06/20/2026
Hey all!
I usually do some sort of rant for the weekend. But today I decided to do something a bit differently. I focus my training and teaching on ChiLin, but I also train and teach Yang Taijiquan. This is a short story I wrote about Taiji. It specifically talks about the 5 elements of Song松 and FaJin 發劲. It is about a 5 to 7 minute read. Please tell me what you think!
Tai Ji versus the Meteor
I. 听 (Tīng) – To Listen
The training hall always smelled of camphor, cedar, and old sweat. Outside, the city hummed with its usual mechanical impatience, but inside, we moved to the rhythm of a wooden flute drifting from a speaker connected to my phone.
“You are anticipating, Steven,” I said, keeping my palms connected to his arms. We were circling in Tui Shou—pushing hands. “You are trying to guess where my weight is going before I even know it myself. Anticipation leads to failure, failure leads to panic.”
Steven grunted, his shoulders tense, his weight shifted erratically from foot to foot. “If I don’t anticipate, you’ll capture me and throw me.”
“If you anticipate, you throw yourself,” I replied, gently yielding my hip, letting his momentum slide by into empty air. He stumbled forward, catching his balance with a frustrated shake of his head. “We call the first step Ting. To listen. You must quiet your mind until you can hear my intentions through your bones, through your skin, through the hairs on your arms. Only when you listen can you know.”
The flute music cut out. The synchronized wail of a dozen smartphones in the room simultaneously vibrating with the emergency broadcast tone. It was a digital scream that made half the class rise up out of their stance. Some of their partners took the opportunity to press them back several feet and announce their victory in the game.
I walked over to the speaker, picked up my phone, and read the text. I had to read the message several times as I wasn’t sure if I was properly understanding what the message was. The words were clinical, written by someone trying very hard not to cause a stampede: an asteroid, a two mile rock of nickel and iron, thirty days away. Target zone: Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of North America.
I looked at the small class who had spent the last hour pushing one another around.
“Go home,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “Go call your families. We are done for the day.”
They left in an eerie, quiet rush. I stood by the window and watched them stream into the parking lot. Some ran. Some immediately got in their cars and blew their horns. They had heard the noise, but they weren't listening. They were already closing their ears to the end of the world, pretending that if they drove fast enough, they could outrun their fate.
II. 懂 (Dǒng) – To Understand
By Day Seven, the city was a fractured thing. The transit grid had collapsed as workers walked off the job to be with their loved ones. The radio stations were dead air, save for a few automated loops.
Steven was the only one who showed up to class. The hall was freezing; the power grid had flickered out two days prior.
“Steven, I am surprised to see you. Wouldn’t you want to spend this time with your family? Loved ones?” I asked, inviting him inside.
“They’re in Ohio. No trains, no flights, roads are blocked with abandoned cars,” Steven said. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked at the empty wooden floor. “I didn’t know what else to do. I figured… if I’m going to die in three weeks, I’d rather be doing something instead of just… waiting.”
We squared off. No music this time. Just the rhythm of our breathing.
“My Sifu used to tell me stories about Chen Wang Ting,” I murmured as our wrists met. “A general in the Ming Dynasty. He spent his life fighting bloody campaigns, watching commanders charge hard into enemy lines only to get slaughtered. When he retired to Chen Village, he didn't so much as invent Taiji. He took military flanking tactics and turned them inward. He understood that when an unstoppable force strikes, rigidity is a death sentence. Knowing where you are stiff and immovable, and knowing where you still have freedom to move provides options. Options provide a peaceful calm spirit. You have to know yourself, and you have to understand the enemy.”
Steven pushed hard, his anger flaring. I didn't resist; I absorbed his pressure into my back foot, sinking low.
I look at him. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles…”
Steven asks me how this helps with an asteroid.
“Notice all of the fathers of Tai Ji were killers and soldiers. Tai Ji may use our opponent’s force against them, but it is not a passive art. When we push against an unstoppable force, we must know enough to change.” I point out the window. “Look, it’s only been seven days and people are already changing. They are spiteful against the world. They loot, they hurt, they destroy. Change is inevitable. Knowledge that change is coming is invaluable.”
I look back to Steven. “If we know that change is coming—not just from the asteroid, but from within us—we can begin the next step.”
With a puzzled look, Steven asks, “What is that?”
I smile. “To transform that change.”
III. 化 (Huà) – To Transform
By Day Fifteen, the anger had burned itself out, replaced by a desperate, hollow bartering. The town I once knew looks unrecognizable. So much damage, and the asteroid is still weeks away. By the time it gets here, it may just pass us by, seeing how there will be nothing left to destroy. The streets were like a ghost town. People had fled to the hills, or barricaded themselves in basements, praying to a god they had ignored for decades. Many inconsolable souls took fate into their own hands and wouldn’t give the hunk of rock and metal the satisfaction.
Steven and I walked the empty neighborhoods. We knocked on doors. We went to the churches, the mosques, the community centers where people sat in frozen, terrified silences. We didn't offer salvation. We offered a collective breath.
We gathered them in the local park—maybe five to ten people the first day, a few more the next. A makeshift militia of painters, grandmothers, out-of-work mechanics, and frightened kids. We didn't teach them how to fight. We taught them how to stand. We brought out old acoustic guitars and hand drums.
At first, people were reluctant. “What is the point?” they will ask themselves. And to be honest, that is a great question. But then they will hear the music, the laughter. A community of life, celebrating all that we are. “We cannot divert the trajectory of the rock,” I told the circle, the cold wind whipping at our coats. “But we can transform how we meet it. Do not let the fear make you animals before the fire even touches the grass. We don’t have much time left here; let us make a loud, joyful noise so this evil rust globule knows exactly what it is destroying.”
For a few days, the park felt like a festival at the edge of time. We transformed their paralyzed terror into a communal defiance. It was a beautiful bargain, a way of looking the apex predator in the eye and choosing to sing anyway.
IV. 捺 (Nà) – To Neutralize
By Day Twenty-Five, the bargain failed. The sky had turned an ominous, bruised purple, and the asteroid was visible to the naked eye—a jagged, burning scar cutting through the daylight.
The weight of it crushed the park community. The singing stopped. Cults formed overnight in the ruins of downtown, painting eyeless faces on the walls, throwing offerings into bonfires. A profound, suffocating depression settled over the valley like ash.
Steven’s form was heavy, sluggish. When we pushed, his arms felt like lead.
“I can’t do it, Sifu,” he whispered, dropping his hands. “What’s the point of neutralizing your force? When you get under my center and I know I’m going down… what’s the move? How do I fight back against the fall?”
“You don't fight the fall,” I said. “You neutralize it by letting go of your resistance. Look at the cults down the street. Look at the people drinking themselves to death in the gutters. They are trying to push back against a mountain. They are generating the very force that is breaking their spirits.”
I took his hand, placing it over his own heart.
“Na is about control, Steven, but not the control of a tyrant. It is control of your spirit to bring harmony. Listen to the terror in your chest. Don't argue with it. Don't try to think it away. Let it be there. Give it space. When you stop fighting your own fear, you neutralize its power over you. The meteor is just a giant mirror, Steven. It’s showing us exactly who we are when the illusions are stripped away.”
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. For the first time in weeks, the tension left his shoulders. His resistance melted away. And he found his center. All this time he thought he had to either fight back or give in. He finally found the third option, to neutralize.
V. 发 (Fā) – To Release
Today is the final day. Thirty days from first learning about our fate. There was no more wind. The atmosphere felt thick, charged with static electricity that made the hairs on my arms stand up. The horizon was gone, swallowed by a wall of blinding, incandescent heat that roared with the sound of a thousand crashing oceans.
Steven hadn't come back to the hall, and that was as it should be. I hoped he was at peace, sitting quietly somewhere, listening to his own heart.
The glass windows of the training hall began to vibrate, a high-pitched hum that shattered the mirrors along the wall. The cedar floorboards grew warm beneath my bare feet. The sky parted, a brilliant, terrifying white light cascading through the skylights, erasing all shadows.
In Taiji, they teach you that Fajin is an explosive strike—a violent release of pent-up energy meant to shatter an opponent's ribs. But they are wrong. Fa is simply the ultimate letting go. It is the moment the arrow leaves the bow.
I took a deep breath, sank my weight into the trembling earth, and raised my hands into the opening posture one last time.
As the heat hit my face, I didn't feel fear. I didn't feel despair. I felt a profound, radiant wave of gratitude. I felt the immense privilege of having lived, of having taught, of having shared a quiet room with open-hearted people.
The force arrived. And I simply let it through.
