Pushing Hands is Not About Accommodating... (Huh??!!)

After telling me that pushing hands is about pushing the hands, the same fellow student told me that he cannot accommodate what I tell him when we were pushing hands. The context was: I was trying to tell him where he should place his hands so as to counter my push when we were practising two-hands pushing hands, so that we can work on drawing the circles first.

As I said, he probably did more years of taiji than me and thus know what he was talking about... but still, isn't taiji about trying to follow your opponent, and from there counter him? Isn't taiji about accommodating to your opponent (舍己从人)? But still, there is still a lesson to learn here.

Pushing hands is not about learning how to push someone. We can easily do that, just by you pushing me and I pushing you. Pushing hands is about learning how to sense your opponent's and your own force. I think the important thing when learning pushing hands is to know why you are even learning it in the first place. If the objective is to be able to push someone, you will learn how to push people. If your objective is to learn how to sense force, you will learn how to sense force and use it against your opponent.

And of course, if your objective is to learn to push but mine is to learn to sense your force, while you may be able to push me around at first, I will soon be able too use your force against you. The more I let you push me, there more I learn how to sense your force and eventually use it against you. If you never let your opponent push you, you will not know how to sense force.