Balance and Breath
25.04.2024 Kate Middeleer
Learning from Tai Chi teacher Darren Jackson.
‘Healthy living’ is often seen as a simple transaction. The dividend to an equation whose numbers will be made known to us, if only we subscribe to the correct guru. That we could be on the receiving end of good skin and a fit body seems plenty worth the price of entry, as long as the vitamins don’t get recalled and it doesn’t come out that spiralina is toxic or reformer pilates is hell on your joints.
These modes of medicine feel like sexy new commitments to self, so exciting, in fact, that we don’t always stop at adding green juice to our morning routine—we go ahead and alkalize the water and swear off sugar and flush the Tooheys down the drain until our housemate says, “What the hell? I would have finished those”.
More often than not—be it in a few days, weeks, months—we eventually find ourselves out to dinner, turning to the housemate and saying, “You owe me a beer”.
Perhaps the feelings of unfulfillment could be avoided if we cut the fad-istic health regimen and experiment with balance. Definitely not an original idea, I know. Moderation and balance are preached loudly these days. But a big advocate for the concept was born in a practice that came along thousands of years before the pyramid schemes and fitness monarchies.
All of which ties into my meeting with Darren at the Bangalow Pub a few months back. We grab a beer, and talk about balance, discussing his work as a Tai Chi teacher under Piccabeen Park’s pagoda. Tai chi, Darren tells me, is a focus on energy, which is all about Yin and Yang. Mind and body. Fast and slow. Hard and soft. The art is about negotiating between these polarities in our body and mind in order to achieve physical health, martial power, and yes… balance.
At the pub, we sip beer, sniff chicken schnitties and contemplate how one might subdue their primitive fight or flight response. “The mind has a Yin and a Yang component,” Darren explains. “Yin is ready to run away. Until you have your back against the wall and you’re screwed. Then there’s Yang, overly aggressive”.
When he’s not teaching, Darren is a metalsmith, making jewelry and swords. Or when he’s not doing that, he’s buying, restoring and selling audio equipment. But Tai Chi is where his passions lie, I can tell, as he takes me through the intricacies of the practice. His weekly lessons in Piccabeen Park begin with the solo practice, and then what is called ‘pushing hands’, an exercise that looks like sparring, but is more about understanding energy – your own and your partner’s. What strikes me is that one’s skill is largely dependent on an awareness of one’s own weakness—learning where you’re holding tension through breathing and body scans; then teaching yourself to let those points relax.
“It takes a while but after 15 years you can be like, ‘Shit I’m holding a lot of tension there,’” he says. “Ninety percent of the work is knowing your own body. Once you find it in yourself, you only have to look at someone else to see where they’re holding. It’s like being telepathic,” he says with a smile. “There’s nothing faster than being already there”. No arguments there.
I sit in on a class in the Bangalow Pagoda on a Tuesday afternoon. Some of the students have arrived early, sparring as I walk over. In the sun I watch as more gather, all ages. I weave around arms spread wide and deep breathing, as the group of students and teacher become a powerful bridge between singular meditation and a synchronized dance.
“You show your partners where their errors are, and you learn together. The hits are secondary. The pushing hands teaches you that”.
Darren describes the master he studies with every year in Phuket, Thailand, as one of twenty disciples. And speaks of his sifu’s mastery of chi giving him the ability to heal injuries without medicine, and of sheering a person’s feet off the ground, flinging them against a wall without touching them.
“Mastery is when you have transcended the ego and you have made your body and mind capable of housing a higher consciousness,” he adds. This is the same art practiced in yoga and meditation. It’s emptying the mind, relieving ourselves of any consciousness within the present moment.
A healthy lifestyle to me can often feel like an exhausting string of ‘right’ choices; movement every morning before work and good food in the refrigerator. Choices, choices, choices…So the idea that a healthy foundation could actually stem from an empty mind? Alright, I’ll bite.
Contact Darren Jackson for class information.
+61 424 032 329
milehigh@fastmail.fm