Wordpress Update

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More Rain, More Books, More Ideas

My computer has been having a crash fest lately and that's a good thing because it put my nose into some great books I'll be blogging about over the next month.

Class was canceled this morning.  We were caught in a down pour even though Yahoo Weather was predicting 1% chance of rain.  We finished standing and did push hands under the trees for a little bit anyway.

This weekend I saw George Xu, also in the rain, and he delivered a few printable topics.

The 5 Types of Training Predators Do:

1. Power stretch


2. Standing still with the mind outside the body


3. Slow movement


4. Fast movement


5. Shaking

Power stretch means stretching from the inside out.  Standing with the mind out side the body means the mind is on the prey and the surrounding environment.  Slow movement includes stalking, shrinking and expanding, six dimensions power, etc.... Fast movement must be unconscious of the physical body.  And shaking is used to insure that the prey can not fight back once it has been seized.

Shrinking and Expanding

Shrinking and expanding, or shrinking and pouncing, is something every predator does.  If you want to develop martial arts skill you must replace bending and stretching with shrinking and expanding.

The error of bending and stretching is a human epidemic.  Not that it is a crisis or a struggle or a life and death situation, humans can freely carry on merrily bending and stretching from now until internal arts are in the Olympics (or eternity, which ever comes first).

Without shrinking and expanding it is impossible to get effortless three dimensional power; up/down, left/right, front/back, and spiral/turn.

When predators fight they always attack using whole-body shrinking and expanding.  This allows them to simultaneously strike, uproot, and rotate their prey.

Predators are also very cautious about receiving injuries.  Shrinking and expanding allows a predator to diminish the force of their prey's counter attack without reducing the force of their own attack.

Shrinking and expanding does not require strength, in fact, for the most part, strength will inhibit it.

Internal Stretching vs. External Stretching

I wish there was a simple way to explain this.

I'm not genetically flexible and although I did train martial arts before puberty, I didn't do enough to make me significantly more flexible than an average guy you might meet on the street. So at seventeen when I really got into dance for the first time, I started stretching a lot, everyday. And when I say everyday, I mean, everyday--I didn't miss a day of stretching for probably 5 years.

All that yoga prop junk is just for people who are short on time, if you have the time to stretch you don't need a prop. (There is one exception; sometimes a coach will advise a prop because someone is stretching unevenly, for that it is an extremely good idea.)

Stretching the same muscles day after day while doing kicks and jumps that use your maximum range of motion is painful, but it's muscle pain, it's the kind of 'hurts so good' pain that all athletes love. It's not debilitating pain, it's not nagging pain. Who am I to tell people not to do it?

I'm nobody. If you do it and you like it, keep doing it. But I have a duty of another order. I'm here to be a voice for another way of thinking and experiencing life. I'm here to represent the unique study of Chinese Internal Martial Arts and their relation to a Daoist view of what a human being is.

About 13 years ago, the idea of internal flexibility started to take root in my body. It did not come from stretching, nor did it come from standing still or meditation. It came from doing what most people these days would call qigong. Specifically I was doing Tiandifu (Heaven Earth Contract) style of qigong. Most Taijiquan classes include this type of movement; expanding the dantian in all directions while extending the arms over the head and then drawing everything back in. The thing is I did more than most people do and I was really focused on lengthening the spine.

At this time in my practice I could do what they call in gymnastics a back walkover. But in order to do it I needed to do a lot of stretching, especially bridges. From doing the internal spine lengthening, the quality of my flexibility totally changed, I was able to do a back walkover cold. Cold means without warming up, without stretching out first.

Then about ten years ago I was on a backpacking trip and I fell with a heavy backpack on. I really hurt my arm and my back. For the first time in my life I was waking up in the middle of the night in pain. It took a long time to heal and I've never gotten back to the point where I could do a back walkover cold. Bummer huh?

The plus side is that now I have a lot of expertise about spine injuries. Also I've thought about and tried a really wide range of stretching routines.

So what is the difference between internal stretching and external stretching?

External stretching is when you put pressure on a joint or a muscle or a muscle group in order to get it to relax and/or lengthen. When we do this type of stretching we cut off the connection between our dantian and our limbs. If we do this kind of stretching we have to do the same stretches everyday because the dantian will automatically try to suck our limbs back into itself while we are sleeping. (If you don't sleep for 24 hours you will likely be really flexible but also at higher risk of muscle/tendon/ligament tears.)

Internal stretching may not look like stretching. To stretch internally our arms and legs have to be a part of the dantian. Once a person has this feeling in motion, the stretches are easy to find or invent.

The dantian expands, condenses, rolls and twists. As it moves, so must the limbs move with it, as one continuous whole. You've probably heard that before, but are you doing it? Is the movement of your thigh the same movement as the movement of your belly? Is it simultaneous? Does it have the same quality?

This is one of those things which is so simple most people miss it. In order for a person who is flexible by training to develop internal stretching, he or she will have to give up what they are already good at.

What Makes a Man a Man?

Looks like my homey Sasha Barron Cohen is up to his old tricks again. If you're not familiar with him, he is the voice behind the kid's song, "I like to move it, move it" the title track of Disney's rather entertaining gay agenda movie--Madagascar.

Now, last year I was sitting with my mom out in front of a cafe in the Castro District, the self-described gayest neighborhood on earth. Since gay identity came out of Hippie identity, gays love flowers. So naturally next door to the cafe, was a flower shop. And in the flower shop, mounted on the wall, was a television set. Now, I've noticed that a certain pizza shop on the next block also has a television mounted on the wall which plays gay porno 24/7 (the pizza's ok). But in the flower shop, that would be too much. No, the flower shop uses their mounted television to plays Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

Why might you ask? Because being yourself is beautiful.

So click on the link and check out what Bruno is up to. And make sure you click though the extra pages because there is some funny stuff. I seems like the fighters really came to fight! Is there a lesson here about letting go of what we think we are?

UPDATE: film info:

Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.

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.

Yoga is not what it seems

Charles Weidman --Photo by Barbara Morgan (1944). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David C. Ruttenberg, 1987 

I admit that I've had it out for yoga for years. It is not the fact that people are getting to know themselves by practicing something physical with discipline, that part I find beautiful. My problem has always been that yoga seemed so "in the box" when compared to dance and martial arts. To put it bluntly, if your "downward dog" doesn't eventually scamper around the room and chase its tail, what is the point?

Years ago I had a dance teacher who trained with one of the early moderns,

Charles Weidman. Incidentally, his stuff rocked. Anyway she said to the class one day, "You know at some point during the late 70's people started saying that the way I start my class is like yoga. It wasn't until years later that I took a yoga class and saw what they meant. I wonder where those early modern dancers learned it?" Hmmm....

I was at a party a couple of years ago and spoke with a woman who made a lot of dough in the first internet explosion. She has been a Zen practitioner for 30 years and has practiced yoga for the last 20. She told me that when she first started practicing yoga, the meditation component was entirely Vippassina oriented. Meaning that it was a process of examining and transcending the body. Now yoga classes are almost all Zen (what she referred to as the "Insight" tradition) oriented meditation, meaning they see the precision of the posture as the method and the result, non-conceptual, non-transcendent, emptiness without a goal.

She wasn't really taking sides as to which type of meditation goes better with yoga, and neither am I, she was just saying it is an unacknowledged innovation.

Well, maybe this article from Yoga Journal will shed some light, as the yoga crew are fond of saying. The article is partly a review of The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by N. E. Sjoman, as this quote shows:

Modern hatha yoga draws on British gymnastics? The yoga of Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya influenced by a potpourri that included Indian wrestlers? These are claims guaranteed to send a frisson of horror up the limber spine of any yoga fundamentalist. But according to Sjoman, his book is meant not to debunk yoga, but to pay tribute to it as a dynamic, growing, and ever-changing art.

Here is a quick quote from an Amazon review:

The core of the book is a translation of a text from the 1800s from the private library of the Mysore palace which is the only textual documentation of an extended asana practice - asanas being the yoga positions that form the core of yoga practice today.

I haven't read the book but it purportedly explains that the standing and inverted posses in yoga come from western gymnastics and the ubiquitous "sun salutations" come from Indian wrestling!

Is it true? I don't know, but you gotta love this stuff.

Oh, and just in case anybody is wondering (or listening) all that health stuff about how this or that posture is good for this or that organ, this or that problem...that all happened in the last ten years! --Intelligent people combining personal experience with wishful thinking and a little (Martha Steward inspired) "distressing" the surface to give it that antique feel!

Check out this wonderful list of all the things people are doing with Yoga these days over at Jen's Reviews. 18 Amazing Benefits of Yoga, According to Science.

Continuum

I'm old enough, and was born in the right place, to remember the real New Age. The basis of the New Age movement was the hippy idea that we could change the metaphors we live by. If we changed the games children played from competitive ones to cooperative ones, and we change the stories--the mythologies-- our society perpetuates, we could bring about a new way of being, a New Age. Frankly, it was a fun time to be a kid, even if putting my Cheerios underneath a pyramid didn't really change the taste and even the most cooperative game can be made competitive if there are enough eight-year-old-boy hormones to go around.

That experience was still not enough to stop me from cringing at the New Age bravado apparent in these videos and web-links about the bodywork system known as Continuum. (I recommend watching the "research" video first.)

Still, I think it is one of the cooler bodywork ideas out there. They take the Chinese ideas of huntun (totally undifferentiated chaos) or hunyuan (original chaos?) and really make them tangible. And while I doubt I'll ever say it quite like Emilie Conrad, I find myself agreeing with most of what she says about fear, change and the nature of human movement. (Her book.)

The Return of Paulie Zink

I made a point of asking Paulie Zink and his wife to please get some stuff up on Youtube and I probably wasn't the only one. They've done it. And here too.

Even better, he is coming out of retirement to teach Monkey Kung Fu. I also talked to both of them about how extraordinarily wonderful it would be if this Monkey Daoyin was being passed on to kids. I'm thinking here of a Mr. Rogers with mad Kung Fu skills. The wild dynamic world of animation coming to life.

I've been teaching the little bits of his system that I learned to my Northern Shaolin students and they love it. I think I'm going to try to get to Southern California for the workshop.

Heat or Ice

Yesterday, having just gotten into my warm car after watching the latest Stephen King movie and nearly freezing to death talking to a fellow movie goer in the wind, I saw a small group of high school girls crossing the street. Very sort pants, low socks, t-shirts. One of them had big lumps of plastic wrap around her knees and ankles. I suddenly registered that they were athletes and that the plastic wrap was holding large amounts of ice on the unfortunate young womans legs.

Many people think sitting in an ice bath after a workout is a good way to train. Most people who would be reading my blog know that Chinese medicine almost never uses ice.

There are a whole bunch of theories about why ice is good, but my experience tells me that mostly it is terrible. It is better than nothing on burns, but if you have burn cream, it is better. There is no question that ice can bring down swelling after an injury. For a really bad injury I would put ice on it right away. But as part of a training ritual, it is barbaric. It develops bad, tense, stiff, muscle quality and in the long run it probably leads to arthritis.
I love hot tubs and steam baths. When I was young and road my bicycle at high speed over steep hills to all my appointments, swam in the freezing cold ocean, did kungfu and dance for 6 or even 8 hours every day, and sat still (or slept) in stupid classes at school--a nice hot bath once or twice a week was very close to Nirvana. Still, as a training method it contributed nothing. I was tired and stiff because I was training too much of the wrong thing. It would be better just to train right. Too much hot drains the qi.
Cleaning and scrubbing the surface of your body every time you sweat is really important to maintaining good muscle and joint quality. This is why internal martial artists, especially when they get older, try not to sweat most of the time. If at the end of your practice you aren't near water and a place where you can be naked, at least towel off and change some of your clothes.
A short little dip in hot water, a one minute ice massage after a sprain, fine; Don't make a habit of it.