Welcome to Episode #119 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Lighten Your Load – Tai Chi’s Double-Weighted Error.”
The art of Tai Chi Chuan is often criticized (or even mocked) in modern martial arts circles. Of course, much of that criticism comes from people who have never researched or practiced the art whatsoever!
Typically, the critics have only seen Tai Chi Chuan students being defeated in competitions and then concluded that the art’s strategies and techniques offer no value to a serious martial artist.
NOT SO!
To be fair, many teachers of Tai Chi Chuan prefer to practice the philosophical aspects of the art more than the practical, which can definitely lead to trouble in the realm of self-defense. However, that does not mean the art itself is lacking in profound and valuable concepts.
One concept that I find extremely helpful is the “double-weighted error”. Even as a mere admirer of Tai Chi Chuan, as opposed to a formal student, my understanding of this classic piece of advice has changed my practice for the better.
Right or wrong, I hope this concept will change yours, too!
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Lighten Your Load – Tai Chi’s Double-Weighted Error
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome my friend. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. This is episode #119 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.
Let me ask you, have you ever felt stressed out, overwhelmed, like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders? Well, of course, you’re human. And the fact is that life is heavy. And when it comes to self-defense, someone trying to injure you or even kill you, well, that’s about as heavy as it gets.
Today I want to break down the four different ways, the four different categories of weight in this world.
Why does life get so heavy? And I also want to share three tips to help you unload some of that weight or, hopefully, avoid it altogether.
Now, this whole discussion was inspired from the art of Tai Chi, or Tai Chi Chuan. In the classics of Tai Chi, you will find a term, double-weighted.
Now, the idea of being double-weighted is an error. It’s something you want to avoid in your practice, whether it’s alone or with a partner or in a real fight.
Now, let me say right up front, I am not speaking today as a student, formal student of Tai Chi. I’ve dabbled, but I’m certainly not an expert. I wouldn’t even call myself a formal student.
I am an admirer, and as someone who has read about and dabbled in practicing Tai Chi, this concept was inspiring. So, I’m just going to share my thoughts, my understanding of this concept. And if it doesn’t match up with what the experts say, well, guess what?
When it comes to the Chinese martial arts, even the experts disagree. We don’t know exactly what the old masters meant when they wrote it down. And if the experts can disagree, then I feel much better about sharing my humble opinion.
So, here’s what double-weighted means to me and how I’m using it in my practice.
First of all, you might find some people who think that double-weighted just means even distribution of your weight in your feet, like a horse stance, 50-50. That idea makes no sense to me, so I’m just going to ignore it.
To me, double-weighted starts to make sense when you think about that feeling you get, when you feel stuck, when you feel frozen. For instance, you are standing and someone comes over and puts their head on your shoulder and leans on you, let’s say.
Now, when they’re leaning on you and you are now crooked, you are not just supporting your weight, you’re also holding up some of their weight. So, if I don’t accommodate that, if I don’t shift my position, I don’t adjust my posture, I am now tighter, I’m straining a little bit, and I’m not as free as I was, I’m somewhat constrained.
So, in that way, I would say you are double-weighted. It’s my weight plus their weight. The state of being frozen.
It could also be just on your own, if you slip and you fall, okay, you have the physical challenge of managing this fall down to the ground, but let’s say you’re also afraid. You stiffen up, your eyes go wide, your hands pop out, and when you hit the ground, because you’re stiff and because you weren’t able to soften and go with it, you break a wrist or you hit your head, you have a bad fall.
So in that way, I would say you were double-weighted because you felt stuck or frozen, helpless, for that fall to the ground.
So this is something, this state of being double-weighted, getting heavier than you normally are, of getting stuck, can happen on your own or it can happen because of someone else’s activities against you. So let’s break it down even further.
Like I said, four different ways, more specifically, that you may add heaviness, weight to your life. And hopefully we can avoid these, but here’s the first one.
The first one is your body versus gravity. This one, we can’t escape. There’s no way you can get around it. You’re living in a body, I presume. So your weight is always being pulled down by gravity. And we try to manage that with good posture, right?
So one of our studies as martial artists is the study of stances and our alignment. If you are bent over in your life or you’re hunched over commonly, that means that some of your muscles are working harder than they need to.
You’re burning calories, extra calories. You are adding tension into your body. And that strain is limiting your freedom of movement because you’re tighter some place. And over time, certain muscles are getting weaker while others are trying to accommodate for them.
So you’re imbalanced and you’re constrained and you’re unnecessarily burdened. So we try to lighten that load by good posture. Once we start moving, it becomes even more challenging.
If you can’t balance yourself and get rid of excess tension when you’re just standing, now that you’re stepping, running, kicking, fighting, it’s only more difficult.
So example, a spinning hook kick to the head. Do you practice spinning hook kicks to the head? Well, that’s physically challenging. If you had a jump spin hook kick to the head, okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
You really have to have a great skill to figure out your alignment, your timing, your shifting, to execute that technique and land comfortably.
And this is the point of our training. As martial artists, we are in the pursuit of efficiency.
I can’t stop gravity. There will always be some tugging and some effort. That’s our single weight. Let’s call that. I’m not double-weighted yet. It’s single-weighted, just that natural alignment.
But anything that takes us off of that, if we’re tilting, leaning, we’re not practicing how to move in this world with coordination and ease, then we are now double-weighting ourselves. We’re making it even harder.
So, if you’re training well, then in most cases you should be finding comfort in how you stand, how you sit, and how you move in the world.
So that’s category number one, where you might find excess weight in your life.
The second category, instead of your body versus gravity, what about your mind?
Your mind versus beliefs and your mind versus emotions. What is your mental state at any given moment?
Let’s say something frightens you, like when you take that fall. That immediately adds tension into your body as well. Or if you’re afraid, you hear a bump in the night, and your body gets tight, okay, now you’re double-weighted that way.
In your head, if you’re afraid of something, you may also be less aware than you would have been if you were just staying calm. You start to tunnel vision. You start to add worry, like what was that? Am I going to die? Do I have what it takes to get out of this situation?
So while you’re worrying, you’re not paying attention to opportunities and possibilities. You’ve lost some of your creativity.
So it’s very likely that you will find yourself on a daily basis, on one level or another, stuck in your own body and stuck in your own thoughts. Stuck because of anger, tension, tunnel vision, self-doubts, worrying that you’re not competent at something.
Worry about anxiety, not worry about anxiety, anxiety in general. Worry that you’re going to lose your job, worry that you’re going to get sick, worry that you won’t be there for the people who love you. Tons of reasons to carry around anxiety.
Embarrassment, that you’re going to make a mistake, that you’re going to fail, that you’re not going to live up to your own expectations, let alone someone else’s expectations.
All of this stuff adds up to trouble, a clouded mind, our training should lead us to clarity. Comfort in our body, clarity in our minds.
We need to learn how to make peace with mistakes, how to make peace with our failures. We need to learn how to make peace with pain, physical pain.
If I’m injured, that’s a physical problem, but it’s also a mental problem depending on how I react to that. If my identity has now been broken. Like I’m a really good kicker. But now my leg is broken, so who am I? I’m a loser now.
We can’t let that happen. We need to train constantly for comfort in our bodies and clarity in our minds. That leads to confidence. And that’s the goal of our training, right?
We want confidence that I can move anywhere and I’m always free in my thoughts to create what I need to survive.
Third category. So far we’ve only been talking about the extra weight that we put on ourselves. But of course, particularly in self-defense, we are concerned about the weight that others are going to throw on top of us.
And the third category would be my body versus your body or someone else’s body. This is probably the heart of self-defense problems.
Someone’s got their hands on your neck. Someone is pulling your hair. Someone is punching you in the stomach. Their body is affecting your body.
Are you still comfortable when someone is choking you? Are you comfortable when someone is punching you?
If you are pulling off that spinning hook kick, even if you found a nice way to be efficient and skillful at it, even if you are clear headed when you throw it, if physically someone pushes you while you are throwing that kick or is pulling you, then you have something new to contend with. There is extra weight on you. There is a new challenge that’s come from the outside for you to execute that kick.
This is the beauty of training to fight. You have to deal with that, manage it.
So hopefully your training leads you not to just be efficient with your own movement, but to be efficient when someone is trying to oppose that movement. Training with resistance.
Someone is trying to take away your balance, and you are training yourself to get through that, to manage it, to keep my balance no matter what you do to me.
Punch, push, pull, lift, tackle, that I can maintain the comfort in my body so that I can be free to do whatever I need to do. That’s very challenging.
Fourth category. Before it was our mind against our own thoughts and our own emotions, but what about your mind versus someone else’s mind?
Someone makes a threat. Someone says, I’m going to kill you. How does that affect your mind?
If you allow someone to intimidate you, to frighten you, well, then your body is going to change, your thoughts are going to change, and usually not in a good way. You’ll be constrained. You will feel less free.
We have to guard against this. Before someone even touches you, you may already be intimidated and double-weighted just by the thought of what they might do to you.
You’re throwing that spinning hook kick again. Even if you’re very efficient hitting a bag or throwing it in the air, if someone says, hey, I want you to spar the champ over here. Here’s the heavyweight UFC champ. You have an opportunity. Go spar this guy.
Well, now as you think about throwing that spinning hook kick, you may instantly have worry now, where you didn’t have it before on the bag, that this guy is going to catch your foot or shoot when you’re kicking and take you right down or you’re going to miss. Now that kick is being affected simply because in your head you’ve added worry. You’ve allowed it to get in.
That’s in a sporting session. What about on the street? Someone jumps out of their car at a red light, storms over to your car. You get out. Not sure that was a good idea.
You get out. You’re thinking about that spinning hook kick to the head. But this guy looks tough. This guy’s got a knife. This guy’s got a buddy. Psychologically, you start shutting down perhaps. You’ve lost your clarity. Now you’re just confused. You’re scared. You’ve got doubts.
They weren’t there before. It’s the presence of this other person that put those things into you.
We’ve got to guard against that. And again, this is where training comes in. We should be training not just to be calm and confident with our own thoughts and emotions, but we need to maintain that calm, cool demeanor and our confidence even when someone else’s mental presence, their glare, their words, their mere presence starts to change how we feel. So I would call that with resistance.
We have to train not just for efficiency against resistance, but clarity against resistance.
Okay, so this is what I’m talking about when I talk about double-weightedness. Anything that’s making you carry a heavier burden than you normally do, or that you should be. Anything that takes you from your optimal state when you’re feeling great to something suboptimal where you feel limited and strained. Anything that takes you from a state of freedom and creativity and joy to a state of worry and limitations and pain.
A quick aside, when I say influences from outside of you, we’ve been using a person for that right now. A person’s body or a person’s mental state or threats. Really, it could be anything in life.
Outside of the martial arts realm, that other could be anything outside of yourself that adds weight to your life. If you’re taking a hike and lightning strikes and a tree falls and traps you under it, well, you have to deal with your body plus the body of this tree. So in that sense, you’re now double-weighted.
If that is freezing you up and you’re frozen, you feel stuck and you’re thrashing about, wasting energy, you’re double-weighted.
It could be a virus, right? Be having an illness is weakening your body, maybe changing the way you think about yourself, it’s taking you out of your groove, out of your optimal state. So technically that virus is double-weighting you if you allow it.
The list goes on and on. That’s the point. In life, you’re always fighting something. Gravity is always there. Hunger, the need for affection, all these things we have in our lives, we need money, we’re always fighting. And if you want a happy life, we need to get better, I think, through training.
We need to get better, we need to build the skills to avoid these extra weights, to unload these weights if we can. And for any weight that we can’t unload, how to carry it with some grace, with some dignity, to make the best of it, to maximize our opportunities no matter what.
Okay?
So, if we’re on the same page, again, I appreciate this inspirational concept from Tai Chi, but I do think it stops short of how bad the problem can get. Double-weighted, most of these examples that I’ve been giving, you’re not just double-weighted, you’re triple-weighted. You’re quadruple-weighted or more.
If you have a bad knee, if you tore your ACL, okay, well, one, if I want to throw a kick, well, there’s the physical challenge, I’ve got to balance that, that’s my single weight. But now there’s pain in that injury, and there’s fear from that injury, that I might hurt it again, need another surgery.
There’s also my identity that’s been broken, because I was the star of the class, I throw these kicks so great, and now I’m hobbling. So, very quickly, you’re two, three, four times heavier than you normally would be when you’re in your prime optimal state.
If you have bad posture, alright, you’re already double-weighted, you’re already making life hard on yourself, and then someone threatens you, I’m going to go over there and punch you in the face, now there’s fear, so already I’m triple-weighted, and then they actually do punch you, so now you have to deal with pain, fear of more punches, maybe you’re already falling to the ground, and you had bad posture, and you don’t move well, I can’t even keep up with how many times your weight is being added on top of you.
It doesn’t take much, and it’s very sad, really, to think about how many of us, or how often, even the best of us, walk around already double-weighted. We’re already walking around in a fight that’s two-on-one before I even see another human being.
If I feel like a loser, and I feel like a victim and helpless in this world, I’m already double-weighting myself. It’s already two-on-one, if that makes sense.
My soul has two problems now. I’ve got to move my body through this world, and I have to do it while I’m feeling like a helpless loser.
So now if another person comes into this picture and they want to hurt me, I’m already battling my own problems, my own two-on-one, and now here comes you. That’s three-on-one right off the bat.
If I have bad posture, I don’t move well, I don’t feel comfortable in my body, I also don’t like myself much, I don’t feel very competent in this world, and here comes you making threats, and you’re putting your hands on me. Four-on-one.
If you have a friend, it’s getting worse. We stack the odds sometimes so heavily against us, we cannot win. We are automatically putting ourselves in situations where it’s impossible to succeed, and that’s sad.
It’s so sad, and whether I’m talking about you sometimes, I mean, all of us are there sometimes. Or someone you love, and we all know this, people that you know who are their own worst enemies, their own worst enemies.
Think about that phrase. They’re already beating themselves up. You don’t have to do anything to hurt their feelings or make them feel lesser than or unworthy of a better life. They’re already doing it to themselves. Everything else just piles on, and then it becomes hopeless, it seems.
But hang on. Don’t turn off the video and jump off a cliff just yet.
I’ve got three humble tips that I’m going to offer here that have helped me.
Number one. Don’t take life so personally.
It’s very easy to get pulled into drama. Even on our own.
If I’m training and I hurt my wrist, tweak my wrist on the bag, I immediately feel sorry for myself. I feel like a loser.
What am I doing? I should have known better. Blah, blah, blah.
What about tomorrow? Now they’re going to think I’m terrible.
It’s amazing how quickly you can go from optimal state to crushing self-pity, self-doubt. We can’t let that happen. We need to operate from a place of objectivity.
If this calls to mind the philosophy of stoicism, so be it. Excellent. Take a big helping of stoicism.
If this brings to mind some Zen concepts, being able to see things uncolored by judgment and just see things as they are, okay, then take that approach.
But the point is to be able to transcend our judgments, transcend our emotions, transcend the drama and just float above the noise. Float above the chatter. That alone is freeing. Transcend to kind of float above it. You’re lighter.
You can’t do that if you’re down in the trenches, down in the mud, wallowing in self-pity. You can’t float down there.
So the trick here though is when you’re objective, that means you dismiss the negative aspects of your life and I would say the positive aspects of your life. I can’t allow myself to get swayed either way.
That’s the exercise. That’s pure stoicism.
No matter what you do in this world, there will be people who love you and love what you’re doing and people who hate you and hate what you’re doing. No matter what you do. I can’t let either one of those poles affect me.
Whether you love me or hate me, my focus has to be objective to just say, I just want to be my best. I just need to know what I’ve got, what I want, and can I make it happen the best way I can?
I just want to fight my best fight in this world. And to do that, I need to get the drama out of my way.
Now, granted, for this tip, when I say don’t take life so personally, that’s like saying, hey, don’t be sick. Hey you, don’t be poor, be rich. Doesn’t help. So how do you do it?
How do you get to this stoic state, this Zen mind? How do you get there?
Very simply, I’m not a doctor or a magician. I would just say very simply, take the long view of your life. Take the wide view. See the big picture.
If right now I asked you to think back to yourself when you were 20 years ago, whatever age, if you’re only 20 right now, then think back to when you were 10.
What were you worried about 20 years ago? What were you worried about? Was there a bully making your life more difficult? Were you worried about asking someone out on a date? Finding a job? Passing final exams and graduating school?
Getting into a martial arts school? Getting to the right school? Passing your next belt test? Being a black belt? Opening a school?
What were you worried about?
Take a look. You’re here. You made it. You survived. Clearly, you had the tools to get through all of that. But how much time and energy and attention did you waste with all of the worry? The worry didn’t help, I bet. The worry just takes away your energy, slows you down, and limited your actions.
There’s really no positivity behind the worry. The anxiety doesn’t get you where you want to go. It only slows you down and holds you down. So break free of that. Seek objectivity.
If you take it the other way, let’s go 20 years now into the future. 20 years from now, look back to where you are right now, today, and what is worrying you?
20 years from now, what are you still going to be worried about that you’re worried about today? Or, once again, will you see 20 years from now that you got through it, you survived, you succeeded, you did what you had to do?
Your job is to be the best person you can be right now and fight as hard as you can for what’s right for you. That’s it. If you allow worry and anxiety and doubts, get in the way and make yourself heavier, you’re not going to go as far.
So, please remember, the noise and the chatter just don’t matter.
They don’t. Just focus on what you want and focus on your next move to make it happen. That’s it.
Tip number two. Keep training. All along, I’ve been saying that training is a solution to all of this weight being piled on us. I’ve been saying it all along. We think about lifting weights. There we go.
Forget for a moment about physical metal plates on bars that you’re lifting. I’m talking about the weight of life, the four different ways that we have weight put upon us. We want to lift those weights. We want to figure out how to manage those weights better.
How do you do it? Training. To me, that’s what martial arts training is the best at.
Martial arts training gives you a chance to face fear, the weight of that fear and work through it and either manage it better or remove it. Fantastic.
It allows you to take on insecurity, ignorance, incompetence. I think it has it all. That’s why I love martial arts training.
You can purposely put yourself in situations that add weight and then you get a chance to lift it and get better at it and get stronger and more skillful and then lighter.
When you first started sparring, was it easy? No, it’s heavy. It’s dark. It can be traumatic, but you give it time. You give it effort. You keep training. And with time and effort, you develop skill.
You develop knowledge. You find comfort and confidence. And that’s the point. So keep training.
As a side note, please train with other people. If not all the time, sometimes.
Remember, of the four categories of weight, two are just you. The other two come from someone other than you. That’s a partner. So if you’re not training with a partner, well, then you’re only getting good at two of the categories for weight-bearing. A partner fills in the other half.
If you want to have the lightest journey through this world, you need to train with other people. I don’t just want to be free when I’m alone. I want to be free when I’m with somebody else, especially if they’re trying to punch me in the face. I want to feel free.
Tip number three. Keep measuring. By measuring, I mean pay attention. Pay attention to what makes you feel heavier, what makes you feel stuck or frozen, and figure out why.
What caused it? Who were you with? What were you doing? Where were you?
Every time that you sense a change in your breathing, maybe you stop breathing or you’re starting to breathe faster, what caused that?
Every time you feel a tightness in your chest or your neck or your back, what’s going on? What triggered that? Can you remove this from your environment?
What if you feel queasy, nauseous, sick to your stomach? What caused this?
There are clues here. It shouldn’t be a mystery. Something shrinks your body. Pay attention.
What just made you feel smaller in your space? What took away your size?
If you feel intimidated, you don’t feel like you can speak your mind, you don’t feel safe, you feel threatened, you feel like a loser, what just happened?
Why don’t you feel worthy of what you want in this world? There are clues here.
You will see patterns if you pay attention. You may already be able to identify those things. It may not be a mystery at all.
So then the challenge becomes, can you remove them? Can you stop them? Can you avoid them? Get rid of them.
Of course, while you’re busy measuring what makes you heavier, you should also be measuring what makes you feel lighter.
When do you feel free? When do you feel creative? When are you in the flow? When do you feel weightless?
If double-weighted is a problem, and even being single-weighted is part of life, naturally, well, anything we can do to feel weightless that lifts us up must be good, must be better for us, must give us more opportunity. So, pay attention to both sides.
What makes you feel heavy? What makes you feel light?
The fact is that we are fighting all day every day, so you should be measuring all day every day.
If something is making you heavier, change it. If something is making you feel lighter, keep doing it.
That’s really simple. Now, hang on. Before we wrap this up, I do have to warn you, in case you didn’t know, we all die. We all end up crushed under some weight, whatever that may be, an accident, an illness, a murder.
I just want you to know, the number one takeaway, if nothing else, is you’re not alone in feeling that pressure. You’re not alone in feeling the crush of life. But as martial artists, we have this goal that we can be our best under that pressure.
Under the weight, we learn how to defend ourselves and still put out our best effort to go as far as we can. Doesn’t mean we always win, but we go as far as we can with what we’ve got.
Whether that weight comes from ourselves, or from life itself, or from other people. We learn to avoid carrying extra weight. We learn to unload extra weight. And if we can unload it, we learn to carry extra weight with a little more grace and maybe even a little style.
Of course, we’re not just martial artists. We’re also good-hearted, kind, caring human beings. And as such, that carries its own goal.
I don’t just want to be my best self. I want to help others be their best self too. So if I can learn how to lighten my load, I’ll do whatever I can to help someone else lighten their load too.
And if we can do that, if all of us can do that, then not only will we have happy lives, but everyone we love will have a happy life too.
All right, thanks for letting me unload all of that. Hey, if you’re a student of Tai Chi, let me know in my way off base on my thinking about double-weightedness or does some of this make sense?
If you’re not a student of Tai Chi, let me know what you’re thinking anyway. I’m always curious. Maybe you’ve got a tip to help me lighten my load.
Until next time, smiles up my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.
