I really enjoyed teaching last nights' Breakthrough class. I run a Kickboxing class before hand and it turned out to be a pretty sweaty, full on affair. Full of agressive contact drills and a big chunk of sparring. The problem was that I had always intended to teach bits and pieces from Tai Chi in the second class. Well that wasn't the problem in fact, the issue was that all of the guys who do the Kickboxing stay on to get the Breakthrough training. Maximum respect to them all, I've always felt that training intensely for longer than an hour is too much to ask of anyone. In this scenario we were going from straight forward "Grunt and Punt" which is the best way to train Kickboxing, (also I feel that term should get as much recognition as "Ground and Pound" or "Sprawl and Brawl") to the seemingly more gentle and extremely more complex art of Tai Chi. So I had to bridge the gap. What better way to do it than with combat application from the very first few steps of a Tai Chi form? It is often the misconception that Tai Chi is gentle, within it lies some of the greatest and most painful techniques you could find. I was so happy to see the guys embrace the "take something hard and pointy and put it somewhere fragile" (minds out of the gutter folks combat is a serious business). That is as thorough as all combat needs to get really, which shows that Kickboxing and Tai Chi are as equally complex as they are simple! I don't know how many times I said "There is always something you can hit" and was really pleased to see the students apply that and come up with some awesome stuff! We moved on to some basic pushing hands, which in my opinion is actually the most advanced type of combat. So we moved in a beautiful cycle that took us from the Yang that is "Grunt and Punt" to the Yin of "Yield and Shield" (oh thats good!!)
I think that we should approach all our training from this holistic point of view. We cannot neglect any part of our training. At first it may seem that you find no use for something, or that it's not your thing. That's fine but I think that if we look deeper we see that the same principles often apply. It is easy to think about it in martial terms, a fight is still a fight no matter how you approach it. We will find victory in that fight by applying much of the same strategic measures. We will benefit from having hardened our bodies and from sharpening our minds. We will fight to our opponents weakness and not to our strengths. We will exploit a moment and through constant good practice we will find those moments more frequently. It's a great game to be in! I think that todays' meditation should be based around the principles of pushing hands "it is wise to yield but never be weak"
