*YEARS AGO I USED TO DO A LOT OF FENCING* as in with a bendy sward. The instructor used to do a one-a-month session where novices would come in and thrash the living daylights out of each other for an hour - it was NOT fencing, it was hitting each other with a pointy stick, but out of every class of 30, 5 people would go on to learn it as a sport / hobby Thats how I started, everyone has to start a new thing in an accessible way.
My teacher also emphasised awareness that everyone could come away from class with different understanding simply based on where you were standing in the room. Every senior instructor seemed to have a different flavour of the same system. It was always my job to try to make sense and integrate any teaching with my own current level of understanding.
Thank you for articulating this view. I have had the same experience with differences in teachers and senior instructors. And unraveling the differences was a strong developmental stimulus-especially in my having to sort out what seemed to be or what were contradictions.
An interesting question for sure, it certainly has changed in some ways since I first started in 1985 in London, and my current teacher would say the same from when he started in the early 70s in Penang. Even in those times there were many different approaches to learning and training Tai Chi. As a Tai Chi TH-camr, Gene Burnett, once said: Tai Chi is a broad church that can accommodate many practices. There are certainly people who still teach and/or practise "old school/traditional" Tai Chi, although perhaps there are not so many compared to the more "modern" styles. There are also a variety of "mixed forms" or "newly invented forms" out there. Some might say that is "dilution", whereas others might see it as "evolution" - for good or for bad. Dr. Chi Chiang Tao once said that even in the 70s, the Tai Chi being practised wasn't even 5% of what it used to be. His generation from either China, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Malaysia - would have had very different experiences of Tai Chi to what most, if not all of us have had in our Western culture since then. I guess we all have different perspectives on this, depending on our own experiences and how we've been taught over the years. Tai Chi, in very broad terms, seems to be loosely considered as either a health focused practice or a martial arts focused practice (even those two terms are open to vast interpretation). There are also the more esoteric or spiritual interpretations - with more emphasis on meditation. Then there are the more sports orientated/competition based versions. In an interview with Ken Van Sickle, he suggested that perhaps the ideal way to evolve would be to develop all the different aspects of the art - not just to focus on one at the exclusion of the others. However, for many of us Tai Chi is a personal journey that we somehow fell into initially by chance or destiny, which then takes us along a road of self-discovery through our experience with various teachers and schools through solo training, partner training, teaching some others maybe and learning from others too, whenever we have the opportunity to do so.
It's a bit like what I call 'menu' Chinese medicine which seems to focus on symptoms rather than causes. Acupuncture formulae/herbal remedies for.. followed by a long list of common ailments. It may be a way of attracting western patients into the real, wholistic, traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis of illness and imbalance, and educating them once they are 'in the door.'
*YEARS AGO I USED TO DO A LOT OF FENCING* as in with a bendy sward. The instructor used to do a one-a-month session where novices would come in and thrash the living daylights out of each other for an hour - it was NOT fencing, it was hitting each other with a pointy stick, but out of every class of 30, 5 people would go on to learn it as a sport / hobby
Thats how I started, everyone has to start a new thing in an accessible way.
Thank you so much for posting this relevant anecdote and cogent conclusion.
🙏🙏🙏
My teacher also emphasised awareness that everyone could come away from class with different understanding simply based on where you were standing in the room. Every senior instructor seemed to have a different flavour of the same system. It was always my job to try to make sense and integrate any teaching with my own current level of understanding.
Thank you for articulating this view. I have had the same experience with differences in teachers and senior instructors. And unraveling the differences was a strong developmental stimulus-especially in my having to sort out what seemed to be or what were contradictions.
An interesting question for sure, it certainly has changed in some ways since I first started in 1985 in London, and my current teacher would say the same from when he started in the early 70s in Penang. Even in those times there were many different approaches to learning and training Tai Chi. As a Tai Chi TH-camr, Gene Burnett, once said: Tai Chi is a broad church that can accommodate many practices.
There are certainly people who still teach and/or practise "old school/traditional" Tai Chi, although perhaps there are not so many compared to the more "modern" styles. There are also a variety of "mixed forms" or "newly invented forms" out there. Some might say that is "dilution", whereas others might see it as "evolution" - for good or for bad.
Dr. Chi Chiang Tao once said that even in the 70s, the Tai Chi being practised wasn't even 5% of what it used to be. His generation from either China, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Malaysia - would have had very different experiences of Tai Chi to what most, if not all of us have had in our Western culture since then. I guess we all have different perspectives on this, depending on our own experiences and how we've been taught over the years.
Tai Chi, in very broad terms, seems to be loosely considered as either a health focused practice or a martial arts focused practice (even those two terms are open to vast interpretation). There are also the more esoteric or spiritual interpretations - with more emphasis on meditation. Then there are the more sports orientated/competition based versions. In an interview with Ken Van Sickle, he suggested that perhaps the ideal way to evolve would be to develop all the different aspects of the art - not just to focus on one at the exclusion of the others. However, for many of us Tai Chi is a personal journey that we somehow fell into initially by chance or destiny, which then takes us along a road of self-discovery through our experience with various teachers and schools through solo training, partner training, teaching some others maybe and learning from others too, whenever we have the opportunity to do so.
It's a bit like what I call 'menu' Chinese medicine which seems to focus on symptoms rather than causes. Acupuncture formulae/herbal remedies for.. followed by a long list of common ailments. It may be a way of attracting western patients into the real, wholistic, traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis of illness and imbalance, and educating them once they are 'in the door.'
Yes tai chi has gotten off to a slow start in America due to the vast # of poor (inexperienced) teachers….