Finding Qi

I described in What is Qi?' what I understand the word qi to mean, as opposed to common understandings of the word. It is not a mystical magic fairy force that new age hippies move with their mind. Rather it is the effect of convergence exhibited by systems whose output affects its input. The example I often give is that of a self balancing scooter, and how there appears to be a kind of magic magnetic force keeping it upright. From the point of view of the rider when riding it, it may as well be a 'magic magnetic uprighting' force provided it behaves consistently. But from an engineering perspective, that 'magic uprighting' force is the result of the feedback from the microcontroller out through the motors and back through the accelerometer (who's job is to detect which direction gravity is pulling in, so as to determine which way is down and hence which way is up). With humans we replace the motor control with nerves and muscles, the accelerometer with our array of physical senses, and the microcontroller by the brain. But, viewed abstractly, the convergence phenomena resulting from feedback is the same. It is this abstract feedback driven convergence that I understand the concept of qi to really be about. My personal Taiji practice changed drastically once I saw things this way.

So the qi effect—and I think it is best understood as an effect, and an abstract one at that—results from the integration of input and output via some intelligent controller which generates output according to the difference between its state as determined from its input, and some internal target we call an Intention. Thus it makes sense to focus not on the qi effect itself, but on the input, target, and output. The input is what we call Awareness, and is practised deliberately both in Taiji and in mindfulness related meditation practices. Then the output is generated by comparing what our Awareness tells us about how or where we are, and our Intention of how or where we wish to be, and generating output that hopefully moves us from where we are to where we wish to be, possibly along a path we wish ourselves to move along. (It should be understood that 'where we are', 'where we wish to be', 'path', and 'move' should be interpreted in a very general and abstract way.)

A Simple Exercise

(I must emphasise that qi here means as I explain it above, which may not coincide with what someone else understands that word to mean.) So to find qi, consider this exercise:

• First stand with your arms by your side.
• If necessary raise your arms level with your shoulders to get a good picture and feeling of what it is like in this position.
• Then return to standing.
• Now, have a strong wish or visualisation of yourself with your arms in that raised position and, keeping this in mind, raise your arms.
• Repeat a few dozen times, paying strong deliberate attention to the visualisation. Gradually your brain will be conditioned to associate the Intention of raised arms with the path you take to get there.
• After much practice, this conditioning results in you feeling a force pulling you from where you are to where you Intend.

With years of diligent practice, this conditioning will strengthen to the point that Intention alone suffices for you brain to converge your body towards an intended posture. Then gentle partner practice enables you to train this convergence to be robust against small external perturbations, and then gradually more and more robust against stronger perturbations. You will aim to minimise use of force, and so mind and body will learn to flow and roll around obstacles, to maximise relaxation and use of balance and the natural structure of the body, and that's pretty much it for the first decade or two of practice.

Why Practise Form?

To quote Bruce Lee, as I do often: I fear not the man who as practised a thousand kicks, I fear the man who has practised one kick a thousand times. The more different types of exercises and forms we try to learn, for a given amount of practice time, the more thinly we spread our practice between them. It is better to have a small set of exercises that cover what is necessary and practise those few exercises thoroughly. Then what is learned in those few exercises can the be taken and explored and applied elsewhere.

It is like a musician studying a piece. It can take weeks or months to learn a piece of music sufficient that one can begin studying the particular techniques one wishes to learn. For example Chopin's Black Key étude, may take months to learn (as a piece it is beyond me at my current standard of playing the piano). Until it is reasonably well learned, we aren't ready to actually study what the piece is there to teach. It is the same with forms: it can take months to learn the choreography of a form accurately enough for it to be beneficial as an object of study. Only when we don't have to think about the choreography are we free to actually study Taiji through it.

So think of a Form as a study piece through which one is intended to study Taiji. Doing the Form isn't Taiji. The Form itself isn't Taiji either. Rather the Form is an exercise designed to teach and train Taiji. One can do Taiji without doing the Form; and one can do the Form without doing Taiji. One can execute the choreography of the Form in a very beautiful and graceful way, and perhaps gain a lot through doing so, and please others too, but yet without doing Taiji. Taiji is primarily about training the Mind and integrating it with the body. It's just that the Form is the most recognisable thing that people who genuinely train Taiji do. Being the most visible aspect of the art, it is often confused with it. And with that confusion, the beautiful core of the art becomes lost to the winds of what I call degeneracy.

Getting Back To Qi

To summarise, what matters is to develop Awareness and Intention. Do that well, and the qi will sort itself out. Don't do that well, and it won't. The concept of qi is just a mental abstraction to help one understand the process by which we train our Mind in Taiji. The trouble with it, especially as transmitted to the west, given its very abstract nature and the lack of means available to ancient martial arts to transmit abstract ideas accurately. Form gives us a set of postures which can be utilised to train Intention and Awareness. Fixed-pattern push-hands exercises then take things further, so that we are no longer spatially isolated from others, but are actively interacting with them.

As for abstract ideas, this is something that modern mathematics gives us. Equipped with a grounding in pure mathematics and abstraction as it arises there, one is better equipped to recognise abstraction and understand issues related to it. But trying to explain things which are sort-of-real and sort-of-imaginary yet not-totally-real and not-totally-imaginary-either is a hard thing to do even to university mathematics students.