05.17.08

Being Your Own Student

Posted in teaching at 7:38 am by Scott P. Phillips

Of course everyone has heard that you have to be come your own teacher. That you not only have to internalize the lessons of your teacher, but you have to teach yourself. You must take what the teacher does, expand it, apply it, and then refine it.  You must make your teacher’s voice your own.
I had a dream in the middle of the day yesterday. I dreamed I was in High School studying history. I was plagued by guilt at having failed to do an assignment.  I went up to the teacher, who was a woman, I got on my knees, bent back the brim of my baseball cap, and tried to explain why I was such a talented, and enthusiastic, and yet pathetically under performing student.  On my knees I made the excuse that I had been working on other projects which were also historical; projects which were important and fit better with my style of learning.

When I woke up my partner Sarah said I had been talking during my nap.  The words she repeated back to me were the words of the teacher in the dream, “You can still accomplish your goals, you can still follow through on your commitments.”

As people who take on life-long learning projects like Chinese Martial Arts, we often know what we have to do.  Even worse, we often know what we should have been doing.  We know the path, we just haven’t taken it.

So I would like to add to the old adage you have to become your own teacher, that you also have to become your own student.

Permalink Comments

05.16.08

How do Kids Learn?

Posted in Fighting, History, teaching at 7:59 am by Scott P. Phillips

Because I perform several different sword forms I’ve gotten in the habit of explaining a little bit about dueling.  It is a nice tie in with History and teachers appreciate it.  The funny thing is, students already know what a duel is.  They often don’t know it by name, but when I describe the type of thing a duel would be fought over, namely honor, and that every duel needs to have seconds (to enforce the rules and to fight themselves if the rules are broken)–elementary school students all recognize the “fair fight” so common on the school yard.

Students also know the difference between a matched or a fair fight and bullying.  Why do they know this?  How do they learn it?  Is there something in our DNA?  Is dueling as natural as mothering?

Permalink 2 Comments

05.08.08

Orange Juice and Hermits

Posted in Health, teaching, Daoism at 8:41 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I grew up arguing every night at the dinner table. For the most part it was an edifying and respectful experience. This kind of intensive educational model is pretty rare world-wide (except in Israel where it is the norm).

We also drank orange juice with our dinner which is a real “no-no” in Chinese medicine, mainly because your spleen will reject all the highest quality nutrients in favor of the simple sugars. The rejected foods still get digested but your body needs to create more heat to digest these higher quality nutrients once they have been passed on to the large intestine. The result is that your body takes on fluids in order to insulate the other organs from all the heat. Orange juice makes most people gain body weight in water, edema. (After years it becomes the syndrome known as “damp heat.”)

However; I don’t think drinking orange juice had a negative effect on my health, most kids are pretty resilient as long as they are getting enough food.

But there was one strange effect. Now if I drink orange juice with a meal, even breakfast, I’ll get in an argument. I become completely posessed by my ancestors. Generally I believe things like this can be overcome with will power, but in this case I have no control. If I’m alone, I’ll argue with a chair.

One of my students sent me this email:

I wrote down what we just talked about because I didn’t want to forget it. Then I wondered if I’d really understood correctly. So if this does not look like what you meant, could you let me know.
-H

My Question: Should one practice differently on different days? For example should some days be longer, more in-depth etc?

Your Answer: There are two Wuwei approaches:

1) Practice at the same time, same place, same duration, same stuff. The difference will still be there; it will be made apparent with a backdrop of sameness.
2) Hermit method: move with the qi of the moment. Practices will vary significantly.

There are also two De or “virtuous perfection” approaches:

1) Urban – Do many discrete experiments with one’s practice so that you will achieve certain and specific fruitions. This could include the calendar (tongshu), food, intensity, etc. But it will include record keeping of some sort, as experiments involve constant evaluation and recalibration to produce fruition.
2)Hermit method: Could involve calendar, detailed seasonal correspondence. Embodying and exploring the qi of various events (like grass sprouting or mushrooms coming up). Records will also be kept for the same purpose.

Follow up question: Is the difference between the hermit and urban methods, the level of detail and in-depth relation with natural environment?

Now in my family, if after a long discussion someone were to restate my argument in crystal clear and respectful terms, there is a good chance that they would be on the verge of delivering a fatal blow.

But putting that possibility aside, this question shows the difficulty of communicating Daoist view and practice with words.

The key thing to digest here is that the wuwei view does not require analysis. By asking the question you are already in the de (perfection, integration, improvement) camp. [note: De is often translated “virtue,” it is the de used in the title of the Dao De Jing.]

The wuwei hermit method is called “The Wandering of the Mare.” Living around other people means having to coordinate with their schedules and that is antithetical to constant spontaneity.

The wuwei view suggests that practice is self-revealing, it doesn’t require any discipline other than trusting your appetites.

Yes, the difference between the urban and the hermit models of de (perfection) is one of detail and depth. But it is also a difference of scale.

The urban perfection seeker is very playful and creative. The fact that I spent many years doing a 20 minute Japanese Tea Ceremony in my elevated gold-painted elixir-dedicated Quiet Room before leaving the house, means that now when I walk into Starbucks I’m getting an enormous hit of mythic transcendence–office furniture and paper cups are not obstacles.

The hermit version of perfection studies is so big, complex, and refined that I’ll have to save it for another post. (That’s a joke.)

Permalink 1 Comment

05.03.08

Indolence

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Taijiquan, teaching, Shaolin at 9:46 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Indolence literally means “freedom from pain,” but it has come to mean: the rejection of obligation, difficulty, or even honor or class. Since most of us have neither honor nor class to reject–those meanings are rare. Indolence is a synonym for laziness, but honestly if you are going to exert all the effort it takes to call someone else “lazy,” are you really going to go the extra mile and call them indolent? I mean, you might have to explain it.

The question of whether indolence in its literal sense can be a virtue in martial arts training arose last month on Formosa Neijia and on Dojo Rat, but I’m too…you know…to find and link to the exact posts.

On Formosa Neijia the subject was raised in a rather contentions way, through the suggestion that Yang stylists might not work as hard as Chen stylists. Naturally, the comments concluded that it is individual practitioners, not styles, which are variously lazy or hard working.

However, some people did conclude that to avoid pain in ones practice can have positive results. Does this really work?

Diligently practicing to avoid pain won’t work. We actually need to practice what is painful, and we need to practice each and every painful thing until we understand exactly how and why it is painful. I’m not saying you need to injure your wrist on the left side and then do it again on the right side. That would be dumb.

You can certainly extrapolate that if a practice causes injury to one part of the body it will do the same to another. The more quickly you learn what truly hurts, the more quickly you will progress. Learning, in this case means learning not to do what hurts.

But….

I’ve been teaching kids some short Shaolin routines called Stone Monkey. One of the characteristics of the Stone Monkey is that you bang your elbows and knees on the ground and even grind your fist into the ground with your entire body weight on it. If you do it right, it doesn’t hurt. But it always hurts the first few times you do it and if you have a case of blood stagnation from too much time on the cough watching Kungfu movies, it will continue to hurt until you improve the quality of your blood and your circulation. That could take a while.

Good martial arts training works backwards.

About 80% of the people I teach habitually slightly dislocate at least one of their hips. While they are young it hardly matters, young hips are juicy and forgiving. They just develop protective muscles which limit range of motion. But if one of these students takes a lot of weight in a slightly dislocated hip they can have pain. As people age the slight dislocation of the hips becomes a bigger and bigger problem.

The key to training is to notice the dislocation, notice that it causes a tiny bit of pain. The pain is usually so small it quickly turns to numbness if you ignore it, but don’t ignore it! Understand exactly how and why it occurs. Then stop doing it. And when I mean stop, I mean STOP!

You have to take these sorts of mis-alignment-pain seriously enough to re-teach yourself how to walk, how to run, how to climb stairs, how to get in and out of a car, just about everything.

At one point (years ago) in my standing practice, about 40 minutes into standing still, my foot would start to hurt. I’m talking about, “I want to scream,” type of pain. The first 1000 times I felt this pain, I wiggled, and jiggled until it stopped. Finally one day I stuck with it. When I was done standing I didn’t shake out, I moved very slowly and carefully through my taiji and bagua and even while doing push hands. It hurt really badly the whole time. At some point I fell into trance and lost the pain.

But I had held onto it long enough to know that it was a problem I was re-creating with the inefficiency of my movement on a daily basis. So for the next week or so I stood until it hurt and I stayed with the pain until I could identify its causes in my daily behavior.

You won’t really understand what is hurting and why it is hurting unless you push your body through the difficult parts of training. If you want to transform yourself through martial arts, you’ve got to hold low stances, do extreme power stretching and high kicks, get bumps, bruises and twists, and slowly and methodically unravel the bad habits and old injuries–pain is part of the whole package.

That being said, don’t eat an 800 pound bag of potato chips. If something is hurting and you understand how and why, than stop already. There is nothing wrong with potato chips, as long as you don’t eat more than five.

I might add in passing that pains of the heart and mind work the same way; the experience of intimacy is linked to betrayal, and abandoning rigid thinking is linked to cognitive dissonance.

___________________________________________

Note: I got the picture of people doing taijiquan in wheelchairs from United Spinal. Apparently taiji is of benefit for people with MS.

Permalink 4 Comments

05.01.08

Best Products

Posted in Health, teaching, Clothing etc. at 1:55 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Occasionally I do product reviews. Lately I hear people worrying about the “economy,” which I think is silly. If the economy slows down, it’s like it’s doing taijiquan. We notice where we’re wasting energy, we discard excess, our appetites readjust and become more refined, we redesign our interactions for the space and things we use everyday– generally we simplify our lives.

That being said, of course, most of the people reading this blog will not be effected in any significant way by the Economic Tai Chi Effect™.

In fact, since I’m getting between 1 and 2 thousand hits a day, by my rough calculations, there are about 20 people reading this blog once a week who make more than 50 million dollars a year. One man’s economy, is another man’s splurge.

There are a few products I have purchased over the years which out class all the others for their sheer usefulness and contribution to my simple life.

The first is my skateboard, and I make no brand recommendations.

The second, my weapons, which will each get their own reviews at some point.

The third is my programmable rice cooker which has a setting for porridge (jook, congee). I’ve got a Neuro Fuzzy.

The forth is my Japanese warm spray toilet. I love that thing. I love it so much that when I go camping I now bring a hand held high-pressure squirter. (Saves money on toilet paper too.)

The sprayer I bought was cheap ($72 on Craigslist), but heck, if you’re saving money by moving to a smaller home or something, you might consider spending $13,000 on this new toilet by Inax!

The blog where I saw the toilet also has an Auto Healther–massager that would be a welcome addition at most schools. In fact, it would be nice to have one handy to put my Kung Fu students in when they are acting like monsters.

Update:  After posting this, my reader numbers suddenly dropped suggesting that perhaps my calculations were wrong.  200 Americans made $50 million last year.  That number could be almost doubled if we include the whole English speaking world.  So I was assuming that 1 in 20 were reading my blog, and that is probably too high.  It is probably closer to 1 in 200– which comes out to 2 very wealthy people.  It would be safer to say that there are 10 people with assets of 50 million or more who practice taijiquan, have an interest in Daoism, and sometimes read my blog.

Permalink Comments

04.25.08

Troubled Kids, Performance, and Society

Posted in Martial Arts, teaching at 12:33 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I have a group of elementary school kids I have been teaching on Fridays after school. I turned down the job three times because I know from experience that kids lose their impulse control on Fridays after school and I didn’t want to deal with that. But for some reason, I no longer remember, I said “yes” the fourth time they asked me.

Well, they are some of the most difficult kids to teach. They get in fights, which never happens in my classes. They mess with other peoples stuff. They whine too, about hunger and pain, it is like being stuck in a giant nest with 20 hungry crying baby pterradactyls.

But something happened that made me think.

The school asked me to do a performance; to have the kids perform at a parent night. I said, “sure,” and I guess because the other acts were things like “kid poetry,” they made my group the headliners. The kids were totally not into rehearsing and I really had almost nothing planned. The night of the performance I had no idea even which kids were going to show up.

But 12 kids did show up and they were really excited. I put them on the stage and just had them do stuff that I had tried to teach them over the last 10 weeks. To my complete surprise, it went well, the audience was cheering and kids were like a dream class: They had presence and focus and they were game for whatever I threw at them. One little girl found her way to the front when I was having them do forms and she did it perfectly with a smile and charisma, and all the other kids were following her like their lives depended on it!

My thought is this: How can we give people who are on the fringe, frustrated misfits, or underworld types ways to be at the center of attention.– I’m thinking “star status,” ranks, roles and positions which give them ritual potency. Rappers and hip-hop celebrities come to mind. This is not about good and bad, it is about establishing order.

Permalink Comments

04.17.08

The Sound of Wen and Wu

Posted in Martial Arts, History, teaching, Daoism, Books at 2:27 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I woke up this morning with my arms crossed.  Actually more than crossed, knotted-up would be a better description.  One hand jutting past my armpit, the other arm wrapped around it twice and dangling between my ear and my shoulder.  It took a minute to figure out which arm was which.  My honey says I do gongfu in my sleep.

Anyway I’ve been reading a wonderful dissertation, which I will review when I finish reading it, called “Martial Gods and Magic Swords,” by Avron Boretz.  The Daoist scholar Paul Katz recommended it.

Today I just want to talk about one of his footnotes.  In a discussion about the relationship between wen (civil, scholarly, cultural) and wu (military, martial) he mentions that the drum is wen and the cymbal is wu.  That really got me thinking.

The drum establishes order, it is steady and precise.  The cymbal is an explosion of sound, it breaks the air and shatters the peace.  When I teach kids or perform, I use the drum for stepping, and the cymbal for sudden kicks.

The large gong is, of course, used for bowing, but it is also good for transitions or even moments of transcendence.

The wood-block (called a fish in Chinese) is used for accenting orders or commands, it is often answered by the performer with a stomp of the foot (leading into cat stance or monk stance).  It is a high sharp sound.  Wood-blocks are used for chanting invocations, and by Buddhists for chanting sutras.  The same wood-block sound was traditionally used in formal arguments and teachings to accent an important point that had just been made.

“The Dao which can be named is not the true Dao!” “PAAHK.”

The flutes and reed instruments mimic the human voice.

Permalink 2 Comments

04.16.08

Confucius

Posted in History, teaching at 12:57 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Confucius said, “If I show the student(s) one corner of the square and he doesn’t show me the other three, I change the subject.”

There are some scholars who believe that this quote from Confucius is about taxes. They believe this because taxes were paid in grain which was grown on square plots made up of nine sections. Eight families would work together on all nine sections and the center section would be collected by the government.

Ahhh taxes, well at least we don’t have to pay them in grain anymore…

Anyway… I don’t think Confucius was talking about taxes.

What I love about this quote is it really shows the reciprocity that is key to understanding Confucius. It even implies cosmology–a cosmology where everything is mutually self-re-creating.

If I show the student one corner of the square, it is the student’s job to show me the other three. That is not my job. It is the student’s job to bring significant energy and commitment to the lesson.

One the other hand, if the student doesn’t respond to my lesson I don’t look to criticise the student. I first reflect and then acknowledge that I’m not offering a teaching which meets the student where they are, at their learning level or interest. A good teacher will move on to a new subject or try a new approach.

Permalink Comments

03.23.08

Down With Health!

Posted in Health, teaching, Qi Jocks at 7:50 am by Scott P. Phillips

I’m really starting to hate qigong.

A member of my extended family who is a famous lawyer once said to me that she couldn’t understand people who do things for their health when they aren’t having any health problems.

I’m sick of hearing people ask, “What is this good for?” The operative this being some exercise or even some entire internal martial art.

But I’m even more sick of the answers other teachers give. “This is good for lowering blood pressure,” “This one is helpful for diabetes symptoms,” “Do this everyday and you’ll never get migraines,” “This is proven to help with balance problems as you age.”

This is all just as lazy as the infantile martial arts extremists who say you should practice so that if by a stroke of bad luck you happen to get attacked, you will be thoroughly trained to defend yourself against all odds.

Listen world! If you want to have a long life, your best shot is having friends of different ages in different walks of life. Be part of a complex active social network.

If you want to be healthy, take a walk everyday.

The reasons for studying internal martial arts are: truth and beauty. Study because you want to explore the truth about how your body works, how it feels, how it changes, and how it operates in diverse situations. Study because you want to experience the truth about the stuff you are made of, about the situation of your birth.

The discovery of beauty requires perception, sentience, introspection, and re-creation. The discovery of beauty comes from making mistakes, from getting it wrong, from mis-seeing things and then changing your way of knowing.

Please, trust me. If you know your body inside out from deep daily experience and exploration you will have tools for healing and transformation that are beyond what most other people can comprehend. It’s like an extra bonus that comes with the territory.

Qigong was invented as a distinct category during the Communist era to answer the inane question, “What is this good for?”

Permalink 8 Comments

03.17.08

Master Cat

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, History, teaching at 5:04 pm by Scott P. Phillips

A long time ago Tiger was awkward and clumsy. Lacking skill he found a great gongfu master and begged him to accept him as a student. This is how he came to study with Master Cat.

Tiger studied and practiced Master Cat’s lessons with great diligence until one day, after many years, he believed he was more powerful and more skillful than Master Cat.

Tiger said to Master Cat, “Thank you Shifu, you have taught me all your greatest secrets and now my gongfu is superior to yours, now I’m going to eat you!”

In the time it took Tiger to say these words, Master Cat had scaled a tree and walked out on a branch, “Oh,” said Master Cat, “There was one thing I forgot to teach you.”

——————–

I like this story for its cuteness and because it plays on what we think we know about natural ability. Did the tiger really learn all his gongfu from a cat? It makes sense to me.

But the story also takes for granted the paranoid old master. I have felt that fear of giving away gongfu secrets lurking there in even the most open and generous masters.

Even as we can feel Daoist inspiration surging through the internal martial arts, nudging us to let go of fear as a driving force in our quest for power–the lingering mythic fear of the Mongols, the Qing Dynasty, the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, WWII, the Purges, the Great Leap, the Re-education camps….haunts our movements and our practice.

Permalink Comments

03.12.08

Milking it

Posted in Health, teaching, Shaolin at 4:20 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I was performing Wuhudao (five tiger sword), a classic Northern Shaolin form for some first graders the other day. We had a conversation I’ve had many times with many different groups of kids.

I perform, I bow, the kids clap, “Are there any questions?”

First kid, “Can that sword kill someone?”

Me, “As you can see if you look closely if isn’t sharpened.” I bring it over for the students to inspect.

Second kid, “Was it sharpened when you first got it?”

Me, “No, it is an authentically weighted practice sword, for training gongfu. It was never sharp.”

Third kid, “Could that sword kill somebody?”

Me, “Hhhmmm”

First kid again, “But could that sword be used to kill someone?”

Me, ” I think you guys are asking the wrong question.”

Another kid, “Would that sword be able to kill someone?”

Me, “Of course this sword could be used to kill someone, but so could a glass of milk. A glass of milk in the wrong hands could become a deadly weapon.”

First kid again, “I want to get a sword!”

Permalink 2 Comments

03.04.08

The Quest for Power (Part 3)

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, teaching, Daoism at 3:07 pm by Scott P. Phillips

In the two previous posts, I wrote that the quest for power is born when our survival feels threatened and arises from qi deficiency which creates conflicting emotions. I also wrote about how the quest for power begets sacrifice.

In the Chinese martial arts we have the expression “Ox power” to describe simple muscular strength. Generally speaking, the first stage of martial training is to get rid of ox power and replace it with “muscle tendon lengthening power” and (depending on the focus of the school) fighting technique.

This process can be generalized for all pursuits of power. All power is preliminary. Give up a low position in the government in order to take on a higher one. If your climb up the corporate ladder is obstructed it may be time to start your own company.
We don’t get new power without letting go of old ideas about power. Following this observation to its logical conclusion or extreme, letting go of all ideas of power will open up the biggest possibilities. All the Daoist classics say in one way or another, if you want strength cultivate weakness.

The quest for power is a natural out growth of fear. Fear can arise with or without apparent cause. The brilliance of Daoist thought in this regard is the recognition that there are physiological processes which bring about the experience of fear and the feeling that our survival is threatened.

Daoist practices often explore power from the point of view of what is being sacrificed. Instead of seeking to harness fear for the accumulation of power, these practices teach our bodies how fear arises and how it takes hold. These practices do not eliminate fear. They simply teach our bodies that there is an option to let go of fear when it does arise.

For instance, the Daoist Calendar can be understood as a tool for observing and resolving the fear that arises from not being able to control or predict the future.

Obviously there is no ‘One Right Way’ of dealing with the fear of not knowing what is coming next! The term “Orthodox Daoism” Zhengyidao- literally means: The One True Way; however, what the term really refers to is an orthodox set of experiments that have been tried and tested over many years. Just because they are orthodox, doesn’t mean they will work for you, but the only way to know for sure is to test them yourself.

Internal martial arts clearly have some Daoist origins. It is fair to say they are Daoist inspired to the extent that they treat power as a physiological experiment which over time exchanges power for casual potency and transforms fear into naturalness (ziran). That being said, Martial Arts are not Orthodox Daoist practices because they contain so many potencial pitfalls. Once you have accumulated power, it is often hard to give it up because it seems like you have a “leg up” on everyone around you.

What makes a specific approach to meditation or ritual Zhengyi (Orthodox) is that it has proven over the centuries to be a more direct route to simplicity.

Teaching 6 and 7 year olds is a process of getting them to give up screaming and crying for more sophisticated forms of power, like carefully chosen words. Of course they could learn to use their crying in increasingly more manipulative ways, or they could just keep developing their screaming power and it might someday become formidable. One of the nice things about teaching kids is that they haven’t developed Ox Power yet, so I don’t have to un-teach it. That step can be skipped.

Acquiring each new type of power requires letting go of the previous type of power that worked for you. The type of power we use is part of our story. It is wrapped up in our identity and our body image. In a sense, our Power Body, is our system for storing fear. Letting go of a big fear requires a big commitment, but letting go of a small fear can be more difficult because it isn’t obvious what triggers it, how it is stored, or where it came from in the first place.

This is how it works: Bad choices can be overcome by new better choices. Old ghostly decisions, the ones you aren’t even aware you made a commitment too, are much harder to change.

Where does the quest for power ultimately lead? Death. People often set up their deaths so that they will continue to accumulate power after they are dead. (The biggest part of Fengshui is not how to arrange your freaking living room! It is trying to limit the negative influences your ancestors have already put in motion!)

The idea behind using Eunuchs in the royal courts was that they wouldn’t be constantly using their position to try and install their offspring into positions of power. The irony is that having no balls turned them into ego maniacs that wanted power just for themselves.

As far as accumulating power while we are still alive, the Chinese pinnacle of power has always been to become the emperor. The job of emperor is considered the most potent job there is. The traditional Chinese ideal is that the country is being well run when the emperor has nothing to do. Similarly in Chinese medicine, the heart only has a job when the other organs are out of whack. If the emperor or the heart is actively trying to accomplish something, everybody is in trouble.

Permalink 4 Comments