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| Master Kai Ying Tung, ShanShui-TaiChi, 2012 |
When I started, Emilio Gonzalez was
usually the leader of two evening practice sessions during the week, and
exuberant Saturday morning sessions in the ballroom at 50 Oak Street, San
Francisco. Other senior students taught as well and there were often twenty of
us, working at different levels. Master Tung did not encourage competition,
telling us that the person who began tai chi first would always be ahead of the
one who had begun practice later.
At the beginning I strove to practice every day, often going
to the arboretum in San Francisco as soon as I woke to do the sets that I had
so far learned. I was thrilled with the poetic names for the movements, from
“white crane spreads its wings” to “two birds parting” and “cloud hands.” Many
of the movements were counter-intuitive, such as placing your weight on one leg
and turning on that weighted foot; keeping a “channel” between your feet for
stability; and the roundedness of every movement, during which one’s whole body
is “full,” pushing out in every direction.
Learning took a long time. Often as you worked to gain
mastery of one thing, you lost the previous thing! Only continued practice
allowed you to gather up all the pieces into one fluid set. For myself in
particular, tai chi helped with emotional problems, such as the fact that I
“over-identified” with others. In the grid in which we stood to do tai chi,
each person was related to his own source. “Energy comes up from the ground,
gets directed by the waist and expressed in the hands,” we were told.
I found that the intense physical efforts we put out, often
finding ourselves wringing wet at the end of class, grounded me in my
tumultuous emotional life. The early years of practicing tai chi was a time of
great opening for me, in which I understood myself better and achieved at least
some mastery over my intensity. Practice became the discipline which allowed me
to keep to the aspirations I had set for myself.
By the time I began tai chi practice, I already felt that
Taoism was the religion closest to the way I saw the world, particularly in the
sense that spirit and matter are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable.
John Blofeld’s charming writing, particularly in Taoism: The Road to
Immortality [1978], was my guide. I also read Deng Ming Dao’s romantic The Wandering Taoist [1986], which, though discredited as to its authenticity, described a
Taoist education. The meditation method I’ve used ever since, based on the
microcosmic orbit, I learned mostly from this book.
Tai chi itself cannot be learned from books, however. Only
with reputable teachers in long, earnest practice does one study tai chi. Over
the years, in the dynamic Kai Ying Tung Academy, I learned many sets, both fast
and slow, including weapon sets and two-person sets. After much intense
practice, my body was light, flexible and anxious for more! Though we all knew
the health benefits of full-body circulation, the way the sets stimulate the
energy or “chi” which flows through the meridians in the body, there was no way
to compare it to what one would be like without it!
Despite what I gained, I learned that you must give yourself
to the practice. People who tried to make it into something they thought it
should be did not succeed. It is, in a way, a method of learning not to have
intention, to experience “choiceless awareness.” I also found it impossible to
write about tai chi! Or to watch it if one is not a student! The fact that tai
chi is a primary experience is one of its gifts.
Though my practice is no longer as avid as it once was, it
is still sustaining. Involved in the lives and experiences of many fine
students and teachers, I have counted myself lucky to be part of a tai chi
community which points the way both in practice and in life. It is impossible
to come to the end of practice. There is always more.
