overall description.

Context: Since, due to work pressures, I couldn’t attend the Bogor workshop (Indonesia is the only point in master CZH’s Canada/US — Europe –> China –> Australia annual journey arc that Indians can get visas to, without hassle, and where things are affordable. Given the weak and ever falling Indian rupee, it is the one place where Indians can get the benefit of direct teaching from him. I was a little anxious when I went to Bali a few years ago, due to not knowing anyone there or having met Master Chen before. This time i knew what a workshop involved, had done some (but not enough, in retrospect) Yilu 13 practice, knew many people from the Bali workshop, and could form a better picture of what master Chen’s teaching was like etc, which gave me some kind of framework to temper my expectations

So I and a friend went on down to Surabaya, and after waiting around a bit, with senior student (and organizer) Candra Lo, Ong Wen Ming, Alex Merentek, and a young newcomer, Anthony Chen, for Master Chen and some of his disciples to arrive from Singapore, went to the hotel had dinner, and crashed.

One thing I noticed here was that most Indians (including me) are a bit stiff and formal in public settings like airport lounges, but the truly dedicated and advanced students (like Ming, Gora, Alex, and Chandra) just start practiing Yilu and/or foundations, discussing CZH’s previous lectures, videos etc. It was good fun to sit there in the lounge and watch all this, learn a ton, and jump in and ask questons from these advanced students. Then master Chen came along. Lesson Learned: If you get some free time, use it to practice foundations or yilu. Don’t care about what people think. Ignore social conditioning.

Day 1: 21st January 2024.

The sun rises early in Surabaya. 05:00 hours (ish) vs 06:30 ish in most of India. I still had some amount of jetlag, but a great breakfast cleared up some of the fog. A bus picked us all up and we went to the training area which seemed to be a Karate dojo, in its ‘day job’and got right down to practice.After foundations practice and yilu under the supervision of Chen Xu and Ketong Lin, master Chen started teaching in his inimitable style. He’d often start with something (relatively!) simple, and then teach more and more involved variants of that fundamental move, often immediately having students pair up and test it out against resistance. I found that this sequence was highly educational, since it is often easy enough to think you understood some technique, especially since Master Chen (MC from here on, I’ll use CZH interchangably, I understand that ‘sifu’ is used only by ‘indoor disciples’ in China, which I am not) has the ability to find and use the most appropriate Engilsh words and phrases, effortlessly translating Chinese concepts, some quite esoteric on the fly, but when you actually try to make it work against even a mildly resisting opponent, that is a completely different game.

Then there was some free hand push hands. Unlike most TJQ schools, in Practical Method, the push hands is not a pre arranged sequence of I do this, and you do this and then you do this, and so on, in other words not (usually) ‘fxed step’. Instead, two people step into the ‘ring’, cross hands, and when master Chen says, “go!” or “fight!” it becomes a full fledged effort, within the push hand rules (no kicking, punching, or any other form of strikes, no gouging or biting, or attacks to dangerous areas, but otherwise anything goes) to win. All good fun, but as ageing person with a bum shoulder and no real technique, I watched from the sidelines for this particular exercise, and am glad I did so. A long way to go before I can face an opponent going all out to throw me around the room!

There were two sessions in the day, one from around 08:30 to 12:30, then a break for lunch then the next one would be approximately 14:00 to 15:00, with a break for tea.

Supper/dinner is early in Surabaya. The sun sets at 17:00 ish and dinner time begins at around 18:00. Candra Lo (chief organizer) took us to a different top notch restaurant each day of the program, and the food was incredible.

Came back from the dinner and was asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.

Brief descriptions of the techniques that were taught on day 1.

These might be cryptic for people who didn’t attend that day and/or don’t have a background in Practical Method. These are brief notes I made on a piece of paper (_TODO in future – take a notebook to the workshops!) as soon as I could get a break from the teaching. I do this when I’m watching videos of CZH or his senior students, and by necessity, this is what I understood than properly reflective of what was actually taught. Some stuff demoed by/on advanced students went right over my head. So these notes are again necessarly incomplete.You just have to be there to get a full picture. My one liner notes for the day were

1. Two man sensitivity/listening exercise. One person puts out a hand, with zero resistance in it, and the other moves it in random directions, while the person putting out the hand ‘listens’/attempts to find a ‘center point’. The physical effect that denotes the ‘finding the center point’ (there was a technical Chinese term for this – I forget) is that the person manipulating the arm experiences a sensation of ‘jammed’. The idea was that you immediately stop – the exercise is not one of fighting technique, but of listening – and restart, but I noticed at least some students attempting to push into, or otherwise use the ‘center point’ once found, so after some time MC stepped in and demonstrated some PM specific ways of using this point once found, to uproot, throw, etc the opponent. Since I don’t really know enough PM to fight, I was happy to find the point and stop.

2. A more advanced version of the listening exercise, where two people lock hands in a ‘wrestling’/pushing starting posture and then move back and forth, attempting to find the ‘jamming point’. again the exercise asks that you stop when this point is found, and reset, but some students attempted to apply fighting/pushing technique once the point was found. Again, MC demoed some ways of using this point, once found, to uproot etc the opponent but I think (all of these sentences have an implicit “I think” at the beginning) the point of the basic exercise was to find the ‘jamming point’ and then stop and reset, which is the point of listening exercises.

3. Counters to moves where people ‘bear hug’ you from behind. The point is to use proper PM TJQ technique (vs raw strength) to break free – the firsts tep of which is to create space so you can the PM techniques – often direct variants of the foundation exercises – to escape the opponent’s grip. I found that I couldn’t use the technique as taught – since I am weak and don’t have enough practice in foundations/yilu, so MC gave me an easier alternative technique, which I was able to use even against very strong opponents.

This is something I like about MC. If you go to him with technical problems he has endless patience and the unique ability to tell you what *you* are doing wrong, and devise alternate solutions that fit your body/skill level, to get to the finishing point of the exercise. This is very useful and often even very advanced students don’t have this skill, and often have to resort to repeating the standard instruction sets – which is not useful in solving the problem – ‘yes I heard you say that the first time, but I can’t do it. What to do now?’ – is a question to which only the best teachers can find answers customized to your level and limits.

4. Moving your ‘center’ (usually from the kua) against an opponent in a way that whatever force they are applying to you cannot resist your “incoming”. I could accomplish this only partially, probably just needs a lot more practice, but when I could, the opponent was immediately uprooted. MC said that when you ‘fight’ (as normal people would) the opponent often feels it in his chest, but when you use proper PM technique he feels it in his feet, while feeling nothing in his torso, which is confusing for most people.

Day 2:

began with dragging myself out of bed with an “I want a lot more sleep” feeling , but the usual good breakfast settled some of that. I was hoping MC would teach some Hunyuan, but he didn’t and went into more PM technique, lots more of it, in the usual ‘here is the simplest version which you should start practice with – then when you are more advanced you do this, and after many years of practice you do this , … ” format. The most advanced variants had MC move a finger a few inches this way or that and the opponent would go down in a heap or be thrown large distances – something that *looks* fake when you see it on video. Before I was on the receiving end of such technique, I was skeptical too. But once you experience it – often the subjective feeling is one of being hit by a truch you didn’t see coming, or being irressistibly pulled to the floor by an ocean tide, then you know it is not fake. At all.

My note say that during day 2 we learned/were taught

1. Creating a speed differential in the body against a fighting opponent. The idea is that the upper body, led by the hands, moves at a different speed, usually faster, than the lower body, often led by kua, which ‘switches’ to a faster speed. since the hands are used only to maintain structure and/or deceive the opponent and all the fighting is done with the legs/kua, the opponent is faced with a force that seems to come out of nowhere – your arms shoulders don’t exert force, only transmit it – and so he can’t deal with this ’empty force’.

2. ‘moving on a line’.

The basic (and very eye opening) idea here is that when MC says ‘move on a line’ he is not being poetic. He means that there is a *literal* line that your body should move on. One aspect of this was how the feet should be on a literal line – he made us place our feet on lines (on the wooden floor) and align our bodies accordingly, and this made an immediate difference. Another aspect we trained in was to make some direction switching moves from yilu along literal straight lines. Often since you are touching the opponent with your hands, you need to learn how to move the rest of your body along a line without using your arms to exert force on your opponent to “support” your move, not to push or pull your opponent where your arms touch him to support the move of your body. On the receiving end of this move, when done well, the subjective feeling is “where did he go?” since his hands don’t transmit the sensation that he is moving his body. All of us practised against (an unresiting!) Chen Xu, and also against each other. I found an engineering background useful in understanding this, in terms of which vectors should move, and which shouldn’t and only move the mody along the ‘moving’ vectors. I found some success with this move – again no big deal for advanced students, but for an old guy with a stiff and injured body, very satisfying. Needs a lot more practice, as always.

3. a ‘fixed step’ push hands exercise where (unlike in other taiji styles) we move our hands along the perimeter of a square, against resistance and “shrinking and expanding the torso- vs the more usual swaying/rounded motion. This is very educational since the opponent can’t really do anytihng but ‘be moved’ even if he exerts a lot of pressure to ‘pin’ you.

4. A ‘guitar string’ technique – where you use short ‘pulses’ to manipulate your oppnents’ upper body, lower body, or both. It is hard to explain with words.

Day 3.

MC started teaching us Hun Yuan Qi Gong (yay!). but the session was cut short by the airconditioning failing. Surabaya is *very* hot, even for a person from India, and humid too – so often when you use google to find the local temperature, you get “36 degrees centigrade – feels like 40. Excessive heat warning”. MC said that some of the techniques could be dangerous if performed on a hot day by old people, children etc. I fall into the first category, so while disappointed- my secret mission on this trip was to learn HunYuan fundamentals, more on this later – I was quite relieved. Also there was some time pressure here. MC explained some of the HYQG 12 sequence, promised to teach more later. also he started explaining in Chinese, with a senior student translating into Bahasa – but soon noticed that I and my friend (also from India) was looking blank and switched to English, which was a great relief. But the translation was, by necessity, abbreviated so all I could gather for form 1- sink and cleanse qi – was ‘statue with water rolling down’ . Eh wut?

Then the rest of the day was taken in us holding various postures from the yilu, with Chen Xu, KT, and MC walking by and making corrections as Leo took photographs. We had to hold the stances for what felt like eternity, (but probably was only a few minutes) and after the first 30 sectonds, various muscles would first start hurting, then burning. I did ‘pop up’ a few times when the supervisors’ back was turned, a luxury denied to people in the front line, who were just short of screaming their lungs out by the time this exercise conclued. We worked through the first 13 postures of the Yilu int his fashion. I was very glad when this exercise concluded.

MC gave me some corrections on one of the ‘leg steps out’ moves of the Yilu 13. With his modifications – toes ‘point to nose’, Kua and hip pushes into heel, hands come into a line parallel to that of the feet, head should remain high and not flop this way or that, suddenly this posture – which usually feels quite unstable, becomes very powerful and balanced. I need to put this into every step-out move in the Yilu.

This day ended with everyone feeling sore and fatigued. Never knew *not* moving could be this hard! (PM doesn’t do the “zhan zhuang” bit prevalant in other TJQ styles, so this is probably as close as we’ll come, and in any case the emphasis was on correct structure not “being soft” or “song”). Damned hard work. I slept like a log, was out like a light when my head touched the pillow.

Day 4

1. The opponent pushes (hard) on your hip. you (1) ‘settle’ on your rear kua, transmitting the force into the ground. you move, with the (now ’empty’) other leg, *without* the opponent detecting this motion, then ‘step onto’ that foot, (KEY) moving only your torso, with the structure of the rest of the body not changing. When done correctly, this suddenly uproots the opponent. Hard to do, but very satisfying when done right. as usual MC demonstrated some advanced variants of this move, none of which I could pull off.

2. INSIGHT: the positive circle works on the same principle as above. the withdrawing elbow ‘sits on’ or ‘locks onto’ the kua. the issuing hand cannot be resisted when done correctly etc.

3. Some good advice from Alfred Deng, which showed how the mind is playing tricks on you. what you think is happening is not what is actually happening, and there are ways to “see” what is actually happening.

4. How to open the kua. This is probably what I need to achieve over the coming months. method 1. Exaggerated folding and opening (thank you Gora!) 2. Putting your knees against the wall and pushing one kua to touch the wall without letting the other leg move (Thank you Sunando!)

Then there was some wild push hands with the incredible Jojo Juarsa and the South East Asian champion – I forgot to get how his name is spelled, but it seems to sound something like “Shonan”? – a very nice person, and very helpful and humble, and a part of MC’s group.

In the background to all this, there seemed to be some taiji “politics” happening in the background with multiple masters of other schools, and a local politician and his wife, visiting, and lots of ceremony and gift giving, and staking out positions etc, all of which was fun to watch and try to figure out, but which had nothing to do with training per se. The visiting masters all seemed quite impressed (rightly so) with the PM school, and CZH (rightly so!).

I managed to get in a private session with MC at the last moment, a few hours before getting on the flight to India. I’m waiting for the videos of that session to be out, and then I’ll write a separate short entry here about that too.

After a very long and tiring flight back home, today morning a couple of friends said they wanted to come to Indonesia next time with me, after hearing my description of what happened there. Not sure if they will actually followthrough, but a good development none the less, in the Tai Chi desert that is the subcontinent of India. One billion people with no access to quality TJQ instruction! hopefully this will get fixed in the future.

And that concludes my report on what happened during the four days of PM workshop in Surabaya.