The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (last chapter)

The last chapter of The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, is titled "A Moving Yi Jing." The meat and potatoes of this chapter are two great lists.

The first list is a paragraph for each of the qi transmissions associated with each of the eight "mother palms" and gua (trigrams) of B.K. Frantzis's baguazhang system (which has no form).

The qi transmissions are supplemented in the applications section too. The authors clearly and succinctly describe the feeling of each palm change; how it moves and what makes it distinct. They also explain that the best way to develop these qi transmissions is through the practice of Soft-hands, Roshou (a dynamic moving and slapping version of push-hands).

I plan to do a video for each of the Baguazhang qi transmissions with in a year.

What is a Daoist Body? 

The second list is this:

1. The Physical Body


2. The Qi Body


3. The Emotional Body


4. The Thinking Body


5. The Psychic Body


6. The Causal Body


7. The Body of Individuality


8. The body of the Dao

The authors give very short descriptions of what each category might mean, calling them energy bodies. Beyond that what they say is embarrassing for it's lack of connection to anything real.  (Baguazhang is not a self-help program, and neither is the Yijing.)
Religious Daoism conceptualizes a human being as not just one body but many bodies. Calling them "energy bodies" is misleading. Your house is a body that you share with everyone else who lives there. You can clean, remodel, or move to another house, but the fact that you have such a body is a given. All bodies relate to other bodies. If you live in a damp shack for a month your physical body will start to creek at the joints and your lung capacity will decrease (effecting your qi body).

The way religious Daoists conceptualize it, we share a body with everyone who reads this blog or speaks English. More importantly, we share a body with everyone who makes the same commitments we do, thus Christians all share a body, Muslims all share a body, and everyone who worships Guanyin shares a body.

Ghosts have very weak bodies, demons and gods very strong ones (we give them our strength).

Horror movies are so visceral because as you watch them your various "commitment bodies" are being contorted, poked and exploded. (Obviously, I love the horror genre.)

This is a list used to train Daoist exorcists. In order to do an exorcism you must be able to recognize all the different types of possession in other people and in yourself.

1. Physical possession is pain. In it's lesser forms we recognize it as tension or even "strength." Physical possession causes people to lash out and to blame.


2. Qi possession is associated with controlling the breath, it amplifies feelings, creates excitement and it can lead to transcendent states. (Godlike or "I can't feel my body" types of disassociation.) Mania.


3. Emotional possession translates perfectly into English. Possessed by fear, anger, love, etc...


4. Thinking possession is like believing that the oceans are going to rise because we drive to work. Or that everything that happens in the Middle-East matters. You know, "Global Conspiracy," "The world is in crisis, dude."


5. Psychic possession is believing you know what someone else is thinking, or what is about to happen next.


6. Causal possession is like schizophrenia. When you think objects or icons or voices in your head are the cause of something in the real world. Profound disassociation.


7. The body of Individuation is supreme ego-mania. There are a number of narcotics that can bring about this near-death experience. It is when you feel/believe that you are the cause and purpose of everything.


8. The body of the Dao is a complete death. Sometimes call immortality. It is experience without any limits or conceptions.

Baguazhang is a dance form that explores all the different ways we can become possessed.  It is dancing with what it is to be alive.  Perhaps we could think of it as a personal, daily exorcism, although that certianly isn't traditional.

In case I lost you-- and you don't see the connection to martial arts-- notice that I just made a really good list of what might cause someone to attack you.

The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 4)

Continuing my discussion of the Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna Zhang, we turn to the chapter entitled "The Daoist Roots of Baguazhang."

The chapter can be summarized like this: Dong Haichuan and Liu Hung Chieh both studied with some unnamed Daoists and Daoists do meditation. Baguazhang practitioners do sitting, standing, and walking meditation, which must have come from these unnamed Daoists. See the problem yet?

In the second paragraph we read:

Apparently, these Daosits looked to their predecessors--the shaman founders of Chinese culture--for some of the patterns of their moving meditations. Some of the oldest texts relating to the study of the Dao have chronicled a few of the dance patterns of the legendary Yu, mythical father of Chinese Shamanism. The patterns of many of these Shamanistic practices were circles and spirals.

The connection of the Dance of Yu to baguazhang is one of those big multi-layered topics for another day. But I can at least point out what the authors don't; Da Yu (the Great Yu) was an exorcist. The reason he is considered the founder of Chinese culture is because 4000 years ago he toured the known world (the whole country) performing the first national exorcisms.



I grew up around a lot of Cantonese speaking kids. When they got mad they would shout "Fuk Da Yu!" which sounded so much like F--k Y-u! that we had a lot of fun saying it. It turns out that they were saying "A curse upon your ancestors." Yu is the mythic ancestor of all Chinese and his name has actually come to mean "ancestor!"

The authors present Professor Kang Gewu's thesis that the roots of baguazhang are to be found in a circle walking practice of the Longmen sect. The concept of "secularism" does not translate very well into Chinese. For instance, Catholicism and Protestantism have often been viewed by Chinese as completely different religions. The idea that Daoism has sects is foreign to Daoism itself. This notion adds somewhat to the confusion about baguazhang's daoist roots. If it's possible to be ordained in a Quanzhen monastery, go and study ritual with a Tianshi householder, and then go live in a Zhengyi hermit enclave on Mao Mountain--then these categories don't meet the definition of sects.

To the authors credit, Longmen (Dragon gate) is correctly identified as a later Daoist lineage (1656) of the Qing Dynasty which merged with Confucianism and promoted a public code of conduct for lay practitioners. (I think of it as decaf-Daoism. It would be very hard to figure out why people drink coffee everyday if the only kind you had ever tried was decaf.)

That's most of what the authors have to say about Daoism. At one point they describe the meditative goal of circle walking as, to "make heaven and earth reside within one's own body," thus joining our inner world with the outer world to become "One with the Dao." Thanks for that. Basic Chinese cosmology posits that we are a temporary contract between Heaven and Earth to hang out in a body for, give or take, 80 years. How does walking in a circle make that more or less true?

In the second half of this chapter, the authors describe in detail a method of "dissolving" taught by B.K. Frantzis. The method described here is great. The problem is that without contextualization, without some grasp of the view which inspired this method, there is a very high probability that the fruition of practice will be overlooked. (And that appears to be what happened.)

The method they describe has the goal of clearing "energy blockages" from the body so that we can store unlimited amounts of qi. I'm deeply familiar with this method but I don't personally like to think of myself as being full of energy blockages, whatever that means. Frankly, the method is not very important.

My intension is not to sound dismissive, by all means, clear out those energy blocks! But taking a step back, isn't that what I am-- a big old energy blockage. To all my fellow energy blockages out there (this means you, dear reader) I say this: Respect yourself, lighten up, and trust your experience. You'll figure it out.

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The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 2)

Here I continue my commentary on The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna.
The first section of the book is called "The Origins of Ba Gua Zhang: A Blend of History and Legend." It is the most complete collection of stories about baguazhang that I've seen. It follows all the various lineages down from Dong Haichuan. Wow, how do I put this? Writing should be like fighting a war. I fell asleep six times reading this section.

Still I found lots of material that was new to me. I didn't know that Wang Shujin spent a year studying with Wang Xiangzai, the founder of Yiquan. Hong Yixinag and Wang Shujin Yi were both members of the Yi Guan Dao religious society. "The outer teaching of the sect revolved around the belief that Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam and Christianity are all different expressions of the same universal and unwavering Dao, while the esoteric teaching of the sect involved various qi gong and other energy practices. " Wang was a Yi Guan Dao leader and thus fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1948.

This section has lots of interesting material I didn't know before. I think my frustration with it stems from that fact it wavers between the encyclopedic tracking of all the various bagua masters, and stories about them. Should I memorize these stories? Is there some teaching point behind them? Does this history mean anything?

I know a reason these histories are important. If you go into any park in the morning, anywhere in the world where there are people practicing Chinese martial arts, and do your baguazhang, people will come up to you and ask where you learned. They will probably trace you back to a common gongfu ancestor with someone else in the park. Chances are good that they will ask you to perform and that if you have been taught correctly you will refuse twice, saying each time that you really are not good enough, that you would only embarrass your teacher, and that only your teacher's teacher was really great. But the third time they ask you, it becomes your duty to perform. The benefit of this is that after you perform you can point to anyone who was watching and they will obligated to show their stuff. It's kind of like a drinking game with your "new family."
There is also another reason. Many of us want to know how our individual style got its characteristics. The authors do a good job of tracing this "progress" or "decline" (which ever you prefer) from Dong Haichuan. However; where Dong Haichuan learned his Baguazhang is at this point, just a bunch of ledgends and unconvincing theories.

Frank Allen's main teacher is B.K. Frantzis and since I also do his style of Baguazhang, we have the same lineage through Frantzis to Liu Hengjie (Liu Hung Chieh).

In the section on forms (p. 87-88) the Authors explain why Liu Hung Chieh didn't teach a Baguazhang form and why his style is not orthodox Yinfu or Cheng Tinghua:

While still in his teens, Liu Hung Chieh became the disciple of bagua master, Liu Zhenlin. Liu Hung Chieh furst studied with Liu Zhenlin when Liu was teaching in the school of Cheng Tinghua's son Cheng Youlung and Dong Haichuan's student Liu Dekuan. Liu Zhen Lin was a famous fighter and bodyguard who first studied bagua under Yin Fu's student Liu Yongqing (who was a close friend and training partner of Yin Fu's top student, Ma Gui). The young Liu Zhenlin learned all of his basic bagua from these two masters, but his teachers brought him to bow before and become the disciple of court minister Liang Zhaiwen; in this way, Liu Zhenlin received entry into the third generation of bagua masters, which was the same generation as his foundation teachers. Liang Zhaiwen was a military man who had been the chief guard at the most important fire gate on the Great Wall before becoming a court minister. Due to Liang's position in lthe court, his association with the palace eunuch servant Dong Haichuan was not widely known until after Liang's death. Because he was the top student of Liu Zhenlin, it is same to asume that young Liu Hung Chieh also received training under his teacher's gongfu "uncles," Liu Yongqing and Ma Gui.

I am indebted to the authors for supplying this history even if my regular readers are likely to find it on the boring side. I promise to spice things up in the next couple of posts!

The authors go on to say that Liu Hung Chieh spent many years studying Daoist Circle Walking Meditation which influenced the development of his style of practice and teaching. In my opinion, someone, very possibly Liu, studied Daoist exorcism, not just circle walking. From my experience of Daoist exorcism it is a more likely source for the diverse phyiso-spirit knowledge that Liu passed on to B.K. Frantzis, (even if I'm the only one who thinks so.)
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Yang-Chu

If you haven't read Yang-Chu, I recommend it. Yang-Chu is considered one of the early voices of Daoism (300 BCE), a voice for wuwei.

His ideas are recorded in the seventh section of the Leizi (Lieh-Tzu). It's a short section and you can read it on-line here.

Yang-Chu said, all we are is a body and a story. It isn't much but applying his minimalism is useful for cutting through hype.

Yang-Chu didn't reject qi, or wealth, or pleasure--to him these are just relative ways of describing experience. He seems a little anti-fame, but that's because he sees freedom in the possibility of changing our story and fame has a tendency to lock us into our stories. We definitely have a body which moves around, thinks, and changes. And we tell all kinds of stories.

It is hardly ever the body that stops people from developing great martial arts skills, it is usually the story that gets in the way.

Most modern people find discussions of fate kind of silly. Like dude, I'm free, right? Yang-Chu cuts through all that. You do have a body, and it does have limitations. Those limitations are not always known, but they do shape our life and our experience of life. Our body does have a fate, or put another way, our fate does have a "shape."

Our story also has limitations, fate. Tell too wacky a story and you'll get yourself locked up. But even if you are walking around with a bad reputation, you are still pretty free to change your story. That freedom to change our story also suggests that we might be able to discard our story or cut it down to a nice manageable size.

The book Blink talks about a guy in Oregon who studied couples on video and developed a scoring system based on observations that could tell him with 90% accuracy if a given couple would still be together in 15 years. When I first heard this I was in shock for a few days. Why was I bothering with all the little details, like doing the dishes and "communicating" if almost all the significant data was in a 15 minute video interview? Is it possible that we really don't have free will?

Anyway, I would really like to get a video scoring system to determine whether or not a student is going to practice everyday, or if they will still be studying gongfu in like 10 years. Heck, I'd like to score myself!

We should definitely be offering discounts to people who have the FATE to practice everyday. What is your fate?

Mung Bean-thread Salad

At the end of summer Daoists eat foods which cool blood to release any trapped summer heat before starting the tonification process leading into winter.  This bean-thread noodle recipe by Daoist priest Nam Singh is designed to clear heat.

Heat in the blood has symptoms very similar to mild infection.  If the heat is not cleared it can eventually become swelling of the joints, rashes or fever.

The word for mung beans in Chinese is chingdou, which can mean both clear or green. The long clear noodles made from these green beans are  sometimes called long-life noodles. Enjoy!

Prepare 

• 8 tender romaine heart leaves, washed and dried


• 1 small package dried beanthread, soaked until soft


• 2 large stalks of celery, cut in 1-inch strips and blanched in boiling water for 30 seconds


• 4 scallions, sliced thinly on diagonal


• 1/2 cup roasted unsalted peanuts


• 2 eggs, mixed and cooked like thin omelet, sliced as celery


• 1/2 cup fresh blanched peas or sliced snowpeas

Strain soaked beanthread and add to boiling water and cook until clear and tender.

Dressing

• 3 T peanut oil


• 1 T black sesame oil


• 1-1/2 T rice vinegar


• 1 T fresh peanut butter


• 1 T tamari


• 1 t curry or five spice powder

Blend all dressing items thoroughly with a wire whisk in a large bowl.  Use water to create a light and creamy texture.  Mix with beanthread and vegetables then chil for 30 minutes.  Serve in romaine leaves.

Precpts

The Xiang’er Precepts of the Dao are meant to summarize what the Daodejing says about appropriate conduct. They are held and regularly renewed by all Celestial Master (Tianshi) daoist priests. In a traditional daoist village lay people would also be encouraged to keep these precepts. The word translated here as "practice" is xing which actually means "a way of moving":

The Nine Practices

Practice lacking falseness.

Practice flexibility and weakness.

Practice maintaining the feminine. Do not initiate actions.

Practice lacking fame.

Practice clarity and stillness.

Practice good deeds.

Practice desirelessness

Practice knowing how to cease with sufficiency.

Practice yielding to others.

Translated by Stephen R. Bokenkamp in, Early Daoist Scriptures.

The ninth precept, yielding to others, is wuwei. The first precept probably works better in English as "Be Honest." The second precept is often the tough one for people. The flexibility part sounds cool, but the weakness part is confusing. Here is what Wang Xiangzai says should be the second step of martial arts training:

If one does not have the basic mechanical ability, then no matter what the movement is like, it is all wrong. The same applies to using strength and not using strength. The movements of an ordinary person cannot have strength without constant unilateral tension that disturbs the blood circulation. Every kind of strength based on constant unilateral tension is stiff and inharmonious, and besides that, harmful to health. Having strength without constant unilateral tension is namely having strength without using strength, and when using it, one gains strength.

There is a type of strength that develops from fear of being weak. And there is a type of weakness that develops out of a fear of being too strong. The type of strength (shili) we are trying to reveal when we practice internal arts is potential strength--It can be cultivated while walking, sitting, reclining and standing still.

Irreversibility

The reason for discipline is to make a practice irreversible.

There is a gongfu rule of thumb, "one day missed, ten days lost." If you start a practice and miss a few days of practice right at the beginning, you basically lose your momentum and have to start over. If you learn something new and don't practice it the next day, it is usually lost by the third day, you'll have to re-learn it. If you have been practicing everyday for nine months and you miss three days of practice, you've basically set yourself back a month.

Chinese martial arts work by momentum, that is why discipline is so important. In English we often say, "Practice it until it becomes second nature." This is a similar idea.

Problems arise when we don't really understand why we are doing a particular practice. Kinesthetic learning often starts out with a method that is supposed to reveal some type of fruition over time. Once the fruition is revealed it can be integrated into everything we do. Sometimes this means we can drop the method. Sometimes the method is itself part of the fruition.

For example, the Kitchen God lives over the stove in Chinese homes. He represents an irreversible commitment to keep the house clean. The method is cleaning on a regular schedule. When cleaning becomes "second nature" the method can become more spontaneous, but it can't really be dropped. The fruition is living in a cleaner, simpler, healthier environment, where things are easy to find, easy to store, and easy to get rid of.

But discipline itself is a hook with out a worm. If the fruition does not reveal itself, or if the fruition we thought we were going to get doesn't materialize, the experiment is a failure--the discipline should be dropped. With kinesthetic practices expect to have a clear idea what fruition will eventually become irreversible after about two months. It sometimes takes a little longer to get the idea. A method can easily take two years to truly become irreversible but you should know long before that what the method is doing and how it is changing you.

Most Daoist inspired methods reveal something about your true nature. Often it is an appetite of some kind. The most obvious example is that sitting or standing practices reveal an appetite for stillness. After about two years of discipline your appetite should be strong enough to direct your practice, rigid or militaristic discipline will actually hold you back. I know my morning standing practice is irreversible because if some anomaly or emergency disrupts my practice, the rest of the day I feel myself being pulled toward stillness--At the end of the day I jump into bed and savor the thought of waking up to my practice.

The rule of thumb is this: We are doing experiments which reveal our true nature; we are not signing up for self-improvement.

Zhang Sanfeng

I've been weeding around for a standard translation of the Zhang Sanfeng Taijiquan creation story. Every book or website seems to tell the tale a little bit differently.

Let's try this one:

Zhang Sanfeng's family came from Dragon Tiger Mountain (Longhushan). Sometime around the end of the Song Dynasty(960-1279 CE) he passed the Imperial exam and worked for the government. He learned some Shaolin and some jindan (meditation). The Mongols invaded, there was war and a new Yuan Dynasty(1279-1368). Side stepping the turmoil and chaos he went off to live on Wudang mountain.

One day he saw a crane and a snake fighting. Each used different natural styles of movement to yield and attack, but neither the snake nor the crane got hurt. That night he had a dream in which the deity Xuanwu appeared and taught him a way of moving. When he awoke he began practicing what Xuanwu had taught him. Sometime later he was attacked by 100 bandits and using his new practice was able to defeat them all. He lived for over 200 years and his practice eventually became known as Taijiquan.

What does this mean?

The Zhang family residence at Dragon Tiger mountain was the home of the Tianshi, the head priest of Religious Daoism. The name Sanfeng means "three mountains" and most likely means he was a member of an inner alchemy jindan lineage. Lineage names are picked from a secret poem, so people in the same lineage of the same generation sometimes have the same name. Either he really lived for 200 years or was several different people from the same generation within a Daoist lineage.

The last part of Zhang Sanfeng's life corresponds with the founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE). At that time the Tianshi, the most important religious leader in the country, went into a nine year retreat on Dragon Tiger mountain for the purpose of teaching the God Xuanwu, to be the head deity of the Chinese pantheon of gods. At the end of the nine years Xuanwu was promoted to the seat at the North Star and given the title Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior. This god was promoted at the request of the first Ming Emperor who had made many sacrifices to Xuanwu (Mysterious/Dark War God) during the years he battled the armies of the previous Yuan Dynasty.

The snake uses wave action, rolling from one one end to the other. The Crane uses opening and closing, drawing in toward the center and pushing out toward the periphery. Zhang lived in a natural setting and practiced Daoist Dreaming. This is the practice of weaving Night and Day seamlessly together. His experiences during the day drifted into his dreams, and his dream body became his waking body.

Infants do not know if they are awake or asleep and they can spend hours playing with their internal organs. To the infant what is inside has no name and what is outside has no name. This undifferentiated state has a name in Chinese: Taiji.

The art of Taijiquan is a guide to weaving our day into our dreams and the unbounded movement of our dream bodies into our waking bodies.

The two Zhang's (Sanfeng and the Tianshi) were on the same mountain, hanging with the same god as he went through a transformation. In Daoism they are called seed people because they carry knowledge from previous eras and make it relevant in the present.

Why Create a Martial Art?

I just wrote a long response to José de Freitas whose comment at the end of the New Students post is worth reading. It raises the very difficult and multi-layered question of why and how Chinese martial arts were created. To answer it adequately requires knowledge of Chinese history, religion, language (my weakness), and martial arts.

Here is an excerpt of my response to stimulate your appetite:

It might make more sense to argue that Chinese Martial Arts were created to promote the idea of universal responsibility. In a world with no aristocracy and no warrior class, it is the citizen-merchant-farmer who must be prepared to defend the nation, the family, and the internal social order. (Notice I did not include self-defense, which did not exist as an excuse for fighting in Chinese history.)

I absolutely love this question. If we look at all the individual and wildly diverse Chinese martial arts and all the individual and wildly diverse motivations people have for training in them--and try to work backwards to explain why they were created; it is a mighty tough task. What were the social milieus that inspired and supported the invention of Chinese martial arts? Do they exist in any form today?

I have commented in previous posts that there are quite a few books these days which assert that martial arts were created and preserved exclusively by people who had martial arts jobs. However; many martial arts creation stories talk about someone wandering out of the wilderness, or dreaming a dream, or finding a secret text. I find it hard to believe that these are just silly stories. It is more likely that they are summaries of a longer, more complex story. So in the next day or so I will take on the Taijiquan creation story.

Daoist Ritual Standing

Daoism has always maintained its roots to the shamanic and ecstatic worlds and at the same time used them do distinguish itself. Orthodox Daoist's do not practice any martial arts yet Daoists use swords in ritual dance and summon demon armies.

Ancient martial arts traditions are surely an important influence in the development of Daoism, and Daoism has continued to spin-off inspirations for martial arts. I have a bunch of posts dealing with this that I'm working on, but let me start by addressing an interesting quote that "adz" left in the comments sections of my posts on standing.

For me standing is a very active practice (as bizarre as that sounds to some folk). There are so many different aspects that can be worked, but Yao ZhongXun has already said it much better than what I ever could: Training of the mind alone is not Yiquan as is not physical practice alone. The two must be combined. The essence can only be cultivated by integration of the mind and body. Visualization or mental imagery must be employed in relaxed standing (Zhan Zhuang) to direct an integrated neuromuscular coordination that results in a whole-body response. Kinesthetic perception of the internal/external opposing force pairs (Zheng Li) and internal isometrics is developed to seek, sense, experience, cultivate, understand and master the whole-body balanced force (Hun Yuan Li).

This secular attempt to describe jindan (the golden elixir meditation) runs into the same problems Mantak Chia did.

In Taijiquan it is standard to learn "peng, ji, lu, and an" as four separate internal changes and then put them together in a seamless circular motion. The circles then become smaller and smaller. In Xingyi a very similar method is used in, for instance, the metal element to create cutting movement which resembles a forward moving skill-saw-blade.

Wang Xiangzai, the founder of the Yiquan system mentioned above in the quote, may have developed his method from Xingyi. One practice we do in Yiquan is to stand like we are holding a tree. We then move the imaginary tree imperceptibly up-down, left-right, forward-back, and inward-outward. Like taijiquan, this individual training eventually becomes a seamless movement and what starts as small circles becomes smaller and smaller until we can integrate these small circles into our larger movements. We then have power in all directions.

It is a stretch to call this meditation or standing still, no? My friend was joking that it is meditation for people with Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.).

(Here I go digging myself a whole so deep I can't possibly dig myself out in one post.)

In Acupuncture we call the first needle, "calling the qi to order." In Daoist ritual the first act is also called, "calling the qi to order." To call the qi to order one must first invoke the Perfected Warrior, Zhen Wu. This is done by standing still using the physicality of the method described above. It is a totally ready stance--able to instantaneously issue force in all directions.

But Zhen Wu is not just a physicality, he is a whole way of seeing the world, and he is the first stage in the practice of jindan (golden elixir) (Daoist ritual was totally integrated into a solo meditation system during the Tang Dynasty, 600 CE.)

Zhen Wu is visualized in his armor with skin like the night sky drawing inward, chain and silk is woven into his hair. He has bare feet and he is energetically on the edge of his seat. Think of him as holding a sword in one hand, without a sheath, the tip of the blade is dragging on the ground. He is the embodiment of the taijiquan concept song (or sung, let go, sink) he is utterly fearless, the god of nothing-to-lose.

This is stage one. Don't get me wrong, stage one is cool. But these secularists have no way to deal with stage two, and no coherent explanation of fruition. (Perhaps we should have an old-folks home especially for people who can issue power in all directions at once.)

UPDATE: the quote about mentions "whole body balanced force," when I wrote this ten years ago I didn't know what that was. Now I teach it! But I call it the six dimensions and three thresholds of counterbalancing.