In practicing Tai Chi coordinate your upper with your lower body, your inner with your outer being. By coordinating you enhance your body awareness. Body awareness helps you understand the physical reality of your being. It helps you notice where you hurt, where you have the most flexibility, which leg you favor, whether your waist turns easier right than left. In short, body awareness helps you objectively feel what you are as a physical being at any single point in time. It’s part of the reason that Tai Chi works so well to improve balance and to create a general sense of physical ease.
The first stanza of Chang San-feng’s Tai Chi Chuan Ching says “In motion all parts of the body must be light nimble and strung together.” This, then, is the first principle of realizing the essence of Tai Chi Chuan. That is what it means to Coordinate.
Being a first principle doesn’t mean it’s what you can practice first. Before you can effectively coordinate, you need to be at a place where the moves come easily and naturally. When you’re first learning a move, it’s sometimes hard enough to even breathe. But, once you have some memory of moves and you’re relaxed enough to continue breathing deeply and easily, then you can expand your awareness so you coordinate and link your whole body.
Coordinate Quickly with Sun Style
Since the Sun style has 9 distinct sections, you can get to the stage where you coordinate in your practice as soon as you finish Section 1. This can be as soon as a month after beginning. At that point, you have a distinct set of moves that you ‘know’ that you practice, that you train. You’re beyond simply memorizing so you can actually coordinate and harmonize your body from head to toe.
At the same time you continue to learn new moves in succeeding sections. This means that you engage multiple levels of your brain, both your practice and your learning centers, all through your journey toward Tai Chi proficiency.
To put the principle of coordinating into practice it’s useful to have some concrete physical touchstones. Chang San-feng continues that “ the feet, legs and waist must act together simultaneously so that while stepping forward or back the timing and position are correct.”
Verbalize
In more concrete terms this means envisioning your hands coordinate with your feet, your elbows coordinate with your knees, your waist coordinate with your hips and your mind moving together with your body. You can apply these phrases while performing your Sun Style Tai Chi Chuan. By silently saying these phrases as you move, you can feel the coordination and get a very real sense of the way your hands and feet coordinate, the way your shoulders and hips coordinate.
This exercise works to actually increase the coordination of your body. It also works to help you feel better coordinated. For example, during brush knee push step, it’s easy to feel your upper and lower body coordinate when you envision and make real the parallel movement of your hands with your feet, your elbows with your knees and your shoulders with your hips. If you recite and actualize these coordinations over and over, soon you will have created better coordination and you will have a deeper feeling for the way your whole body works together as a unit. Even more, you will sense how your body is an extension of your spirit.
Variety Builds Fluidity
Create variety by silently saying the coordinations both from top to bottom and from bottom to top. So, sometimes say, feet coordinate with hands, knees coordinate with elbows, hips coordinate with shoulders, body coordinates with mind. Sometimes reverse this: hands coordinate with feet, elbows coordinate with knees, shoulders coordinate with hips. Either up or down, it all still comes together with your spirit. But I’m pretty sure that, like me, you will have a different feeling when envisioning your harmonies from bottom to top than when scanning yourself from top to bottom. It’s an interesting demonstration of the way context, habit and orientation affect perception.
Coordinate with Contrast
On a deeper level, it helps you feel coordination even when moves may seem disconnected. When your left arm moves forward and your right leg moves back, that too can be a coordination, but it’s a coordination not of symmetry but of contrast. “In discontinuity there is still continuity,” according to Wu Yu-hsiang in his Expositions of Insights Into the Practice of the Thirteen Postures.
Harmonize Inside and Out
Realizing the connection and harmony of your body, mind and spirit throughout the many moves in your Tai Chi practice helps you feel the harmony of yourself in the wider world. The connection you feel within yourself becomes part of the connection you feel with the Universe so that the ease you feel inside yourself becomes the coordinate ease that guides the way you live.