I’ve liked fighting since I was a kid. Not real fighting, and not watching sport fighting, but wrestling with my little brother. I loved the energy of it— getting mad at each other, getting riled up, then yelling at each other, the grappling, the slapping each other, but not so hard that we’d actually hurt the other person or they’d tell our parents. If our parents found out, we might get in trouble, so we’d try to keep our play fighting mostly civil. 

I teach push hands now, which is martial arts play fighting. I realized after class last week that a big piece of push hands is teaching people how to fight civilly. In push hands, two people touch in with each other, usually forearm to forearm, and feel into each other’s body and energy. The goal in push hands is usually to uproot your partner/opponent, but depending on how your play push hands, it could also be to hit them and avoid getting hit.

When we first begin learning push hands, there’s no martial intent, no hitting. We just practice holding our body in the proper posture, touching in with our partner, sticking to our partner, then moving around while stuck. One person leads, one follows, then they switch roles. Once students are comfortable with that, then both people lead and follow at the same time. Or you could think of it as no one is leading or following. When I first suggest to students that they try this, their heads kind of explode. It’s delightful to witness.

And it’s one of the many paradoxes that push hands invites us to explore: how do we lead and follow at the same time? How do we move if no one is leading or following? 

The answer, as I see it, is that in the beginning, someone is kind of leading. If it’s you, try to stop leading for a while. Follow the movement, let the movement lead the next movement. If you and your partner can do this together harmoniously, it will feel as though no one is leading or following. It will feel like a flow state. That flow state is embodying paradox: no one is leading the movement and yet we are still moving. And it feels so lovely, there’s a lightness and joy to it. It’s what I hope to experience every time I touch in with someone.

Keep in mind, though, that martial push hands isn’t dancing, so while it is harmonious, it is also combative. We are pitted against our partner; we are trying to uproot them and hit them. And yet we are also aiming for harmony with them. Another paradox, hooray!

In my own push hands practice, I’ve recently been playing with letting my martial intention lead me. My intention is that I will strike or uproot my partner when the opportunity arises. “Intention without attachment,” is one of my teacher Master Shanti’s catchphrases. To me this means that my martial intention doesn’t have any moves or timeframe attached to it—I’m not intending to punch my partner in the gut right now, that’s attachment to a particular timing and technique. Rather, I’m simply intending to strike or uproot them at some point in our time together. If the opening arises, my martial intention might invite me to punch my partner in the gut. But in this case I don’t “do” the punch, the punch moves me. Often, when a technique “moves me” and it lands on my partner successfully, I feel a sense of surprise and delight and having been moved. This feeling of letting go, of non-doing, is the heart of what I’m aiming for in my push hands practice. It’s allowing the art to be expressed through me rather than by me.

But to do this, I seem to need a partner/opponent who I can flow with, who will go along with the give and take and is open to experiencing non-doing. I like thinking about the complexity of the partner/opponent relationship. The partner aspect of the relationship calls us to establish trust, understanding, and to make agreements about how we will engage martially (contact level, what targets are on/off limits, what injuries we might be dealing with.) The opponent aspect of the relationship calls for us to strike or uproot our partner if the opportunity arises. It asks us to take the shot on the other person, to take the opportunity to “win” the round if we can.

The ego can get very attached to winning. I’ve experienced plenty of push hands rounds where our egos have been fired up and we’re trying to smash each other. Sometimes the smashing is consensual and very fun, sometimes it’s full of anger and very triggering. Understanding where my partner and I are emotionally is an important aspect of the engagement. I can’t be so nice that I’m not trying to hit them at all, but I can’t be so ruthless that I want to hurt them. They are my partner, after all, and I want to take care of them so we can practice together another day. Still, if I don’t take my shots, I’m not being the best opponent I can be, and my partner doesn’t get the chance to learn how to deal with my strikes. As my former teacher Sifu Kyle would say about our push hands opponents, “You’ve gotta love ’em enough to hit ’em.”

One aspect that can add civility to a push hands engagement is calling out our partner’s points. Calling out the opponent’s points is something I learned in my Mo Duk Pai training. If my partner scores on me, I can say, “good job,” or make a gesture that shows I know they scored. This adds a level of humility to the engagement, and turns my partner’s success into our success. Maybe I’m not the one who scored the point, but as a team, we created a situation where someone scored successfully. That’s a win for both of us and for our relationship.

To me this is the magic of the partner/opponent relationship: when we have our agreements in place and our flow established, we can create lovely martial moments that surprise and delight us both. We can allow the art to move us instead of “doing” the art. We can create a space where we can both grow and deepen our art, and, in a larger sense, a space in which we can understand more about ourselves, the other person, and how we are in relationship.

What a gift it is to have good partner/opponents in our lives.