There was a time when focusing on one style of Tai chi and maybe even one form was for me an important way to practice. Being unclear about the nature of Tai chi, it puzzled me why people did so many styles and purported to teach so many forms. This attitude was informed by my sole engagement with the Yang long form for about 15 years. After leaving that, I embraced Cheng Man-ch’ing’s simplified form for seven years. So more or less twenty plus years in the Yang style. Since then I’ve focused on the Sun style long form. A recent attempt to re-engage with Yang style shows me the value of just sticking with Sun style as my self-care practice. Although, this attempt may yet deepen my understanding of Tai chi’s principles through a study of theYang family style.
Read more: Hello Yang Style…AgainCheng Man-Ch’ing is my Tai chi exemplar, in no small part because he had a significant life outside of Tai chi. He was an artist, a doctor, and in Taiwan, a member of their legislative assembly. In Tai chi he taught his simplified form, push hands and the Yang sword set when in America, and it seems the long form in America and Taiwan. Apparently he had to cadge one of his most famous students Ben Lo to learn even the sword set. This intense focus on one set, getting great depth on a subject had always been my ideal. Even though my whole life seems more like a monument to flip flopping from topic to topic.
So there I was, saying hello to Traditional Yang style again. I went back to the Moyanistas to see how that has progressed in the ten years since I left. That was an altogether bracing experience so I hastily moved on to the Yang family form. As much as the benefits of Cheng’s form inspires me to keep doing Taichi first thing every morning and last thing every night, the fun factor has never really shone through for me with his set. When learning the form at a serious Tai chi academy I shared with another beginner that Cheng had been a famous artist. She was bewildered, you would never know it she retorted. I could see her point. One element of Tai chi that has kept me doing it for decades are its aesthetic joys.
Although, it was not a matter of how it feels that prompted me to look beyond Cheng’s most remarkable set. Alas after more than three years doing Cheng’s form everyday my health had improved to such an extent that after 20 years I no longer needed to take NSAID’s. I say alas because as fantastic as it was to be rid of those chemicals and the worry of what damage came from using them long-term, it did mean suddenly having to deal with living in a body without those anti-inflammatories. In particular, when it came to the Yang style, my arthritic shoulder was aggravated after not very many sets in a day by the single whip of that form. The other factor that sent me looking for something else to do was the loss of muscle mass I felt after doing the simplified form for three or four years. Of course, it was not the set itself that facilitated that. Rather it was rarely doing more than two sets a day, one at each end of the day for years on end.
So, since 2020 I’ve been building my skills in the Sun Style long form. It took longer than expected to really get into that set, perhaps because of the changes that needed to happen in a body shaped by Yang style for so long. After 80 hours of instruction in the Sun form from practitioners with the highest skills and deepest Tai chi knowledge, suitable instruction has dried up. There seems no dedicated Sun style practitioners teaching in Australia, much less Perth. Nor are there ongoing zoom lessons anywhere I’ve been able to find, and no quality online instruction courses. And being a hybrid form, the Sun style I now realise, is in fact immensely complicated.
So, after a flurry of searching and experimenting my learning has turned to the Yang family 103 form as enunciated by Yang Jun. Although, as it turned out I won’t actually practice the form, because it is not a good fit for my spinal issues. However, Yang Jun is an extraordinary teacher with immense knowledge. By providing a profound description of what is important in his Tai chi, he provides me with a double description that facilitates the deeper learning about the principles of Tai chi in the Sun family form.
So, I hope to build up my knowledge over the next four months and learn in greater depth the extraordinary internal elements of tai chi that are present in both Yang style and Sun family style. The task is to work through learning what is the same in the two distinct family styles. A philosophical challenge that can only deepen my engagement with this life saving art. Not least because a double description is always the foundation of seeing things with depth, and levelling up in Tai chi is at base, a deeper understanding of the art. So I move forward embracing Sun and Yang family styles as the twin towers of my Tai chi journey.