Rediscovering Taijiquan

My journey in martial arts began twenty years ago. I have studied Taijiquan and other internal arts for the past ten years now. The past three of those years have been spent almost exclusively on Yiquan, only practicing Taijiquan a few times a week. Yiquan offers a sense of freedom that I find hard to resist. With Yiquan, we don’t worry about forms, techniques, or rules of any kind. In the years leading up to my introduction to Fong Ha and his Integral Chuan practice of combining Taijiquan, Yiquan, Qigong, and Tai Chi Ruler, I had studied simplified Taijiquan, Baguazhang, Xingyiquan and various forms of qigong. I was overloaded with forms, rules, and techniques. Yiquan brought me back to the root of internal martial arts practice.

I recently moved Washington State. As an East Asian Medicine Practitioner, I am always looking for ways to share my ways with the community. I began teaching Taijiquan at the local YMCA. I wanted to teach Yiquan or qigong, but those forms are much less popular than Taiji. This proved to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. I have always loved Taijiquan and was happy to jump back into it after such a break. I was pleasantly surprised at how my Taiji had still improved, despite the years away from it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, Fong Ha has brilliantly explained that the essence of all the arts is basically the same and that it really doesn’t matter how we train as long as we understand the root. Getting back to my Taijiquan really showed this to me. I can remember the form becoming stifling. I sometimes find myself asking many of the same questions the founder of Yiquan, Wang Xiangzhai, asked. I asked questions like, “Why do a kick here…why is single whip like this?” This is a natural part of the process. We outgrow our understanding of the form. We may feel, as I did, that we have outgrown the form itself, but this is not always true. It is our understanding that has become stifling, not the form.

This has been a wonderfully liberating lesson for me and has taken my Taijiquan practice to a whole new level. The form feels more alive to me than ever before and I am finding all sorts of nuances of expression that were hidden from me by the limitations of my own understanding. I think I’m coming to understand why Ha Sifu calls his art Integral Chuan and why it really doesn’t matter how we practice the basic principles of central equilibrium, listening, and finding our own way. We can learn these principles in Taijiquan or Tae Kwon Do, but the real lesson is in practicing them every day in all that we do and to keep ourselves free to roam from form to form, method to method, without losing the root of it all.