Do Not Ask For Whom the Bell Tolls…

 

12-17-2005

Tonight I’m formally stepping down as a Tai Chi instructor.

 

This has nothing to do with teaching Isshinryu, and it has everything to do with teaching Isshinryu, the choices I’ve made about my program to try and capture pre 1900 karate training, and what the past may have been like.

 

No longer being an instructor is a necessity in many ways. My students no longer can attend class and I’ve been alone most of this year. But that’s not the real reason, it’s the ghosts!

 

I never started out studying Tai Chi to be an instructor, nor to do Tai Chi as a martial art. No reason except to do it.

 

Long before I began my study of karate I had an interest in various Chinese studies, Tai Chi Chaun being one. When the opportunity presented myself, as a new Isshinryu sho-dan to study with Ernest Rothrock I took advantage. It unlocked more than Tai Chi Chaun.

I found great friendship with Ernest.  I found kung fu and uncountable other things. I discovered as a new black belt, my knowledge meant nothing and had to fully experience being a beginner anew. No time to let being a black belt go to my head. As I had just begun teaching youth, it helped me immeasurably to learn what they were experiencing too, how to learn.

 

I took my weekly half hour class and trained a great deal on the side. Then I had become a karate bum, teaching two days a week, studying tai chi, and training in a number of different arts to have somebody to train with.

 

Funny thing very shortly after I began I experienced something I still can’t explain. Calling it Chi is too simple a way out, perhaps it was feeling my body trying to work together.  I had been training only a few months when Charlie returned from his base in Florida and I showed him what I was learning (having just returned from class with Ernest). Charlie experienced a wave of energy flow across his face as I performed the section I was doing, and had me do it again and experienced it again.  He had been training his Chinkuchi training from Shinso at that time, and felt that perhaps it sensitized him to feel the ‘something’.

 

That year on New Years day I attended a private practice with Ernest and two others in his Wilkes Barre school. When we did our tai chi on the floor it was awesome feeling waves of energy bouncing off the wall.

 

Look I don’t care whether any who read this believe it or not. It’s just what I experienced.  Then I kept working on it. Ernest moved to Pittsburgh and I saw him infrequently and dreaded doing my Tai Chi before him, his ability was too far above mine, and his long list of detailed corrections was intimidating.

 

But I kept practicing.

Then I moved to Derry, began my program here, experienced crippling arthritis for a number of years and continued all my studies, Tai Chi among it.

 

I never included Tai Chi in my karate program. They’re different beasts. But my adult group saw me do a half hour of Tai Chi before class on Saturday mornings and a handful of them found it interesting and approached me about teaching them.

From that came my Sunday morning Tai Chi Chaun class on my driveway for the past 17 or 18 years, hot (115) or cold (-20), sunny or blizzards and sub zero temperatures. Only for rain is class cancelled.  Jim Keenan’s been on my driveway, so has Joe Swift watching my Tai Chi.

 

But now I’m mostly alone.  John Dinger left us last year.  Doc’s personal life and medical practice have left him no time for Tai Chi and little for karate.  Dennis has disappeared for months now and we suspect he may have shipped out to sea again.

 

The ghosts bothering me are the remembrances of those times. The years they swore it was impossible for them to learn the 108. The conquest when they did so. The day their tai chi movement actually was touching the flow of tai chi and not karate. The sharing as we blasted each other softly.

 

By sharing with them I learned so much more about my studies. How effective applied tai chi was for defense for example, after caving their chests in with the smallest movements, by accident, because I truly didn’t understand the forces I was using.

 

The incredible day after 15 years when Ernest had a moment to share with me another level, showing me 1. I knew nothing 2. what was actually there, and the implications to or karate studies of vast wealth. 

Now if I had been training with Ernest perhaps I would have experienced it sooner, or perhaps he would have kept to the 15 year point before he shared it.  It just works, how effective body alignment increases power, and layers more from that simple way. Which is of course the reason he’d tear my practice apart in infinite detail, trying to get me to understand it at every level.

 

Well my commitment to my tai chi became deeper. And my studies in karate moved more deeply too. [This was a number of years before I met Harrill Sensei.]

 

Those ghosts I recall remember the looks in Advanced Karate Class when they’d experience the subtle intersection of our karate application studies to a movement section of our Tai Chi we had recently been studying. And one reinforced the other, but if you hadn’t walked the walk it means little.

 

The Ghosts of the eternal discussion about our technique.

 

I think part of the leveler was John Dinger’s unexpected illness and death. Perhaps it made everyone aware how short time is and how many roses one must take the time to gather while there is time.

 

But the ghosts are interfering with my practice, whether running TCC Sword, Yang or Wu forms, and I have to help them pass.

Now this sounds like a personal lament, and of course it is. But it also ties into my original reason for teaching karate. What were things like pre 1900 when classes were small, and what was and what wasn’t passed along? What happened when an instructor died without leaving a heir?

 

I believe I can answer much of that these days.

 

By keeping classes small you can probe infinite detail with a student, that cannot be addressed with a class. You focus more on the small things, the ones that when changed lead to greater things in the long run. You keep the students as personal as possible. You don’t just teach, you share, you cajole, you argue, you succeed, you fail.

If you work at your craft you never stop learning, the new, or even how to teach more fully. For example I don’t prepare for any class, I immerse myself into it and each class becomes a unique event never to be repeated. Don’t need lesson plans, I just share the art, the rest flows from there.

At any level, some get it, some don’t, some will work, some will coast. Even more so at advanced levels. You don’t make anyone anything. You just share a shape, help mold a pattern and they’ll decide whether to believe it or not, not you.

 

The arts experienced this way are alive. They flow and move. I don’t try and change forms, but living them you begin to understand why change actually was the norm.

Charlie telling me as a brown belt, the first 20 years your art is the product of your instructor, after 20 years your art is your own..  The other day Dan Smith of the Seibukan, who regularly travels to Okinawa to train, expanded on this. The art of Okinawa was to study kata deeply, and that is why the changes occurred. The why of the 15+ version of Patsai, the result of deep study in a world that had no vocabulary to even say punch, that had no permanent template of the right way to do a kata. Just a commitment to get into your art.

 

Now though I’ve learned many forms, and many variations, I don’t intentionally teach that way. My Yang Tai Chi Chaun is hopefully very close to the way I remember being shown it originally. Of course my instructor’s Yang Tai Chi Chaun, which still is better than mine because I haven’t had the hip replacement he did 10 years ago that would have made me a bionic man too, has moved on and is different than mine.

 

His is more powerful and his ongoing studies kept his form fluid.

But I feel in tai chi the shape is less important than you enter the flow and you exit the flow, and hopefully in between there is tai chi chaun.

 

No student can learn what his instructor knows, the catch up will not exceed the teacher.  But a good teacher will give the student what they need to exceed the instructor in their own path.

 

So arts in one sense die. Forms are lost, ideas remain unexpressed.

 

Gosh the several hundred kata I’ve studied will not be passed but for a fraction of it.

 

So I’m no longer a Tai Chi Chaun instructor. That is of course unless the necessity of a students need forces me back into that role.

 

Instead, standing bare naked before you is but Victor Smith, minor tai chi chaun adept,  standing on his driveway in New Hampshire each Sunday morning, trying to not creak too loud as I once again enter the flow.