"I'm doing everything right and it still doesn't work,"and, " I don't want to push someone over anyway." Also, "Why can't I as a woman push that man?"

Patient practise of a new awareness of waist/ hara/ tantien and how it allows the whole back to release strength will produce a reliable underlay of strength after the 'acclimatisaton' phase. It has to become less conscious, more ordinary. Pushing someone over is fine. It just depends why you're doing it.

The internal strength grows as we feel more and more integrated, or rounded, in the way we move. It's no coincidence that some males often push fairly well, before some females, as they often have quite prominently that yang/ male interest in giving a push, from the robust world of boyhood, where it wasn't necessarily an aggressive act, just part of play development

If one has always associated pushing with negativity and aggression, it's challenging to lovingly, as a comrade, and with internal strength, have a go at launching someone.

What many males have to get past, however, is their relationship with aggression, which has no place in Tai Chi at the higher levels of study. Not because of some ethical clause in your student contract, but because it's unbalanced. At the heart of the tendency we might find a feeling of inequality, which causes indiscriminate competitive lurches against absolutely anyone.

A warrior has no time to waste on ideas of superiority or inferiority, after seeing that everything in the world is equally as mysterious as themselves. Equally extraordinary.

Getting skilful in Tai Chi without having done the internal work on oneself can make for a very energetic but distorted practitioner. Weaknesses of character may be magnified rather than removed or transformed, and the ego is then unable to take its proper place in the order of things, as a wise guardian in a complex world.

Moreover, issues of self-importance or -unimportance look farcical in the face of the Infinite, and yet almost everyone is frantically reviewing their score their whole life long. I met someone the other day with 690 Facebook friends, and they "know them all."

First Post

This drawing is called 'After Ploughing, Planting'. It's a meditation on what to do with all the preparation and practise a person may find they've accumulated over the years, in their chosen Art.

I practise Art, Music, and Tai Chi/ Hsing I / Ba Gua ( the so called 'internal' martial arts' from China), and this blog is a journal to plant somewhere the thoughts that come up during practising and teaching Tai Chi and its sister arts.

In the picture the landscape is huge, much bigger than the single figure bent to their task. Shunryu Suzuki calls it, "To light one small corner of the world".

When we go deeper into an Art, it gets harder and harder to 'report back' to others. All's fine for a while, as you can describe the techniques and difficulties that go with them, but soon you may find yourself alone and quieter than normal, and that it's not unpleasant. A lot of people come to a class to get an hour or so of exercise, and hardly practise during the days between. After a while though, their time in class may lead them out further, and the urge to practise builds.

We tell ourselves it's for this or that reason, but with luck, certainty collapses slowly and we just do it. " Be there while it's happening."

Kai Out