You want to practice your Tai Chi form, but Toronto is covered in snow and your place is cramped.
What do you do??
Tai Chi takes space. This is one of its best qualities, and also one of its challenges for us city-dwellers.
Our long form asks us to use an open space about 20’ x 10’. There are adjustments that we can make: a small step up at strategic moments, shorter steps and a smaller frame. But however you cut it, Tai Chi takes space. Space that not all of us think we have.
During the summer months, it is not really a problem. In Toronto, we are fortunate to have hundreds of parks where we usually have no trouble finding a spot under the trees to practice. The only real obstacle then is simply having the courage to do Tai Chi in public. It honestly took me many months to get over the feeling that I looked totally silly waving my hands around awkwardly. Eventually, slowly, I got comfortable practising my form in public, and it was one of the best things I ever did for my practice.
Self-consciousness aside, summer practice is easy.
When a few inches of snow cover your favourite park spots, what can you do?
It’s honestly a hard question, so this post will offer you a couple of ideas.
1) Put on your boots and get out there!
You can always, of course, simply brave the weather. Layer up in a flexible jacket, a hat, gloves, and snow boots. The ground will be uneven, and maybe slippery as well. The stiff, heavy boots will feel strange if your feet are used to cotton Tai Chi slippers.
It will not feel like the movements you are used to, but form in the crisp, cold air can be a rewarding challenge. It is an exercise in remaining soft and comfortable in the face of inhospitable surroundings.
Life occasionally brings us to situations that are uncomfortable and inhospitable—anything from a meeting at work where your spiteful manager seems hellbent on getting under your skin, to a flight delay at your layover airport, in the middle of the night, on your trip back home.
In the act of practising form in a cold snowy park, you may learn something, about yourself or about the nature of discomfort and adaptation, that applies to those other situations.
2) Make the most of your inside space
In Toronto, most of us live in houses or apartments that do not seem to have enough open space to do the form. However, with a few modifications, you may be surprised what you can fit into a small space.
When Rising Sun School was at 908 Bathurst, the space was narrow so Sifu had us pause at the end of Cloud Hands to take a step forward. The first time I saw this a light bulb went off.
My first apartment in Toronto was a tiny bachelor. And I mean tiny, tiny. Eight feet by 12 feet, to be generous, plus a very narrow kitchen and a compact bathroom at the far end. Throughout the summer, I could practice in the park. But in winter, I had to make do with the space I had.
I arranged the furniture to maximize my floor space in the shape of the form, which is roughly an “L”. I had to shuffle step away from edges and slip around a shelf and under a loft bed. My indoor form wasn’t the prettiest thing in that space, but it worked well enough to keep me practising through the winter.
I had to sacrifice that beautiful flow state you sometimes settle into when doing Tai Chi. In exchange, I workshopped specific movements and played with the proprioceptive awareness of the edges of my frame. Sometimes I played wildly with it just to see how far I could take it. It was as if a writer took Anna Karenina and squished it into a one-page poem. Then ripped up that poem and wrote a new Anna Karenina poem from a different perspective. Over and over.
The constraint of my tiny apartment spurred a creative exploration of the movements of the form. So when I went back into class and practised the canonical form, I was better able to glimpse the inspiration of the movements, the life in them, and the genius of why they are the way the are.
3) Tai Chi beyond the form
A third way to keep up with your practice is to think beyond the form itself. Sifu’s Tai Chi curriculum is carefully designed to teach us about body mechanics—the simple, fundamental principles of how our bodies move.
At the beginning of every Foundation class, we do two exercises: Walking The Circle and Formal Walking. These exercises prepare us for form practice. They also serve as a workshop for exploring different aspects of movement mechanics. We look at balance and how to organize the Three Centers. We play with the processes of stepping, turning and moving from the center. At the end of the Walking The Circle exercise, we sometimes also explore the idea of the “Figure 8” and how that movement resonates through our body.
You can think of these exercises as a way to extract an idea from the form, practice it in isolation, and then bring it back into your form work. But it can also go the other way. They can be a gateway to help us bring a universal principle of movement into our practice of Tai Chi form, and then back into our daily lives.
Tai Chi gets us to move in ways that we have mostly forgotten since early childhood. Controlling from the waist, initiating movement from the soles of the feet, issuing soft power through the hands, keeping the eyes up and the spine long, thinking down to go up, Figure 8 movements—these ideas, and many others, are principles from the form that can be applied all the time.
Doing the dishes: soft power and Figure 8s.
Changing a light bulb: think down to go up.
Dodging rush hour foot traffic in Yonge-Bloor subway station: controlling from the waist.
Carrying a heavy box up from basement storage: eyes up spine long, soles of the feet, control from the waist…
Tai Chi is everywhere, in everything.
Even if you can’t practice your form as much during the winter, you can always practice Tai Chi.
∞
Henry Claflin is an instructor at Rising Sun School and an apprentice to Sifu Paul McCaughey. He has a private acupuncture practice in downtown Toronto. Read more of his writings at https://henryclaflin.com.