Apace...

Sifu made a strong point during this evening's t'ai chi class, which helped explain the interaction between learning the form and the various "push-hands" exercises in which we are engaging. The health aspect to t'ai chi, says sifu, has little to do with learning the form, but more to do with having suitable parts of your body relax (without conscious effort, as far as I can tell) in response to stress, as might occur when a violent interaction with an attacker is imminent.

Sifu's demonstration of what he meant was impressive. In one example, he aligned his body in such a way so as to re-route the attacker's force through the aligned parts of his body into the ground, while exerting no appreciable counterforce. In another, sifu allowed his body to respond in a completely relaxed manner, as if it was made of jelly, making it impossible for an attacker to apply force in any meaningful way.

We then broke up into pairs and experimented with simply trying to sense, through physical contact, when various parts of the opponent's body were becoming tense (for this exercise, we took turns tensing various parts of ourselves on purpose), at which point it is surprising how little force is needed to make the opponent lose balance.

All that said, I am still very young in this knowledge—my ability to sense tenseness in an opponent require said tension to be about as obvious as the blaring siren and flashing lights on a passing emergency vehicle—but look forward to developing, with time.

In other news, today's work load was not very large, which in a way was good. I somehow really exhausted myself yesterday, with the result that I spent the second half of yesterday and most of today feeling pretty tired.

Cheers...