Reflecting on Yang Chen Fu’s 10 Important Points of T’ai-chi Chuan
Who is Yang Chen Fu?
Yang Chen Fu, grandson of Yang Style founder Yang Lu-chan, receives great credit for popularizing the Supreme-Ultimate Fist Form. He emphasized health components of the system. Check out Yang Chen Fu’s oral instructions in Yang Family Secret Transmissions (aff link) or in The Essence and Applications of Taijiquan (aff link) to glimpse the source of the following 10 reflections.
1. Lighten Up!
Stop thinking, scheming, believing, strategizing so much. Stop it. Chen Fu’s bit about “the energy at the top of the head should be light and sensitive” recommends lightening up. So relax; lighten up. Your head is built with highly sophisticated sensory equipment. Too much thinking, scheming, believing, and strategizing is a way of filtering, filtering, filtering, and filtering all your sensory information. Instead: enjoy sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Lighten up.
2. Hear Your Heart
Relax your chest and shoulders enough so that you can hear and feel your heart pulsing inside. Let this sensation expand, slowly, throughout your body. Allow your heart, pulsing, to guide your movements, your decisions, and your mind. Listen.
3. Find Your Waist
Tense and relax your belly; wring your air out and allow it back it. Coordinate with your lower back… flex (while exhaling) and extend (with an easy inhale) your lower back. Then add a twist. Twist your waist while exhaling; find center with inhale. While the goal is to “Relax The Waist” tensing it is part of discovering it: so put a little tension on the exhale and then go deeper into relaxing while inhaling. Once you feel your waist winding and unwinding then relax more. Allow your breath to release and return naturally.
4. Find Your Roots
Learn to sink into your heels. Actually, sink into the front of your heel. While sinking, grip the floor a little bit with your toes (or squeeze the Earth or the insides of your shoes). Then learn to rest on one leg, gripping and sinking. Then learn to lift the other leg. You can “distinguish full [weight] and empty [no weight]” now. This simple physical sensation is the beginning. Get this (it’s critical) and then look for energies.
5. Hang Your Shoulders & Elbows
Your shoulders hang from your head & neck, your elbows hang from your shoulders. From your head and spine they hang, by your trapezium and rhomboid musculature and attending tensile structures. When the shoulders & elbows hang, they can be driven by the lower muscles (like latissimus dorsi) and thereby develop great power.
6. Use Tensile Strength, Not Compressive Strength
The architecture of your body uses tensegrity: continuous tensile membranes wrapping discontinuous compressive members… in other words: your bones, the discontinuous compressive members, are wrapped in fascia—continuous, interwoven web-like membranes (each and every physiological structure is wrapped in this). Fascia provides tensile strength. Explore this concept to flex and develop a mature idea about strength.
7. Coordinate Your Upper & Lower Body
Move them together, and then move them separately. At first, T’ai-chi Chüan instructors teach you to move as one whole unit, do that well. (Some teachers end their teachings with whole-body-moving.) When you’re ready, move on. Begin exploring waving motions: power driven by the feet & legs, churned in the waist, and slung out the hands. Like a wave rolling from toes to fingers…
8. Discover the Inner and Outer Layers of Your Body
Stand Still. Breathe. Feel, deep down, into the layers of your body.
9. Continuity Doesn’t Exist, But Strive For It
Searching and searching for continuity helps us create it, but, like dream fragments, the more unified we become, the more we discover the whirling chaos mumbling around the smooth edge of awareness.
10. Go Slow To Go Fast
Going slow lets us get to all the important parts of our task, never needing to retrace one’s actions. This concept is embedded in the warrior’s mind. Under the effects of adrenaline or other kinds of duress, time shifts: it slows. When we practice slowly, we prepare for smooth continuity that allow impressive speed and power without the hindrance of regret, forethought, or hindsight and without the barriers of ideas, beliefs, and ego structures.
Deep, whole stillness is immense.