Giles wrote:...one has to write an essay, plus fotonotes and caveats, each time one posts anything. (Which can still be misunderstood, and will usually bore people anyway).
That said, please enlighten as to where (in this thread) you think everyone is 'throwing out the taiji parts'. And indeed why no-one has any idea about what the goal is and/or why everyone is refusing to follow a more traditional approach?
You're in the right to call me out in this way, but I still don't feel like writing an essay on the subject yet. I am however writing a book. Don't know when it will be done. The price will be indexed to the price of a first year calculus textbook -- say, spivak. So between $100 and $400. Now that isn't to say that I feel like holding things back online, just what it seems to take to motivate me. Plus I find writing therapeutic.
Anyways there is a goal in push hands, that is to practice the four main energies of peng, lu, ji, an, more or less -- I believe I have posted the Yang Jun video, the Ma Hong video, and a number of others including one by a member of the Wu family, which all seem to discuss the exact same basic fundamentals and mode of practice. My point is that when you step too far out of that sphere, such as the oft repeated sentiments that someone does not like to push in push hands, or they dont like to follow the opponent, or they think push hands is meaningless, or that it doesn't work, or that you 'need more' somehow, or whatever the antisentiment is of the day, then you are not trudging along and making steady progress. And if you are not trudging along and making steady progress then you are not trudging along and making steady progress.
So whose fault is it. I remember a blog post of mine called diary of a failure where I analyzed some now defunct websites of people who no longer come around these parts anymore. One of them said they felt deflated after losing a match of push hands against someone who was bigger and stronger and, frustrated that they could not make it work, gave up and ended up (in the long run) in other martial arts. Well there are a number of problems with the story but the main one is that after all the success they had, they gave up instead of sitting and thinking about it for a while.
Sometimes the problem is you just didn't do your homework, and blaming others is just a way to make you psychologically able to accept your failure and move on. So few times people are unable to blame themselves and do what it takes to succeed. Sometimes that kind of path can be painful but face it. Your mom isn't always going to be alive. Sometimes you just have to deal with it and move on. Sometimes there is never a point.
I kinda just think it's not suited to everyone. Along that line there are two kinds of people you can separate the group into, those who do push hands properly and those who don't, and the secondary characteristic you see emerging in these two groups is that the kind who do it properly tend to do a lot of soul searching and are maybe more humble at accepting their failures. The other ones are more proud, usually more famous or more well known, more outspoken, and tend to do other martial arts to supplement their taiji such as judo. This is important to them because they don't like feeling weak like as if they only did tai chi.
Not sure what else we can draw from that kind of situation but this is something I have noticed over the years. Two different personality types. You can change from one to the other, if you want to, because the martial art you choose helps shape your personality, as well as providing a fit for your extant personality type.