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Kungfu Tai

There is No Such Thing as Easy Tai Chi

The students in the tai chi workshop were standing in a posture, groaning and grunting and shaking as they waited for Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang to look at them. Leg muscles strained from fatigue. A few moments later during a break, a student commented to Grandmaster Chen that tai chi is every difficult.

If you’ve ever attended a workshop by a member of the Chen family, you understand why the comment would be made. Students hold postures while the instructor walks around the room, correcting each student individually. By the time he gets to you, your legs are often shaking with fatigue, and if he puts you into the correct posture, you may just collapse to the floor.

This is one of the reasons I get annoyed when I see ads that promise “easy tai chi.” Those who have studied with the true masters can tell you that there is absolutely no such thing. Fake tai chi might be easy. The health type of tai chi for “moving meditation” might be easy. Tai Chi for senior citizens might be easy.

Real tai chi is a powerful martial art. It is very difficult and takes years of practice to even begin to see proper body mechanics. No pain, no gain. That’s a phrase you don’t hear in the “easy tai chi” classes.

So when the comment was made at the workshop about how difficult tai chi is, Grandmaster Chen smiled and said, “If it was easy, everyone be master.” He should know. He’s the direct descendant of the creator of tai chi, Chen Wangting.

Historians dismiss the old folk tales about a monk creating tai chi after seeing two insects fighting. Historians can only trace tai chi back 350 years, to this retired warrior in the Chen Village in Henan Province, China. Many decades later, the Chen family had a servant named Yang luChan who they taught the family art after he showed skill, and when he left the Chen Village he was told he could not teach Chen tai chi so he created Yang style.

Generations later, Chen Xiaowang tries to maintain the original quality of this powerful martial art. He has also told reporters that he feels the pressure of the generations to be a highly skilled master. It is his honor and burden to be the “standard-bearer” for the Chen family art in the 19th generation.

The pursuit of the title of master is a mental disease in America. Open the phone book of any American city, look at the ads in the martial arts section of the yellow pages, and there are more masters than you can shake a staff at.

I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but real mastery of the martial arts requires more than most of these people have had to endure. It also requires skill that most of these people don’t have. Almost any American who claims to be a master of tai chi would be laughed at by the people who are considered to be masters in China.

Several years ago I was in Chicago for two or three days and I stopped by a tai chi school in the city. A woman who may have been in her thirties or forties walked up to me, dressed in a tai chi uniform. She introduced herself as “Master” something-or-other and I immediately left the building. Anyone who introduces themselves as a master is definitely not a master.

In America, we expect to see results immediately. We want instant gratification. We’re a “take it now, pay for it later” culture, not willing to sacrifice and wait for the payoff.

In the martial arts, that has resulted in a lot of schools around the country that promote you to the next belt in three months whether you’re ready or not. They sell you memberships to their “Black Belt Club” and guarantee that you’ll receive a black belt. For the next promotion you might need to know a few extra techniques and maybe a form. The quality is negotiable. I’ve studied in these schools at times during my 36 years in martial arts.

Some of these schools are raking in a lot of money.

When I began studying Chen tai chi, I had already studied Yang style for over a decade. I was pretty good. At least, I thought I was. I won a gold medal in the 1990 AAU National Kung-Fu Championships in Tai Chi Forms competition.

Then, in 1998, I met Jim and Angela Criscimagna (now disciples of Chen Xiaowang) and I began seeing how difficult it is to achieve good tai chi body mechanics. Month after month I studied, drove a 4-hour round trip to go to classes — sometimes twice a week — and learned weekly lessons in humility. Week after week, month after month, my bad habits were corrected. Each time, the long drive home was spent realizing just how much I had to learn, and yet I was psyched by the knowledge that I was learning high quality tai chi.

It’s too much for some people. I’ve had students come to me after studying other styles of martial arts. Most of them don’t last long. They see how difficult it is, and they can’t adjust to the fact that THIS TAKES YEARS, not months or weeks.

Quality tai chi is a long-term commitment. When your experience in martial arts is in a strip-mall karate or taekwondo school and a punch is simply a matter of maintaining muscle tension and balance — and twisting the hips into the punch — it’s a rude awakening when you’re faced with the internal arts. Establishing ground path, maintaining peng, rotating the dan t’ien (NOT the hips) and other physical skills are so foreign that most students run screaming back to the schools that make you feel like you’ve really achieved by accomplishing far less.

And when you’re in one of the many thousands of tai chi classes in America that help you “cultivate chi” or the classes for “health and meditation,” it’s even more surprising to learn the difficulty of real tai chi.

When I was faced with this, I realized that as long as I could take baby steps forward and see even a little progress every few months, I would be learning something of real value, something of a higher quality than I had ever learned. The choice was very easy. It was either tackle something very difficult and learn quality or continue to live in a bubble.

Even now, in my late Fifties, I still work very hard to develop my skills in tai chi, hsing-i and bagua. I know the principles and I know what I’m trying to achieve. As I pass these principles on, students sometimes think I’m too picky. It’s true that I don’t congratulate them when their body mechanics are bad. If I wanted to run a McDojo everyone would be promoted and everyone’s ego would be stroked, but that’s not the path to quality. Ask any football or basketball coach and they’ll back me up on that one. Good tai chi is no different from any other sport that requires skill.

I hope you’ll make a vow to yourself to pursue quality no matter how long it takes. It may feel good to strap on a black belt that took you only two years to earn, and you might fool a lot of friends and family into thinking that you’re a deadly weapon. It might feel good to be in an “easy” tai chi class and think that you’re developing supernatural chi powers, but when you look in the mirror, don’t fool yourself. The art of Tai Chi requires highly developed physical skill and has nothing to do with metaphysical theories.

And if tai chi was easy, everyone would be a master.

About the Author

Ken Gullette has studied and practiced martial arts for 36 years and is an acclaimed teacher who emphasizes the correct body mechanics for powerful internal arts. He has students worldwide who study through his online internal arts school and he also teaches through a very informative blog.

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