Wu Style Tai Chi Double-Edged Sword [Dec 5 & 6, 2009]
"It does up the ante a little,” says visiting Energy Arts instructor Edward Ware, who will introduce BTC students to the less practiced art of tai chi Sword on December 5-6.
Tai chi can come across as very “yin”—solitary, quiet, meditative, internal. “It’s all that,” Edward says, but Sword is a tool also to engage with the external world and deal with adversity, while driving qi through your system and bringing elements of play back to the game. Balancing the “yang.” “We can all get really serious with this study; sometimes if you go too deep, you lose the fun.”
The workshop will cover only parts of a tai chi Sword form, which has a run-time of roughly 15-minutes, longer than Short Form, shorter than Long Form. Because some of the postures are challenging, students will benefit most if they come well grounded in fundamental tai chi alignments. A group purchase of modestly priced swords is being arranged. Edward usually uses metal.
The ‘double edged’ sword(a traditional starter) is known as a “scholar’s weapon,” capable of being manipulated spiral-like in smaller spaces than the ‘broad’ sword with its hacking motion. Why learn? As a tool to feel more. You start to go out in space with the tip of the sword, “bringing something intangible into the more tangible world,” Edward says. The sword extends the sense of your periphery, cultivating the ability to connect more deeply from the tantien to outside your body. “You listen more to what’s going on around you.”
There’s also the physics of it— the longer the lever, the more internal pressure massages your body’s organs. Having a sword in hand pulls something out of you that an empty hand doesn’t, making motions more intense than with regular tai chi.
Edward has studied since 1997 with Bruce Frantzis. Before that, he learned tai chi Sword just because his teacher in China—son of the son-in-law of the founder of the Wu style—said he should. A professional drummer of long standing at the time, he found the practice immediately appealing: “I already had drum sticks; the sword was just a bit longer.”