Internal stillness or calmness is palpable and should attend all form and pushing hands practice. Mr Li constantly reminded me that from stillness comes movement and unity. He said that a signi cant fault that persists with many practitioners, even after many years, and hampers their progress is the inability to calm the mind. We all have a mental addiction to distracting thoughts and external stimulous. Stillness does not mean that you become totally unaware of what is going on around you, indeed your awareness should be heightened, but it means that you should not be captured by it.
Calmness is a technique to minimalise their damage.
Mr Li said that through regular practice the level of calmness would deepen would deepen allowing the mind to be eventually stilled and the mind intent that is associated with Taiji to emerge. Although Mr Li regularly referred to all aspects of Grand Master Mas 5 character maxim, he also added a postscript of his own and that was belief. This, he said, was most pertinant to the foreign student of Taiji, since chinese were brought up to believe in its ef cacy and power. Mr Li said that many westerners seemed to nd it hard to give up the idea of pure physical strength and the muscle bound torso. He said that the idea of investment in lossso often mentioned on the learning curve of Taiji was particularly alien to westerners who generally could not trust the idea to gain internal strength one had to relinquish the idea of external strength.