First In The Mind, Then In The Body

A saying I picked up in my years learning Taiji is this:

In a sense, Taiji is an application of meditation to movement and martial arts. (I say 'in a sense', since this is not any kind of precise definition of what Taiji is or what it is about.) Now mediation is the practice of re-programming your Mind and brain. And Taiji, seen as 'moving meditation', is an art that is all about reprogramming how you understand Mind, body, Awareness, and movement. Taiji is all about making these things deliberate, conscious, and putting them front and centre in your life. Then, with that in place, you have foundations on which to rebuild yourself as a better, more effective and healthier person.

So what does this saying 'First in the Mind, then in the body' mean? In short, it means that before performing any action, you have a deliberate Intention to perform that action. It is the opposite of unconscious habits and muscle memory. Often people train things so that they are automatic, since this allows them to do those things in the fastest and most efficient way. In the context of martial arts, from which Taiji derives, there is a problem: what is done quickly and automatically can happen before you have the chance to consciously inhibit. A skilled martial artist can read what an opponent does automatically, and can formulate ways to exploit this. Thus, the reverse approach is to make everything conscious and deliberate. This means that nothing happens without your conscious Mind's say-so. Now that latter one is an extreme, more of a point-at-infinity to aim at than something to be actually realised.

Now this idea ties in, intimately, with how I describe chi here: as the 'convergence and flow' effect that arises when Awareness and Intention are tightly integrated. To train this, we must:

1. First give our Mind and brain a clear picture of what we want to happen (the Intention);
2. Using whatever means we have to hand, show our Mind and brain examples of how to realise that Intention.

At first, it can be as simple as raising your arm level with your shoulder. If you do that once, nothing much happens. Do that a few hundred times, and your brain will learn the association between the Intention and how to realise it. At that point, you will start to feel the Intention pulling your body towards it. As I say, this is an effect that arises from tight integration of Intention and Awareness, not some kind of 'magic force' that your Mind is tapping into. (But it can easily seem like a 'magic force' that your Mind is tapping into, and considering it as such needn't get in the way of your practising and developing it.)

One thing a Taiji Form provides is a set of exercise in doing just this. Each posture is a shape to Intend your body to get into; between adjacent postures are transitions, which are paths along which you Intend your body to move, getting you from one posture to the next. Then within this are myriad exercises in paying attention to your body, to what you feel, to the condition of your muscles, and so on.

With time, we reach the point where the Intention alone is sufficient to cause our body to move into the Intended posture, and with partner practice this process can become robust against external perturbations, such as a push from somebody, or something else. Without this robustness, our practice is fragile, and easily disrupted (cf. Meditate In The Marketplace). From then, what happens In The Mind, automatically and efficiently entails In The Body.