So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

[origami_itto]

My experience with tajiquan has been such that I feel like I'm constantly experiencing new epiphanies. I'm obsessed wth training and thinking about it, reading about it.

My latest epiphany is really dialing into the relaxation and release. I feel like it's getting incredibly deep.

And then hiding under that "last" bit of tension is not only MORE tension, but ENTIRELY DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF TENSION!

I find myself holding energy the way I hold muscular tension and having to make sure I keep it moving to keep from hurting myself by inducing cramps and spasms.

I thought this was supposed to get easier and I feel like I'm in more danger than ever. It's not fair.

My wife was watching me do my form this afternoon and she told me it looked like I was vibrating.

I showed her how in my arms there are points in the movements where they do vibrate, always in the same place, always in the same way. I only noticed it in my right arm but she said it was all over my body.

I can only think that it is due to reaching a certain point of release. I have found and mainly removed the excess energy and tension mentally but there is still a residual tension that my movements are fighting against that causes friction them to catch and vibrate like rubbing your finger on the rim of a wine glass.

I don't feel any vibration but it is pretty visible.

Sound familiar at all to anyone?

[Sajite]

I'd like to know if you test this subjective feelings with some kind of objective testing.

[Sajite]

Those vibrations sound a lot like fasciculations and they happen in stressed nervous systems and some neurological diseases

[origami_itto]

That's definitely something to consider. My hands are pretty steady and I'm generally in a pretty good meditative state for form practice. Though life is general is pretty stressful for me.

As far as subjective vs objective, that's literally what I'm talking about.

I've started paying more attention and I can feel the tiny fluctuations, but I first noticed it as a repeatable phenomenon visually.

My wrist was kind of tight so I was doing a wave to flex the arm and as the wrist dropped and the fingers go up there was a click.

So I started playing with that to find the click and then trying to time it so I would make contact with my wife at the exact point it clicked, etc. Standard bored kungfu stuff.

Anyhow that's where I noticed the vibration. Again it's kind of like running a finger or some rubber against something and it's catching and skipping, but just the tiniest amount, and right around where the click was happening but that's gone now.

So the movement in doing is like this.

Right hand at shoulder height, elbow down, palm facing to the left.

Rotate the elbow counter clockwise, let everything else move naturally.

When the elbow is at shoulder height the fingers and wrist hang down.

Push the elbow down, then the wrist, then the fingers. Leave the muscles slack but let the arm hang in space until the wave causes parts to move.

My hand starts vibrating around where the wrist flexes while the fingers go up and as they follow the palm downwards. It doesn't do it if I'm holding physical or energetic tension.

The whole exercise is like cracking a whip in slow motion. Literally if I were cracking a whip this is the motion I would use.

This is something I pulled from my completely incorrect and misunderstood HSS'S song gong 1

[Quigga]

Be sure to move quicker from time to time and to add some explosive movements. Especially if it feels like too much to hold, when you start shaking/vibrating like you describe. It's a bit like lightning and thunder.

Once its too much for your current body development, it will want to come out naturally. Just a spark, or mentally triggering it, then bam.

IME the slower you go, the more energy builds up and more quickly too. I spent some time practicing 'Raise Hands', doing one move in 10-20 minutes.

Super slow moving is quite interesting imo. 60-80% super slow, 20-40% normal Tai Chi speed, 10% normal speed, 5% explosive is what I read somewhere.

[origami_itto]

Be sure to move quicker from time to time and to add some explosive movements. Especially if it feels like too much to hold, when you start shaking/vibrating like you describe. It's a bit like lightning and thunder.

Once its too much for your current body development, it will want to come out naturally. Just a spark, or mentally triggering it, then bam.

IME the slower you go, the more energy builds up and more quickly too. I spent some time practicing 'Raise Hands', doing one move in 10-20 minutes.

Super slow moving is quite interesting imo. 60-80% super slow, 20-40% normal Tai Chi speed, 10% normal speed, 5% explosive is what I read somewhere.

I want to be clear here, it's not shaking. If I move faster it happens faster. If I move slower it happens slower. If I stop moving it stops.

I practice a mix of conditioning methods. Taking it kind of easy on the explosive movement at the moment. Bursitis and an old injury in the shoulder starts acting up when I crash in or try that punching the air type of movement. Xingyi doesn't hurt too much if I'm not forcing it.

I'm staying away from the explosive stuff till I get a little more direct instruction on the fajin form.

I know I hit like a ton of bricks don't need to keep trying to convince myself. The subtle stuff is so much more interesting.

Some of the Dong family Qigong is good for stressing the joints a little for health.

[charlie_cambridge]

Are you training the 1st loosening as taught by Mizner? I would not call that "HSS song gong" as at least the stuff in public youtube is not what HSS taught.

How are you thinking of the release? PK would say you cannot be completely relaxed in taiji, that's completely wrong (if you were completely relaxed you would just be lying on the ground), so first off something has to activate (and waves of changes through the body etc, not going to even try to summarize in a message).

So first off if you are just thinking "release more and more" without collapsing, then maybe you will unconsciously overactivate certain things (you have to activate something to not collapse) and if you keep telling your body it is releasing then you may miss (even unconsciously blinding yourself to) the subtle activations/contractions, and if that happens then you maybe only notice when it gets to a dramatic extreme (e.g. vibrating is often something activating/contracting quite strongly unconsciously while you release other things).

[wayne hansen]

So are you saying Huangs first exercise done by your teacher on YouTube is incorrect
Seeing this is an exercise not derived from Huang all other people and lineages are not correct

[origami_itto]

Are you training the 1st loosening as taught by Mizner? I would not call that "HSS song gong" as at least the stuff in public youtube is not what HSS taught.

How are you thinking of the release? PK would say you cannot be completely relaxed in taiji, that's completely wrong (if you were completely relaxed you would just be lying on the ground), so first off something has to activate (and waves of changes through the body etc, not going to even try to summarize in a message).

So first off if you are just thinking "release more and more" without collapsing, then maybe you will unconsciously overactivate certain things (you have to activate something to not collapse) and if you keep telling your body it is releasing then you may miss (even unconsciously blinding yourself to) the subtle activations/contractions, and if that happens then you maybe only notice when it gets to a dramatic extreme (e.g. vibrating is often something activating/contracting quite strongly unconsciously while you release other things).

Releasing and relaxing are completely different things.

Releasing extraneous tension, energy, intention, expectation. It's not becoming a floppy noodle or running away from energy. It's letting it move through you.

Too often we talk about taijiquan as if it could be reduced to just one thing, and we assume too much in discussion. Releasing (as mentioned above) and emptying is preparation. Storing, mobilizing, and releasing energy is what you do with the prepared body.

Cleaning the gun barrel, loading and firing.

[wayne hansen]

Release is a product of relax
Relax is a product of release
They are the same thing

[charlie_cambridge]

I think part of the confusion with taiji is everyone seems to mean very different things when using the same simple words like "release" and "relax" etc..

"Releasing extraneous tension, energy, intention, expectation" sounds the same as "relax" to me. Now I agree it can be confusing when people translate "sung" as "relax" since those are two different things, but for common words like release/relax we prefer to use the most obvious literal meaning of the word (i.e. to let go)

"It's not becoming a floppy noodle or running away from energy. It's letting it move through you." --I would not use the word "release" for this, because that's not what the muscle is actually doing.

So we would say release=relax =the muscle lengthening with a decrease in tension decreases.

The energizing and activation (opposite of release in a way) is an impulse that causes the muscle to begin to build a tension--if it shortens under that tension we call in contraction, if the muscle lengthens under that tension we call it stretch (what the physiologists call "eccentric contraction" but actually we see stretch as something more subtle than just that).

If you are "not becoming a floppy noodle" then by definition something has to activate (if every muscle just let go of tension you'd flop). Now you did qualify with the word "extraneous" so sounds like we agree some tension is required. We prefer to define our terms so the distinction is very clear e.g. release= tension going down period, activation =the beginning of increasing some tension. This makes it very clear what is doing what when.

But I think it can be confusing to define release as "letting go of extraneous tension etc" rather than just "letting go of tension" period because it can be very unclear what is "extraneous" and what is not, so from the very beginning the basic concept is not clear. I think this is relevant and not just semantics because it can then for example lead to the vibrating you describe because you could be holding excess tension that you do not believe/realize is extraneous.

[origami_itto]

Release is a product of relax
Relax is a product of release
They are the same thing

Getting hung up on terminology is fun.

I think that release goes beyond just relaxing muscles. Sure relaxing is a part of it, but there's more.

I think part of the confusion with taiji is everyone seems to mean very different things when using the same simple words like "release" and "relax" etc..

"Releasing extraneous tension, energy, intention, expectation" sounds the same as "relax" to me. Now I agree it can be confusing when people translate "sung" as "relax" since those are two different things, but for common words like release/relax we prefer to use the most obvious literal meaning of the word (i.e. to let go)

"It's not becoming a floppy noodle or running away from energy. It's letting it move through you." --I would not use the word "release" for this, because that's not what the muscle is actually doing.

So we would say release=relax =the muscle lengthening with a decrease in tension decreases.

The energizing and activation (opposite of release in a way) is an impulse that causes the muscle to begin to build a tension--if it shortens under that tension we call in contraction, if the muscle lengthens under that tension we call it stretch (what the physiologists call "eccentric contraction" but actually we see stretch as something more subtle than just that).

If you are "not becoming a floppy noodle" then by definition something has to activate (if every muscle just let go of tension you'd flop). Now you did qualify with the word "extraneous" so sounds like we agree some tension is required. We prefer to define our terms so the distinction is very clear e.g. release= tension going down period, activation =the beginning of increasing some tension. This makes it very clear what is doing what when.

But I think it can be confusing to define release as "letting go of extraneous tension etc" rather than just "letting go of tension" period because it can be very unclear what is "extraneous" and what is not, so from the very beginning the basic concept is not clear. I think this is relevant and not just semantics because it can then for example lead to the vibrating you describe because you could be holding excess tension that you do not believe/realize is extraneous.

You're absolutely right, thank you for sharing your perspective.

[charlie_cambridge]

@origami_itto: one of my students asked about my hand vibrating a few months ago, I thanked him for calling my attention to it, and explained that I was incorrectly contracting something subconsciously that I should not be.

So are you saying Huangs first exercise done by your teacher on YouTube is incorrect
Seeing this is an exercise not derived from Huang all other people and lineages are not correct

@Wayne:
1) not sure how this applies to other people and lineages, what Huang chose to show (or not show) on youtube presumably has nothing to do with what they are doing (as long as the source of their exercise was from their teacher/independently back from there and not originally just from watching Huang on youtube of course)

2) for the first part yes I am saying Huang deliberately did it wrong in the film on youtube. PK talks about how Huang would collect and destroy/"borrow" and never return any films students took of him doing it correctly for the inner school, Huang deliberately showed incorrect things in public. If you're familiar with him this should be obvious when you see Huang's short form on youtube. It looks obviously robotic because he is making a conscious effort to deliberately do certain things completely incorrectly (not how he actually trained or taught the moves at all).

Not just him. I'd go so far as to say the same thing about ZMQ, YCF and every pretty much every serious Chinese martial art practitioner of his generation and before: any picture/video any of them put out for the public was not fully correct/at least somewhat misleading. This is one reason there are thousands of different interpretations of taiji today (even just of "Yang style" taiji) --it's not just because 99% of people who trained taiji are somehow complete morons and hence so much less consistent than 99% of people practicing anything else, but because the majority of these people were taught different things by their teachers. My experience is the people who really know taiji do the same things (maybe slightly different external form but for key internal principles they are the same, taiji is taiji. If people are doing 5 different fundamental things in their "taiji," at least 4 of the 5 are wrong, taiji's core principles are one thing and not ten different "interpretations"). I have a student who's trained various things 30+ years and he seems to have had a good xingyi teacher, his xingyi has more fundamental elements much more similar (some things almost exactly the same) to what we do than the "Yang style taiji" he learned. (And his xingyi also somehow is also fairly different from most other xingyi people I've met)

I would not fault the old masters for choosing not to openly teach to the public, given the context of the time (mostly before guns) when martial arts were actually practically useful for real military application, it would be like openly sharing the blueprints for your most advanced military technology/secret weaponry with the public, and to this day I do not believe anyone does that with modern military technology.

Also not sure what you mean by this exercise is not derived from Huang, yes he ultimately distilled what he got from his teachers,

[origami_itto]

@origami_itto: one of my students asked about my hand vibrating a few months ago, I thanked him for calling my attention to it, and explained that I was incorrectly contracting something subconsciously that I should not be.

Yep, as I'm working on releasing further I'm losing the vibrating in some parts of the movement.

[charlie_cambridge]

One think from PK I found helpful from this is he said contraction is not "bad" like some modern taiji people seem to think, it's just another muscle state no different from release. The problem comes if there is activation (or contraction) and the body does not move (usually because of an unconscious opposing contraction/activation somewhere else doing the exact opposite thing) --this is what we call "double contraction" (which we prefer over the term "double weighted" because it has nothing to do with the weight distribution, you can be in a double contracted state with all weight on one foot, or in a fluid not double contracted state even when moving through weight in both feet)

In myself I noticed the "vibration" as a quick unconscious moment of said double contraction before changing it, with the solution being to make sure every relevant part of the body continues to move smoothly in response to the activation (so nothing ever gets stuck even for a moment, the vibration sometimes being not fine enough motor control to manage that smoothly enough on whatever level)

@origami_itto: one of my students asked about my hand vibrating a few months ago, I thanked him for calling my attention to it, and explained that I was incorrectly contracting something subconsciously that I should not be.

Yep, as I'm working on releasing further I'm losing the vibrating in some parts of the movement.