Avoiding the Detours that Cost Years

​The internal arts are famously opaque, and Chen-style Taijiquan is no exception. People train for decades accumulating isolated insights without a coherent framework to place them in, and progress can feel random: moments of clarity scattered between long stretches of uncertainty. The difficulty isn't mystical. It's that the signals indicating correct development are subtle and easy to miss, and they become subtler with each stage of refinement. This is why so many practitioners lose the thread as the work deepens, plateauing far earlier than they need to.

Effort, practice and persistence are not enough. Without accurate understanding to orient you, it is all too easy to train hard while reinforcing the wrong habits, moving with conviction in the wrong direction. As they say in Chen Village: there are no shortcuts, but there are countless detours

This places the student in an unusual double bind. In most skills, you are only partly dependent on a teacher, because repetition alone will bring improvement. And when you do need guidance, a teacher can usually show you what to do in a way you can copy. Chen-style Taijiquan offers neither. Repetition without accurate orientation tends to entrench the wrong habits, so you depend on a teacher far more than in most disciplines. Yet much of what matters can't simply be shown, because it happens inside the body and can only be found there. So you are at once entirely dependent on your teacher and entirely responsible for your own progress: bringing your own intelligence to the practice, investigating, and testing what you're told against what you feel.

The way through is orientation: a clear understanding of the terrain and the journey, continually renewed. Because the signals keep becoming subtler, orientation isn't something you establish once; it has to be renewed at every stage of practice. Done well, it can mean the difference between steady development and decades of confusion and stagnation.

The Landscape Is Your Own Body

The landscape you are navigating is your own bodymind, your psychosomatic structure: the felt interior of your own being, in stillness and in movement. At first it is unfamiliar and difficult to read, like moorland in fog. The signals are there, but your interoceptive resolution isn't yet fine enough to distinguish them from noise. Every direction looks the same.

But the landscape doesn't stay that way. As practice deepens, the fog begins to lift. Signs that were once invisible begin to emerge. The felt interior of the body softens and clarifies, and what was once sensory noise gradually resolves into something legible and navigable. Wayfinding becomes more self-directed and less dependent on outside guidance. The body becomes both the landscape and the guide, and the path begins to reveal itself ahead of you.

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Why It Has to Be a Quest

This is why learning Taijiquan is better understood as a quest than as a curriculum. A curriculum assumes the destination can be described in advance and reached by following the steps. A quest gives direction and orientation without imposing a fixed path, leaving room for exploration, mistakes, and wandering, a process more akin to discovery than learning in the traditional sense.  

Progress is not linear. It requires sustained orientation across terrain that keeps revealing new complexity. Having a bearing, a sense of where you are and what you're looking for, makes the exploration more deliberate without making it less alive. Good guidance can show you where to look and keep you off the worst detours. But the discoveries themselves cannot be handed to you. They must be earned.

Lineage and Approach

Good guidance is unfortunately very rare. Many practitioners struggle in part because they are learning from teachers who are sincere but lack real skill, and without that skill even the early signals can remain out of reach. And even with a master, the transmission can be hard to decode without a clear sense of what you're looking for.

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Everything I teach is aimed at closing that gap: helping serious practitioners develop their internal navigation earlier, avoid the most common detours, and recognise the correct signals at each stage of the journey. I've studied directly under Wang Haijun for close to two decades. The frameworks, the physiological account, and the articulation of what correct practice actually produces are all an attempt to make that transmission more legible.

Ways to Train

There are several ways to train with me, and they differ mainly in how much direct contact they allow. Much of what matters in Chen style is felt rather than seen, and some corrections can only be delivered by hand, by adjusting your structure directly, in ways that verbal instruction can't fully convey.

 

So some in-person contact with a qualified teacher remains essential. But it doesn't have to be constant. Good online instruction and intelligent practice can substantially reduce how much in-person time you need. If regular classes aren't possible, a combination works very well: online study and feedback for steady day-to-day progress, with periodic in-person sessions or seminars for the corrections that can only be conveyed through touch.

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In-person Tai Chi classes in Bali. Regular classes in Canggu and Ubud, for beginners through to advanced practitioners. This is the most direct way to train: the teacher can see what your body is doing and correct it through touch, and in partner work you can feel the qualities you're developing directly through contact.

The online course. A structured foundation covering the body method principles, silk reeling and the complete Laojia Yilu form, taught with depth and precision. Much of what has to be learned doesn't require personalised feedback, and the course covers these aspects thoroughly, so that time with a teacher can be used most effectively. It's also a resource to return to again and again: as your practice deepens you'll discover new detail in material you thought you knew.

Online one-to-one sessions. Personalised correction of your movement and practice. A good teacher can see a great deal through a screen, and a lot can still be communicated through demonstration, precise verbal cues and guided attention to what you should be feeling. Without touch, some corrections are harder to convey, but these sessions can still resolve many of the errors that would otherwise go unnoticed for years.

Seminars with Wang Haijun. For those who want to experience the source of the lineage directly, his seminars are the deepest form of transmission available.​​​