Accidents (part 3)

People sometimes achieve very high level martial arts by accident. Accidents happen when we aren't paying attention, so they are often effortless.

A few years ago I was teaching Northern Shaolin to juvenile delinquents. A program was set up that was a collaboration between the school district, the sheriff's department, and Performing Arts Workshop. It was a lock down school which had a significant performing arts component. My classes always had a probation officer present watching on the side. All the students were between 13 and 16 years old and had been convicted of crimes.

Somewhere towards the end of my residency I brought my friend and Choi Li Fut expert Greg Mooney in as a guest artist. One of my rules is that students bow as they enter or exit the room. On this particular day, like most days, they were unruly, rude and disorganized as they entered the auditorium. As I introduced Greg they started pestering and shouting that they wanted us to fight, "We want to see you fight."

I looked at Greg, he is a performer, a stunt clown (he used to do 500 shows a year), we had sparred enough to know each others stuff. He looked game.
"OK," I said, "I'll make a deal with you guys." "You give us your full attention, you work hard, concentrate, and give todays class the best effort you've ever given, and we'll fight for you-- at the end of class."

As I said it, I thought to myself, 'these kids don't have any discipline, there isn't much chance that they will really concentrate?'

"Really?" They asked, "If we do our best you'll really fight each other, for real?"

"Yes," I said. I knew I was taking a little risk, I looked over at the probation officer and he was motionless. "Alright, it's a deal then let's practice."

That day they practiced harder than they ever had before, it was a fun class. I guess they trusted me. So at the end I had them all sit down and Greg and I went at it.

Neither of us were looking to connect a punch, we were putting on a show. Our strikes were intentionally missing by just enough to make it look real, we each took a couple of dive rolls on the hard floor, our sweeps were slow enough to give each other time to fall the easy way, our kicks were to the meaty parts. The juveniles were screaming with delight.

Then I did a simple bagua zhang single palm change. Greg accidentally turned into it. I was trying to make all my movements empty of force, and at that moment I wasn't even aiming at a target, I was paying attention to my audience. But my elbow connected with Greg's temple and he flew backwards into the air. His temple opened up and blood spurted out everywhere. My movement at that moment was so effortless I didn't even feel my elbow connect.

I helped Greg to his feet and we had an eye to eye bonding moment. The juveniles were completely blown away, their enthusiasm was profound. They also found it incredible that after such an event we were showing all the signs of being best friends.

As they left class that day, each of them bowed with reverence and sincerity I hadn't believed possible. The staff of the school reported to me that a year later the students were still talking about it as their best day ever at school.

Push Hands: Small Circle, Big Circle

Small Circle push-hands is a rules set which can have moving feet, but really ought to be learned with fixed feet first.  Small circle push-hands allows no grabbing, slapping or striking.  You can only do peng, ji, lu, and an.  The reason it is called small circle is because you are trying to develop peng, ji, lu, and an (ward off, push/poke, draw inward, cover/contain) in a continuous circle, no breaks, no moments of intermittent force.  Small circle push-hands can be completely improvised or it can follow a set sequence.
Once you have established small circle push-hands there are lots of subtler games that can be played from it.

Big Circle push-hands gets it's name because to play it one must break the small circle.  The rule set allows for grabbing (chin na), plucking (zai), elbow strikes, throws, and traps (zhou), forward strikes with the shoulder (kao), and two directional attacks to the opponent's frame which can be light swipes, slaps or sudden jolts(lieh).

Most people learn both big circle and small circle at the same time.  I think that is a mistake, the two rule sets should be clearly differentiated.   The question remains, which is better to learn first?

Small Circle push-hands is the heart of the game, but to deal with an aggressor you must know Big Circle push-hands cold.

Workshop Yu Cheng Yong

I'm going to a workshop this weekend with Yu Cheng Yong:

Master Yu Chen Yong Born in 1943 Tian Jing, China. Started his training as a wrestler in 1953 then moved to Tai Ji in 1957 with famous Master Wu and Master Niu. He also studied Ba Gua with famous Master such as Gao Yi Shen and Yang Ban Hou large frame Tai Ji with Master Niu Lian Yuan and Zhao Bao Style Tai Ji with Master Hou and Master Yue. One of his teacher is the very famous master Han Mu Xia whom defeated the Russia champion wrestler in 1930, which he then went on to win 10 gold metal from 10 different countries. The metals are now in the China National Historical Museum. In 2000, the master performance in Tian Jing master Yu got 1st place for the title of "best Master performance". In 2005, Master Yu acquired famous master Zhao Bao Tai Ji title from Wu Dang Mountain.

UPDATE:  The US State Department would not give him a visa.

Cranes Feet

Taijiquan is often said to be the combination of the movements of a crane and the movements of a snake. I haven't had a lot of time to observe cranes but there are some great blue herons around the park where I teach.

The other day I watched a heron stand on a grassy field and eat five live baby gophers. It waited in stillness and then struck suddenly into the soil. I have it from a reliable source that they are actually feeling the vibration of the gopher under the ground. They must use the difference in the intensity of the vibration in each foot to determine the location of the gopher. They may even develop a mental picture of the gopher's movement and tunnel system.

When you practice internal martial arts you want your feet to be so relaxed that you could pick up even the slightest vibration and get a mental picture of what is causing it. Any tension or excess movement in your feet and this ability will be obstructed. Your feet must be completely devoid of an agenda.

Our great ape ancestors hunt gopher-like critters called bushbabies. They sharpen sticks and wait by their holes to spear them. My guess is that they also have some ability to sense vibration with their feet and use it to create a mental picture.

I have an "edge theory" based on my experience which goes like this. At the tip of our tail bone there is a small sphere called the coccygeal body (Wiki). It is surrounded by a capillary net strongly suggesting that it excretes something which goes directly into the blood, a property which would make it an endocrine gland. But so far, no one has figured out what it excretes. My theory is that vibrations come up both legs and meet at the tip of the tail bone simultaneously triggering this gland and vibrating the spine all the way up to the teeth. If the frequency of the vibration is one we associate with small animals which we would like to eat, our mouth starts watering. If the frequency of the vibration is very deep like from an elephant, a stampede, or a lion, our mouth goes dry, creating a fear response. (Here is a wacky site which presents another edge theory.)

Anyway, practice keeping your feet so relaxed that you can feel under the ground.

Breath

Dave from Formosa Neijia asked why I didn't mention breathing as a method for lowering heart rate in the previous post about the heart.

First of all, yes, labored breathing is an indicator that you are over working the heart. But if you are panting, or gasping you have gone too far. In other words it is not a very good indicator of over work because the heart has to be pumping too fast for a while before it effects the breath.

To extend the classic Chinese metaphor. The heart is the Emperor and the lungs are the Ministers. If the Emperor is acting inappropriately, the Ministers are likely to be indulgent for a while and they'll try dropping subtle hints before they run into court shouting.

But all of this misses the point that liver stagnation is rampant everywhere there is a booming service economy and cheep food! (For those of you who don't speak Traditional Chinese Medicine Lingoâ„¢, Couch Potatoismâ„¢ is the modern slang term for liver stagnation.) People with liver stagnation need to breath hard! They need vigor. They need to get their hearts pumping. They need to stimulate the liver to surge blood in and out of their limbs. They need to shout at something other than the TV set.

Another reason I didn't mention breathing in the previous post about the heart is that breathing practices are too strong and very hard to generalize about. I have two basic teachings about breathing: 1) Yin Proceeds Yang. 2) "Breath like the silk spinner and the jade carver."
Teaching about breathing is highly individual. If you have ever had an injury to your pelvis, shoulder, neck, ribs, or spine, there is a high probability that it changed your breathing. When injuries occur the breath immediately comes in to numb the area and increase blood flow. It is a bit of a mystery to me why these injuries linger so long in the way a person breathes, but they do. So teaching breathing is highly personal and esoteric.

In The Fundamentals of Pa Kua Chang by Park Bok Nam and Dan Miller they outline a systematic way of developing breathing. They start with one type of breathing and then move to another and then another. But they are very careful to point out that when you switch from one type of breathing to another has to be decided by a teacher who is monitoring your progress closely. In other words, the method can't really be systematized, it is esoteric.

In fact, over many years, unmonitored breathing practices can be harmful to the heart. I'm thinking particularly of taijiquan and yoga instructors who guide their students to breathe into the arms.

While I'm on a roll I should also point out that during intense exercise the muscles and the heart/brain compete for blood.  Since the heart/brain is more important, your body will close off the perineum at the base of your pelvis in order to restrict circulation into the legs, and sometimes it will do the same thing at the armpits.  You will know this has been happening to you if after exercising you feel all "tingly" in the limbs.

The Heart

Summer is the season of the heart and bitter is the flavor recommended to help with the transition into Summer. In Summer the main change in our practice is that we try not to sweat.

The average human heart beats about 3 billion times and then it stops. The logic of doing exercise which increases the speed at which your heart beats is that after you finish exercising your heart will beat slower than it would have if you hadn't exercised at all. So although you'll use up a whole bunch of beats in that hour of aerobics, you'll more than regain the number of beats you lost in the 23 hours until your next workout. If you exercise regularly it will likely take you more years to reach 3 billion beats.
It's a good theory.

My sister is a swimmer. She loves to race and she trains hard. One of the ways she trains endurance is that she will time herself swimming a given distance as fast as she can. She then immediately takes her pulse. Instead of trying to swim faster the next time, she tries to swim the same distance in the same time, but with a lower heart rate.

Chinese martial arts, particularly the internal arts of bagua, xingyi, and taijiquan, use a simular strategy during the summer months. We try to practice as fast as we can without increasing our heart rates. Some practitioners actually take their pulse in the "play the pipa" posture or another posture where the fingers go to the wrist. But that isn't necessary.

With a little practice it is possible to become very sensitive to the feeling of the pores of your skin opening and closing. You can in fact gain some control over this process, but simply monitoring your pores will tell you if your heart rate is increasing. Of course the pores open to release sweat, and that is what is meant by the proscription to "practice not sweating."

Another way to lower your heart rate, improve your stamina and perhaps lengthen your life span is to attend to the center of your palms. The acupuncture point on the center of your palm is actually about one inch in diameter. It is called the Laogong point (Pericardium 8) and it is associated with the heart. (The name Laogong means "palace of toil.") The center of the palm should remain relaxed. If it hardens, it is likely that your heart is working harder. You can feel your heart in your palms, you can feel an increase in blood surge. You can even feel your pulse continuously while you are doing the form, but that isn't recommended because it requires excessive concentration, which isn't very relaxing.
In bagua, xingyi, and taijiquan (most obviously in the movement lu), the center of the palm is actually pulled back. This can be done manually by expanding the elbow which creates a vaccum which then sucks the center of the palm back up toward the elbow. But that just helps you get the feeling. In actual practice the martial arts postures allow the heart to move effortlessly backwards and down (the kidneys move forward and up) creating a feeling of connectedness between your palms and your heart.

Note: There is no way someone with this knowledge could get carpel tunnel syndrome.

Spiraling Bones

All the bones in our bodies have a spiral. The direction of every bone's spiral is pretty much the same on everyone. These are set while we are still in the womb.

Ligaments give the spirals in each bone continuity across joints; from one bone to another. A given bone may spiral more than once while it is growing, but the second spiral will be in the same direction.

A good example of this is the clavicle (collar bone).  You can see that there is a spiral on the left side of the picture where it would attach to the scapula and the rest of the arm.  That spiral rotation is contiguous with the spiral further to the right where the bone would attach to the sternum.  Each of those spirals are actually the same spiral but the one on the arm side grew first, the one on the sternum side happened later.

So if you are trying to figure out how the spiral in you humerus (upper arm) continues through to your sternum, find the first part of the spiral rotating your arm forward/inward, then find the second part of the spiral by bringing your sternum up.

The spirals in our bones are there all the time.  If you know which way each bone spirals,  you can figure out which ways force will transfer through the body most easily.

Internal arts are all designed with these spirals in mind.

Here is a cool website which says something different about human structure, but interesting none-the-less.

My comments on other blogs and some reruns

I left a few comments on other blogs today.  Two are here on the subject of martial arts metaphors.  Another one (at the bottom) is on self-defense as a way of staying open.

In case you missed these back in August, I'm still rather fond of these four posts on eyes.
Eyes

More about Eyes

Eyes and Baguazhang

Eyes and Baguazhang (cont.)

Monkey Swings

Last month I was at a family gathering and there was a five month old girl who was crying. Her aunt, who has several wild children of her own, tried rocking her and then bouncing her, but the baby was still crying. Then with a big grin she announced, "We are going to have to try Monkey Swings." I can now verify from my observations that monkey swings are an effective crying control mechanism.

The standard Taijiquan, Xingyi and Bagua zhang instructions tell us to lift up our heads from the Baihui point on the very top of the head. Some Shaolin and meditation schools say to lift from a point a little further back so that the chin comes in slightly. Further, I have heard lift from the roof of the mouth, lift from the base of the skull and even lift from a point in the air about one foot above your head.

All of these instructions are useful gates. It is vitally important to develop awareness of head position, centerline, dingjin (upward power), and zhengqi (upright, self-correcting vigor). However, I think these instructions alone will not produce a high quality final product.

I've now spent way too much time looking at baby pictures on google images, I may need some time to recover my manliness. Unfortunately I could not find a single picture of a monkey swing so I'll have to describe it. Here is how you do a Monkey Swing^TM:

While sitting down place the baby on its back in your lap with the its feet facing you. Take hold of an ankle and a wrist in each of your hands. Then lift up and swing the baby's bottom toward your face and then it's head out and away, using your forearms as the pivot. Continue swinging until the desired results are achieved.

As you are imaging this, you might think that the baby's head would flop backwards like that of the child on the swing above. But it didn't. The baby's head stayed right in line with its torso. This was a five month old I was watching, a younger baby probably would have had a floppy head. An older child would certainly be able to do this, but in most cases it would be obvious that they were using voluntary neck muscles.

The baby I watched did all this automatically. Her head was inside her dantian!

The highest level martial artists put their head inside their dantian.

Here is:
A baby development site.

Shaped by the Sea

The way martial traditions are shaped by the environment is an interesting topic at many levels. In a hundred years Californian martial arts will have been re-formed by and for people who spend lot's of time in cars, drinking coffee, and typing on computers.

Southern Shaolin, like Choy Li Fut, seems like it was formed by people familiar with fighting in confined spaced, narrow corridors, and tight corners.

Northern Shaolin, on the other hand, seems like it was formed for wide open fields of battle, spear training particularly.

Liuhe (Six Harmonies) style of Xingyi seems like it might have developed on narrow rice paddy pathways.

Baguazhang is harder to place, but from my experience walking in the mountains, I would say there is a strong case to be made that carrying something around on narrow or steep mountain ledges is a likely possible origin.

Taijiquan comes out of the water.

Years ago I had the opportunity to meet Willem de Thouars who, as a child in Indonesia, studied Silat. After achieving a significant level of martial skill at an early age, his family told him to ask the Chinese people living down the road if they would teach him.

The man he ended up studying with eventually taught him Baguazhang, Taijiquan and other arts. The teacher's first condition for allowing young Willem to become a student was for him to go to the river and jump off of the bridge onto the slippery floating logs that were part of a local logging operation and balance there. He said it took a long time to learn and it was very brutal.

(If you are not going to try this method yourself, at least think about what it would feel like. How relaxed do your legs need to be? How much mobility do you need in your torso?)

If you've watched all my Youtube videos you know that I have a little experience fighting on fishing boats in Alaska. The first couple of times I went to sea, I got seasick, but with a little coaching I learned. To avoid seasickness first you have to keep your eyes gazing out on the horizon. Looking at the boat or the water will make you sick. This is very simular to the kind of vision we use in Taijiquan, we soften our focus and gaze way off into the distance.
The second part of not getting seasick is just relaxation. If you try to "hold" your balance, or "hold" your internal organs in place, you will vomit. You have to just let your whole body move around on its own. Trust the rolling of the sea-- again, very simular to taijiquan practice.
We worked 20 hour shifts on one of the worst fishing boat in the fleet (worst because the skipper's brain wasn't equipt with the re-evaluation process). All the guys got sore knees, except yours truly.

The secret to my knees not hurting like everyone else's was that I was rolling my dantian and keeping my knees bent the whole time I was on the boat. At that time, when I wasn't working 20 hours, I was doing about 4 hours a day of Chen Style Taijiquan Chansijin (silk reeling exercises).

When I came back to San Francisco my teacher at the time said to my fellow students (probably hoping another student would use his words as an excuse to challenge me to a fight), "You all have been practicing here with me all Summer, the Priest (that's what he liked to call me) has been away in Alaska and he has progressed more than any of you have." (Yikes, competitiveness encouraged.)

The last thing I want to say about water is that if you've ever poled a boat through the water or used a Chinese style stern oar, you might have noticed that it is a lot like the Taijiquan movement, "Grasp the Birds Tail."

Oh, O.K., one more thing. If the founders of Taijiquan were actually fisherman, then it would explain how the modern day practitioners' picked up the habit of exaggerating (the size of the fish that got away).