![]() ![]() Ignore clever gymnastic feats and yards of verbal waffle. Take no notice of how famous their name is, how old they are, how many students they have, what titles they go by, how many books they've had published or what comments have been posted about them by adoring fans or critics. Study clips on YouTube: HD or blurry black and white, "grandmasters" or "never-even-heard-ofs". Both of the above depend on being able to have even the vaguest idea of what "It" is in the first place, otherwise you won't know whether your teacher has "It" or not. Don't just copy their movements, follow their instructions and try to intellectually figure it all out move as they move, feel as they feel, remembering that "It" is not so much a "doing" as a "being".ģ. You can learn a lot from other teachers (if you are lucky), including good structure and some of the main principles, and it's possible that, with the right foundation, you might then make the intuitive leap that allows you to experience "It" for yourself, but if you really want to go all the way, it's probably more useful to have a teacher who has "It" so that you can see "It" and sense "It" on a regular basis and, with the right attitude on your part, start to notice and absorb "It" like a process of osmosis.Ģ. So, if you can't buy "It", steal "It", read about "It" or have "It" genetically or ceremonially bequeathed upon you, how do you get "It"?ġ. "It" isn't something that those who "talk the talk" in published works and costly seminars have ever necessarily experienced for themselves, so a library of learned texts isn't going to help that much, and neither are workshops on distant continents, visits to ancient temples and so forth. ![]() ![]() If a grandmaster has "It", there's no guarantee that his or her sons or daughters will have it too, which makes family trees and lineages a bit irrelevant if you are looking for the real thing rather than something that will look good on your CV. Sadly, "It" is one of the hardest things to put into words, and if you showed it to a thousand students for half a lifetime, only a handful would ever see what you were showing them, so it's incredibly difficult to teach to others. When someone has "It" you can sense it, when you have "It" yourself you never lose it, and if you could bottle "It" and pass it onto others in a fizzy drink, you'd make a fortune. So what is "It"? "It" is that rare quality which you occasionally find among internal martial artists. There's an old saying in the Internal Martial Arts: It doesn't matter who your teacher is or what your lineage is, if you haven't got "It". If a martial artist has "IT", you tend to know about it.Īnother answer is that "IT" matters a great deal, because without it, your Tai Chi doesn't work terribly well as an effective method of self-protection.ĭiscovering "It" - That springy, jingy thingy We could just call it "IT" for want of a better word. Using Chinese words isn't essential if you can think of a suitable name for it in your own language. One answer is that it doesn't matter at all, but only in as much as it doesn't matter what you call it. You can of course, pay a few thousand quid for someone's inner door teaching in an attempt to discover this stuff but then what you receive may be about as reliable as the stuff you get from books, (ie. You may hear different explanations about what jing or jin might be though few books give you much information, those that do may give you mis-information and a recent search of Wikipedia came up with nothing at all. Once you begin to learn about Tai Chi Chuan as a fighting art you will hear the word "jing" mentioned in many different contexts. Many people see Tai Chi as a slow, graceful dance-like exercise and wonder how it could possibly be effective as a martial art - until they feel the power generated by these seemingly "soft" movements or try to attack someone only to find themselves flung off at a tangent or becoming more intimately-acquainted with the floor. ![]()
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