Meditations of Violence

Yes, dear reader, it seems I am the last kid (blogger) on the block to read Meditations on Violence, A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, by Sgt. Rory Miller. Many of my fellow bloggers have recommended it but it wasn't until I got hold of it myself that I understood why.

Sgt. Rory is a good writer. He understand his audience really well. His audience is made up mostly of tough-guy martial artists who train a lot, and not so tough-guy martial artists who also train a lot. He talks to us as if we were a bunch of girls sitting around in our nighties at a pajama party. In walks Sgt. Rory with his big boots, body armor, sim-guns, SWAT team-prison guard experience, with talk of predators and the monkey dance. With bravado and humor, he kindly offers to set us straight.

This book makes you meditate on violence. I particularly like his discussion of what happens to your body when you are attacked--What he calls the hormone cocktail. He says we lose dexterity and coordination and not just the ability the think or plan but the ability to see, hear and feel. Our sense of time becomes distorted and we can even freeze up.

Reading this book makes us think hard on the value of our martial arts training. Different types of training serve wildly different purposes. Of course this is obvious, we don't do muscle building to get good at push-hands, we don't cultivate weakness to win wrestling competitions, and we don't practice butterfly kicks unless we have an appetite for showing off. But no doubt, readers will find justifications for doing the practices they already enjoy--Even though he blind sides you with smart quips like this one:

Experience, in my opinion, could not give rise to a new martial art. Given the idiosyncratic nature and the improbability of surviving enough high-end encounters, it would be hard to come up with guiding principles or even a core of reliable techniques. I am painfully aware that things that worked in one instant have failed utterly in others.

There we have it, from the tough guy of all tough guys, the professionals' professional, the marital arts trainers' trainer! Martial arts can not have been created by people with real life fighting experience. Go ahead, bite down on this bullet, I know it hurts.

Still he unwittingly makes a great case for Chinese internal martial arts training. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that the main reason internal martial arts were created was for fighting (an idea my regular readers know I find ridiculous).

In a fight for our lives we fall under the influence of adrenaline and we become very strong. Mark one down for cultivating weakness! Don't waste your time cultivating strength, in a real fight you'll be really, really strong-- automatically...autonomicly.

You will also lose your sensitivity to pain, so external conditioning, training to take blows, is also a waste of time. Sgt. Rory doesn't totally reject conditioning. He says that training surprise impacts, on your face particularly, can help to keep you from going into shock in a situation where you are completely surprised. Familiarity with the feeling of being hit will make it easier to see through the hormonal fog.

Speaking of fog, he gives some statistics on police firing their pistols while they are under attack. Basically, they miss most of time at very close range because they are shaking and they can't see:

...Under the stress hormones, peripheral vision is lost and there is physical "tunnel vision." Depth perception is lost or altered, resulting in officers remembering a threat five feet away as down a forty-foot corridor. Auditory exclusion occurs--you may not hear gunfire, or people shouting your name or sirens.

Blood is pooled in the internal organs, drawn away from the limbs. Your legs and arms may feel weak and cold and clumsy. You may not be able to feel your fingers and you will not be able to use "fine motor skills," the precision grips and strikes necessary for some styles such as Aikido.

The "dis" of Aikido here is totally unnecessary since all styles have these kind of techniques, probably invented for dealing with drunks. But what a great case he makes for internal styles like Baguazhang and Taijiquan!

Internal arts don't rely on focused use of the eyes, in fact my bagua training is full of exercises designed to get you to use your eyes in unusual ways. I would even argue that the different bagua Palm Changes can invoke different experiences of time, distortions if you will. If you are constantly spinning around or turning your head, you can get by without your peripheral vision.

Internal arts are based on the principle that coordination will be impossible in a real fight. That's why we only move from the dantian! (As I noted above, I don't believe fighting is the only reason we move the way we do, or even the primary reason...but it makes a great argument doesn't it?) In bagua and taiji we don't tense up our muscles, all movement is centralized in a single impulse. We use one unbroken spiral as our only technique.

Jumping rope? Waste of time too. It's fun training for sparing games, but in a real surprise attack two things are likely. One, you freeze and stop breathing like you are a frightened animal "playing dead." And two, the hormone cocktail will give incredible speed and stamina--don't bother training those either!

Lest I leave you thinking everything he says is pro-internal arts, I should point out the obvious. Any technique requiring sensitivity will likely be useless in a fight to the death. So is push-hands, which is all about sensitivity, really useless? Maybe it is. But he also makes the case that training to attack from a place of total stillness is great practice for teaching yourself how to get "un-frozen" when you are utterly petrified. Good Stuff!!!

note: I just I just Googled "Meditation on Violence" and I got Maya Deren's 1948 12 minute film by the same title, a classic if you haven't seen it yet.

Sensory Integration Disorders

I took a short workshop on working with Special Education students last week. It got me thinking about how common low-grade Sensory Integration Disorders are. A Sensory Integration Disorder is a developmental problem, meaning it appears as a child ages.

Special Education is constantly redefining and re-categorizing its terms. These categories also have a habit of overlapping. Even highly functional people can show signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Asperger syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, or my favorite-- Learning Disability.

I've known quite a few martial artists who were Obsessive about martial arts to the point where they really could not handle someone changing the subject. In some sense, it is people who have an insane ability to limit their focus that can also achieve greatness in a field which requires discipline. Some of them really can not sit still. I myself had no patience for sitting in class and listening to a teacher after age 14.

What was interesting about the workshop is that I realized that there is a significant percentage of people who love martial arts because they have some kind of Sensory Integration Disorder. Martial arts practices make these people feel good!

For instance, many people who have Sensory Integration Disorders like to hold or squeeze things in their hand. Squeezing their hand into a fist (or the knife hand shape) feels good. Holding a difficult stance while the teacher or another student pushes against one's body, testing "structure and root," is also the kind of thing that feels good to a person with a Sensory Integration Disorder. Wearing weights, armor, or very particular clothing is also helpful.

Part of what characterizes a Sensory Integration Problem is not being sure where your body is, or what your body is doing. So conditioning exercises which put pressure or impact on the skin and bones actually feel good, they help a person with this problem integrate. Building up muscles may also feel good. As does wrestling, or even getting caught in a football style pileup!

When you think about it, fighting is the art of giving other people a sensory integration problem! I'm not just talking about clocking someone-- the head fake, cross hands, the spiral punch, shrinking/expanding-- any kind of unexpected or unpredictable movement can cause a sensory integration problem in your opponent. All martial arts also teach us to improve our sensory integration so that we are not "phased" by what ever tricks or surprises are thrown our way.

Push-hands really, when you think about it, is a bunch of games that develop better sensory integration. When you lose at push-hands, especially to a far superior player, it feels like you just floated off balance. Often you can't really even figure out what happened. Often beginners are so sensorially disoriented that they don't even notice they have lost!

The Wind (Xun, or third) palm change in Baguazhang uses a particularly unnerving technique to disorient the opponent. We brush very lightly over the surface of our opponent's skin/body, not usually hard enough to move them, but very quickly covering as much body surface as possible. The effect of these quick light swipes is that it is hard to feel where the opponent is, and that moment of disorientation often effects balance too. It feels like you are fighting a ghost.

The therapeutic aspects of martial arts should be more widely acknowledged. Learning to fight is good.

Soy Milk with Your Coffee?

I went over to Master George Xu's house yesterday to work on a writing project.

He has always had really interesting and weird ways of saying things.  I just thought I'd share a couple with you.

We were talking about how your mind should be when you are fighting or practicing internal martial arts.  He said that your body should be unconscious like when you are watching a movie.  He sometimes uses the word subconscious instead.  Both words are from psychology, and neither one really hits the mark.  One reason it's hard to explain is that America is a "what" culture, and China is a "how" culture.  We tend to think about "what" we should do, a Chinese person tends to think about "how" it should be done.

But of course George Xu's students ask, "What do you mean?"  George's answer is a combination of mime and words, but if it was just words it would sound like this, "It's like when your boss is yelling at you.  As he glares at you, shaking and pointing the finger of his right hand, he unconsciously reaches out to the side for his cup of coffee with his left hand, finds it, picks it up, brings it to his mouth, takes a sip and puts it back down.  All this without looking left, and without a break in his tirade.---  The hand that reached for the coffee cup was unconscious, the way your whole body should be when you are fighting or training internal martial arts."

In his kitchen, yesterday, after we had a few cups of tea he started demonstrating.  While he was throwing me into the walls and various kitchen implements, he pointed out that I haven't perfected my shoulders yet.  He said, "Your shoulders should be like Soy bean milk."  He demonstrated this for me, and repeated the phrase 4 or 5 times.  I tried to feel what he was doing as he launched me into the microwave.

Back a home about six hours later, I put my feet up and closed my eyes.  Suddenly it struck me just how outrageous and yet specific the expression, "Shoulders like soy bean milk" actually is. 

Now, Get to work!

Practicing Internal Arts Will Shorten Your Life!

Continuing on the previous post "The Real Purpose of Internal Arts," I would like to say clearly for the record, Internal Martial Arts will shorten your life.

Why?  You thought they were good for your health didn't yah? Not a chance.  Yang Chenfu, the most famous Taijiquan Master of the 20th Century died at like 54.  Many Internal Masters have died in their 50's.  They were all too fat.  Many internal martial artists have died from fighting injuries and venereal diseases too.

Lets get this clear.  Practicing Internal Martial Arts does not make you a good person.  If you are a ruffian goon, you will live and die like a ruffian goon.  If you think you are practicing everyday for some future attack, to fend off some wild assailant, that view will determine the type of fruition available to you.

Even if you practice the highest level art, with the most supreme teacher, your view will still determine what results your practice produces.  The constant search for power and superiority will shut out the other types of fruition that these arts were in fact created to reveal.

The problem is that modern Masters have been cut off from their own roots, they have historic amnesia.   I know all these history book writers keep telling us that Internal Martial Arts were created by professional fighters because their jobs as bodyguards or mercenaries required it.  Poppy-cock!  It's just not possible.  Why would someone weaken themselves if they were facing actual violent adversity on a daily basis?

No, the Internal Martial Arts were developed by people who had already cultivated a subtle body; a weak, sensitive, feminine (yes I said that), humble, yielding,  and desireless physicality.  A body cultivated with the idea that lack of pretense is not only a moral way of being; but a moral way of moving.

This is not the morality of being good. This type of morality is based on being real.

The Daoist practice of being real produces freedom and spontaneity (ziran). The inspiration to create from that "body" has led to experiments in every walk of life. 

In every realm of living-- effortlessness, naturalness, and the complete embodiment of an animated cosmos, found a way into peoples' daily lives, into the sacred and the mundane.

If you just practice any of the Internal Martial Arts or Qigong you will probably get fat.  Why?  Because these arts were created from a "body" that was incredibly efficient.

When you begin training martial arts, especially if you start in your 20's or younger, you will automatically work hard, and over do it.  When we are young we have too much qi in our channels.  All we can really do with that extra qi is waste it.  Hopefully we blow it off in ways that won't leave a perminant mark on our bodies.

When working hard and training hard, we naturally need to eat a lot.  But if you seriously practice Internal Martial Arts or Qigong, you will become more efficient in your movement and you will have to be disciplined about eating less. If you do that, your appetite intelligence (your spleen function in Chinese Medicine) will become much more discerning. It will tell you what is good for you to eat, and how much is the appropriate portion.  You will be able to trust your appetite(s).

In addition, your digestive system itself will become more efficient over time.  Your body will extract more nutrients from less food.  If, however, you fail to regularly and consistently reassess your appetite, you will over eat-- and you will get fat.

Improved digestion and movement efficiency will happen simply from practicing any Internal Martial Arts method, it makes no difference what you think or what you believe.  But the fruition I'm calling "appetite sensitivity" will only develop if your view is that you are cultivating weakness.

Boom and bust fitness routines, like Boot Camps, are one of the worst thing a person interested in developing a subtle body could do.  Your appetite sensitivity will shrivel up and fall off.

Flying Fish

Most people don't have a very clear sense of their spine. There are hundreds of different martial arts and qigong exercises which bring sensitivity, awareness and mobility to the spine. This material is very rich.

The vast majority of this material must be taught in a small class because each person needs a fair amount of feedback and interaction with the teacher. That's why it's not very well known or understood. It's this lack of personal attention which leads people to keep doing brutish things like sit-ups.

I thought I would offer one image which my student have often found helpful.

When the arms lift in Heaven Earth style qigong (or Baguazhang circle walking or numerous other internal arts/movements I could point to) the protuberances (Spinous Process) on the spine starting in the lumbar region move upward. This is true whether you start with the arms moving to the front or to the sides.

This movement matches that of a flying fish jumping out of the water. When the fish jumps its dorsal fin (the one on its lower back) goes up and forward (towards the head). The dorsal fin on a fish is actually the spine, it is simply a spine with long spinal protuberances (Spinous Process).

Ailerons

Many people have pointed out that Taijiquan may be an art designed to keep the dynamic quality of our sea legs, while on land.  It is at least designed to get us to give up the predictability of our land legs.  The image often repeated in both martial arts and Chinese medicine of the dantian being an ocean would somewhat support this thesis to.  Shirley seamen realized that the gentle pitching and rolling of the ocean was good for the internal organs.  Perhaps they wanted to keep that quality of health once they gave up the sea life.

So naturally I recommend people try doing their taijiquan on a boat sometime.  I would recommend you try it on an airplane too, but now-a-days that will likely get an over reaction from your fellow air travellers.

Still, if we were making up a new martial art today we would have to consider that by far the most potent images of balance and power are fighter jets.

The first attempts at making an airplane had to solve the problem of creating lift and steering, but once those problems were solved the airplanes still didn't stay in the air because air is not even.  In order to keep an airplane in the air one must constantly correct the pitch and the roll.

That's what ailerons do.  And that is what internal martial arts must do too.  To generate continuious power while maintaining circular motion requires constant correction.  To have unbroken balance and power we must always have an active correction mechanism which allows for adjustments of up and down, front and back, left and right and spiral twisting.  These adjustments must all be simultaneous, we never sacrifice one dimension for another.

Are ailerons a good metaphor for this?

Gaining Control

A female friend of mine was recently attacked by a crazed crackhead half block from her house.  He was big and he kicked her in the ribs.

She thought her ribs were broken, she feared for her life, and she thought about the lives of her two new born infants who were thankfully not with her at the time.  Then she "went crazy on him," and he ran off.

In telling me about the incident she said she wished she had studied martial arts because she wanted to make sure he didn't hurt anyone else.  That, I think was the rational explanation, the more spontaneous explanation, I'm guessing, would be that she wanted to kick his ass.

A few days later while we were sitting at an outdoor table at a local bakery/cafe, she asked me how much martial arts training would have helped her.  I dodged the question and talked to her a bit about self-defense and what kind of training we do.  Then a 300 pound guy sat down next two her on a large green wooden box which had a sign saying please do not sit here.  The purpose of the box was to guide the flow of foot traffic around the tables and chairs, and thus, not for sitting.   It promptly toppled over onto her--bruising her arm.

The guy was naturally embarrassed and apologetic.  But that prompted her to ask me if studying martial arts would have prevented her from getting hit by the box.

So I was cornered.  Would martial arts training help with a surprise attack or a surprise accident?  Yes, probably, maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know,... how could I know?

Hexagram 10 of the Yijing (I Ching) is about just such a situation.  The title reads Treading (Lu):

Treading on a tiger's tail: one is not bitten.  Auspicious.

The image is of an innocent, perhaps a 10 year old child, stepping on the tail of a tiger and not getting bitten.  Why?  We don't really know.  Perhaps it is because the tiger isn't hungry and 'though surprised, it doesn't feel threatened.

Chinese Internal Martial Arts cultivated with a Daoist perspective achieve quite the opposite results of what most people think.  These arts are not about gaining control.  They are not about preparing for some monstrous future attack.  They are not about trying to control or predict the future.

To the contrary, they are about giving up the effort to control.  The basic  assumption or experiment of internal martial arts is that other options will present themselves effortlessly when we give up trying to control.  Does this really happen?  Yes, probably...maybe...How could I know?  I don't know, I simply have the experience that being less aggressive reveals other options.  I certainly don't know in advance what those options will be.  I keep repeating and simplifying the experiments because having options sometimes seems akin to freedom.

In Buddhism they have the expression, "Skillful Means," to describe brilliant techniques on the road to enlightenment.  But it's also kind of a Buddhist joke because the end result requires no skill at all.

In my opinion, this friend of mine who got attacked, did everything right.  She did get some bruises on her ribs, but frankly a couple of weeks training in martial arts could easily produce the same injuries.  After she chased him away by whatever crazy moving, screaming and raging she did, she even had the peace of mind to record all the details about his clothing and appearance for the police.

Her innocent response was good enough.

And that is the point of this post.  Not only are we cultivating weakness, we are cultivating innocence.  The skills we develop in all the Internal Martial Arts involve discarding our learned responses, discarding our preconceptions about what our body is and how it works, discarding our ideas about how events begin and how they come to a resolution.

Discarding pretense, embracing innocence.

My Name is Mud

Check out a great post from Martial Arts Blogger Jianghu 2.0. First he gives his explanation of keeping one's tongue on the roof of the mouth and then how one should conceptualize baguazhang's mud walking.

I was taught an additional reason for putting the tongue on the roof of the mouth:  In meditation/stillness, it allows saliva to pool and then descend down one's throat with out creating the gag reflex or having to actively swallow.  Not particularly useful for pure martial arts though.

Perhaps because of my California coastal experiences with mud I think of baguazhang mud walking happening in sticky mud, instead of the slippery or calf-deep mud he describes.  The advantage of sticky mud is that it emphasizes the opening and closing (kaihe) of the joints while giving the same emphasis to the back foot that calf-deep mud would.

Of course, if you have been practicing with the slippery mud idea that has the advantage that you don't rely on a fixed root; a higher level practice actually.  I suppose the next level up might be walking on top of quicksand, or really high level--water.

Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 2)

Musicians must learn to distinguish between jing and qi.

Most of you don't know that I studied Indian Classical Tabla drumming.  You can hear me playing on a few of my Youtube videos, but don't go back and listen to them for that reason alone, because I never got especially good.  I did, however, approach the study of Indian Classical music the way I approached everything in my twenties--that is, I practiced like crazy (four hours a day for several years).

In Indian music there is a virtuoso  rhythmic pattern which repeats three times called a tihai.  Tihais can be long or short, they come in many different types and they are amazing to hear.  But at the highest level, the level of the greatest musicians, there are actually only two types of tihais, ones from the heart and ones from the mind.

Both of these two types of tihais are improvised.  Tihais from the mind blow you away with their perfect blend of structural precision and complexity.  Tihais from the heart are more difficult for me to explain, they are more relational, emotional, and transcendent.

Zakir Hussein said that when he plays tihais he is actually making and seeing multi-dimensional geometric patterns in his mind.  Ali Akbar Khan said that he is playing with pure light.

When we really play music, our mind is not on the notes, the time signatures, beats, or scales.  When we really play music we want to express mood, sentiment, and emotion.  It's not usually raw emotion either, it is what we might call a crystalline form of emotion--Emotion which has already been explored, plumbed, completed or even resolved.

One's mind must not be focused on the musical details of technique, composition, or if I understand the Indian master's explanations above correctly--our minds shouldn't be on the music either.
In music as in internal martial arts, one must separate jing and qi--the physicality from what animates it.  

Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 1)

When I'm typing, I'm not thinking about the keys I'm hitting, and I'm not thinking about the words I'm spelling, I am thinking about what I want to say. I am thinking about the sentiment I want to convey, the style, the flavor, and the rhythm.

But in actual practice even those things I am consciously thinking about spin in and out of my mind in a very spontaneous way, they don't have any particular order, often they simply emerge fully formed at the moment of expression.

Martial arts are the same. This is as true for fighting as it is for performing forms.

In typing, if my mind goes to the keys, I stumble. In internal martial arts, taiji, xingyi, bagua--the moment you distinguish one muscle group from another, you have made a mistake. You can no longer have whole body power. You can no longer have the differentiation of jing and qi.

When you are learning to type, of course you look at the keys. When you are training martial arts, of course you make distinctions between muscle groups (and a lot of other things.) But once you are performing at the level of an art, once you are an artist, your mind must not get stuck distinguishing different parts of your body.