Last week I traveled to British Columbia to train with my Tai Chi teacher, Master Shanti. She is a woman I met sometime around 2007 at PAWMA camp, the camp put on by the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists. From the first class I took with her, I could see she offered something different than most other teachers. Her attention to the deep, internal, subtle structure of the body was far more attuned than other teachers I had trained with. She would suggest I move my knee a quarter inch, and that adjustment would change the strength of my stance dramatically. She asked me to fill my joints, to rest in, to take the slow ride into the deepest structure my body could manifest.
I began training in her system, The Shanti System, in 2018, soon after she had developed it. The system itself is a small collection of Tai Chi exercises that encompass all that our teacher wants us to learn. Here it is:
Wuji Standing: standing meditation, the foundation of our system
White Lotus Daoyin: a qigong in which we learn to express directional energy
Fang Song Gongs: exercises for efficient and clean kinetic movement
Blooding: exercises to open and fill the joints that allow us a more tangible relationship with chi
Freeform: allowing for free expression of martial movement within the container of our bodies
Even though I’ve been training in the system for four years now, I still don’t know how to do all of the exercises. The fang song gongs in particular seem hard for me to remember.
I think part of this, my inability to remember, has been an exhaustion with learning new things. I’m only recently realizing how exhausted I’ve been as a mother to young children. Exhaustion that was increased by grieving my father who died in 2020. Exhaustion that was increased when my mom had a massive stroke in 2021. Exhaustion that felt never-ending and hopeless when my marriage became full of resentment and my husband and I became adversaries instead of teammates over the course of covid (that resentment is, thankfully, subsiding thanks to couples therapy.)
Also, there’s a bitter part of me that hasn’t wanted to learn new things. In the last martial system I trained in, I learned enormous amounts of curriculum. Forms, kick combinations, hand combinations, fighting principles, the history of the system, the names of all of the black belts, and so much more. I put my whole self into that system with the expectation that all of that hard work would pay off when I earned my black belt.
But I didn’t earn my black belt. Instead I got pregnant, and soon after my son was born, my beloved Sifu left our school. I had no teacher anymore. I tried to go back to training in the system, but every time I tried, I got physically hurt. My postpartum body needed more tender care, and the teachers and students in the system at the time weren’t able to offer that. I also wasn’t able to speak up for myself and ask for tenderness. The culture at our school had been one of toughness, and I had gone soft.
I blamed myself for not being tough enough, and conflated that into feeling like I wasn’t a good enough martial artist. I pulled away from the school feeling defeated, and decided that maybe martial arts just wasn’t for me after all.
But the training was in my bones, and through my friend Jaydra, I circled around to training with my new teacher. Master Shanti values tenderness, connection, and emotion. These are all pieces that I hadn’t known I’d needed in my training. They are pieces that support me as a whole person.
So here I am now, in 2022, having just returned from B.C. where I trained with my teacher and fellow Systemers for four straight days.
Though I don’t know how to replicate all of the curriculum, what I do know I am beginning to know deeply. Over the course of the four days, my lower back, my “gate of life,” settled in more deeply and fully than it ever has. This has offered me the deepest connection to the earth I have felt yet, the earth being our ultimate source of martial power.
A correction that my teacher offered my right foot upended my entire universe. I could feel that how I had been holding that foot — twisted out a couple inches too far — was misaligned and I hadn’t noticed until Master Shanti pointed it out. After allowing for the correction, I had to blank out for a few hours so my body could have a deep internal conversation with itself to remember the new position.
And the time spent with my fellow students was joyful time. Our system is hard to learn. It asks us to rewire our brains and bodies from old patterned behavior into new, clearer ways of being. It invites us into “non-doing,” or “allowing,” which is far more difficult than just doing a punch. My fellow students and I share the frustration of our attempts at non-doing, and we celebrate each other boisterously when we have non-doing success.
So I have returned home to Portland not knowing much more than I did before I left, but knowing what I do know much more deeply. I have a felt sense, an introception, as my teacher says, of the art that I didn’t have before I left. I feel joyful and proud of the progress I have made, and deeply happy that I’ve gotten to where I am right now.
Michelle Folk Johnson 