Learning Tai Chi On Your Own at Home
One of the funny scenes from the 1984 film Karate Kid I, happened the morning after Daniel was beaten up at the beach by Johnny Lawrence and the Cobra Kai bunch after Daniel tried to make a move on Johnny's girl. OK, ex-girl. Early the next morning, Daniel is practicing karate kicks with great intensity from a book on the table. Mr. Miyagi arrives and walks into Daniel’s apartment to fix a broken faucet that Daniel's mom asked to have fixed. The following short conversation ensues:
MR. MIYAGI. Oh, Karate?
DANIEL. Yeah.
MR. MIYAGI. Oh, very good. Learn from book?
DANIEL. Yeah, and a few classes at the Y in Newark where I lived.
MR. MIYAGI. Oh.
(from Karate Kid. Directed by John G. Avildsen, Columbia Pictures, 1984.)
Mr. Miyagi's tone and expression say it all: you can't learn Karate from a book, and we watch along realizing how silly it is. And maybe that is correct. After all, Daniel wants to learn Karate so he can fight those tough and troublesome Cobra Kai boys who have only but begun to cause him grief. If nothing else, he is going to need someone to lay and take punches and kicks, so of course, learning alone from a book is not going to quite cut it. If he were going to learn judo or aikido, he would surely need someone to flip over. If he were going to learn kung fu. . . well, have you ever seen a kung fu movie where the star was wailing away at nothingness? No, of course. If you want to learn to hit or kick someone or something, it seems commonsense that your fist or foot must make contact with someone or at least something else.
But does that hold true as well for tai chi? I mean, sure it is a martial art and all and, yes, there are martial applications that can be learned and practiced for most of the individual movements within a form, but the vast majority of learners and practitioners today don't choose to continue on in that particular martial direction. Most just learn the form as a means of exercise and relaxation. Even those who so want to learn martial applications are usually required to learn and then practice the form at least a year or more before moving on to application. In the end, no matter what direction one goes or for what reason they are studying, most people will be spending most if not all of their time practicing their chosen form over and over again on their own. As Michael P. Garofalo put it, "In the end, Taijiquan is primarily a solo practice."
"But You Will Learn Mistakes!"
Since the case then can be made that tai chi is primarily a solo practice, is it then wrong to assume that it can't be learned on one's own? If you ask if it is possible to learn on your own, most people in the Taichi world will tell you the same thing: "No, you'll learn mistakes!" in other words, you really should learn from a teacher so that you don't learn mistakes that will prove difficult to unlearn and correct later. Even many books and DVDs will say the same thing. Of course, the idea behind it is that the mistakes you learn on your own will be remembered through muscle memory, and muscle memory is hard to unlearn and correct, and I get it.
It is sort of like when I was learning how to play the mountain dulcimer back in North Carolina 10 or so years back, and I decided to take on one song called Sandy River Belle on my own before we got to it in class. I was impressed how good I was at the song, strumming up a real rhythm fest of a rendition, but a few months later when we actually took on that song in class, all was going just swimmingly until the end, when my teacher and I were obviously playing very different melodies. She looked at me and said something to the effect of "that ending sounds great, but it's not Sandy River Belle."
Just recently that memory popped into my mild while I was reading a recently released book about the man who first got me interested in Tai chi back in Los Angeles, Master James Wing Woo. The book is called Tai Chi Master, and it is written by a former student of Master Woo's by the name of Eduardo Barraza Regalado. In that book, Eduardo recalls the first time he practiced tai chi with Master Woo. Basically, Master Woo gave Eduardo one of those show-me-what-you-got commands, and so Educardo ran though the entire form as he had learned it, feeling a bit proud and confident since he was considered a top student back home. When he was done, however, Master Woo looked at him and said:
"I don't know what you did, but that. . . is NOT Tai Chi!! We're going to have to start from the beginning, Eduardo. I'm going to have to correct everything."
Needless to say, Eduardo felt, to use his own words, "totally humiliated, sad, angry," but the interesting thing was that Eduardo had not taught himself. He had learned his Taichi in classes back home from well-regarded teachers, which just goes to show two things: you can even learn mistakes from a teacher, and one teacher's "way" is another's mistake. I suppose it goes without saying that not all teachers are created equal. Some are better than others, and some are just awful, and that is true regardless of the subject you are learning, be it Taichi or German or Locational Analysis or Propositional Logic.
The more important lesson from the study, however, is that Eduardo was not forever trapped by the mistakes he had learned and committed to muscle memory. He worked with Master Woo to correct his mistakes and then went on to be a quite competent practitioner of tai chi. In the same way, I was not locked into playing Sandy River Belle the incorrect way forever. My teacher taught me what it should sound like in the end, and I learned how to play it right. (I still like my "original" version better though. lol)
What Are Corrections?
I assume most of you can imagine what corrections might be in a Taichi context, but just in case it is worth briefly explaining, especially for those who may have never witnessed it before. Basically, corrections are given when an instructor notices you doing something that is not correct. It might be a simple little correction to perfect a stance, like positioning you hand to be at the right height or distance from body, adjusting the point of your leg or foot. Sometimes it might be a correction of how you are making a certain move. Often it involves your posture, getting the back and next in line, chin at the right level, and the head not hanging as if by a thread but not plucked up in the air like a corncob stuck on a bamboo skewer.
There are teachers who do a lot of corrections, and then there are some who do some but usually on one or two students with whom they use as models, so to speak. Some only do them in response to a question, such as "Am I doing this right? It feels weird." Some don't do them at all. If you're curious then you can take a look at this video of Hao Yinru doing corrections on a student* who is trying to work on the move White Goose Spreads its Wings.
*(Please note that the linked video is on the Chinese BiliBili site, so it is all in Chinese. While clicking the translate button in your browser will translate all the text on the page to English, it will not translate anything in the video, text or audio).
As I just mentioned, some teachers don't do any corrections, and thus corrections in a class environment is not a given. In the classes I've taken, I can think of only a few times where I was physically corrected, usually by an assistant, in class. In the seminars I've taken, I never received personal correction, and in fact it was usually the local host teachers and their assistants who got the hands-on corrections, not the students. The students just learned by watching that process, thus learning vicariously, so to speak. In that sense, it becomes general guidance or instruction, not correction, and general guidance and instruction is given on many better-quality DVDs or online courses. At any rate, regardless of the good intentions of the corrections giving teacher, every person cannot be corrected all the time, and thus you will clearly see in group performances of a form that many students are not doing things exactly the same way as some of the others because no teacher can catch and correct all those mistakes all the time.
The Pros of Studying on Your Own
With all I've experienced so far, (and if you've read my Road to Taichi series of posts, you will have a good idea of what that experience is), I can see the advantages of attending classes, at least once in a while, but I also can see the advantages, and at times necessities, of studying at home on your own. I mean, every style of Taichi that I've learned I have at least begun with by studying on my own. The reasons varied from not being sure I wanted study a given style, and thus first wanting to give it a try before making a commitment. Another was sheer lack of an alternative. If there is no one around to teach you what you want to learn, then your choice is to study something different, study on your own, or not study at all. I think it is clear that the last option is hardly an option at all.
As was the case for me with Chen style Taichi, when I finally did find a school that taught it, it was a 65-mile trip in rush hour traffic in a leased car already at the 32,000 miles mark. The entire endeavor was not only costly in terms of gas (luckily the car had good mileage!) as well as in terms of lease over-mileage return penalties that were sure to accrue, but it was not exactly the most environmentally friendly way of going about things. I was upping my carbon footprint in my quest of the cotton-soled-shoe arts, which seemed a tad ironic somehow.
It was also a bit frustrating not to have control over how my study time was used. I am not faulting the school, mind you, but rather the way things are when you take an in-person class: you pay for 1 hour, of which 50 minutes is actual class time, and then spend 15 to 25 minutes of that time learning and doing warmups. Now, to be fair, some warmups of the silk-reeling variety are part of Chen training, so learning that was part of what you sign up for with Chen style, but once you know the exercises, it seems to be something you should do on your own, not as part of the class. The objective of going to class is to learn the form, so as a customer, every moment not used teaching or practicing the form, seems a bit of waste.
When I was first starting out trying to get started in Taichi in earnest I contacted the author of a Taichi blog I had been following to ask for some advice. The blog was called Cloud Hands, and the author was (and remains) James Garafolo, whose name I mentioned earlier in this post. He is not only the author of that blog, but also other sites that contain pertinent information. He also taught Taichi and qigong classes, ran a Taichi club, and yet he is also an advocate of learning and practicing Taichi on your own. In fact, it was his writing and encouragement that got me into the can-do way of thinking. He ever wrote an entire post on the topic of solo practice and learning, which you can read here: Cloud Hands: Tai Chi Chuan Solo Practice Thoughts.
Many of the things mentioned in the article are things that I either experienced or had also thought, such as the amount of class time spent on warmups. Another is that of pacing - the control of time. In a class, you are basically on someone else's schedule. You do lesson one until you are taught lesson two, and you don't go on to lesson three until the teacher is convinced that you and everyone else has got it down, which sometimes can be much more than you feel you yourself need. Yes, a challenge for any teacher is the "teach me more difficult" student, who can drive a teacher up the wall, especially if said student is not as good as he or she thinks he is, but while that is a valid problem in, say, a foreign language class, in a Taichi class it is something that only time and practice can correct. I mean it is safe to say that even once you know the whole form, you can spend the rest of your life striving to get it all right. Waiting for perfection of a move in a class until everyone gets it right would keep you behind for the next ten years. . .and leave you broke!
Well, I exaggerate, I admit, but I think you catch my drift, two drifts actually since Taichi classes can add up in terms of cost. If you are challenged for money, the class fees and transportation costs could be enough to keep you from studying. The cost of a book and DVD, on the other hand, would set you back less than a month's worth of classes, and with the wealth of videos available online on YouTube, and its Chinese equivalents Bili Bili and Douyin, these days, you could pretty much get yourself started and fairly well down the line in Chinese for no cost at all.
A final point made is that different people have different learning styles. While some prosper in the company of others, some feel intimidated by such groups. The way a teacher teaches also has an impact, with some being a good fit for some students, and not such a good fit with others. Learning on your own helps you get around such problems by allowing you full control of who your teacher is, how you interact with what they teach, and who is there with you in the classroom. . . or rather, which room in your house.
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