Chen Style Taijiquan and Hunyuan Taiji email: practicalmethod@qq.com

Doing taiji is like riding on a closed loop train. One can talk about the beautiful sceneries one read from a brochure, but those are just imaginations. One must get on the train to really experience it. There are multiple trains running on the same track. Different people may get on the different trains from different stations. What people may see and experience from their respective trains may be different. People who started the journey first on the same train would know what the later passengers talk about. People who started the ride at the same time but from different stations may think they are not riding on the same track when they exchange information. There may be people who never look outside of the window and still wonder what the views are like. The longer you ride on the train, the more track you have covered, and you will be able to share more common experience with more people, yet you don’t really know where you are heading and what you may see the next day. On the train, you may go back and forth among different cabins, but overall the train is always moving forward. It is not easy to stay on the train, there is limited space on the train, and there are many things you cannot do. It gets lonely sometimes, but it helps when you have friends taking the ride with you. People, who can’t bear with it, may get off and never get back on. There are people who may take a break at one station, and then continue on the journey. If you are able to treat the train as your home, you will always come back to it.  One may ask how to get on the train in the first place, one will need to follow the instructions of the people who are already on the train. People will give you instructions to one of the stations. At the beginning you won’t really know if the instructions are correct as you have no experience, and so you may as well try. Some people may doubt the instructions as the instructions make no sense to them or they can’t see the road or how the road may lead to the station. The worst thing you can do is to modify the instructions yourself, and those are the people who get lost and will never find the station. Whether one has the fortune to receive the correct instructions is a matter of fate. Hope you enjoy your scenery.

On to the next yilu…