You can practice this all day as you move about. Feel free to concentrate on leg movement sometimes and then on arm movement at others.
When you feel ready or adventurous - do them together!
Swirls: What about swirls? Well for example, take a look at the yin yang diagram and follow the red dashed line upwards.
It is full yin, so if you trace this pattern out, you should be in full yin too (back weighted). At the top is full yang and again, you should be at full yang (front weighted). Continue following the line and at the center of the diagram, the line becomes solid. Follow it until you "end at the beginning". Now try it the opposite way and start by going up the right hand side.
This yin yang you see is just a two-dimensional object. Now just think about doing this in 3-dimensions. Many of the skills needed to play taichi are encompassed by traversing the diagram.
1 comment:
From a 12-year student of the art with a dilettante's exposure to anatomy/kinesiology: perhaps what I'm about to say is obvious to author Bob, who is interested in biophysics. But it may be useful to practitioners seeking to employ the 'circles' concept he presents.
Basic aspect of circles: they have a center -- think of how one traces a circle with a compass.
In the tai chi context, if we can feel where the center of a desired circle of movement is, we can create it infallibly and instantaneously (for example to perform Bob's proposed exercise.
The joints of the human skeleton (shoulder, hip socket among the most obvious, but there are hundreds) all serve as centers of full or partial circles traced by the more periperal end of the bone which is on the more peripheral side of the joint in question. Stated as a general principle in this way this is confusing and hard to understand -- but specific examples makes it crystal-clear:
In walking for example, at the simplest level, the hip joint is the center of a partial circle traced back and forth (forward and back) by the knee (the more peripheral end of the more peripheral of the two bones that meet at the hip joint.
2nd example: In a classic correctly-executed push, while not obvious to some but nevertheless true, the shoulder joint is the center of a circle made by the elbow (elbow being the more peripheral end of more peripheral of the two bones that meet at the shoulder joint).
Simple bottom line: if we learn where our joints are, feel them and keep them free, the circles emerge naturally and effortlessly.
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