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Mark Freeman wrote:
We train using the term "completely relax" rather than "relax completely" just to confuse the issue even more  |
You have to relax, true, but it's what you're doing while you're relaxing that is important.
Think of it like this. If you're teaching someone to cast with a fly-rod, they have to relax the arm, although of course some parts of the arm are in use and there are some other skill requirements you have to know in order to cast the line. Suppose you tried to teach fly-casting by just telling everyone, "Relax". Obviously you wouldn't get much in the way of results. Same thing with the "relax" in Aikido, Taiji, and many other "soft" martial arts.... just telling people to relax, without telling them how to do the rest is fruitless. And that is exactly, IMO, what goes wrong and why there aren't so many people with good results. Worse yet, too many of the teachers don't really know how to do these things well, so they spend a lot of time saying "relax" and "you'll get it someday" when they haven't really got it themselves.
Yours in abject cynicism.
Mike