Turtles and 氣

I am not going to get this story quite right. Forgive my paraphrasing.

In my Tai Chi class, the instructor had been introducing a set of exercises called the "Animal Play" series. The animals of interest that I remember were mostly the tiger, dragon, and turtle (which, now that I come to think of it, represent 3 of the 4 cardinal directions). They have names like "Turtle Looking" and "Turtle Swimming" (the English names, of course).


One day during class, he demonstrated an exercise by which one roots one's feet and plants one's palms on one's hips, then moves the waist through ever-widening circles while trying to keep the head level. At some point, the circles become too great for the rest of the body to compensate for and the person falls off-balance and must take a step.

The first step catches and prevents the fall, the second step follows less urgently in the direction that the body is naturally moving in, and the third step places itself in a shoulder-width, stable position alongside the other foot.

Our faces displayed a mix of amusement, confusion, and skepticism.


He explained,

There was a man, a practitioner of Tai Chi who fell ill for a long time and though his family cared for him, nothing seemed to aid his recovery. While the man rested at home, he noticed that every day a turtle would crawl up near his house and he observed it performing strange actions, falling over, stumbling, and then righting itself. He decided that the turtle was trying to show him what to do and he patterned himself after its actions. After taking up this practice, he recovered his health.

The relation of the body to the flow of qi (氣 or chi) can become disrupted, disordered, and misaligned. The purpose of this exercise is to lose control of the body and allow the qi to realign it to its natural direction regarding the cardinal points.

By the time the third step is taken, the body should be standing comfortably, facing the new direction that the qi naturally aligns with, when release of other controls allows it to do so.