Tai Chi Push-Hands
In a nutshell (okay, maybe a small bowl) push-hands is a two-person exercise in which the participants try to push or pull each other off-balance. Naturally, they’re doing this while trying to maintain their own balance AND trying to redirect incoming attacks and (ideally) turn them to their own advantage. It’s sort of a wrestling match, though it’s not a grappling/grabbing art, and it often requires some torso flexibility.
Anyway, my point for this thread is that when I was learning it from my first teacher, I would often close my eyes and find myself doing much better because the lack of visual distraction allowed me to get a better sense of my opponent’s direction of attack, via the pressure on my wrist(s) and fingertips. My first Tai Chi instructor always discouraged me from “blind push-hands” because he felt the eyes are an extremely helpful and necessary part of martial arts training.
When I was teaching my own Tai Chi classes, I would often do the push-hands exercise with my eyes closed, especially with newer students because it seemed to help emphasize their tension and rigidity then they were supposed to be relaxed and flexible.
My current Tai Chi instructor doesn’t like to do push-hands at all. However, he has noted as part of class lectures that the Chinese masters encourage practicing push-hands both with eyes open and with the eyes closed; the latter called “listening” to the opponent. We would call it *sensing *or *feeling *the opponent (while trying to avoid the sexual overtones those terms imply in Western language)
–G!