By Tu-Ky Lam
Yin and Yang theory is part of the Chinese philosophy, which permeates the everyday life of the Chinese people from arts, martial arts and other areas of culture. Yin signifies feminine—things that are soft and slow; while Yang signifies masculine—things that are strong and fast. Tension, heat, day, etc. are Yang while relaxation, cold, night, etc. are Yin. You may notice that things that are Yin are the opposite parts of things that are Yang. They oppose each other and yet they work with each other to form integral parts of a new complete entity, each depending on the other. Hence there is the saying, “Yin and Yang are the root of each other”.
Yin and Yang are everywhere in Taijiquan, in the Taiji form, push-hands, and sparring. Here we will see how this theory is applied.
When we practice Taijiquan, we have to do it gently and slowly. In other words, we have to be relaxed. Relaxation starts from our mind. If our mind is tense (wanting to fight or show off our internal strength, etc.), our body cannot be relaxed. So we must always remind us to use as little force as possible. A good way to relax is to make our hands move first and our torso and legs will follow. (If you move your waist first and hands later, you will tend to use force and so cannot relax.) Then we must make our muscles relaxed. If we are good at this, we will be able to feel that our muscles drop.
But our skeleton has to stay upright to hold our body (which contains some tension), otherwise we will collapse. How do we go about doing this? We have to sit properly on our legs and lift the top of our head up (I have mentioned this over one hundred times, but nobody listens). We will also have to stretch our joints to make our torso and arms longer. All this will create a little tension.
So we can see relaxation and tension exist at the same time in our body. However, we have to be relaxed most of the time during training. When we want to push or punch someone we still have to be relaxed, and we tense up or use force only at the point of contact (when our hand touches our opponent). Tension in this case lasts only a split second.
Why do we have to be relaxed most of the time? So that we can produce more force. If we are relaxed, we can make the strength of our body together with our body weight release to our opponent. We can push him further away or hit him harder. If we use force, which usually comes from our arms, our arms will be tied up by our force and so become stiff, and the force we produce is much (ten times?) weaker than if we are relaxed.
Many things that we do in our daily life, we have to be relaxed and then release our strength. For example, when we play basketball, volleyball, basketball and football, we have to be relaxed so that we can hit the ball hard when our hand or foot touches the ball. If we use force before we kick or throw the ball, it will not go far. We will be a crap footballer or basket player. When a dog comes out of a bath or a swim, it will gently shake its body to get rid of the water. This is relaxation and tension at work together.
What if we are relaxed but cannot produce stronger force? We have to practice zhan-zhuang, at least an hour a day. Without zhan-zhuang, we will have little internal strength no matter how hard we train on the routines.
If we practice Taijiquan gently and slowly without using force, we can usually feel our body is light, and sometimes empty. This shows that our training is on the right track—we are very relaxed.
If we have spent a lot of time dong zhan-zhuang, we can have another kind of feeling —heavy. This heaviness is an indication that we have internal strength through doing zhan-zhuang. If you can feel the lightness and heaviness at the same time it is great. Do not try to find the feeling of heaviness. Just do standing practice and be relaxed during form practice. It will come one day.
During zhan-zhuang, if we sit on our legs with our toes clinging on to the floor, we will feel that we are grounded and the lower part of our body is heavy. As we are relaxed, we also feel that our upper body is light. So we feel heavy and light at the same time.
In Taijiquan, if the upper part of our body is light and lower part heavy, it is good as we have a good base to operate on. Top heavy is no good as we can be toppled easily.
We have to always sit on our legs during training. If we do not sit properly on our legs, we will not be grounded and we will have no power. Our training will be a waste of time. When we sit more on one leg this leg is firmer and heavier than the other leg. If you lift your head top up the firmness will go up to your head. Then this side of your body (from the firm leg up to the top of your head) is substantial, and the other side is insubstantial.
The substantial side of your body will give you strong support, enabling you to absorb or redirect the incoming force, and retaliate quickly. When it cannot cope with the incoming force, it can be changed to insubstantial to let the incoming force go through. But the other side of our body has to be changed to substantial immediately to give our body support. This is not easy to achieve and requires a lot of practice.
Many students have a misconception that when they are pushed during push-hands they can turn their waist and let the incoming force go through. But they can never get the timing right. They either turn too early or too late, and end up getting thrown off balance easily. The right option is to make the part of the body that is pushed go very light and loose (insubstantial) so that our opponent can have nothing to push, and his push will go past us. In this case, it looks as though we turn our waist, but in fact we do not. Our waist is turned by our opponent and not by ourselves. (If you really want to turn, then you should not turn your waist too early, do it only when your opponent is pushing at this part of your body.)
Chen style Taijiquan is practiced with a slow and fast tempo, which makes it very interesting to practice and very beautiful to watch. When we move slowly and gently, we are trying to make our energy to circulate. When we move fast and strong, we release our power to punch or push someone away. This is compatible with the Taiji classics, which say, “When your opponent moves fast, you have to move fast as well. When your opponent moves slowly, you have to follow”.
When and how to move fast and when to move slowly is quite a challenge to students. Generally speaking, students all start with the first routine, which has a lot more gentle and slow moves than the second routine. So students should start doing every move gently and slowly, and later on learn how to do the few fast and strong moves in the first routine. The second routine, which has a lot of strong and fast movements, will strengthen the training of this aspect of Taijiquan, and should be learned much later.
We should spend a lot of time doing standing practice to increase our internal strength, which will help us better release power (strong and fast). With constant practicing the routines and zhan-zhuang, students will gradually develop their own rhythm and their own way of doing Taijiquan, which is distinguished from all other people.
Opening and closing refers to the movement of our body. When two parts of our body (arms, legs, torso, etc.) move away from each other, the movement is called opening. If they move closer to each, then it is closing. For example, in the last move of “Brush Knee”, where our hands move away from each other to the left and right, the movement is called opening. This is followed by both hands moving downwards towards each other in the first move of “First Closing,”, which is called closing. In “Push with Both Hands”, where we move our hands forwards to push (our hands move away from our torso), the movement is opening. The opening and closing of our hands need to be backed up by our torso and legs, otherwise our hands will not be strong enough.
Our torso will generally turn left and right to help our arms (hands) perform a task. When we turn left, the left side of our torso is open and the right side closed. The same applies to the right side of our torso.
Our legs will have to push the ground all the time to send “jing” (internal strength) up to our torso and hand. The general rule is when we turn left, our left leg gently pushes into the ground and the right leg pushes towards the left leg, and the same principle applies when we turn right. The opposite movements of our legs will easily send jing to our upper body.
How does the “open and closed” rule apply in our legs? Usually when we begin to turn, our legs (knees) are open. At the end of our move, our knees are closed. If your hips are loose enough, you will be able to feel that they open and close together with your knees.
Chen style Taiji movements are always round and circular. To achieve this, our movements will have to go in six directions: front, back, left, right, top and bottom. This task is not easy, but if we tackle two directions at a time, eventually we will get it right.
Top and bottom are the backbone of the other directions and so are the most important. We should get them right first. During our practice, we should always try to make two parts of our body move in those opposite directions. For example, we have to sit on our legs, our toes need to cling to floor and our head has to be lifted up. These opposite movements will give our body support and strength to perform other tasks.
When this rule is applied in the routines, we have to make one part of our body go up and the other go down. For example, in the last move of “Buddha's Warrior Attendant Pounds the Mortar”, we move our right knee up and raise our right fist to the height of our chin, our left hip should stay or sit down instead up going up. When our right fist comes down to “pound the mortar,”, we should not bend our left knee and make our left hip come down. In other words, we should sit firmly on our left leg, and move our right hand and right foot up and down. The firm left leg will give us strength to perform our task well.
In the last move of “White Crane Spreads its Wings,”, we sit firmly on our right legs, lift the top of our head up, and move our right hand up and left hand down.
This rule applies more to our arms than our legs. An easy way is to always make our elbows extend to both sides of our body. “Push with Both Hands”, “Protect the Head and Push the Mountain”, “Single Whip” and “White Crane Spreads its Wings” are a few examples.
When we cannot balance our elbows, we use our hands to compensate for it. For example, in “Lazy Tying Coat”, our right hand goes to the right while our left elbow goes to the left.
This is tricky as there are not many movements in the routines where one hand goes to the front and the other to the back as in “Step back and Whirl Arms” and “Step back and Press Elbow.”
In “Push with Both Hands” and “Protect the Head and Push the Mountain” where we move both hands out to push, the balance of front and back is achieved in our legs. Both our legs and knees move closer towards each to send our energy up our torso and hands. This movement also help us to stay rooted. We can balance our front and back with all other postures finishing with a “Front bow stance” in the same manner.
This article covers only the major areas of Yin and Yang in Taijiquan. Other areas can be reasoned along the same line.