Bao wrote:...But it’s not Just a skill of relaxation. When you practice A very deep relaxation, you must use other, deeper muscles than you are used to...You really need to go beyond softness and relaxation. Instead you need to understand how to be really limp. Then you can understand how the body itself wants to help you to keep up the structure and prevents it from relaxation. This is peng. Peng as expansion is built from relaxation, not by trying to keep the body al dente.
It’s not an easy task to achieve and I won’t pretend it is. But this is why people have a hard time to understand that relaxation is a skill. If you try to balance softness with 30% hardness or structure, you will never learn to become soft enough to realize what softness can do and why Tai Chi masters regard it as a skil.
And I do know that very few here agree with me.
I whole-heartedly agree.
As an aside, a "simple" exercise I've done with beginners is to have a beginner let me support the full weight of one of their arms in my hands. If I suddenly stop supporting their arm, it should drop like dead weight. My experience is that many people, more men than women, can't do this. They can't get their arm to be absolutely limp and supported. When I stop supporting their arm, it doesn't drop, but hangs in mid-air where I was supporting it. I've found that many non-beginners can't do this either. It isn't a high-level skill: it is entry level.
The inability to really "let go", and the excess tension that goes with it, prevents the body from "threading" itself (e.g. the middle from driving the extremities): silk reeling, for example, becomes choreography. "Jin" won't reach the extremities, but gets lost in the transmission.