Saturday, January 7, 2012

What is the Difference Between Silk Reeling and Spiral Force?


I recently wrote an article recently about Silk Reeling in Tai Chi. A reader on LinkedIn suggested that I was confusing some terms.

What exactly is the difference between "silk reeling" and "spiral force"?

My teacher uses the terms interchangeably. He has a Chen background. I did some research online and found the terms silk reeling (chan si jing) and spiral force (luo xuan jing). However, I could not find any explanation of what these terms meant.

One web site, Shaolin Gongfu, defined both terms the same, as "the strength twisting in a round". That's not very helpful. I would really appreciate some help understanding these terms.

1 comment:

  1. There has been extensive discussion on LinkedIn about the use of the terms "silk reeling" and "spiral force", with little agreement. It is clear that they are not the same thing but they are related at a very deep level. In my writings here, I will continue to use the terms as I have before. The title here is Silk Reeling, but most of the article is about developing the spiral force from the ground and through the dan tien.

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