Refuge vs. Treasure

Religious Daoism makes a distinction between two experiences of practice.  These two come into existence because our unconscious or aggressive conduct creates a cleave between the way things actually are and the way we imagine them to be.  In the one case, practice is experienced as an absolute treasure because it is a perfect expression of our true nature (de 德) and it permeates everything we do.  In the other case, practice is experienced as an incredible nourishing and inspiring refuge from the stress, fear and passions of our daily lives.  

In the written literature of Daoism, this distinction has sometimes been couched as the reason Daoism is not for everyone.  Religions which encourage practice as a refuge appear to have a big advantage over Daoism.  Practice as a refuge may even be addictive or function as a tool for mental clarity or stress reduction.  A refuge is easy to sell.

When we treat practice as a treasure the results are inseparable from all experience.  A roller derby helmet becomes part of practice, a loose tooth, the smell of a skill-saw cutting plywood.  

We can and do sway back and forth between these two experiences of practice.  Some nights before bed, as we are brushing our teeth we think, “I can’t wait to get up in the morning and practice.”  That’s what treating practice as a refuge feels like.  

Practice as a treasure has no pluses in its camp.  Nothing that can be pointed to.  

This is the conversation I know about practice; the pull of one, the unbounded unnamable quality of the other. 

There really is no conversation I can have of any meaning or significance unless the student already has a practice as solid as stone.

So then I ask the question-- what is the way in?  What is the basis for teaching?  On what ground does it take root?  

In children it is quite obvious that they have potency and access to freedom of movement and openness to learning.  Children have a practice, it just has no form because it is still so open to not-knowing, and not-doing.  As long as they are not over scheduled they can discover practice.

In adults it is obvious too, in the way people can hold their faces in a mask, or accomplish tasks without thinking, or bring energy, skills and ideas forth to solve a problem. We are capable of these things because of our rituals of “practice,” whatever they may be. 

Still, the conversation can not happen until the practice is chosen and one has signed contracts with all their demons to that affect!  The ability to make commitments is the single most defining quality that makes us human.  

I suppose, I could wander here for a moment into the realm of explanation, though I suspect it will leave me dreaming of my refuge.  Practice is another way of saying self-conditioning.  It is making deep grooves in our nature and behavior patterns rather than shallow scratches.  So Daoist practice is un-self-conditioning.  The making of a groove-less groove.  

Beautiful music and delicious food, cause the traveler to stop.  

Words about the Dao are insipid and bland.  

-- Laozi

How Cheap is Life?

Alexander Hamilton came from a place where life was cheap.  In the West Indies of his time the majority of people were enslaved, didn't wear clothes and had an average working life expectancy of four years.  He didn't know his father and his mother died when he was ten.  Death was all around him, yet somehow he learned accounting and how to read and write in English, French, and Hebrew.  At the age of 15 a devastating hurricane destroyed much of his surroundings and he wrote a vivid description of it which was published in newspapers all along the East Coast of the future US.  Someone in New York was so impressed by his writing that they took up a collection to send him to Princeton!  When he got there, talk of revolution was in the air and he convinced his dorm mates to practice marching drills with him from a book.  When war came he marched his friends down to the armory and because he had already taken command they made him an officer on the spot.  Shortly after the first battle he met George Washington who recognized his merits and made him Aide-de camp, responsible for all correspondence of the general.  

And the rest is history.  As far as supplying ideas and doing the intellectual leg work he is the single most important American founding Father.  When a person's life has been that cheap-- and he gets through it-- he must see challenges differently than the rest of us.  Not just challenges, but risks and ideas too.

Clarence Thomas has a lot of critics, enemies really.  He was born in a Gullah community.  The name Gullah is probably a distortion of Angola.  The Gullah were isolated to some degree in language and culture because they used African fighting traditions to free bonded people and make war.  After the American Civil War, a group of Gullah that were fighting on the Mexican Border were invited to join the US Calvary; later made famous by Bob Marley's song "The Buffalo Soldiers."

Clarence Thomas grew up in extreme poverty and hardship, abandoned by both parents he delivered coal as child, probably the dirtiest work there is.  Yet he managed to attend school, always graduating at the top of his class and receiving one scholarship after another.  To this day he is subjected to constant racist attacks that he is stupid and unworthy, that he only ever got anywhere in life because of other peoples pity, guilt and charity.  Yet he knows how cheap life can be.  His eloquent and unfettered opinion on the right to keep and bear arms is a necessary addition to our understanding of the history of the United States.  Like Hamilton, Thomas knows that the pen is mightier than the sword.  People who know how cheap life can be, fear the pen more than the sword, or in this case, the gun.

I've been watching a lot of Italian knife fighting lately.  Its spontaneity and musicality are informing my jian (double edged sword) work.  This art clearly comes from a place and time when life was cheap.

The Chinese arts I study are at least 500 years old, that's a lot of time to keep a tradition going.  That means the arts survived many eras when life was cheap as well as eras when life was not so cheap.  Classical artists try to consolidate and pass on as much of the essence of their art as they can.  Yet, we often fail to understand the lessons of the previous generations.   Without the actual experiences, accumulated knowledge is often just a shadow; shadows on top of shadows.  I'm very lucky to have studied so much with George Xu because he lived through a time when life was very cheap.  He has been able to bring many of those shadows to life!  Perhaps it has been harder to learn from him those parts of the arts that flurished when times were not so cheap, thank goodness for my other teachers, but the beauty of these arts is that these shadows on top shadows take tangible forms if you nurture them.  And George Xu certainly has taught me a kind of openness which can only come from choosing life!

There are several chapters of the Daodejing which are about living through times when life is cheap.  I leave you with this one: 

Exiting at birth, entering at death,

3 in 10 choose life,

3 in 10 choose death,

3 in 10, 'though they choose life, make decisions that bring about premature death.

Why? because they regard life as precious.

And then there are those who are good at nourishing life!

When entering a wilderness, they don't avoid tigers or rhinos,

When entering a battle, they don't put on armor or take up weapons.

The rhino finds no place to jab his horn,

The tiger finds no place to dig its claws,

The weapon finds nothing to catch its blade,

 Why? because there is no death point on them.

--Daodejing, Chapter 50

Dream Practice

The five practices of orthodox Daoism (Zhengyidao) are zuowang (sitting and forgetting), jindan (the golden elixir), ritual (the spontaneous and routine nourishing and re-balancing of living communities), daoyin (revealing ones true nature through exploring the limits of stillness and wildness), and dreaming.

I'm not sure anyone is really qualified to teach dreaming.  The other name for dream practice is "day and night the same."  In my own practice I have been experiencing a mind-body sensation that feels like dreaming.  It first started in my kua (hip area) and has spread to my entire body.  Sometimes it is intermittent, and sometimes it is only a portion of my body.  So it has become a measure of "good" practice that my entire body feels like it is dreaming.  Perhaps I could describe it as being outside of time.  Another characteristic of this "dream body," is that when I want to move, I move the environment around me.  I just think, "put the house behind you," and my body turns away from the house.  The sensation I get is a sort of short cut to doing what I've already been doing.  In that sense it may simply be the integration of new material.  But it feels deeply familiar.  Dream-like.

(Here is a post I wrote in 2007 on Tai Chi and Dreaming)

Sign-Up!

I'm reposting the info about Camp Jing below.  If you are interested in attending please contact me immediately!  I have had some enthusiastic interest but not enough sign-ups to run both weeks so I'm going to cancel one of them by May 16th-- I need to decide which one to cancel so people from out of town can buy plane tickets.  Give me a call or drop me and email:

gongfuguy@gmail.com    415.200.8201

_________________________________

Basic Chinese Internal Martial Arts 5-Day Training

Lafayette, CA

Session 1 - JUNE 11th-15th
Session 2 - JUNE 18th-22th

The internal martial arts are famous for the cultivation of qi and effortless power; however, the qi levels
and spirit levels can only develop from a physical base.  Without a solid base of practice the higher
levels are in accessible.  This class will focus on physical prowess and high-level body mechanics.  We
will use spiraling, lengthening, shrinking, and expanding to connect the whole body into a powerful
platform for spontaneous freedom.

Zhanzhuang - The practice of standing meditation also called yiquan or wuji.  No one ever got good by skipping this step.

Neigong - Internal power stretch and whole-body shrinking and expanding. This is all the soft stuff!  It develops the four corners of martial fitness -  Unliftable, Unsqueezable, Unmoveable, and Unstoppable.

Jibengong - Basic training for internal martial arts, which includes individual exercises to develop irreversible body art (shenfa), exquisite structure (xing), and refined power (jin). Taiji, xinyi, or bagua focus, depending on your experience.

Lecture-encounters will include a Daoist text studies introduction and history, along with group exploration of the experimental links between theater and meditation. All instruction will be given in the classical one-to-one naturally disheveled style in order to meet and match each person?s unique experience and insights.

Two Person Practices develop spacial awareness and technical spontaneity while systematically testing every part of our physical and emotional bodies. This includes everything to do with resistance, light contact, throws, rough footwork, tui shou, and roshou. How can we discard our social need to dominate or submit, and embody nonaggression without giving up marital prowess?

Schedule
Begin in the parks around Lafayette, CA
6 AM  Zhan Zhuang
7 AM  Neigong
8 AM  Jibengong
*9 AM  Breakfast  (Optional: rice porridge made from bone stock with pickled foods)
10 AM Two Person Practices Training
12 PM Lunch - bring your own or eat locally.  Take a nap, drink tea...
2 PM Lecture/Encounter
4 PM End

*Breakfast will be based on Traditional Chinese Nutritional Theory.

Sleeping
There is camping in the area, hotels, youth hostels, and many other options. We will be walking distance from a BART train stop which means you can stay pretty much anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cost per session - $350

To reserve your spot send a check made out to:
Scott P. Phillips
62 Stanton St., San Francisco CA 94114

Feel free to email gongfuguy@gmail.com or call 415.200.8201 to discuss details.

Daoism and the Martial Arts: What is Emptiness?

Lecture Series (2)

Daoism and The Martial Arts:

"What is Emptiness?"

What are the uses of emptiness?



Why was emptiness sought after by generals, princes, actors, exorcists, daoist hermits, fengshui masters, poets, judges, martial artists, and weavers?



Could emptiness mean being really, really relaxed?  Or could it refer to becoming a container?  If so, a container for what?



What is the difference between an empty body and an empty mind?



If becoming empty is a good thing, how is it applied?



Does qigong, yogic daoyin or tai chi help with this stuff?



Is there more than one type of emptiness?



This talk will cover the latest research into these questions and more.

May 20th, 2012

East Bay Yoga Shala

Sunday, 10:30 AM

2050 4th Street

Berkeley, CA

Scott P. Phillips teaches traditional Chinese martial arts, which he began studying when we was 10 years old.  Instead of summer-camp, his parents sent him to a Buddhist monastery.  His life long study of history, spontaneity, and Daoism is a regular part of his teaching.

Two Events

I'm starting my very own:

Lecture Series

- Daoism and The Martial Arts:  Is there a missing link?

Sunday, April 22nd, at 10:30 AM.   At East Bay Hatha Yoga Shala 2050 4th Street, Berkeley, CA.

Here is the flier (pdf) if you can think of a place good to posted it (your refrigerator is ok.)

How could notions of softness,

gentleness, ?uidity and even

weakness have gotten tangled up

with martial arts?

What exactly is the link between

ritual trance, meditation and tai

chi super hero skills?

Were ancient Daoists some kind

of elite ?ghting group?

Or did they just play that role on

the stage?

Could these ideas and practices

have just melted into each other

over centuries?

Does qigong or yogic daoyin

have anything to do with all this

stuff or is that a different road all

together?

This talk will cover the latest

research into these questions

and more.

How could notions of softness, gentleness, fluidity and even weakness have gotten tangled up with martial arts?

What exactly is the link between ritual trance, meditation and tai chi super hero skills?

Were ancient Daoists some kind of elite fighting group?

Or did they just play that role on the stage?

Could these ideas and practices have just melted into each other over centuries?

Does qigong or yogic daoyin have anything to do with all this stuff or is that a different road all together?

This talk will cover the latest research into these questions and more.

_______________________

Also I'm participating in a "Pop-Up" for a new organization called We Are = Movement.  On April 21st @ 1 PM I'm going to be doing solo practice in a storefront with windows at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco.  There are lots of other solo practices to watch over the week and some cool looking evening talks.  Check it out!

Trees

I love trees. Trees are part of what make us humans human. We have evolved with them.  Trees to climb, trees to shelter us, trees to hide us, trees to help us stand up and look around, trees as lookout posts, trees to build with, trees for fire to keep warm and sing and dance and party, trees for sticks to cook, hunt, and fight with, trees to cross rivers, trees to make boats, trees to make tools. And on and on.

I've looked over a few scientific studies showing that people breath better around trees. (Which if you've been reading this blog you know, supports my view that we don’t really have control over our breathing--the environment itself trumps our intentions.)

I've recently started doing tree practices. Before I describe those, I’ll describe the internal martial arts practices related to trees that many people already know about.

First off is from Yiquan. While standing still hold your arms out in front of you and wrap them around an imaginary tree. Imagine the tree growing, first up, then fatter, then imagine it sinking while you hold it up, then shrinking, then swaying while you hold on to it, then imagine yourself moving it. This is all done invisibly from the hugging-the-tree posture (zhanzhuang).

Next you can practice gathering qi from a real tree. This exercise can be found in many qigong books and was first taught to me as part of Chen style taijiquan. Stand facing the tree with one foot back and do a circular gathering exercise (there are many) as if pulling in a fishing net, or pulling sheets off of a line. (Follow the peng-ji-lu-an sequence if you know it, as in ‘grasping the birds tail.’) While doing this, feel qi coming down the tree into the roots and then rising up behind you into the canopy and then down the tree again in a large circular vertical orbit.

I learned those exercises over 20 years ago, and long ago they became second nature.  But they are important.

The new exercises come from George Xu and involve getting right up to a tree and touching it:

Put your hands on the tree and while keeping your spine vertical and your pelvis level rise up, sink down, move in and move out (kua squats if you know them). Next do the same thing but with absolutely no pressure from the hands on the tree nor any lifting off. Then use your feet to do the same thing you are doing with your hands, allow no force or pressure from the feet. This is a method for ridding ones body of jin, structural power. Once your structural power is turned off, and it’s absence is well established, practice melting all tension and internal body sensation down the front of your body to the ground. If you do this correctly a sensation of steam will begin to rise up from the ground. Practice this until it is a continuous sensation, like rain hitting warm ground and creating steam. Next use only this (neidan) feeling to try and pull the tree down, up, in, out, to the side and...twist.

Commitment 101

When a person commits to doing a practice the two most important things to define are the time of day the practice will take place and the location of the practice.

I often hear about people "trying" to develop a committed meditation practice.  This has always seemed inexplicable to me.  The only important questions are, do you have a designated time? and do you have a designated place?

Here is a picture of the room I build to practice meditation in:



Quiet Room on a 4 foot high platform with homemade Shoji



Quiet Room: Dedicated space for zuowang and chadao

The New Definition of Fascia

Josh Leeger turned me on to a series of articles which are using a new definition of Fascia.  This article is particularly worth reading:

Fascial Fitness: Fascia oriented training for bodywork and movement therapies, by Divo G. Müller and Robert Schleip.

Many people I've shown the article to have commented that one of the authors is into a painful type of bodywork called Rolfing, and they have suggested that the authors may have created a Rolfing centric view of fascia.  Strangely no one has pointed out that the other author is into Continuum, which is a very watery type of movement exploration.

You'll get the new definition of fascia by just reading the article, so I'm not going to try to nail it down, but  readers should know that the old definition was a description of the clear or translucent film that surrounds all muscle.  The new definition includes tendon and ligament and sees all that juicy stuff as a single organ.

Whatever, right?  But what is important about this new article, and this new approach, is that it uses clinical language and conforms to kinesiology standards.  Until now there was no clinical explanation of how external martial arts work that any of us could use when talking to a physical therapist.  That's going to be a big change.

Fascia?

The article explains that tendons and ligaments themselves can take load and can spring.  What the authors don't seem to understand is that it is through the natural spirals of the body that all of these soft tissues function together.  They don't seem to realize that the reason they are getting these springy dynamic results from slow holistic lengthening is because their method builds on these underlying spirals.  Spirals are there in shortened positions too, as anyone who does whole body tie-up and throw techniques (think: Aikido) can tell you.

So, it's a good start.  It primarily deals with what we call in both internal and external martial arts, "the foundation."  That is the ability to get in and out of a range of deep, long, loaded, and spiraled stances while using smooth (wood), explosive (fire), fluid (water), and hard-solid (metal) movement qualities.  "The foundation" is what I usually refer to in this blog as "jing training," the first level of internal martial arts.  It is also commonly referred to in martial arts lingo as "the benefits of good structure."

The authors lose a few points in my book at the end of the article when they say this training, "should not replace muscular strength work, cardiovascular training, and coordination exercises."  That statement muddies the issue.  All that stuff is just included in basic Shaolin, it's already complete.  If we are building this "foundation" for learning Tai Chi, Bagua, or Xinyi, then we are going to leverage these underlying spirals to allow us to reduce muscular "strength" and discard the torso tension usually associated with "coordination exercises."

The author, however, should get extra credit for hinting at methods for developing higher levels of internal martial arts.  For instance, take the "ninja principle" all the way out, and the body becomes so light and quiet that our experience of the physical body becomes totally empty (xu).  Or take the idea of fluid movement all the way out, and ones habits of coordination and resistance become baby-like, unconditioned (ziran).

The Proprioceptive Refinement section of the article is the most interesting.  They discuss the, "need to limit the filtering function of the reticular formation."  This refers to a part of our brain which we can train to pay attention to certain kinds of nerve stimuli and ignore others.  Muscles transmit information slowly, that's why we need to turn them off and pay attention to other stimuli-- and that's the very mechanism which can make it is so easy to manipulate someone who is, in martial arts lingo, "too stiff."  Eventually we want to turn off most of our 'inside the body sensors' and turn on most of our 'outside the body sensors.'   The authors correctly identify the problems with doing any movement exactly the same way over and over, namely that we become insensitive to small errors which then become habituated.  This is why it is so important that our forms are empty! By cultivating emptiness, our movement is unconditioned by our mind.  On the other hand, always thinking about a specific and exact application of a technique, will turn us into robots.

Qi has no memory!  To practice martial arts with qi is to be continuously spontaneous.

To quote the Daodejing:

To be preserved whole, bend.

Upright, then twisted;

To be full, empty.

What is worn out will be repaired.

Those who have little, have much to be gained.  Having much, you will only be perplexed!

:5

Fascia?

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Martial Arts in the Modern World (Part 3)

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the third of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

____________

Yamada Shoji's, "The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery," is a hilarious romp.  The German guy, Eugen Herrigel, who wrote the book, Zen and The Art of Archery, was so enthusiastic about Zen that he projected Zen into his study of Archery.  In Japan, Zen wasn't associated with Archery until Herrigel's  book was translated into Japanese.  The confusion is also do to the fact that the particular Archery teacher Herrigel hooked up with (Kenzo Awa) was more than a little eccentric, he had gone through a personal mystical enlightenment experience while practicing alone at night in which his "self" exploded into tiny grains of dust.  But even so Shoji suggests that most likely the connection of Archery to Zen was the result of mis-translations, like one that happened when Awa accidental split one of his own arrows in the center of the target while shooting at night in the dark.  In Japan, splitting an arrow is very bad form because you are damaging your equipment.  Awa probably said something like, "Whoops, accidents happen," and Herrigel took that to mean something like, "Actions happen of their own accord, this is do to Buddha Nature."

_____________

The next essay by Stanley E. Henning is titled, "The Martial Arts in Chinese Physical Culture, 1865-1965." It's a sort of journalistic survey of other works which is biased by a sort of 1970's Taiwanese Nationalism.  Here, "martial arts" gets reductively defined as utilitarian combat skills.  Not coincidentally, all he has to offer about martial arts prior to 1900 are accounts of sensational violence from what must have been a kind of tabloid entertainment rag (think: 'Baby Born With Three Heads!').  There is a parallel here between this approach and the approach of Daoist experts (1950-1990) who went around saying that Daoism is a philosophical way of life and not a religion, dismissing actual Daoists as superstitious and ill-informed villagers who perform silly rituals.  Henning's references to historical works about how Nationalists and Communists have influenced the development and perception of martial arts are excellent.  Anyone not already familiar with this material will certainly benefit from that aspect of this article. (Also see my review of Andrew D. Morris's Marrow of the Nation, of Qigong Fever, or here for a discussion of Lineages.)  But Henning's reductionist definition of martial arts can no longer be taken seriously.  To dismiss religious, ritual, and theatrical origins of martial arts as some form of failure, or deficiency, or superstition, or side track, or degradation from a past purity, is nothing less than cant.