“You can never do physical activity without physical activity. Taiji skill cannot be attained by reading books or talking about it. Thinking about it is only 5% of the practice.”
Taiji is physical
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes. It changes the tissue in a certain way.
Most people, i believe, are just in their minds and not really focused on their body. Taiji establishes the mind connection to the physical reality. So one facette of the Dao is a physical representation on/in the body, as i would put it.
Recently, i showed some “Taiji” to a guy. I grabbed his left forearm with my right hand and we were “fighting” a bit in that way. I hold him with my hand and sticked out the index finger and pointed
to his left shoulder. It was a bit, that i tried to to aim and move my finger towards his shoulder while firmly grapping him with the other fingers and thumb. When i did it this way, he could not move his arm anymore and it was like i caught his whole body into a lock. I have to train this again for validity, but there was something that appeared to work very good. I let loose and gained controle a few times.
In the end, i could almost throw him down ( i didn´t) and had the feeling, that i could break his arm. To talk about feelings is difficult, but nevertheless, i had the feeling of a very heavy hand while doing it. I powered a little bit up and he reacted painfully ( he is a mason, so not a really weak person).
Afterwords he thanked me impressed for this “Taiji” demonstration.
The point for me was, that i had gained controle of the opponents body or center just with one hand. This was an amazing thing to experience and i hope to be able to reproduce that everytime. Only very little effort was needed and the reaction on the opponents body was huge and i believe, that he didn´t realize, that i had caught his body with just a grab.
Thank you Master Chen for teaching your Taiji. Great school.