Rock the Bear (EXPERIMENT Included)

Video: Author teaching ZMQ37 Tai Chi’s ‘Constant Bear’ exercise at a seminar.

Zheng Manqing pioneered a simple internal exercise that is said to embody all the principles of ZMQ37 Tai Chi style as enumerated by his senior disciple, Ben Lo.

1. Body upright

2. Relax

3. Separate weight

4. Fair lady’s hand

5. Turn waist

In the film above I’m instructing it. It’s so simple you can learn it in 2 minutes, or maybe you already know it from previous Tai Chi instruction. It’s commonly used even in other lineages. People do it before class as a mild warmup, or just to feel good. If you don’t already know how to do it, please stop reading here for a minute, watch the video and pick up the essentials. I have a reason for this request.

Whether you already have known it, or whether you just learned it (above), before reading any further get up and try it. It requires no change of clothes, less than two square feet of space, and just a few minutes of time. I have a reason for requesting this.

Did you do it? Ok, you don’t need to make any special effort to remember how it felt for you. Your body will retain the impression. Now I’m going to remind you of one particular teaching point I made recently, in this post below:

In this post, below the paywall line, I imparted an extremely simple yet key principle of Tai Chi. So please review that. I discussed how this (practical) teaching can be applied either within your full practice of the complete ZMQ37 set, or, if you don’t know the full set or don’t have time/space to do it, you can also apply that insight to your practice of one of the Bare Metal Minimality bite-size mini-drills. You’ll see all that in the post linked above.

Now I want to mention one other very easy way to super-charge yourself using that same key teaching, but applied to another well known “bite size” drill, not requiring the full ZMQ form - Constant Bear.