by Christopher Dow

The wisdom of the Tai Chi Classics leaves Tai Chi practitioners with a number of important ideas, principles, and practical advice. Among those is “Invest in loss.” At first glance, the phrase itself might seem to be an oxymoron. After all, “investment” should accrue rather than diminish—though obviously not all investments pan out. But why would anybody deliberately put effort into losing? As usual, Tai Chi asks you to look beneath the surface.

The idea of investment is pretty straightforward. You put in capital—time, effort, money, and so forth—with the expectation of a reward over time. At its most basic in Tai Chi, investing in loss can indicate the expenditure of time and effort to learn the form and to continue to practice it. The loss is that half-hour to hour a day that you spend doing Tai Chi instead of something else. It’s the loss of comfort reflected in the sore muscles and achy joints that sometimes accompany long-term physical practices. And it’s understanding that the movements you’ve practiced diligently are never quite right and constantly have to be redone, adjusted, or realized in a different way.

In that context, I’m reminded of an anecdote about a great Tai Chi master. When asked if he’d ever done a perfect set of Tai Chi, he replied, “I thought I did last week, but this week, I did one even better.” Despite the wryness of his reply, the meaning is clear: Even with his superior skill at Tai Chi, had he not continued to invest time and energy in his art—had he not continued to lose—he would not have continued to progress.

These sorts of investments are easy to see as a tangible quantities, and the results also are tangible: smoother, more flowing movements that are centered and grounded, producing a greater sense of physical capability and well-being. But other benefits that follow, while not exactly tangible, also are manifest. Through investment in daily practice, one experiences many sorts of loss that are really gains: loss of tension, loss of instability, and loss of improper body alignments.

Through investment in the meditational aspect of Tai Chi, one begins to divest oneself of erroneous, wayward, and careless thought. In a sense, Tai Chi asks you to “lose your mind,” for the ultimate loss is loss (or at least suppression) of ego, or the mental desire to always win or look good in the eyes of our fellow humans. Through this investment of calming the mind, we lose the need to observe ourselves from some theoretical outside perspective—a perspective that is filled with often erroneous suppositions of how others see us and what they think of us—and begin to observe ourselves from within.

In Movements of Magic, Bob Klein writes: “Letting go is a basic, if not the basic principle of T’ai-chi-Ch’uan.” (1) In truth, investing in ego loss is one of the principal challenges of push hands practice, and it highlights another definition of “invest,” which also means to give power or authority to, as in an investiture ceremony. In this meaning, you authorize, empower, and ordain someone or something to carry on with a given duty or procedure.

In push hands, you invest an opponent with the opportunity to invade your space and do something to you that most of us hate: push you around at close quarters. In other words, the loss is in allowing yourself to be pushed—to “lose” the fight. Fighting the pressure that your opponent puts on you is, itself, resistance to loss. Instead, one must learn that if resistance is met in one direction, then the accurate response is to lose (sink and turn) and then move in a different direction, seeking an emptiness in which there is no resistance—an emptiness in which resistance is lost, resulting in an investment in non-resistance that results in your opponent’s loss.

Moreover, investing in loss is understanding that your efforts will not produce immediate results, either in practice of the form or in push hands. This is an important thing to keep in mind in our age of instant gratification. A Tai Chi buddy related a conversation he had with a young man who sincerely thought he was really good at kung fu because he could manipulate his game controller expertly during martial arts video games. Instant gratification and fanciful desires rarely produce genuine results. Instead, the mobility, energy, and skills imparted by the Tai Chi form accrue steadily over time in an almost imperceptible fashion, only revealing themselves after long periods of seemingly futile effort. And these long periods of apparent pointless work can definitely make one question the investment in one’s practice, making it seem like wasted effort—a loss of the capital of time and effort.

“Invest in loss” is similar to a number of quotes by various people on the dichotomy of failure and success and how the latter follows only from the former. You might have your favorite; I’m choosing the following:

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