Push Hands is Two-Person T'ai Chi

Cheng Man Ching, on the left, pushing hands (Tui Shou)

I offered the following comment on a post on the Facebook Internal Martial Arts group:

At first, Push Hands felt like a curious exercise for me. I like your emphasis, Richard: That it's another way to understand and apply T'ai Chi principles, in collaboration with another practitioner. What made it curious was that it was more like dance to me, at first, and a scripted one at that. When we learned moving Push Hands, then it was really like that tango! 

But over some years, it helped us build our sensing energy and our sticking energy, and our Push Hands became less scripted and more free style. More like sparring, and more like Bruce Lee's notion of the form of no-form. 

But even as our knowledge and skills developed, the one constant was that Push Hands was not about fighting or winning. Using my sensing energy, for example, I was better able to find my partner's center and jar his root (just so). But my doing so wasn't to knock him down or win over him, but to help him sink his center more and strengthen his root.

There is great confidence gained, when we know we can topple someone but we choose not to.