Reflecting on Yang Chen Fu’s Ten Important Points of Tai Chi Chuan
Tai Chi Utah organized its foundation around Yang Chen Fu’s Early Form. Check out Yang Chen Fu’s words in Yang Family Secret Transmissions or in The Essence and Applications of Taijiquan to glimpse the source of the following reflections on the oral instructions from Yang Chen Fu.
1. Lighten Up!
Stop thinking, scheming, believing, strategizing so much. Stop it. Chen Fu’s bit about “the energy at the top of the head should be light and sensitive” recommends lightening up. So relax; lighten up. Your head is built with highly sophisticated sensory equipment. Too much thinking, scheming, believing, strategizing is like filtering, filtering, filtering all such sensory information. Enjoy sight, sound, smell, taste. Lighten up.
2. Hear Your Heart
Relax your chest and shoulders enough so that you can hear and feel your heart pulsing inside. Let this sensation expand, slowly, throughout your body. Allow your heart, pulsing, to guide your movements, your decisions, your mind. Listen.
3. Soften Your Belly, Your Breathing
Open your belly, especially that bit right between the breastbone and the navel—the solar plexus—expand while you inhale, contract while you exhale. This is for relaxation.
4. Find Your Root
Learn to sink into your heels. Really, sink into the front of your heel. Then learn to rest on one leg. Then learn to lift the other leg. You can “distinguish full [weight] and empty [no weight]” now. This is the beginning.
5. Hang Your Shoulders & Elbows
Your shoulders hang from your head & neck, your elbows hang from your shoulders. From your head and spine they hang, by your trapezium musculature and a variety of tensile structures. When the shoulders & elbows hang, they can be driven by the lower muscles (like latissimus dorsi) and thereby develop great power.
6. Use Tensile Strength, Not Compressive Strength
The architecture of your body is continuous tensile membranes wrapping discontinuous compressive members…i.e. your bones, the compressive members, are wrapped in fascia—all physiological structures are wrapped in this—that provide tensile strength. Explore this concept to flex and develop a mature idea about strength.
7. Coordinate Your Upper & Lower Body
Move them together, move them separately. Sense deeply. At first, Tai Chi Chuan instructors teach you to move as one whole unit. (Many teachers end their teachings with whole-moving. When you’re ready, move on from that.) We eventually begin to explore waving motions, power is driven by the legs, churned in the waist, and slung out the hands.
Coordinating upper and lower
8. Discover the Inner and Outer Layers of Your Body
Stand Still. Breathe. Feel, deep down, into the layers of your body.
9. Continuity Doesn’t Exist, But Strive For It
Searching and searching for continuity helps us create it, but, like dream fragments, the more unified we become, the more we discover the whirling chaos mumbling around the smooth edge of awareness.
10. Go Slow To Go Fast
Taught in Wilderness Medicine courses, throughout the US, this concept mirrors Yang Chen Fu’s concept “seek stillness in movement.” It suggests that going slow lets us get to all the important parts of our task, never needing to retrace one’s actions. This concept is embedded in the warrior’s mind. Under the effects of adrenaline or other kinds of duress, time shifts, it slows. When we practice slowly, we prepare for smooth continuity that will allow us to achieve impressive speed and power without the hindrance of regret, forethought, or hindsight, nor with the barriers presented in ideas, beliefs, and ego structures. Deep, whole stillness is immense.
