suspending the head from a string of pearls and myriad other details. All important, but they never allowed my students or me to get to the core of the matter, that wellspring of all movement, the tan t’ien.

It was like tackling a large block of stone with a tiny hammer and chisel. Yes, small pieces came loose, but we didn’t get to the deep, unfathomable core. Antonia had us moving the whole block, starting from the tan t’ien and sinking down, allowing all the rest to follow.

We were invited to bring our awareness to the area two inches below the navel, allowing it to sink down, lower, settle, release, relax, move with a softening of the knees. Thinking originates in the mind and immediately sets up a duality, opposites, the mind at one end and the tan t’ien at the other. Awareness places us in the tan t’ien and allows us to experience the whole.

First and foremost, we need to become aware of the tan t’ien. Become the tan t’ien itself and allow it to move, sink down. When we are the tan t’ien and allow awareness to lead, everything moves.

At the end of my first class back, after an hour of starting each move with reminders to be aware of the tan t’ien, a student asked, “Why the tan t’ien? Why not place our attention in our head?”

That’s exactly what we do all day long. It’s not wrong; our very survival depends upon it. We wait for a traffic light to change because our head tells us to. If we don’t, our head reminds us, we could die or be injured. The mind also is the source of all that triggers our joy and suffering. Because of our suffering, our yearning, our sense of being unfulfilled, however, we seek out practices such as TCC.

This practice starts with the conscious effort to become more aware. When we allow that awareness to flower, and let the tan t’ien lead, we begin to experience what’s beyond the computerized, compartmentalized mind that fills so much of our day and life.