Lagos iPhone 11/2008

Investment in Loss

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Josh Waitzkin
The Art of Learning P. 106-107

Investment in Loss is giving yourself to the learning process.

"Fortunately, we don't learn Push Hands while teetering on the edge of a cliff. It is not a tragedy if we lose our balance. That said, one of the most challenging leaps for Push Hands students is to release the ego enough to allow themselves to be tossed around while they learn how not to resist. If a big strong guy comes into a martial arts studio and someone pushes him, he wants to resist and push the guy back to prove that he is a big strong guy. The problem is that he isn't learning anything by doing this. In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win. The bruiser will need to get pushed around by little guys for a while, until he learns how to use more than brawn. William Chen calls this investment in loss. Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process. In Push Hands it is letting yourself be pushed without reverting back to old habits -- training yourself to be soft and receptive when your body doesn't have any idea how to do it and wants to tighten up.

The timing of my life was perfect for this type of process. I was wide open to the idea of getting tossed around. Push Hands class was humility training. Working with Chen's advanced students, I was thrown all over the place. They were too fast for me, and their attacks felt like heat-sinking missiles. When I neutralized one foray, the next came from out of nowhere and I went flying. Chen watched these sessions, and made subtle corrections. Every day, he taught me new Tai Chi principles and refined my body mechanics and technical understanding. I felt like a soft piece of clay being molded into shape. As the weeks and months passed by, I devoted myself to training and made rapid progress. Working with other beginners, I could quickly find and exploit the tension in their bodies and at times I was able to stay completely relaxed while their attacks slipped by me. While I learned with open pores -- no ego in the way -- it seemed that many other students were frozen in place, repeating their errors over and over, unable to improve because of a fear of releasing old habits. When Chen made suggestions, they would explain their thinking in an attempt to justify themselves. They were locked up by the need to be correct.

I have long believed that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid ever repeating the same mistake twice -- both technical and psychological -- he or she would skyrocket to the top of their field. Of course such a feat is impossible -- we are bound to repeat thematic errors, if only because many themes are elusive and difficult to pinpoint. For example, in my chess career I didn't realize I was faltering in transitional moments until many months of study brought the pattern to light. So the aim is to minimize repetition as much as possible, by having an eye for consistent psychological and technical themes of error.

In the last years of my chess career, I was numbed by a building sense of alienation. Pressure messed up my head and I got stuck, like the guys doing Push Hands who don't learn from their mistakes and practice with a desperate need to win, to be right, to have everything under control. This ultimately cripples growth and makes Tai Chi look like an extension of rush hour in Times Square. In those early Tai Chi years, my mission was to be wide open to every bit of information. I tried my best to learn from each error, whether it was my own or that of a training partner. Each Push Hands class was a revelation, and after a few months I could handle most players who had been studying for a few years.

This was an exciting time. As I internalized Tai Chi's technical foundation, I began to see my chess understanding manifesting itself in the Push Hands game. I was intimate with competition, so offbeat strategic dynamics were in my blood. I would notice structural flaws in someone's posture, just as I might pick apart a chess position, or I'd play with combinations in a manner people were not familiar with. Pattern recognition was a strength of mine as well, and I quickly picked up on people's tells.

As the months turned into years, my training became more and more vigorous and I learned how to dissolve away from attacks while staying rooted to the ground. It is a sublime feeling when your root kicks in, as if you are not standing on the ground but anchored many feet deep into the earth. The key is relaxed hip joints and spring-like body mechanics, so you can easily receive force by coiling it down through your structure. Working on my root, I began to feel like a tree, swaying in the wind up top, but deeply planted down low. In time, I was also able to make my Tai Chi meditation practice manifest in Push Hands play. Techniques that are hidden within the form started to come out of me spontaneously in martial exchanges, and sometimes partners would go flying away from me without my consciously doing much at all. This was trippy, but a natural consequence of systematic training.

I have mentioned how a large part of Tai Chi is releasing tension from your body through the practice of the meditative form. This is effectively a clearing of interference. Now, add in the coordination of breathing with the movements of the form, and what you have is body and mind energizing into action out of stillness. With practice, the stillness is increasingly profound and the transition into motion can be quite explosive -- this is where the dynamic pushing or striking power of Tai Chi emerges: the radical change from emptiness into fullness. When delivering force, the feeling inside the body is of the ground connecting to your finger tips, with nothing blocking this communication. Highly skilled Tai Chi practitioners are incredibly fast, fluid, responsive -- in a sense, the embodiment of Muhammad Ali's "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

While I was internalizing this information, I was also constantly training with people who were far more advanced. They absolutely manhandled me. There was one man -- call him Evan -- who was the slightly out-of-control powerhouse of the school. Evan was a six-foot-two, 200-pound second-degree karate black belt, eight-year Aikido student, and eight-year student of Tai Chi. Master Chen only let Evan push with people who could handle his aggression without flipping out, tensing, and getting hurt. But even then, Evan often stirred up confrontations. Once he felt I was ready, Chen started pairing me up with Evan.

Talk about investing in loss! It is one thing to put your ego on hold, but this was brutal. Evan would have me plastered up against a wall, my feet a foot or two off the ground, before I even saw the attack coming. It is in the spirit of Tai Chi training for more advanced students to stop when their partner is off-balance. But Evan had a different style. He liked to put you on the ground. Week after week, I would show up in class and get hammered by Evan. No matter how I tried to neutralize his attacks, I just couldn't do it. He was too fast -- how could I dodge what I couldn't see? I knew I should avoid tensing up, but when he came at me my whole body braced for impact. I had no idea how to function from relaxation when a freight train was leveling me fifty times a night. I felt like a punching bag. Basically. I had two options -- I could either avoid Evan or get beat up every class.

I spent many months getting smashed around by Evan, and admittedly it was not easy to invest in loss when I was being pummeled against walls -- literally, the plaster was falling off in the corner of the school into which Evan invited me every night. I'd limp home from practice, bruised and wondering what had happened to my peaceful meditative haven. But then a curious thing began to happen. First, as I got used to taking shots from Evan, I stopped fearing the impact. My body built up resistance to getting smashed, learned how to absorb blows, and I knew I could take what he had to offer. Then as I became more relaxed under fire, Evan seemed to slow down in my mind. I noticed myself sensing his attack before it began. I learned how to read his intention, and be out of the way before he pulled the trigger. As I got better and better at neutralizing his attacks, I began to notice and exploit weaknesses in his game, and sometimes I found myself peacefully watching his hands come toward me in slow motion.

There came a moment when the tables clearly turned for me and Evan. My training had gotten very intense, I had won a couple of middleweight National Championship titles, and was preparing for the World Championships. Evan and I hadn't worked together in a while because he started avoiding me as I improved. But this evening Master Chen paired us up on the mats. Evan came at me like a bull, and I instinctively avoided his onslaught and threw him on the floor. He got up, came back at me, and I tossed him again. I was shocked by how easy it felt. After a few minutes of this Evan said that his foot was bothering him and he called it a night. We shook hands, and he would never work with me again."

Josh Waitzkin
The Art of Learning P. 106-107

Beginner's Mind

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Beginner's mind is the willingness to leave your ego behind and ask questions as a beginner would. Unless you can truly understand the fundamental building blocks, you can't truly develop an intuition. You need to not be afraid to look dumb in asking whatever questions you need to understand the basics. Keep asking questions until you truly understand.