Chen style and spiral movements

I'm seeing many differences between Chen and Yang styles, but one that is really amazing and probably very fundamental is the spiral movements in Chen style Taiji.  All Taiji styles emphasize the internal energy and how the energy - and therefore the movement - is generated from Dantian or the center of the body.  But Chen style's use of Dantian is more expressed - through Dantian rotation and expressing this rotation in pretty much every movement of the routine.  Master Li says that the first road of the old Chen routine is all about bigger spiral movements to train the student in getting the hang of these "rotational" connections.  So you're constantly rotating different parts of the body in conjunction with rotations in Dantian muscles.  To be more accurate, it's the Dantian rotation that results in rotation of hands or legs, etc.

Some of the spiral moves are obvious (and by obvious I mean "can be seen easily").  But the more you look at a good performance, the more you spiral moves.  More and more spirals are built into the transitions from each posture to the next.  At times your body is doing three different spiral moves in three different directions - one by hands, on by the waist, and one by the knees.  It'll take a lot to make this second nature, so that one does not have to think about it.  If one thinks about it, one will fail in doing the real, connected move.    As the Samurai guy in Tom Cruise's Last Samurai said: "Too many mind" :-)

The perfect move is the one with no mind.