The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

Tai Chi Classics, is “to defeat a thousand pounds with four ounces.” Chen’s
barely perceptible contact between his wrist and my pushing hand was an
embodiment of the “four ounces,” but there are countless manifestations of this
principle inside and outside of Tai Chi—some physical, some psychological. If
aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself. I guess the perfect image
is Lucy snatching the football away time and again as Charlie Brown tries to
kick it. Poor Charlie just keeps on flipping himself into the air. The Tai Chi
practitioner’s body needs to learn how to react quickly and naturally slip away
from every conceivable strike. The problem is that we are conditioned to tense
up and resist incoming or hostile force, so we have to learn an entirely new
physiological response to aggression. Before learning the body mechanics of
nonresistance, I had to unlearn my current physical paradigm. Easier said than
done.
Try this: Stand up and plant your feet in the ground. Really dig in. Imagine
you are on the edge of a cliff. Now ask a friend or sibling or spouse to push into
you, and to keep following your attempts at escape with the intention of
making your feet move. This can be done very gently. Both of you should move
slowly and smoothly to avoid injury. My guess is that your physical instinct is to
push back, brace yourself, and try to hold your ground.
Now, you have read about the idea of nonresistance. Give it a try. Try to
maintain your stance without resisting at all and without moving faster than
your opponent. Odds are that unless you are a trained martial artist, this notion
feels unnatural. Where are you supposed to go? You might try to retreat into
your rear leg, but if your partner follows your retreat, you’ll run out of space.
At this point, you will resist. If your partner or opponent is stronger than you
or has good leverage or momentum built up, you will not be able to stop the
incoming power.
Fortunately, we don’t learn Push Hands while teetering on the edge of a
cliff. It is not a tragedy if we lose our balance. That said, one of the most
challenging leaps for Push Hands students is to release the ego enough to allow
themselves to be tossed around while they learn how not to resist. If a big strong
guy comes into a martial arts studio and someone pushes him, he wants to
resist and push the guy back to prove that he is a big strong guy. The problem
is that he isn’t learning anything by doing this. In order to grow, he needs to

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give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win. The bruiser will need to
get pushed around by little guys for a while, until he learns how to use more
than brawn. William Chen calls this investment in loss. Investment in loss is
giving yourself to the learning process. In Push Hands it is letting yourself be
pushed without reverting back to old habits—training yourself to be soft and
receptive when your body doesn’t have any idea how to do it and wants to
tighten up.
The timing of my life was perfect for this type of process. I was wide open
to the idea of getting tossed around—Push Hands class was humility training.
Working with Chen’s advanced students, I was thrown all over the place. They
were too fast for me, and their attacks felt like heat-seeking missiles. When I
neutralized one foray, the next came from out of nowhere and I went flying.
Chen watched these sessions, and made subtle corrections. Every day, he taught
me new Tai Chi principles and refined my body mechanics and technical
understanding. I felt like a soft piece of clay being molded into shape.
As the weeks and months passed by, I devoted myself to training and made
rapid progress. Working with other beginners, I could quickly find and exploit
the tension in their bodies and at times I was able to stay completely relaxed
while their attacks slipped by me. While I learned with open pores—no ego in
the way—it seemed that many other students were frozen in place, repeating
their errors over and over, unable to improve because of a fear of releasing old
habits. When Chen made suggestions, they would explain their thinking in an
attempt to justify themselves. They were locked up by the need to be correct.
I have long believed that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid
ever repeating the same mistake twice—both technical and psychological—he
or she would skyrocket to the top of their field. Of course such a feat is
impossible—we are bound to repeat thematic errors, if only because many
themes are elusive and difficult to pinpoint. For example, in my chess career I
didn’t realize I was faltering in transitional moments until many months of
study brought the pattern to light. So the aim is to minimize repetition as
much as possible, by having an eye for consistent psychological and technical
themes of error.
In the last years of my chess career, I was numbed by a building sense of
alienation. Pressure messed up my head and I got stuck, like the guys doing
Push Hands who don’t learn from their mistakes and practice with a desperate
need to win, to be right, to have everything under control. This ultimately

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cripples growth and makes Tai Chi look like an extension of rush hour in Times
Square. In those early Tai Chi years, my mission was to be wide open to every
bit of information. I tried my best to learn from each error, whether it was my
own or that of a training partner. Each Push Hands class was a revelation, and
after a few months I could handle most players who had been studying for a
few years.
This was an exciting time. As I internalized Tai Chi’s technical foundation, I
began to see my chess understanding manifesting itself in the Push Hands
game. I was intimate with competition, so offbeat strategic dynamics were in
my blood. I would notice structural flaws in someone’s posture, just as I might
pick apart a chess position, or I’d play with combinations in a manner people
were not familiar with. Pattern recognition was a strength of mine as well, and
I quickly picked up on people’s tells.
As the months turned into years, my training became more and more
vigorous and I learned how to dissolve away from attacks while staying rooted
to the ground. It is a sublime feeling when your root kicks in, as if you are not
standing on the ground but anchored many feet deep into the earth. The key is
relaxed hip joints and spring-like body mechanics, so you can easily receive
force by coiling it down through your structure. Working on my root, I began
to feel like a tree, swaying in the wind up top, but deeply planted down low. In
time, I was also able to make my Tai Chi meditation practice manifest in Push
Hands play. Techniques that are hidden within the form started to come out of
me spontaneously in martial exchanges, and sometimes partners would go
flying away from me without my consciously doing much at all. This was
trippy, but a natural consequence of systematic training.
I have mentioned how a large part of Tai Chi is releasing tension from your
body through the practice of the meditative form. This is effectively a clearing
of interference. Now, add in the coordination of breathing with the movements
of the form, and what you have is body and mind energizing into action out of
stillness. With practice, the stillness is increasingly profound and the transition
into motion can be quite explosive—this is where the dynamic pushing or
striking power of Tai Chi emerges: the radical change from emptiness into
fullness. When delivering force, the feeling inside the body is of the ground
connecting to your finger tips, with nothing blocking this communication.
Highly skilled Tai Chi practitioners are incredibly fast, fluid, responsive—in a

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sense, the embodiment of Muhammad Ali’s “Float like a butterfly, sting like a
bee.”
While I was internalizing this information, I was also constantly training
with people who were far more advanced. They absolutely manhandled me.
There was one man—call him Evan—who was the slightly out-of-control
powerhouse of the school. Evan was a six-foot-two, 200-pound second-degree
karate black belt, eight-year Aikido student, and eight-year student of Tai Chi.
Master Chen only let Evan push with people who could handle his aggression
without flipping out, tensing, and getting hurt. But even then, Evan often
stirred up confrontations. Once he felt I was ready, Chen started pairing me up
with Evan.
Talk about investing in loss! It is one thing to put your ego on hold, but
this was brutal. Evan would have me plastered up against a wall, my feet a foot
or two off the ground, before I even saw the attack coming. It is in the spirit of
Tai Chi training for more advanced students to stop when their partner is off-
balance. But Evan had a different style. He liked to put you on the ground.
Week after week, I would show up in class and get hammered by Evan. No
matter how I tried to neutralize his attacks, I just couldn’t do it. He was too
fast—how could I dodge what I couldn’t see? I knew I should avoid tensing up,
but when he came at me my whole body braced for impact. I had no idea how
to function from relaxation when a freight train was leveling me fifty times a
night. I felt like a punching bag. Basically, I had two options—I could either
avoid Evan or get beat up every class.
I spent many months getting smashed around by Evan, and admittedly it
was not easy to invest in loss when I was being pummeled against walls—
literally, the plaster was falling off in the corner of the school into which Evan
invited me every night. I’d limp home from practice, bruised and wondering
what had happened to my peaceful meditative haven. But then a curious thing
began to happen. First, as I got used to taking shots from Evan, I stopped
fearing the impact. My body built up resistance to getting smashed, learned
how to absorb blows, and I knew I could take what he had to offer. Then as I
became more relaxed under fire, Evan seemed to slow down in my mind. I
noticed myself sensing his attack before it began. I learned how to read his
intention, and be out of the way before he pulled the trigger. As I got better
and better at neutralizing his attacks, I began to notice and exploit weaknesses

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in his game, and sometimes I found myself peacefully watching his hands come
toward me in slow motion.
There came a moment when the tables clearly turned for me and Evan. My
training had gotten very intense, I had won a couple of middleweight National
Championship titles, and was preparing for the World Championships. Evan
and I hadn’t worked together in a while because he started avoiding me as I
improved. But this evening Master Chen paired us up on the mats. Evan came
at me like a bull, and I instinctively avoided his onslaught and threw him on
the floor. He got up, came back at me, and I tossed him again. I was shocked
by how easy it felt. After a few minutes of this Evan said that his foot was
bothering him and he called it a night. We shook hands, and he would never
work with me again.
Reflecting on our relationship, I don’t think there was ever any malice in
Evan’s actions. Truth be told, I think he is a good guy whose no-nonsense,
smashmouth approach to martial arts training presented me with a priceless
learning opportunity. It’s clear that if in the beginning I had needed to look
good to satisfy my ego, then I would have avoided that opportunity and all the
pain that accompanied it. For his part, Evan was big and strong, and to an
inexperienced martial artist he was terrifying, but his forceful approach held
him back from internalizing some of the more subtle elements of the art. Most
critically, Evan was unwilling to invest in loss himself. He could have taken my
improvement as a chance to raise his game, but instead he opted out.
* * *
Thinking back on my competitive life, I realize how defining these themes of