External Focus vs Internal Awareness: Transform Your Tai Chi by Fixing One Common Mistake

Thanks for coming back to this series of common mistakes in Tai Chi. The next mistake I want to cover is the tendency to watch or look at your hand during Tai Chi. So oftentimes I will see Tai Chi players say waving doing waving hands in clouds and they'll be looking at their hand. Or when they do brush knee they'll place their focus on the hand. And what this does is it creates focus rather than awareness and focus is less effective. Also it places too much intention on that one part of our body rather than being aware of our entire body and that of the person touching us. So I'm going to demonstrate it and the simple way of fixing this is to keep your nose over your dantian and have your eye gaze go into a peripheral vision and taking up more of the room so that you're not focused on your hand. So common Tai Chi mistake is looking at your hand and the fix for that is line your nose over the dantian and open up your vision into peripheral vision. So let's see what this looks like. So I have Alex here and Alex is going to offer some counter resistance and then give some feedback. Let's step back a little bit so you're in there you go. So with waving hands and clouds if he's going to punch at me and I use waving hands and clouds to block his punch and I'm looking at my hand. So go ahead and apply some over pressure there and tell me what yeah what you're feeling. Well I felt the resistance but you fell back. Okay so when I'm looking at my hand my focus is here and it also tends to be on where he's touching me and it's sort of like having tunnel vision and I start to employ my muscles. Can you can you feel a directionality and kind of a harshness to that? Now let's contrast that with the strategies that I just talked about which is keeping my nose over my dantian and opening up opening up my vision to peripheral vision so that I'm not looking past my hand. I'm actually taking in the room and maybe even gazing past him and let's see if there's a difference. So go ahead. Yeah so what did you feel? Springiness. Oh I love that description springiness which is one of those qualities in tai chi called pong. So pong is actually an onomatopoeia and it is the sound of the quality and so pong like if you think of a ping pong and the bounciness then that's a if there's such a word as pongness that's what you felt was the springiness and the pongness. Okay good so now I'm going to do it in brush knee and so if I come here and what you'll see players do is they'll focus on their hand and so I'm focused right here and at this juncture and I'm really putting my awareness right there and when he pushes it comes back and takes me off. Now if I do the same technique remain my nose over my dantian put my awareness in the room and okay this is really something isn't it? Yeah it was something. It really is yeah okay so you can put this into any of your forms and just watch yourself are you focused on the hand and therefore the intent is what I call double weighted because if my my focus is here on the hand and my intent is here on the hand then and my hold on for just a second my direction is this way then I'm super double weighted and I don't mean double weighted here what I mean is I'm double weighted in my focus and my intention and my direction is all going the same place and that can be used against me so I have to count I have to balance that out and the way you balance it out is your postural body alignment the nose over the dantian and then I open up my peripheral vision and I just I can go through him wherever I want so it's a it's an interesting phenomenon by just changing your awareness changing your focus to awareness you can create an entire different experience thank you and now when you do your brush knee in solo practice for example instead of placing your awareness here or the direction you're going go ahead and spread your awareness all around you and into the road so just to review a common tai chi mistake is to look at the hand and to go in the direction that you're going and a way to fix that is have your nose over your dantian and open up your vision into peripheral vision and you'll find that everything becomes more comfortable in your tai chi and more effective now thanks for watching leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe see you next lesson