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Learning T’ai Chi is just as much art as doing T’ai chi. Instead of waiting for T’ai Chi to come to them, many students want to suck the life out of T’ai chi too quickly.
— Ralph A. Johnson, from T’ai Chi, Dec. 1999.

I just read an article, “Using T’ai Chi in Everyday Life,” and it reminded me of something I said, I believe in this column, some time ago: you can learn all of the postures of t’ai chi in about a year’s time. After that you can begin to learn t’ai chi. After a couple of years of that you can begin to see everything you don’t know.

Last week my teacher was talking about opening up our hips; a very important and difficult thing to do. And yet, it should be easy. For example, curl your hand up into a fist. Now, put your mind in that fist and think “relax.” The fingers release their tension and the fist uncurls. Now do that same thing with your hip. Can you even get your mind inside the hip? Can you feel the joint, let alone the individual muscles there? Probably not.

And yet it is your body just as your fist is. Why isn’t it as easy? Mostly, I suspect, because we don’t think about our hips in those terms. (Or our elbows, shoulders, knees, ankles, etc.) In fact, as a beginning t’ai chi student I couldn’t think in those terms. Now that I am starting my fifth year of study I can begin to put my mind into those various places and learn to control the minute parts of my body.

Today was a prime example. I had a very bad headache at work today. So bad I left early. (It was just shy of migraine status, which meant that I could still drive.) The pain caused the muscles at the back of my skull to tense up. This pulled on my jaw (at the joint), my shoulders and up around my ears. By putting my mind in the back of my skull (a bit redundant, but I think you know what I mean), I was able to release that tension. In so doing I could feel my shoulders drop, a rather large hunk of meat we have all experienced. I could then feel the finer muscles relax and the tension left my jaw, allowing it to relax and slide back to its normal position. Finally I could feel the extremely fine muscles and the skin on the back of my head, up towards the top and behind my ears relax.

The headache in that area subsided greatly. (The extreme pain in my eyes continued, however.) I had to keep coming back to this as the headache wasn’t gone — if I wasn’t careful the muscles would tense right back up again — but I at least had some control. After a nap, the rest of the headache finally dissipated.