Push hands is all about listening. When we talk about listening, we mean listen to all of your partner-his plan, his muscles, his weight, his aura, his focus (1-3).
Push hands allows participants to learn, listen and feel the intent of each other. In this example, the player in white feels her partner's presence (1), searches for a weakness (2) and finds an opening (3).
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Having lived push hands for many years (teaching it across the globe, competing in it on world stages and playing it in my daily life with all levels of artists, at all degrees of challenge, and in myriad forums) I begin to wonder ... what is push hands? I was grateful to learn that there were countless replies to my query; if I asked a thousand sources I got 1,001 answers. It seems everyone has an answer, and everyone believes there is a promised answer-the truth. Here is my wording of that promise. Take it as a way to play push hands if you prefer not to think of it as The Answer.
Avi Schneier, a Brooklyn taijiquan teacher, once (helpfully and humorously) said, "Push hands is when you push with your hands!" Of course, that doesn't fully describe the myriad things we've seen flowering under that moniker. Push hands (or tui shou) has been practiced as a familiar patterned exercise; a drag race start; a super soft, swirly, smiley affair; an intense encounter between passionate opponents; a worrisome live blade drama; and a bloody NHB smackdown. I've seen it manifest in the form of sweaty clinchers squaring off in a ring, single-legged partners with interweaving feet jockeying for a win, a multi-person circle bubbling with excitement and a rapid intertwining of locks and counters amid occasional strikes all coming from a bridge. What they all have in common, and should, are three internal elements of insight.
To be considered push hands, any practice needs to incorporate during each session, and hopefully during every moment of each session, these 3 Decrees.
Listen
There are four points of attention for your listening.
Listen to your partner. This generally means connection. No loss of contact. Ting jing (listening energy/skill) includes not only his structure, but his intention, his heart, his breath. Is he tightening his tissues such that he will no longer be able to present his best tajiquan?
Listen to yourself. Are you beginning to assume something? Are your lungs laboring? Did your connective-tissue system welcome his force or contract? What did it feel like to get that good neutralization working? Are you falling back on poor habits?
Listen to the relationship. The "we" born of "you" and "he." This is not just the adding together of what you've heard of he and you. What newness has sprung? Is there a rhythm of dialogue between you? Has a new mood developed from your interaction? Have you forged an unspoken agreement? If we listen to the us, and through meditation practices we've gotten to know ourselves, whatever of us is not known as me is likely him. If we continue listening to ourselves, we may notice how we have changed due to something in the space in which we play.
Listen to your environment. Is the floor slick from sweat beneath his feet? Are onlookers encouraging, however subtly, the two of you to push in a way you are not inclined to play? Are there breakables in the intended path on which you intend to fling him?
The most important part of listening is to remember to always be listening. Push hands is a full duplex exchange. Unlike a walkie-talkie in which you may only either listen or speak at any given time, push hands requires that each party can both speak and listen at every moment. A telephone call. A dialogue. If we think of any action as speaking, it is easy to see how we so easily slip into walkie-talkie mode.
"I am going to try slant flying here because he is open," we may say to ourselves. So we try it, and then listen for a reaction. This is a failure to keep pushing hands. By acting sequentially-first we had something to say (slant flying), and then we listened for the response-we've created a moment of not listening. In that moment we've provided an opportunity for our partner to exploit us. Instead, practice listening while saying something. When that becomes easy, practice listening while saying something exclamatory like a fajing.
When we talk about listening, we mean listen to all of your partner-his plan, his muscles, his weight, his aura, his focus. And listen with more than your ears. Use your intuition, your tan tien, your mind, even the tiniest hairs on the back of your hands.
Learn
My teacher, Don Ethan Miller, once began a special workshop with an invocation and followed it with a very simple breathing follow-along. We could feel everyone in the room awaiting the moment that the teaching would begin. Happy, but with our minds directed toward the promises of the day ahead. Two breaths in to what appeared to be a longer exercise a wide grin crossed his face and he said, "Has everyone already learned at least a hundred things? I have."
This was less a lesson than a sharing of his experience. For many in the room, it served as a stark reminder or a newfound teaching. Always be learning, and in that teaching find many lessons. If you do not learn-at every opportunity, in every moment-and learn much, you refuse the lessons offered or found. Part of listening is listening for the lesson. If you listen at every moment and listen for lessons, you may discover 10,000 lessons await your acceptance!
Remember, taijiquan is a path, not a destination. And we are on it to discover the pathway. Listen for it, learn it.
Fun
Tui shou is not a practice merely for those locked in an ivory tower, intently focused, listening and learning at every turn. It is a game, a sport, an adventure of freedom. Freeing us. Not freeing us to learn or listen, rather freeing us because we've listened and learned. Taijiquan exists in this moment, and no other. Work is how we remember the moment, return to the moment, find the moment. But fun is, itself, the moment.
Whether in a competition for your first national championship, diligently trying to pass on wisdom to a newbie, desperately searching for a way to overcome the Sumo-size player across from you, or taking in every word of your teacher's never-ending lecture on the merits of Taoist alchemy-always have fun. If it seems inappropriate at the time (you'll know because you are listening) smile inside. If you are intellectually harnessing a perfect nugget of truth (because you are learning) laugh inside.
These 3 Decrees of Non-Separation should help us all recognize push hands in an overheard argument, in a sculptor's reworking of her materials, in the collaborative efforts of a screenwriter and his director, and in your mind urging an old habit out of your body. You will feel it in the gentle, insistent pressings of your massage therapist's palms-surely seeking a safe path. If you, like me, now see push hands in any interaction-in which a goal is reached without force, by finding its Way-this may serve as a reminder of what may go missing from your own practice.
If the reminder seems unnecessary, may it serve as a call to deepen the levels to which, the frequency with which and the direction in which we listen, learn and have fun.
Tui shou is not a practice merely for those locked in an ivory tower, intently focused, listening and learning at every turn. It is a game, a sport, an adventure of freedom (1-3).
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Stephe Watson last wrote about tai chi in the June '06 issue.
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