Beginning Tai Chi, and what Chi feels like

I’ve written elsewhere in some detail about the reasons I came to get involved with Tai Chi, but to summarise, I was advised to take it up by a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine as a means of augmenting a course of acupuncture. That was some eighteen months ago, now, and though my ailment has largely cleared up, and I no longer bother with the acupuncture, I still  practice Tai Chi most days.

When I began learning, I followed the movements, as demonstrated by my instructor, in a fairly mechanical way. It reminded me a little of dancing – the music was different, the rhythms somewhat unfamiliar but you were still moving your arms and your legs in a set sequence.  I always felt very relaxed after an hour of practice – even if all I’d been doing was repeating the same few moves over and over again. It was interesting that I’d spent the whole of the nineteen eighties and most of the nineties learning ball-room dancing. My lessons had often left me sweating and breathless, but never infused with a warm sense of well being, as Tai Chi did – so there had to be more to it than the normal side effects of vigorous exercise.

Apart from that  warm sense of well being, however, I felt nothing “internally”, while the musings of other practitioners I read had led me to expects all sorts of feelings, and I began to wonder if talk of Chi and meridians and energy flow was just a load of clap-trap. Looking back, I’d missed the point, and that warm sense of well being is exactly what Chi can sometimes feel like.  But eventually, as I continued with the practice, I began to feel other things that finally convinced me there was something very unusual going on.

I was learning a set of eleven movements, part of a fairly modern frame, devised by Liming Yue of the Manchester Tai Chi Centre. Among other practices like Silk Reeling and Push Hands, this “eleven form” took me six months to complete. Other courses were offered in various Qigong techniques, and I now have a working knowledge of The Ba Dua Yin, the Yi Jing Ching, and the Shibashi. My personal favourite is the Ba Dua Yin, and I practice this most days.

After the first six months of practice, I began to develop an unusual  sensation in my arms, hands and fingers. It was noticeable particularly during the Qigong practice, but also during the Tai Chi form when my posture happened to fall into the correct alignment. The feeling was like a “tension” or a slight “numbness” that ran from the fingertips, along the arms, and across the shoulders – literally like an unbroken string being drawn firm. Stand normally, move normally, and it isn’t there. Drop into a Tai Chi position, and move through a little of the form, or do some Qigong, and there it is again. Being largely ignorant of human anatomy, on account of my squeamishness, I wondered at first if this “tension” was simply a tightening of the tendons that connect the bones to the muscles, but there are many discrete tendons between the fingertips and the shoulder – definitely not one long one, as the sensation seemed to suggest.

The daily practice of Qigong also began to yield its own range of odd sensations – one in particular, for a while, was an apparent rushing of “something” up my spine, to the top of my head, resulting in a mild dizziness – when all I’d done was move my arms in a particular way.

Perhaps the most obvious weirdness though was simply the heat the practice of both Tai Chi and Qigong generates. Before beginning Tai Chi, I had imagined the practice halls would all be like little pieces of old China, transplanted into an English setting. However, the truth is somewhat different and the practice halls are more likely to be pretty run down, and typically English – musty old church halls, rotten scout huts and the gutted remains of old mills. Where I currently practice, there’s no heating, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem. The winters here are usually pretty mild but cold snaps can take easily take temperatures down to around minus 5C. On such occasions, the temperature in the practise hall barely hovers above freezing, so we generally begin our warm-ups wearing fleece tops and cardigans. After twenty minutes though, the  fleece has been discarded and my tee shirt is usually beginning to show damp patches. Had I been doing something obviously energetic, this would not have surprised me, but in those twenty minutes we might only have done a gentle ten minute warm up routine, no more energetic than walking really, followed by a qigong posture that involves nothing more energetic than standing still. You can imagine then that in the summer, when temperatures get up above 20C, I usually have need of a towel. At first I was sure there was something wrong with me, that I was incredibly unfit, or ill,  but I’ve been assured time and again that I’m simply doing it right and that this is just another example of what Chi feels like.

Inevitably the practice of Tai Chi begins to have effects that are felt in daily life. Apart from the generally relaxed outlook, and the physical sensations, I suddenly found I could beat my son at arm-wrestling – all right, I know this is childish – but  I found if I could bring my thoughts to focus upon my arm, and swell what few paltry muscles I’ve got with my mind, so to speak, I could make it immovable and my son would tire himself out straining against it. Also, on one occasion, when trying to uproot a tree, frankly to the point of exhaustion, I was able to finally snap off the last of its tenacious roots, by winding up the energy from my dan tien and applying a martial release. It worked and the combined effects of the energy, and my surprise, had me falling over backwards, bringing down on top of me a shower of uprooted tree and soil. I’m not making any claims for super normal strength here – indeed I suspect this energy is nothing more than the normal condition of the human body, but applied in a way that’s more efficient than normal. It’s curious though, and  I find that, after only eighteen months of practise, I now believe that much of what has been written about Tai Chi and Qigong, isn’t quite as preposterous as it sounds.