What is required to be a good Tai Chi student? Regular practice, for sure. But perhaps also a certain attitude towards learning itself. Are there better and worse ways of learning? And will spending time thinking about these make us better students of Tai Chi? (Or just keep us away from practice?)
This is an attempt to share some thoughts about the difficulty of learning, particularly as it relates to Tai Chi. Learning Tai Chi, as we all quickly discover, is not like attending a regular evening exercise session. For many of us, it requires that we put ourselves in an unfamiliar situation, that of being a student embarking upon a new education.
Education is a matter of both teaching and learning. To be educable, one has to have the capacity for learning, which comprises aspects of receptivity, reflectivity and active engagement. Human beings have an innate capacity to learn. But the capacity to learn can be severely compromised by poor systems of education and unreflective habits. It is all too common to be in a situation where one is being taught, and yet failing to learn. Many of us, at least some of the time, seem to lose our ability to learn. This may only occur from time to time, but its effect can be devastating to our confidence in ourselves as students.
It may be that poor educational experiences in the past are largely responsible for having fostered the expectation of being taught. This, in combination with the contemporary belief that we can purchase an education, can yield a negative disposition towards learning: we’ve paid our money and turned up to the class, and we expect the teacher to do his/her job and teach us! But when we approach education in this way, we have put aside the art of learning and so we can’t use the guidance our teacher provides to enable us to grow, develop and flourish.
So what is this distinction between learning and being taught, and how can we learn how to learn?
The student of Tai Chi who learns is actively engaged in her experience in class. She is able to transform the knowledge given her into nourishment for mind and body, and as a result is able to grow and develop. By contrast, the student who is merely taught is a passive recipient of knowledge. This student receives instruction without the capacity to use it to shape herself. She consumes without being able to digest what she has been given. She is incapable of transforming instruction into the stuff of growth. Instead, it passes right through her, and she carries on as before, unaffected. How many times do those little corrections to our feet, posture, balance, go in one ear and out the other?
The passive student expects to be taught by the teacher. She believes that it’s the responsibility of the teacher to impart knowledge to her – knowledge that she will then possess. The active student understands that what she has been given are gifts – tools and perhaps a blueprint, but that she herself must be the craftsperson who puts these to use. She alone is responsible for her learning. She is both the material to be moulded and the means of bringing about its transformation. Knowledge is not a parcel that can be handed to her in exchange for money and turning up to class. Transformation is something that her teacher can help guide her in the direction of, and can encourage her to attain, but cannot do for her.
It is perhaps all too easy in modern Western culture to think that we can exchange money and a little bit of our precious time for the kind of improvement that only persistent effort really brings. When we are prey to this cultural norm, we are all too ready to blame what we take to be our lack of “progress” on external factors – our work, family responsibilities, classmates, teachers, the weather, anything other than ourselves! Many of us, I suspect, are guilty of falling into this attitude from time to time. I know I am. So how can we help ourselves? One thing I am learning is that if what we want is real transformation, we have to do more than train our bodies, we have also to reflect upon and learn from our successes and our failures as students. We have to learn how to learn.
The philosopher and psychologist William James, writing over a century ago, offers us some advice:
“By neglecting the necessary concrete labour, by sparing ourselves the daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities … Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”
I find James’s insight here of enormous help in keeping me strong when I start to waver, and hope that it will be of encouragement to others. James had some acquaintance with Eastern traditions of learning, and was much impressed with the role of silent contemplation in these, considering their lack to be a failure in Western education.
I will end, however, with a few words from Confucius, “You cannot carve a rotten piece of wood; you cannot trowel a wall made of dung.”