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PUSH HANDS

By Bob Klein

   Push hands involves some of the deepest problems in interpersonal relationships--the fear of being close, the habit of meeting conflict with conflict, resistance to growing and changing, and the difficulty of remaining oneself while harmonizing with another person.   I have learned a lot about push hands from the ancient practice of snake handling, which, in essence, involves doing push hands with the snake. Imagine a large boa or python curling around your body and intertwining your arms. You cannot force the serpent to do you bidding because it is stronger than you.   By tuning into its flow of energy, you can harmonize with the snake and enter into an energy union. Your motions would be identical to push hands. The snake, of course, doesn’t have hands but uses its entire body. Its attention is distributed throughout its length and allows the snake to instantly respond to the slightest touch or change of balance of the handler.

 Your body is like a spring

     In push hands, you don’t really push with your hands or arms. These appendages act as springs, cushioning your interactions with your partner. They can store energy as a spring can store the energy of something pushing against it.   One’s body becomes very spring-like and force is cushioned, stored, grounded, redirected and released. This teaches us to be flexible emotionally as well. The lessons learned in dealing with physical energy also apply to emotional, mental and spiritual energy. The physical energy is more obvious, more concrete and easier to see.   Practicing push hands frequently creates a more springy emotional and mental attitude as well. You become less fragile in all ways.

    I believe it is a mistake to just try to keep the partner from touching your body. Push hands can be very valuable in teaching you that you can receive another’s energy and it will not harm you as long as you are grounded.   You must learn to allow energy to flow through your body, into the earth and from the earth, through your body, into the partner. This process will focus your attention within yourself, revealing your inner dynamics. It will also give you the confidence to let others closer. This is so for two reasons.

1. You will have spent lots of time seeing inside yourself and getting to know yourself. Therefore, you will be less afraid to “lose yourself,” your identity, in a relationship.
2. You will learn how to neutralize the negative energy of others AFTER it has entered you. This will give you the confidence that you can always clear yourself of unwanted energy, behavior patterns, tensions, etc.

You will allow the beauty of the world to affect you more and will feel more alive. You will reverse the hardening process that most of us learn as children to shield ourselves from pain.

    Push hands is invaluable as a tool to promote personal growth. We often identify strongly with our habits of behavior, emotional reactions and opinions. These rigid patterns of reaction become our self-image. Any suggestion of change and fluidity would be seen as a challenge to our identity. And yet such change and fluidity is a necessary part of life. It is called growth. An entire book has been written about this concept of change and growth, the I-Ching.   The fluidity of body and attention which we develop in push hands allows us to identify with creativity (change, harmony, and spontaneity). We no longer see ourselves as one rigid pattern but as an unfolding of natural processes.   The principles of push hands, the methods of dealing with your partner’s flow of energy represent principles of personal growth. When the partner tenses up, we flow around him or absorb his tension and push through him as water can both flow around rocks or seep into rocks.

Push hands is a mirror

     ‘This teaches us that we don’t have fight our way through life. Our softness can neutralize the hardness of others.   A push hands student should try to think of how each push hands lesson relates to his or her life. If he has difficulty learning some aspect of push hands, does that student have a similar problem in interpersonal relationships?   I also  feel it is the teacher’s responsibility to name these principles with common English words that relate to one’s personal life. “Push,” for example can also mean: anything in one’s life that “pushes buttons” (hassles you).
   A partner may capture your attention by faking a small push on one side, only to come in on the other. The advertising industry does this to us all time. Use simple words which are practical rather than mystical words designed to impress.   Many cultures use mythological stories to encode lessons of growth. The reader becomes aware of the deeper levels of meaning and understands that the mythological characters represent universal qualities within all people. Push hands encodes these lessons in physical movement and makes the lessons much more graspable - more immediate.
   Do you always try to repel the partner or do you allow his energy to seep into you to feel that energy deeply? Is your main concern to push him more than he pushes you or to develop a harmony, a blend of your two energies?   Do you think of technique or trust your creativity to serve you each moment without preplanning? Where is your attention: On thinking the next move or on feeling the flow of energies?   The more you think of winning and pushing, the more rigid your attention will become and the more you will get pushed. Push hands thus becomes a form of death and re-birth.   Let go of the desire to win over the opponent, to struggle through conflict. And then a new self-identity will emerge - creativity, harmony and spontaneity, a channel for the flow of nature.