Tai Chi instructor Robert Tangora blends healing practices, martial arts, and meditation to teach a complete internal arts curriculum. I've had the pleasure of studying with Robert at his studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as through annual seminars at Brookline Tai Chi.
Robert Tangora Tai Chi Cloud Hands:
What I admire about Robert's teaching is the clarity and simplicity of what he tries to convey. He always put the importance of being able to feel and do in your own body over complex technical concepts. At the same time, he is able to explain these concepts elegantly.
In his upcoming book, he uses Tai Chi Cloud Hands as a way to organize many of the different core principles of Tai Chi Chuan. The last time he was in town, we sat down to an interview about why Cloud Hands is such an excellent way to collect all these principles into one exercise.
Focus on Spinal Qigong
The first set I learned from Robert was very similar to Gods Playing in the Clouds and it dealt with the spine. Robert is very clear about the importance of the spine, not just for health and martial power, but as a key integrator in Tai Chi.
From our interview, on the importance of the spine in Cloud Hands:
You've got to have a lot of capacity to like really articulate your spine and you have to have a lot of capacity to open and close all your joints. And you have to do all those really consistently and harmoniously through your entire system.
On the way that Cloud Hands opens the waist:
What it also does, it also starts working to develop a coordination between what's happening in your spine and what's happening in your legs and waist. And if you do it as a static kind of torso practice, you don't develop that. You don't engage your spine. I mean you do, but it's static. It's like you have this kind of lump here that's not moving. As opposed to your spine actually; it's quite articulate and quite strong.
As we've gone through different sets of spinal qigong work, I've tried to explain what I've learned from Robert about spinal qigong.
Some of the biggest lessons:
- The first level of any qigong practice is all about coordinating moving parts. You need to practice slowly and careful, with the goal of synchronizing the timing of the movements.
- Once timing is there, you being to build internal connections, i.e. it becomes possible to have the sense of one part leading another.
- You have to develop a clear sense of how the big muscles of the back connect to the arms and legs.
- Through partner feedback, you can start to discern how the arms and legs “pull†on the spine.
- You refine how the limbs pull on the spine in order to balance the left and right side of the body.
- If your body is open enough, spinal qigong can give an incredibly balanced, whole-body feel to all your movement.
Tai Chi as a Martial Art
While Robert has been a Push Hands champion and loves to play with knives, when he teaches, you clearly get the sense that he sees martial arts as a means to an end in the art, not just a way to fight.
On the way that martial training amplifies health benefits, he points out:
The people I've met who really have the health stuff of Tai Chi really well-developed were all very respectable martial artists. Those are the people who have that most developed.
When you study push hands with him, he makes clear links to the way that the partner exercises develop a looser, more connected body. Once you have a taste of the martial applications, you can work deeper into your solo practice. Above all, you know what you're working towards.
Meditation is Refined Listening
Finally, he spoke about the way that his meditation practice weaves together elements from martial arts and healing.
In terms of health and martial arts, meditation this very important. I kind of address them as separate things, although they're really intertwined. From a health standpoint, meditation is very important because it develops a lot of sensitivity to what's going on inside you. And if you want to be able to fix something, you've got to be able to feel it. If you can't feel it, you can't fix it.
Most of us feel things because we have pain reactions rather than feeling things that aren't painful.
Through meditation you actually learn to feel a lot of things that aren't pain reactions and you learn how those things end up being interrelated with pain reactions. And if you want to become really efficient at healing yourself, or for that matter if you're doing some sort of healing of somebody else, you've got to be able to distinguish those two. Because what you want to be able to do is you want to utilize what is energetically strong and use it to help what's injured.
You have to be able to read those things and you have to be able to map those things in yourself. If you can't map them yourself, you're going to be able map somebody else's. I mean, this is sort of a chicken or egg kind of thing because as you develop it, you develop it in both aspects, but certainly, if you can't feel what's going on in your own body, you ain't going to feel what's going on in somebody else's.
From the standpoint of martial arts versus health practice, I mean if I'm doing something with somebody, I may almost do the identical thing. But it's a lot of ways governed by my intent.
In other words, I could do something. If you had like a vertebrae that was out of alignment, for instance, well I could do something with your arm that would attach to that vertebrae and manipulate it. Well if I'm doing that to help you. I'm going to be manipulating and so it's trying to bring it back, pokes it back into alignment. If I'm doing it martially, I'm going to do just the opposite. I'm going to try to jerk it really hard so it messes it up completely. That's why it's very different in terms of your intent.
In terms of feeling into the person and feeling what's inside of you, it's the same thing.
There's not really any difference; it's just a question of whether you feel it or not. But in terms of how you're applying it, it's very different.
From decades of study and practice, Robert has evolved a view of Tai Chi as an art that gives you access to healing, meditation and martial arts, and allows you to continuously explore and evolved.
Read more about Robert Tangora, Tai Chi, and qigong on this site.
