01.29.08

Qigong Fever

Posted in Qigong, Health, History, Qi Jocks, Books at 11:03 pm by Scott P. Phillips

If this book I’m holding here had been published in 1997 instead of 2007, I probably wouldn’t have set out to write my own book on the history and cultural origins of qigong. I also probably wouldn’t have failed in that endeavor and ended up putting my collection of writings up on the Internet in the form of a blog called “Weakness with a Twist”—and you wouldn’t be reading it!

Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, by David A. Palmer. Published by Columbia University Press, 356 pages.
The book is a history of Qigong, which appropriately frames the subject as a political movement built around a body technology with religious characteristics, and scientific pretensions. It is a book which resists summarization. Never the less I’m going down that road.

Qigong Fever tells a really shocking story of mass hysterical enthusiasm. The kind of popular insanity that can only happen in a world where 2+2=5 if the Party says it does! The state in essence banned religious devotion, magic tricks, spontaneous expression, deep emotion, and even self-respect. The Party claimed to be in favor of using science to save the world, but obviously science cannot be practiced in an environment where 2+2 might equal 5. It was from this skewed environment that qigong came to be capable of healing anything and everything. All over China otherwise ordinary people could see with their ears, control guided missiles with their minds, tell the future while balancing on eggs—qigong became the source for the development of everything weird, magical, new age, charismatic, and psychic. That all this could happen in the name of science would already be beyond normal comprehension, but the Communist Party brought what would otherwise have been just weird and wacky to a fever pitch by issuing an order essentially forbidding skepticism.

The title Qigong Fever refers to the explosion of interest and participation in qigong methods, research, charismatic religion, and a whole lot more that reached a peak in the decade from 1985 to 1996, after which the government cracked down on qigong people in general and particularly on the followers of the dangerously unbalanced Li Hongzhi, known collectively as Falungong.

Palmer tasks himself with creating a historic record for a subject that is made up of seemingly limitless false claims and (even more challenging for the historian) partially false claims about its origins and functions. In addition he tackles problems as an anthropologist carefully milking the overlapping realms of scientism, charisma, national consciousness, repression, religious impulse, and shifting political networks into a frothy qi infused tonic.

The political alliance that made the qigong movement possible eventually fell apart creating outlaws and refugees. The last chapter of the book deals specifically with the Falungong and its transformation from a qigong cult into an outlaw and exiled revolutionary utopian movement.

The book has a lot of footnotes. Palmer draws on a wide array of original Chinese sources for historical material and makes good use of the history of ideas. His writing moves easily between telling the story, putting it in context, and bringing in other peoples ideas and research to convey the depth of his analysis.

If you like this blog you’ll like this book.

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01.27.08

Yi

Posted in Bagua zhang, Fighting, Martial Arts, Qi Jocks at 8:04 pm by Scott P. Phillips

In the Early 90’s when George Xu came back from judging a tournament on the East Coast, he told us that he had been in an interesting and friendly argument with Nan Lu, a baguazhang practitioner in New York City.

The argument was over how to describe high level Yi. Yi is most often translated “intension,” but the English word doesn’t do it justice. Some modern Qi jocks now use the word Yinian, generally meaning something more like “mind” but in qigong circles it simply refers to “the pathway along which you intend to send qi.”

When George Xu wanted to explain to a beginning student what yi was, he would describe two Doberman-pinchers. Both were told to charge at a group of people. One dog got up close and hesitated, jumping around and barking, not sure who to bite. The other dog, the one with clear yi, immediately bit the neck of the guy with the blue shirt.

George had been arguing that one should train with “killer” yi, the mind should be focused exactly on how to kill the opponent. Nan Lu was arguing that one should have “zero” yi, a mind like a translucent sky. George wasn’t willing to concede but he thought Nan Lu’s argument had merit.

A more common use of the word Yi, one that nearly all Chinese martial arts teachers use, means to have an awareness of technique. A student has yi in his form when a knowledgeable observer can see the fighting idea in the students movement. Numerous throws, joint breaks, and striking combination possibilities should be apparent.

Every technique must have the correct force trajectories, and these must be practiced on a live partner. These trajectories themselves are also called yi. Martial arts techniques use trajectories which are vectors, arcs, and spirals. All of this is referred to as yi.

One of the magical things about a gongfu form or routine is that because the same movement can be used for many different techniques, a seasoned practitioner will develop more and more complex yi as the years go by. A single movement can have a hundred different expressions.

This seasoned and complex yi at some point starts to look less specific. With very clear yi, it looks like I’m making an upper-cut to the chin. But if I’ve thoroughly trained 15 different techniques for that movement I can do the movement in what we might call an undifferentiated potential state. Instead of a specific technique or fighting idea showing itself, the yi starts to look like clouds swirling around the body. It is not that you actually see the clouds, what you see is all the possibilities at once.

Practicing at this yi level also feels like clouds, or sometimes like water, fire or mist. Once a practitioner reaches this level, she stops thinking in terms of techniques.

Kumar Frantzis said about Xingyi that when you strike you should be thinking “Only One Thing.”

A Samurai by the old code (budo) didn’t need technique, he needed only to be willing to die.

Wang Xiangzhai, one of the greatest internal martial artists of the 20th Century, said that “the yi should always be round.” I’m working on it.

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01.24.08

Song Zhong Jin

Posted in Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang, Shaolin at 3:24 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I just wanted to throw this term out into cyberspace and see if anyone is interested in discussing what it means.

Song, (first tone in Mandarin) often written sung, is a homonym with pine tree, it means to let go of status, to slack, to relax and to sink.

Zhong means “center,” as in Zhongguo (China, center country).

Jin means a type of power which can be cultivated through practice. The word is almost always used in compound form and so it can mean widely different things, like gongjin (empty force, pushing without touching), or tingjin (sensitivity, literally “hearing power”).

I believe that song zhong jin means something like: Non-structural power. Perhaps it means power which does not rely on a clear center. It may even mean power which is not transfered or generated through the back, the spine, the bones, or the centerline.

What do you all say?

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01.23.08

The Forth Dimension–My Limit

Posted in Taijiquan, Bagua zhang at 8:08 am by Scott P. Phillips

I know I have earned some trust from readers over the last few months. But never the less I suspect that some readers are wondering just how far out I might go.

Well I’m happy to inform you that there is a clear limit to how far I will go. I promise it will not get any more wacko than this.

The following idea occurred to me and although it may be a (rather high level daoyin) stretch, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be the first person to say it.

First everyone should know about this surfer dude, Garrett Lisi. He may have created a unified field theory.

He had been tinkering with “weird” equations for years and getting nowhere, but six months ago he stumbled on a research paper analysing E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points. He noticed that some of the equations describing its structure matched his own. “The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” says Lisi. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!’”

Folks, we may be living in 8 Dimensions and only experiencing 3 of them!

Well I’ve been pondering this during my practice of the last month and thinking to myself, “what if we do have some experience of say the 4th dimension but our brains are wired to make sense of everything in the third?”

The explanations of why and how taijiquan or baguazhang works have never been that great. A lot of us accept the notion that being relaxed with really good alighnment and thinking about very clear force vectors is enough to explain the powers we taiji and bagua guys have, but then again most of us leave some room for doubt.

Well, what if Taijiquan and Baguazhang are actually happening in the fourth dimension?  What if all those strange sensation of yi (intension) and shen (spirit) are actually just shadows of a multi-dimensional experience.  We can’t see or hear it, but perhaps we can still play around at the fringes?

You heard it here first, at Weakness with a Twist.

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01.22.08

Balance, Blankets and Gnarly

Posted in Fighting, Martial Arts, Weakness at 3:23 pm by Scott P. Phillips

As a teenager I was very good at skateboarding. This was before the technology of super light boards and thus before all the hopping and kick flips. Living in San Francisco we skated down hill using slalom and sliding techniques on both streets and sidewalks. I can count on one hand the number of people that could keep up with me.

Whenever I size someone up, of course I look at the usual stuff: their alignment, do they look weak in some areas and stronger in others? what kind of reach do they have? but the big question is, could they do something to me that would hurt more than falling off my skateboard at 30 miles an hour onto the pavement and then sliding to a stop?

I don’t personally take credit for inventing the word “gnarly” but many of my friends at the time were convinced that I had a claim to first usage.

You can tell someone who is just learning how to skateboard because he or she will try to use their leg muscles to steer (and because they will say, “ahhggrrhh” and then fall down.) Downhill skateboarding requires using the whole body to balance and steer.

Balance is not something you find and maintain, it is the ability to constantly shift your weight around. To someone watching a skateboarder doing slalom down a hill it looks like he or she is leaning forward and back. Actually what happens is the instant one moves their weight to one side of the board, the board starts turning to come underneath the weight. This creates first a feeling of heaviness as your weight goes into the board, and then a feeling of lightness as your forward momentum takes you over to the other side of the board. As your weight crosses the centerline you feel weightless for a moment and then you come down heavy on the other side of the board as it turns again.

This heavy-light-heavy sequence is what wins fights. Think about the key moment of a martial encounter in which your body weight comes into full contact with the other person. Just like skateboarding, if you try to use your leg muscles to balance, you will be bowled over. Balance comes from being able to become suddenly light then suddenly heavy.

One high level description of this is that you first throw a very fine light weight silk blanket over your opponent, then you throw a very heavy one.

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01.21.08

The Return of Paulie Zink

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, teaching, Shaolin, Daoism, Flexibility at 10:38 am by Scott P. Phillips

I made a point of asking Paulie Zink and his wife to please get some stuff up on Youtube and I probably wasn’t the only one. They’ve done it. And here too.

Even better, he is coming out of retirement to teach Monkey Kung Fu. I also talked to both of them about how extraordinarily wonderful it would be if this Monkey Daoyin was being passed on to kids. I’m thinking here of a Mr. Rogers with mad Kung Fu skills. The wild dynamic world of animation coming to life.

I’ve been teaching the little bits of his system that I learned to my Northern Shaolin students and they love it. I think I’m going to try to get to Southern California for the workshop.

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01.18.08

Body-Mind Centering

Posted in Health at 3:00 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I don’t have a lot of time to write today but I thought I’d give a plug for Body-Mind Centering.

The School for Body-Mind Centering

Body-Mind Centering Association

I studied this stuff a with Rebecca Haseltine back in the 90’s, we co-taught a few fun workshops too.

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01.17.08

Dizziness

Posted in Fighting, Taijiquan, Health, Martial Arts, Bagua zhang at 7:48 am by Scott P. Phillips

You know that feeling you get when you spin around really fast and then stop? In the cartoons this feeling is usually illustrated with a swirl and some stars around the head. But actually the whole body has this spinning feeling. You can feel it in your knees and elbows too.

With this sort of disorientation it feels as if there is a body that is now still, and a second body that hasn’t stopped spinning yet. As you gain your baring, it feels as if that “other” body comes back inside.

A similar thing happens to me (and I think most people) when I am laying down very relaxed and still. I feel my body start to move around slowly, even though I know I’m not actually moving. I can control it, but it requires that I relax first, it feels like I’m letting myself drift.

Well this feeling of the body drifting out is an important aspect of Baguazhang, Taijiquan, and Internal Martial Arts practice in general. When I soften my movement to the point where I feel like I’m continuously melting, as I turn side to side it feels like my body keeps turning even after I have stopped. If I follow the “other” body, my solid body will lose its integration, so the correct response is to stop and re-integrate. Then I can turn the other way and repeat the experience on the other side.
When doing a form, or practicing push-hands, or even fighting, we control this ‘other’ body, circling it around and even throwing it like a light silk blanket over our opponents.

A significant number of martial arts techniques gain efficacy through disorienting the opponent in one way or another.  Likewise, a significant amount of training is designed to familiarize us with strange sensations and orientations so that when they happen in a fight we don’t get disoriented.

There have been a few studies that show taijiquan training improves balance in older people.  I like to point out that his is “fallout” from, or a  “sidecar” to, the main project of martial training and cultivating weakness, but never the less it is a nice benefit.

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01.16.08

Training for Failure

Posted in Health, teaching at 5:20 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Dave over at Iron-Body and I have been having an exchange of ideas. I was really hoping for a seriously heated disagreement but those southerners are so polite, he’s practically ready to open up a branch of my school in Kentucky. (I’m joking.)

Feeling a little desperate, I was reading over his excellent website and I came across this:

Why shouldn’t I train to failure?

Training to failure on a consistent basis is training to fail. We want our students to succeed, to push hard and occasionally exceed their limits, but mostly staying just below the threshold of failure.

Training to failure for most people creates a negative mindset and causes undesirable breakdown in the musculo-skeletal and Central Nervous systems.You should leave feeling better than when you came in and you should be able to finish your day feeling great and with lots of energy.

Our focus is on quality of movement. When you are training to failure your form will degrade to such an extent that you dramatically increase the risk of injury.

I have to admit two things: One that he explains the problem well, and two, that I basically agree with him.

This reminds me of a student I had that would make a face and either grunt or purse her lips and make farting sound every time I gave her a correction (which was several times each class). She was training hard and wanted to get it right, but the demonstration of self-punishment meant that she added a negative emotion and physicality to my correction. It was too much for me.

I give corrections all the time, if a student doesn’t enjoy getting corrections, they shouldn’t be studying with me. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she had been taught that people would be nicer to her if she showed a willingness to punish herself. She may even have been rewarded for demonstrating frustration.

So actually I don’t really agree with Dave. He is right, but he is not going far enough.

Unhappy students are going to blame me, the teacher, eventually anyway, I might as well take responsibility for everything that goes wrong from the beginning. So I tell my students, “If you don’t understand something, if you get something wrong, if you fail, blame me, it’s my fault!“

Rather than teaching people to avoid experiences of failure, I teach people to enjoy failing! The more good-natured people are about failing the more willing they are to take risks. The more fun they have failing, the more likely they will be to try something new and challenging. Contests and drama would be cold gruel without both failure and success.

If you can fail and enjoy it, people will love being your partner and the teacher will love using you for demonstrations.

Without failure, loss, death and decay around to prop it up, beauty would be much diminished.

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01.15.08

Recipe For Pork Shoulder

Posted in Health at 12:37 pm by Scott P. Phillips

It’s Winter in my part of the world. Time for slow cooking. Since the fire-pig year is coming to a close I thought I’d do something with pork.

If you are training in martial arts, or even if you are hoping to develop the mysterious Daoist inspired “rainbow body,” you are in for a long slow process. Still, everywhere I look, people are trying to find a short cut. While I do believe short cuts are possible, most attempts to speed things up end in failure.

Attempts to short cut the process of making high quality muscle and sinew usually produce toughness at best (lets not talk about the worst case scenario).  Taking the muscle metaphor a little further, what quality of meat are you producing in your training?

If you try to cook pork shoulder in the microwave you’re going to produce something so tough, you might as well have put your shoe in there. All my attempts to speed up the process of making pork shoulder edible have ended in something that requires a lot of chewing and is short on flavor. So here is Nam Singh’s recipe:

• Put a pork shoulder in a dutch oven or heavy pot with a lid
• Half cover it with a 50/50 mix of soy sauce and water.
• Add one whole star anise.

• Put it in a preheated oven at 250 degrees with the lid on
• Turn the pork shoulder every 30 minutes for 5^_1/2 hours
• The finished product has a light sweet black crust and the meat melts in your mouth.
• I like to serve it with homemade pickled cabbage & daikon over rice.
• Don’t be alarmed if the people you feed this to find it difficult to speak for a few minutes and their eyes roll back into there heads.

Note:  If you are interested in San Francisco classes on cooking with traditional Chinese herbs with Nam Singh, drop me a note and I’ll get you in touch with him.

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01.14.08

Michael Jordon’s Tongue

Posted in Health, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang at 2:51 pm by Scott P. Phillips

In Chinese Medical theory the finger and toe nails are considered the ends of the tendons. In gongfu we treat our nails like cat claws that can retract and extend.

Of course humans don’t have the full extension/retraction that cats do but our nails do move and we can learn to have control over them. Developing whole body tendon integration is a preliminary stage for learning whole body power. To do this one must practice initiating movement from the nails, the outer periphery of our bodies.

Just like the nails are the ends of the tendons in Chinese Medical theory, the tongue is the end of the muscles.

The chansijin (taijiquan silk reeling power exercises)  movements of the head have a little known tongue component. For instance there is a “head forward and back” neck roll that replicates the infant sucking reflex all babies develop. If you do the exercise correctly the whole inside of your throat, including your tongue, will involuntarily come outward and suck back inward with each rolling motion.

The seventh palm change in Baguazhang is sometimes called “snake spits out it’s tongue” for the same reason; it is possible to tap into whole body power through activating the sucking reflex in which the tongue goes forward and draws back. With practice, the whole torso will be involved in the movement.

In both of these cases, the tongue remains hidden.  This is a type of secret teaching known as “indoor” or “six ears never hear.”
Michael Jordan, on the other hand, has not been shy about showing us his tongue. He is by far the greatest Basket Ball player I’ve every watched.

Now I ask you, is it a coincidence that he also happens to be the only player who constantly sloshed his tongue around in his mouth and regularly stuck it out when he was making full use of his muscles?  Was he just fooling around, or was that  a secret source of his power?

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01.12.08

A Long Strong Spirited Response

Posted in Health, Weakness, Qi Jocks at 7:30 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Dave Randolph over at iron-body offered a spirited response to my somewhat comic post entitled, “The Two Finger Rule.” He offered several challenges to my anti-strength position so I thought it would be a good idea to explore them.

Do you see all the obese, people out there? People who can barely carry their groceries into the house. Frail old ladies & men who can’t get out of a chair by themselves or have to use an extension thing on the toilet so they don’t have to squat down so far.

Yes, I do see them. Obese people eat too much. People get old and die. I’m not sure, because I haven’t done it yet, but I think getting old and dying takes a lot of practice. If you try to do it without practicing, you can expect some extra complications. Internal Martial arts like Taijquan can be understood as practicing for death.

Correct strength training does not impede the flow of fluids or qi.
Are you saying that all the old drawings of monks carry water up and down steps, swinging stone lock etc were wrong in trying to build functional strength??

Are you confusing true strength training with body building? Yes building bodies is wrong. It teaches muscle isolation and creates huge muscles that are not necessarily strong and that will creates circulation issues. But proper strength training, and I’m speaking of barbells & dumbbells, but things like kettlebells, clubbells, sandbags etc, that teach full body integration and coordination, causes so many positive responses the body in terms or weight control, mobility, flexibility, coordination not to mention the positive effects on hormonal balances, sleep, digestion, among other things

If the definition of “correct strength training” is that it does not impede flow of fluids or qi, than I would be inclined to agree. However; the people I’ve watched training with these AKC Kettle Bells (pictured to the right) do indeed restrict qi circulation, and they compress qi as well.

But let’s agree to drop the word qi, because it has too many possible meanings for such a concrete disagreement. What I mean by qi in this case is a quality of animation that is characteristic of active children and predatory animals.

Monks in Asia carry water on their shoulders, people in Africa and South America carry it on their heads. The skill of carrying water is to continuously transfer all of the weight to the ground and not take any of it in your muscles. Since water tends to slosh around, this requires constant movement and is perhaps one of the reasons we see such great hip articulation in dances like the Samba and the Rumba.

I’ll concede that if someone is really good at water carrying and they get help putting the water on their shoulders or their head, they can carry a heavy load and avoid loosing sensitivity.

…Part of my strength training includes lots of mobility work for joints and muscles as well as qi gong.

I think the Scott Sonnon, Iron-Body, movement to loosen your joints and use awkward weights to stimulate your body to be more efficient is wonderful! Now just drop the strength part!

I love business, and I love this new health kick. But if you are looking for high level internal martial arts, strength will inhibit your development. My point is not to convince the world I’m right, I don’t think sensitivity is for everyone. Perhaps I’m a weakness elitist in that way. Then again, remind what we need strength for?

By the way can you pick up a 75 lb child with two fingers from each hand? No? then how are you going to pick one up & carry he/she if they are injured & can’t walk? Call for someone to help you pick them up?

I would like the world to know that I have two really strong fingers, and I’m undefeated in thumb wrestling. Also, I’m not saying only use two fingers, I’m saying test whatever you are about to lift with two fingers. After the test feel free to add the other fingers, a hip, a chin, or even a whole arm. (And we’ve all heard the story about the lady who flipped over a car because her baby was underneath it. If you’re healthy and you really need the strength, it’ll be there.)

As for picking up kids, two fingers in the armpits usually works, but in my experience they are not shy about biting, better to get help.

Since an injured kid is one less kid I have to teach, I should leave it at that but… I noticed the Iron-Body website does trainings for firefighters who obviously are in the business of rescuing people and their kids. This is great stuff. I admire the business model. But it does raise the question, do firefighters really need extra strength?

You know those ninja shoes? Well, they aren’t actually ninja shoes, they are called jika tabi. All construction workers wear jika tabi in Japan. That’s right, Japanese construction workers think of themselves as crafts people, not laborers. They don’t drop things on their feet, so they don’t need steel-toed boots.  Sometimes conventional thinking is a limitation.
When I was born, all the fire fighters in San Francisco were straight, white, over 6 feet tall, male, and at least 185lbs. We had a Whites Only Union until 1990! San Francisco currently has twice as many fire fighters, engines, and firehouses as we need. Whenever a city official with balls comes along, the Unions go to the sentimental-fireman-gushing-voters and have that official castrated.

If we didn’t have to pay for all that fire fighter corruption we could afford to design and build all new lightweight efficient equipment and we could even have midget fire fighters. Strength is an issue here only because it protects a class of aging, compassionate and heroic men–that should have been let go a long time ago.

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