The Six Levels of Song

The Six Levels of Song is a traditional Yang-family transmission that maps the cultivation of song (鬆, the active release of held tension) as six progressive, cumulative grades. Each level depends on the one before it and is included within the next. The six are not separate skills but successive refinements of a single principle — like milk becoming cream and butter, each stage richer than and built from the last. The framework is closely associated in the contemporary West with Sifu Adam Mizner, whose 2020 blog article articulated it for an English-speaking audience; the substance of the teaching is older. [1]

The six are best understood as landmarks on a long arc of training, not as discrete techniques to master and check off. The dividing lines between them are felt rather than seen, and a practitioner who has touched a later level still spends decades deepening every earlier one. The framework is therefore both a description of where the practitioner currently lives and a map of where the training is going.

Why the order matters

Each level opens the conditions for the next. Trying to skip a stage is not just inefficient; it tends to produce nothing at all, because the substrate is not there. The qi cannot sink through tissues that have not been opened; dispersing cannot happen from a body that has not accumulated; penetration cannot reach into channels that are not yet conducting. Practitioners who attempt to reverse-engineer the late qualities by mimicking their appearance — for instance, by trying to "look soft" — usually wind up with the counterfeit of song, the rigid-and-empty body that has neither structure nor circulation.

The six levels

1. Song Kai (鬆開) — Open

The first level: open the body so that song becomes possible at all. A body bound by habitual tension, gripped by li (力, brute strength), has no path through which release can travel. Traditional Taijiquan training opens this substrate first — through standing practice, through systematic stretching and tissue work, through the slow form itself — until the joints decompress, the diaphragms unsticky, and the fascia begins to glide.

The classical phrasing for this stage is kai men (開門), open the gates, referring to the points along the body's interior at which qi normally stalls. Once these gates open, the body begins to function as a single conduit from toes to fingertips. Song Kai is the precondition not only for the next five levels, but for the existence of any internal flow at all.

This is also the level at which the practitioner first tastes song — not as a finished quality, but as the subtle change of feel when a held region finally lets go. The relationship is reciprocal: opening allows the taste of song, and that song-release in turn opens the body further. We open in order to song, and we song in order to open.

2. Song Chen (鬆沉) — Sink

With the body opened, the qi can begin to sink. The second level is the cultivated quality of letting the breath-energy descend to the dantian (the energetic center below the navel) and, with it, the felt weight of the body settling into the feet. Song Chen is what produces the rooted, heavy, "soft but unmovable" quality that beginners associate with serious Taijiquan.

A crucial point in the traditional teaching: the dantian is not innate. The body is born with tian (田, the field — the region) but not yet with dan (丹, the elixir — the accumulated energy). The dantian as a functional center is formed drop by drop by sustained practice with sufficient song. Without Song Chen, the qi never sinks far enough to accumulate, and the dantian remains a region in name only.

Two conditions block this sinking. The first is physical bracing — any residual tension in the body interrupts the descent, causing the qi to float and the practitioner to become top-heavy and easy to capsize. The second is mental and emotional turbulence — agitation in the mind raises the qi just as effectively as tension in the shoulders. Cultivating a calm, stable mind is therefore part of training Song Chen, not a separate practice; the yi (意, mind-intention) becomes the instrument that directs song, and the ting (聽, listening) becomes the perception that recognizes when song-and-sinking are occurring.

This is the level at which zhan zhuang (站樁, standing post) does its primary work: aligning the skeleton with gravity so that the released flesh can sink along a straight path, then patiently letting the qi follow.

3. Song San (鬆散) — Disperse

From the accumulated sinking of Song Chen, a fullness builds — and at the third level, that fullness begins to disperse. San (散) means to scatter or spread; here it names song's expansion outward through the body and (in mature application) into the partner.

The traditional teaching identifies two manifestations. The first is outward dispersing, in which the nei qi (內氣, inner qi) and wei qi (衛氣, defensive qi) mobilize together to fill the limbs to the extremities — producing peng (掤), the buoyant ward-off quality of the first gate. Genuine peng cannot be held by effort; it is what happens when song-san fills a song-chen body to the boundary.

The second is inward dispersing, the same scattering quality turned within: an incoming force lands on the body but finds no concentrated point to land on, because the song has dispersed the structure too finely. This is one of the foundational engines of hua jin (化勁), neutralization. At this level receiving and issuing become the same instant — the partner's push lands on a dispersed body and is returned along the same path, with the practitioner having done nothing additional.

4. Song Jing (鬆淨) — Clean

The fourth level is named clean because the previous three have come fully into integration — there is no admixture left of the muscular bracing the practitioner began with. Jing (淨, clean, pure) marks the quality of receiving and issuing that happens spontaneously, without effort, and without any trace of li.

Traditional teaching marks this stage as the point at which the practitioner has truly entered the door of Taijiquan. Everything before this level is preparation — opening the body, sinking the qi, learning to disperse. Song Jing is the threshold past which Taijiquan is working rather than being worked at. The art's actions emerge from the practitioner's structure rather than being produced by intention. Push hands at this level looks effortless because it is effortless: cause and effect, in the body's own terms, have collapsed into one.

This level is also where the practitioner stops needing to think about song in real time. Earlier, "song the kua" is a deliberate instruction. By Song Jing, it is the body's default, restored every moment the attention turns there.

5. Song Tong (鬆通) — Penetrate

When song deepens further, the qualities of Open, Sink, Disperse, and Clean intensify, and song itself begins to penetrate — to pass through every channel, every cavity, every cell of the body. Tong (通) means to go through or to pass freely, and that is precisely what song does at this level: the previous structural sense of release gives way to an experience of song traveling without any internal obstacle anywhere.

Two consequences follow. Internally, the practitioner gains a finely articulated capacity to change — to express shen (神, spirit), yi, and qi at scales much smaller than gross body movement. Yin and yang can alternate freely within any region of the body, even within a single point of contact, so that the partner cannot know you — there is nothing fixed enough to read.

Externally, the practitioner's qi begins to enter the partner's body. The joining quality of stick-adhere-join-follow (zhan, nian, lian, sui) — the foundational push-hands skills — finds its mature meaning here. Touching hands with a practitioner at this level is, as the tradition expresses it, like touching hands with a puppet master. The control extends from the contact point all the way through the partner's structure because the song does.

6. Song Kong (鬆空) — Empty

The sixth level is named kong (空), empty. In the Discover Taiji blog article that articulates the framework, Mizner declines to give an extended description of this level — "endless in depth" — and limits himself to what direct experience reports. [1] That is a reasonable boundary for a wiki page too. What can be said about Song Kong is the description the teaching gives of its consequences, not its inner content:

The body becomes so deeply song that it is effectively empty. The partner finds nothing to attack, nothing to land force on, no point to push against. The body's substantial form (its yin aspect) takes on the quality of the insubstantial (yang). Reciprocally, the practitioner's shen and qi beyond the bodily form, which are normally yang/insubstantial, take on the quality of the substantial. This is the classical formulation of yang within yin and yin within yang, the dynamic interpenetration that the symbol of Taiji (太極) itself depicts. And this, in turn, is Taiji born from the emptiness of Wuji (無極) — the undifferentiated stillness from which the art's name derives.

Practical implications

A few consequences flow from the structure of the six levels:

• Earlier levels do not go away. A practitioner at Song Tong still spends real time on Song Kai — opening — every day, because the body re-binds itself and the opening must be renewed. The same is true for sinking and dispersing. The six-level map is cumulative, not sequential-and-discarded.

• The standing practice keeps doing work at every level. Zhan zhuang produces the opening and sinking of the first two levels, but it also produces the dispersing, cleaning, penetration, and emptying of the later four — at scales and qualities the early practitioner cannot yet feel. The same practice deepens with the practitioner.

• The teacher's diagnosis tracks the levels. A correction like "open here" points to Song Kai; "sink the qi" points to Song Chen; "don't manufacture peng" points to the difference between Song San and pre-Song-San bracing. The framework gives both teacher and student a shared vocabulary for what stage the body is at in any given moment.

• There is no shortcut. The classical literature and the contemporary transmission agree on this point. The levels exist in the order they exist because each opens the substrate for the next, and no amount of intention, mimicry, or partial practice can produce a later quality without the earlier ones in place.

Related concepts

Song (鬆) — the foundational principle this framework refines

Peng (掤) — ward-off, the quality that arises at Song San

Fajin (發勁) — issuing power, which depends on Song Jing and beyond

Sources

[1] Adam Mizner, Six Levels of Song, Discover Taiji blog, May 2020. The articulation of the six-level framework above follows the structure laid out in this article, with the substance representing a transmission of older Yang-family teaching rather than a contemporary invention.

[2] Wang Zongyue (王宗岳), Taijiquan Lun (太極拳論). The doctrine of yi over li, of softness overcoming hardness, and of the union of yin and yang — all of which the six-level framework concretely operationalizes — derives from the classical Taiji literature of which Wang's treatise is the most quoted source.