Yin & Yang: Weight Shift Or “Love Energy”?

“When we practise T’ai Chi Chih faithfully, we will find that Love Energy is the fruit,”Justin Stone said in “The Essence of T’ai Chi Chih” in Spiritual Odyssey – Selected Writings: 1985-1997.) Wow, Justin, you used upper case letters here. Something must be pretty important.

Why does everyone feel so good at the end of a TCC class?” Do students merely feel good physically after moving, or has something called compassion been stirred up in their hearts?

Teaching students how to shift the weight correctly is challenging, but a good teacher knows how to help students learn this because shifting the weight correctly is one of the six principles Justin established for how to move in TCC practice.

I often observe that candidates at trainings who don’t shift their weight well or completely often do not sink completely on to the opposite leg before beginning their first weight shift. If one leg doesn’t bend while the other straightens, there is no real yinning and yanging. There is no (or very little) interplay of energy.

So what does this have to do with “Love Energy?” The concept of love infers that there is both subject and object, no? Love means an interplay or interaction of emotion/action, yes? Or is it possible to just be, without being subject or object? “We find that awareness is the root of T’ai Chi Chih,” Justin said in Spiritual Odyssey. So when we sit quietly in a semi-state of bliss after a practice, or when we are filled with contentment as we move, then is it our enhanced awareness that becomes the object or subject of love? Who is giver and who is receiver? I do not pretend to know the answers.

Justin also said (in Spiritual Odyssey) that TCC is “essentially inner-oriented.” To me this is equally true both in the body and in the self. In the body, I feel the weight shift from one leg to the other. I feel the abdomen and/or lower back open or close (or expand and contract). In love, I feel myself expand to reach out to others, and contract to protect myself. I feel myself walk forward in confidence, and then retreat in self-doubt. I feel myself accept change and death, then protest and retract into illusion.

TCC practice has taught me that I do not know how to love fully and completely. And it beckons me to stay on the path of awareness.