windwalker wrote:Consciousness is Key, Not Mechanical, Not Thinking
Interesting approach to push hands one that echoes many of my own thoughts.
"you listen to yourself".
Nice way of putting it...Always mention to those I work with
" you can only feel your own resistance"
Yes, it is an interesting video and lecture.
Some of us might feel some dissonance between what his is doing and what he is saying. What he is doing is very mechanical, but he is conveying a important point. However, I find his word choice a little confusing, and jumping back and forth from Chinese to English just further muddies the waters.
Let’s step away from Taijiquan to illustrate what he is saying starting with baseball pitching, obviously a very mechanical skill. If you want to ruin a pitcher’s career, start getting them to think about their mechanics. Pitching coaches use specific verbal cues, drills, and physical manipulations to correct problems of pitchers. They do not want pitchers to start any kind of mechanical analysis. The coach’s job is to analyze. They want the pitchers to sense and feel the pitch only. Beyond baseball pitchers, this is true of many athletic skills all throwing, golf, tennis, etc. So, yes, you cannot think about mechanics.
I object to Mizner's use of the word, “Consciousness”, his substitute for “yi". That word tends to be associated with cognition and the function of the verbal part of our brain. Mizner specifically says its not about what we are consciously thinking. The verbal processing of the brain is notorious for throwing off the motor control of the brain. So, we also do not want to be thinking in words.
The most accurate way to describe what is going on in our brains is to use terms that are associated with the sensory and motor control centers of our brains. Unfortunately, these are sometimes as foreign to us as yi, qi and jin. The general terms are “proprioception”, “kinesthesia” and "kinesthetic imagination”. The jargon of this field is still evolving, so it also is still incomplete. For example, if I asked you to imagining yourself doing a movement, and you visualized yourself doing the movement. That would have less effect on your later performance of that movement than if you interpreted “imagining" as feeling yourself doing the movement.
I think this is what Mizner is getting at. You can’t think about mechanics. You can’t execute verbal commands in your head. You have to do something else, which he sort of leaves veiled in mystery, but we do it all the time.
If you can walk and chew bubblegum, if you can drive and carry on a conversation with someone in the car, if you can see a pencil rolling off a desk and reach down and catch it before it falls, you can do what he is talking about. This is allowing the motor control and sensory systems of the body to do their jobs unimpeded by the conscious, verbal, and analytical centers of the brain.
The way I first conceptualized this with taijiquan a couple of decades ago was that I needed to internalize the movements, principles. and teachings of taijiquan and ingrain them in my body. I think that is still a valid way to think about it.
Edit: Thinking about terminology, I think, "kinesthetic awareness" or "proprioceptive perception” might be accurate terms, and there is more to it.