The Tai Chi students in the workshop were able to grunt and groan and tremble as they apply to Grand Master Chen Xiao Wang, she was waiting to see. Tense muscles fatigue. A few moments later during a break, a student comment that Grand Master Chen Tai Chi every difficulty.
If you never attended a workshop by a member of the Chen family, you understand why the comment would be made. Students, the postures, while the teacher goes around the room, adjusting each student individually. When he returns to you, your legs were shaking from exhaustion often, and when he brings you into the correct position, you can simply collapse on the floor.
This is one reason why I get angry when I run ads that promise, see “Easy Tai Chi.” Those who have studied real champion, you can say that there is absolutely no such thing. Fake tai chi would be easy. The type of Tai Chi for Health “meditation in motion” would be easy. Tai Chi would be easy for seniors.
True Tai Chi is a powerful martial art. It is very difficult and requires years of practice, begin to see even with a good body mechanics. No pain, no gain. That’s a phrase you do not hear the “easy tai chi” classes.
So if the comments on the workshop, how difficult it is Tai Chi has been made, Grandmaster Chen smiled and said: “. If it were easy, all the masters,” He should know. He is the direct descendant of the creator of Tai Chi, Chen Wang Ting.
Historians dismiss the old folk tale about a monk to create Tai Chi, after fighting two insects. Historians can trace only tai chi 350 years, the retired soldier in the Chen village in Henan province, China. Many decades later, the family had a servant named Yang Chen Luchan family where she learned the art after he showed skill, and when he left the Chen village, he was told he could not teach Chen Tai Chi, Yang style, which he created .
Generations later, Chen Xiao Wang tries to get the original quality of this powerful martial art. He told reporters that he feels the pressure of a well educated generation masters. It is his honor and the burden “standard bearer” for the Chen family art in the 19th Generation.
The goal of Title Master is a mental illness in America. Open the phone book of an American city, look at the advertising in the martial arts part of the yellow pages, and there are more masters than you can shake a wand.
I do not think anyone bubble, but real mastery of the martial arts more than most of these people have suffered. It also requires knowledge that most of these people. Almost every American to become a master of Tai Chi demands would be taken by those who are considered masters in China to ridicule.
Some years ago I was in Chicago for two or three days, and I heard from a Tai Chi school in the city. A woman may have been in the thirties and forties came up to me, dressed in a tai chi uniforms. She introduced herself as a “master” something-or-other, and I immediately left the building. Anyone who imagines that such a masterpiece is certainly not a masterpiece.
In America, we expect to see the results immediately. We want instant gratification. We have a “take now, pay later” culture, not willing to sacrifice and wait for the payout.
In martial arts, which in many schools across the country to the next belt promotion in three months, whether you are ready or has not performed. You sell your membership to their “Black Belt Club” and make sure that you get a black belt. For the next promotion, you need to know a few techniques and perhaps some form. The quality is discussed. I have been studying in these schools at times during my 36 years in the martial arts.
Some of these schools are raking in a lot of money.
If I am studying Chen Tai Chi, Yang style, which I had studied for more than a decade, began. I was pretty good. At least I thought I did. I have 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 a student of Chen Xiao Wang) and I began to see how difficult it is to a good Tai Chi is to reach body mechanics. Every month I studied a 4-hour drive to and from classes – sometimes twice a week – and lessons in humility. Week after week, month after month, corrected my bad habits. Each time, took the long drive home how much I had to learn, but I was knowing that I turned up quality of learning Tai Chi.
There is too much for some people. I have students come to me after studying various martial arts. Most of them lived. You can see how difficult it is, and they can not adapt to the fact that these years, not months or weeks.
Quality of Tai Chi is a long-term commitment. If your experience in martial arts, a strip-mall karate or taekwondo school and a stamp is only a matter of maintaining muscle tone and balance – and turning the hip into the punch – it’s a rude awakening when confronted the internal arts. Foundation of the ground path, balm, turning the Dan Tien (NOT the hips) and other physical skills are so strange that most students run screaming back to the schools that you feel that you really achieved by much less.
And are “cultivating chi” if you help one of the many thousands of Tai Chi classes in America, or classes for “health and meditation,” it is more surprising to learn just how difficult the real Tai Chi.
When I was confronted with this, I realized that while I was small steps forward, and even a little progress every few months, I would be something of real value, resulting in a higher quality than I had ever learned how to learn. The choice was very simple. It was either something very hard to learn and address quality or remain in a bubble.
Even now, in my late fifties, I still have to 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 passed these principles, students sometimes think I’m too picky. It is true that I congratulate not like their body mechanics are bad. If I wanted to run one McDojo everyone would be encouraged and everyone’s ego was flattered, but that’s not the way to quality. Ask any football or basketball coach, and they are to me on that one back. Good Tai Chi is no different than any other sport that requires skill.
I hope you make a vow to pursue the quality no matter how long it takes. It may feel good to strap on a black belt you have only two years to earn, and you can think a lot of friends and family, you have to do a deadly weapon. It could develop a good feeling of having a “slight” tai chi class and your Chi supernatural forces of thinking, but if you look in the mirror, do not fool yourself. The art of Tai Chi requires highly developed physical skills and has nothing to do with metaphysical theories.
And if tai chi were easy, everyone would be a master.