FROM MOVEMENT TO STILLNESS
From movement to stillness
Fourth in a five-part series of interviews with Michael Acton
When I meet Michael for our final interview, we discuss the arc from ‘movement to stillness’ through Taiji to Qi Gong to meditation, and looking back over 40 years’ experience of learning and teaching, we touch on what matters most, in the end.
Having studied to varying degrees karate, Ba Gua and Xing Yi, Chen style and Yang style Taiji Quan, he finally settled on the Wu Style practices and Qi Gong. Having been teaching these arts for 30 years, and now in his early seventies, I ask Michael what matters most to him, at this point?
“Probably in the end of all things, it will be the Qi Gong that outlives the Taiji, because there comes a point with age where you can’t practice like you used to. So Qi Gong is the root. Or, my root.”
With Michael still delivering challenging classes in weapons and push hands, he’s clearly not yet at that point. So I wonder how and why Qi Gong has already come to be so important?
“Master Li’s signature was the Qi Gong of self-nourishment, restoration and conservation. So in a way, that’s governed much of how I teach and what I teach, because it has an ultimate enduring purpose, as opposed to a temporary purpose like a martial art which, yes I can maybe throw somebody on the floor, but when you get old and you’re thinking about your life, maybe that isn’t at such a high level of importance. Whereas the state that you arrive at, clarity of mind, the wisdom mind, if you like, is the result of long and deep nurturing, so that when you die – which is one of the themes of everybody’s life – you have arrived at a point of some sort of clarity, and this is really to do with the long and deep practice of Qi Gong more than Taiji.”
I’m interested to find that Taiji and the form which Michael has loved and taught for so long don’t seem quite as important.
“Some people think the form is the thing, but it’s not, it’s only the beginning. What you bring to the form and how you investigate it is then the ingredient that allows something new to transform within yourself and within the form. And you have to keep adding some ingredient to allow it to grow. And this is what makes a good teacher, I think.”
We discuss what that ingredient is – what is it that needs to be added?
“Master Li was very clear on it, crystal clear. He said Taiji on its own is profound, as an embodied philosophy, a martial art, but to do it to a high level, for him it required you to embark on Qi Gong as a pathway, and one of the most refined ingredients of the Qi Gong pathway would be stillness meditation. So all practices of Taiji in the end, he said, must end in meditation.”
Michael goes on to outline a schematic for the content he teaches, dividing it into three core layers, with Taiji as the starting point.
“The Taiji in itself, in a hierarchy, would be considered only the bottom level. It is the level of conserving Jing, restoring the body and nourishing the body, to set the body up as a healthy entity that is able to withstand the winds and the forces of normal life. So that level is very important because without it you fall over. Every time you stand up you fall over. From my perspective – but it’s also Master Li’s, I believe – the first level is to conserve and restore the body. This is why it’s so popular with older people, because it has a reputation for eternal spring, which is a restoration process, how to restore the body and optimise it at any stage of your ageing life, to be younger again, to be revitalised, to re-set the body if you like. And this is the idea of ‘reversal,’ an idea that’s within the Qi Gong practices.”
He goes on to describe the second level, where the work of the Taiji has begun to have an effect.
“The second level would be when you’ve restored the body to a degree of health, a degree of holistic feeling and qualities we associate with healthiness and balance, with nature. This level really is to start practicing a kind of alchemy, a transformation within the self that can only happen within a healthy body, or within a state that’s been restored or optimised and that’s referred to as the idea of Jing becoming Qi, Qi becoming Shun, Shun becoming void. So at that point you begin a process of transformation or evolution which takes you from the restored state to a state of mental clarity, and a state of transformation within the body. So the second level would be where you start understanding that the body is undergoing change through restoration that allows development of a kind of vitality, a vital energy that would be referred to as Qi.”
As someone with an interest in meditation, I’m keen to hear about the third level, working with the mind towards greater stillness.
“Once you sense this Qi, the energetics of your state and the world around you, the emergence and the interdependence of that, you can start evolving it, and you start moving it towards a different perception, and that’s what you would refer to as more of a spiritual transformation. First it goes through a process of the mind becoming clear, the ability to see situations and understand yourself within them, and then from that, what Buddhists might call a wisdom mind emerges, a sense of how everything is put together and how everything is connected. And for that it’s necessary to do meditation.”
I ask how Michael how he works on this third level of mind and meditation in class, and whether it’s reserved only for those who have learned the Taiji and Qi Gong forms and movements?
“I think good teachers, right in the early stages of practice, introduce the idea that the mind’s ability to focus and fine tune practices to a high level is extremely important. How certain practices teach you to look inwards and assess where you are, who you are, what you are, and what your condition is. So I think that a good teacher will encourage students and give them techniques, like we do. The Zhang Zhuang, the standing, and the form as well have a significant mental component. It’s very hard to bring students to that state because most people work very hard on trying to achieve the form alone. By the time they’ve got to that point and they’ve achieved it, they’ve got some fluidity and physical satisfaction – the sheer pleasure of knowing it. But for some people they’ll have an inclination that it’s only a doorway, the first room.”
We discuss the motivations that bring people to Taiji, and how this affects one’s ability to move through that doorway. In doing so, we circle right back to where we started; the drive to learn martial skills.
“This is one of the paradoxes of Taiji” clarifies Michael. “If you take away the aggressive drive to win, your Taiji will improve. If you achieve a more enlightened mind state of interdependence and fluidity, then your martial skills will also improve… if you want to go to the kind of level that Taiji tries to bring you to, then you have to engage in a very much deeper mind practice, the practice of shen to void, if you like, the practice of giving up resistance, which is a physical state, a mental state, and it’s also a living state in terms of our relationship with the environment, and it’s a state that’s hard to cultivate, in a sense it’s counter intuitive.”
I wonder what this state looks like when it’s achieved, and whether it’s actually possible to attain it?
“In China, you find these old teachers who are still very effective in terms of delivering martial skill, but they have a quality of ease about them, of unstressed ego. There isn’t even an ego involved, they’re just showing you something, so Master Li and Master Liu were the kind of people you’d say they’re sort of enlightened in a way, there weren’t any illusions anymore, they’d somehow blown out that candle and they had an awareness that was not stressed, was at ease with the world around them and themselves, and yet they also had the ability to do these things, some of which are extraordinary and hard to believe things, like small movements that had massive effects, and small gestures of intention with the mind that would change your perception of what was going on.”
I’m enthralled, and ask Michael how often he meets students capable of achieving this level. We discuss the range of students turning up at the studio, their motivations, how to teach them, and ultimately – why? Having attained some level of skill, why should one embark on the difficult and painstaking task of teaching Taiji and Qi Gong?
In our fifth and final interview, we will trace the archaeology of teaching; the treasures uncovered as knowledge is shared.