Push hands is a two person exercise designed to teach the principles of Tai-chi. The people are standing facing each other, in a stance shoulder width apart from left to right and about one and a half shoulder widths apart from front to back. They begin by touching arms and then try to push each other off balance. If you use tension the other person can use your tension to push you over. Each person must be soft and use an expansive force, generated by the sequential opening of the joints, from the feet, legs, hips, elbow and out to the pushing hand (or elbow or shoulder). As you push, you also must absorb the resistance of the partner back down the joints and, in fact, use that absorbed force, sending it back up into the partner.
Each person may move any way they want to, at any speed, with as much or little force as they wish. It is completely spontaneous. The feet must remain on the ground. Each partner pays attention to the balance, state of tension of each muscle, the pattern of attention and other factors, both in his and his partner's body. All of these factors are constantly changing as you move.
This requires a degree of attention easily one hundred times as strong and complex as we normally use. This is why it takes so much time to learn Push Hands. The result is that your highly developed attention serves you well in your everyday life as well. You notice much more about your surroundings and about your own behavior than most people do.
Any pattern of your behavior which is not mechanically appropriate for that moment as you practice Push Hands, is immediately noticed by the partner and taken advantage of. You begin to notice finer and finer habits of behavior down to the level of a single muscle or joint. Push Hands then becomes a practice of observing the entire pattern of learned behavior patterns and deciding which ones are useful and which are not. You then learn, through Push Hands training, how to let go of useless behaviors. This creates a great inner change and makes your life more efficient.
Push Hands is taught after learning at least one Tai-chi form, and learning it well. This takes about a year. It takes about three years of Push Hands training to really understand what you are doing. It takes another two years until you can do Push Hands in real time (without constantly stopping to figure out what to do). In another three years you are fairly skilled. This means eight years of Push Hands training. Without a fair amount of skill in Push Hands, you cannot become a Tai-chi teacher because you can't appreciate the principles of Tai-chi. This is why a Tai-chi student is never allowed to teach until he or she has been studying (on a regular basis) for at least eight or nine years.
The joy of practicing Push Hands with a skilled partner cannot be equalled. The two systems of energy flow and the dynamics of attention of the partners meld into one and you feel you are in another, and a more alive world. It is a Shamanistic practice to the extreme because it brings back the awareness of chi (internal energy) which is the energy sustaining and connecting all living things.
When two people first touch arms, as they prepare to do Push Hands, they immediately assess the pattern of chi and the dynamics of attention throughout the partner's body. You feel the partner's attention filling your body and can sense the degree of skill they have in assessing the dynamics of your energy. You both instantly know who is more skilled. But it doesn't matter. Push Hands is played just for the joy of it. No one is keeping score.