A Journey Through the Jins – Listening and Interpreting

Although Ting Jin is called “listening Jin” it’s about much more than using your ears. It is all about using your whole body to sense the intentions and forces at play within and around your opponent. 

If this sounds a bit complicated, you need to know that it’s not an intellectual thing to be worked out, it’s something that you feel on a more intuitive level, rather than think too much about it.  

To gain some idea of how this works, you can try the finger sensitivity exercise with a partner. One partner closes their eyes while the other leads them around the room for a few minutes, with only the pad of their index finger touching the same place on their partner’s finger. Then you change roles so that you both experience how it is to lead and to be led. 

People are usually surprised to find that their fingers can remain in contact throughout the exercise and they can follow very easily despite not being able to see. 

Then you do the whole thing again but this time you both keep your eyes open. What people normally discover is that it’s much harder with their eyes open because sight is the dominant sense and they automatically find their brain interfering and trying to predict where they are going, rather than feeling and following, sometimes even finding themselves taking over the leading role. 

Once you realise how much you can learn about your opponent through that tiny finger contact, the next step is to try some of your push hands practices with your eyes closed and notice how your skills improve when your eyes and brain take a back seat, and you are just fully present in the moment. You can feel all the forces at play, hear all the sounds around you, and even sense the intentions of your partner and respond appropriately without seeing what they are up to or even thinking about it. 

This is an extremely useful state to be in, although it’s not always a wise move to have your eyes closed during a push hands bout, just as it’s not a good idea to lock your gaze with that of an opponent with a deliberately intimidating stare! Looking distractedly around the room isn’t recommended either. Resting your attention lightly on their upper chest gives you the best of both worlds: you still have your eyes open sufficiently to be aware of your surroundings (in real life it might allow you to be aware of the other guy behind you with the broken bottle), but you maintain your awareness of the whole-body energy of your partner/opponent/assailant. That way, internally, you can sense their intentions and direction of motion, even before they move, so that you can respond appropriately. As it says in the classics, “my opponent moves a little, I move first.” On one level, you are already moving and don’t have a moment of inertia to overcome, and it’s your Ting Jin that allows you to sense what’s happening and where you need to go. 

There are even more levels within levels of subtly different types of Jin for you to explore here.  

As your Ting Jin provides you with information, your interpreting Jin, Dong Jin, now has something to work with. As your Ting Jin senses what’s happening with your opponent, it’s your Dong Jin that interprets their intentions and allows you play around with these forces and decide what to do with them.  

You might follow these forces (Tzo Jin), receive them (Zou Jin) into your sphere of Peng Jin before doing something even more helpful with them, like getting them out of your way instead of having them in your face. 

Again, this is all to do with intuitive qualities rather than mental activity. The logical, intellectual brain is very slow. The first thing you might know about an incoming punch is the colour of the ceiling as you wake up in A&E. However, years of training in your martial art may have primed you with ward-off energy so that you have the almost instantaneous reactions of a rubber ball that can roll things or bounce things away, without any thoughts at all. Which brings us to the next important types of Jin: rolling back (Lu Jin), pressing (Ji Jin) and pushing (An Jin), each of which will merit a section on its own, and all of these can be thought of as ways of neutralising those incoming forces in different ways so that they cause you no harm. So you may or may not be surprised to learn that there is, in our repertoire, a thing called neutralising Jin (Hua Jin). One type of this is the ability to divert and deflect something in a new direction which, from your opponent’s point of view, is like you switched the points on a train track so that the train’s own velocity takes it on its way with very little effort on your part. Which brings us nicely to our next topic: rolling back (Lu Jin).