Ride The Tiger, Make Like Elvis
I learned two awesome things in taiji this week. Wanna know what they are? Sure you do.
The first concerns “Ride the tiger”. Yeah, you used to think it was just a horrible phrasing of Ronnie James Dio’s, but no more. The main Taiji form, known to practitioners as “the 108″**, has three sections, and they all end with the same two moves: Ride the Tiger, and Return to the Mountain.
**Are you asking yourself why a study/art/style/somatic aesthetic that uses names like “Ride the Tiger”, “Repulse the Monkey”, “Lion Shakes Its Head” and “Fair Lady Weaves the Shuttles” for individual movements has names like “The 108″ (and “the 88″ and “sword form”) for its major forms? Because I am.
Anyway, Taiji is a lot like Breakfast of Champions, in that there isn’t a damn thing in it without at least one submerged meaning, but you’ll go crazy if you ever try to find them all. Some of them, however, you get lucky and your Sifu has managed to scrape them out of tradition for you, meaning that his sanity took the hit for yours. Yay! In this case, I won a whammy.
The Tiger, in Chinese mythology, represents the events, trials and lessons of life, seen as a whole. Like life, the tiger is big and fast and way too strong for you to control in any way. It can be beautiful and terrible, painful and playful, exhilarating and torturous. It can be good for you or bad for you, but one thing that can’t be denied is that it IS, every minute, like it or not. To accept the varied nature of life, the good with the bad, the gifts and the lessons, to literally “go with the flow” in the big-picture sense, is to “ride the Tiger”.
The Mountain, in the same symbol-system, represents the spiritual world, the world before and after that of material form. It’s too big to conceive; it disappears into the sky. We come down from the mountain when we’re born, figuratively speaking; we “Return to the mountain” when we die.
So basically, these two moves, which end both sections and the whole form, are a simple, direct, and beautiful metaphor for the right way to approach living and dying. Ride the tiger, and return to the mountain.
Gods I love this art.
Then we come to Hips & Shoulders. This is an interesting one, at least if you’re a nut for this stuff like I am. I read recently on a Taiji blog that it’s a “popular myth” about Taiji that one should move the hips and shoulders independently. In other words, the hips and shoulders should just line up. I ran this by my Sifu on Monday, and he had a very interesting answer, some of which was unfortunately visual so I can’t relate it here, but suffice to say that the independent motion of hips & shoulders is quite important to the form. It’s also, when you get a good hard look, absolutely beautiful, and a big part of why it looks so graceful when someone does the form properly.
Thing is, the hips lead the shoulders. (This is similar advice to another post I read about the elbows leading the hands - and yeah, both are a little hard to do at first.) So, in many moves, there’s a turn of the body, which you think is the waist turning the shoulders, but it’s actually the hips turning first, then the waist pulling the shoulders along behind. Same general idea as when a dancer spins, and leads with their head, only much more subtle.
It’s also hands-down one of the most mind-blowingly sensual movements I’ve ever seen the human body produce.
I’m not sure I can create it for your imagination, what it looks like when someone turns their body by leading with the hips, but for reference, I was standing in a room with three other people watching a 60-ish-year-old man do it and I still felt my hair blow back. Zow. It also looks amazingly powerful, perhaps because, or related to the fact that, the d’an t’ien (roughly speaking, the womb area) is considered the power center of the body in Chinese physiology. (The movement we’re discussing here also uses many oblique back and abdominal muscles which, from my experience with Pilates, I know are a big part of where the “power” in a movement comes from. For example, if you know how to use these muscles, you can lift about 3 times as much as someone who doesn’t - I’ve experienced that, too.)
On a previously-unrealized-related note, there’s also an exercise we do to get “warmed up”, Qi-wise, where you stand with your hips straight and turn your waist back and forth, letting your arms come back and forward, slapping your abdomen with one hand and lower back with the other with each turn. It really works.
It also makes you look just like the little flippy-drum from The Karate Kid.
And believe it or not, that’s not accidental either. (The drum came second to the motion, and it got to Okinawa through China.)
You know, I bet schizophrenics LOVE Taiji, or would if they got into the authentic stuff. You can develop a hell of an “everything means something!” complex just from attending a few classes-!
Before I go, I’d like to point out that if I had to sell my DVDs, my books, my blood, or whatever, in order to afford that \$50 a month for Taiji, I would totally do it. That said, though, Sifu always looks pleasantly surprised when I pay him, and I get the sense that he differentiates between “students” and “customers” and may not even mind if I couldn’t pay for a while. Which just goes to show, that if you really need it, the Universe buys it for you. ;)
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.