Balance

It is a standard of Chinese martial arts that one should cultivate balance. When I learned my first broad sword form (wuhudao) my teacher, Bing Gong, had me learn it with the sword in the left hand because I am left handed. This meant that I had to learn a mirror image of the form he did. Being the precocious kid that I was, I taught myself the right hand too.Later a second teacher, George Xu, taught me another sword form (baxianjian). At the beginning I suggested that perhaps I should learn it left handed. His response was memorable, and classic gongfu-teacher-speak, "You don't have any idea how to use either hand...yet." (I learned it right handed.)

Balance can be measured or assessed in a number of different ways. Here is a short list which I will elaborate on in a future post:

TYPES OF BALANCE

• What is Comfortable to use: One's preference for left or right can be balanced by using the "good side" less

• Body shape and size (including balancing muscles on the left with muscles on the right). Think losing muscle to get to balance, instead of building muscle to get there.

• Weight distribution (front to back and side to side)

• Range of motion (functional range of motion and optimal range of motion.)

• Muscle strength or weakness as distinct from size

• Ability to move qi, fluids, micro-articulation of circles (or other shapes)

• Since the internal organs are never balanced in terms of weight and size they can be balanced in the sense that they can all be felt with equal clarity.

• Multiple layers of qi. Starting a Weiqi (the feeling of the surface of the body) and then going inward layer by layer, sensing left to right, front to back or top and bottom.

• Balance is also part of complete embodiment. What feels balanced?

• Lack of balance in range of motion lower down in the body effects the verticalness of the spine and all angles above the hips? The levelness of the hips dramatically effects the verticalness of the spine.

• Fighters know that you can have a 'blind spot,' a place in your preception where you don't sense things very well. For instance punches that come from a certain angle are more likely to hit you. These can and should be 're-embodied.

Do you own your legs?

Readers can comment on this provocative idea:
George Xu claims to be the source behind Chi Running. One of the things he said is that most people let their legs carry their bodies, they don't use their bodies to carry their legs. By this I understand him to mean that most people lack both integration between their legs and their torso, and they also lack a kind of mind or embodiment.

This integration of the legs and torso, once gained, can be measured as a smaller, more efficient range of motion.  Xu refers to this type of embodiment as the predator mind. It is a kind of fearless self-possession. It is a predatory way of seeing and moving.  It is relaxed yet ready to pounce. It is drawn in toward the center but not closed, not  contracted.

Shen (Spirit?): What does it mean?

Elisabeth Hsu wrote an article in Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, in 2000, called Spirit (SHEN), Styles or Knowing , and Authority in Contemporary Chinese Medicine. The article is a summary of her book from 1999, The Transmission of Chinese Medicine, (Cambridge University Press.) I got the article free through Interlibrary Loan if you are just interested in ideas, but I recommend the book too.

The book tells a cool story. In Kunming, in the late 1980's Hsu signed up to study three different forms of Chinese medicine and compared how they were transmitted. She did this as a medical anthropologist, in other words, she was always looking beyond the subject she was studying to a larger field of knowledge. This is how good social thought gets produced.

First she signed up to study TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) at a government college which taught clinical medicine in a TCM Hospital. Then she found a qigong master, who did treatments on difficult cases. Finally, she found a teacher of the Neijing (Inner Classic of Medicine), really a "doctor's doctor", who had completed his studies before the two big changes in Chinese Medicine took place; the first being the invention of Clinical TCM and the other being the Cultural Revolution.

What she found is that each style of transmission uses the Term SHEN very differently. These differences have profound implications for how these various types of practitioners assert authority and make claims about what is real.

1. Clinical TCM: Shen is a list of observations that correspond closely with what we call functions of the brain in Bio-medicine (you know regular modern medicine.)

2. Qigong Master: Shen is a very vague idea, no one seems to be able to define it, yet people agree that it is what improves (or doesn't improve) with a series of qigong treatment performances.

3. The Neijing expert: Shen means different things in different parts of the text. The teachers uses the text which is often metaphorical or obscure, to impart his traditional knowledge and extensive experience about medicine. Thus the teacher asserts some authority about what Shen means at any one time, or in a particular context. Hsu calls this quality of having multiple meanings polysemous.

In my teaching I falls in to category 3. I use terms like qi, shen, jin, yi, to mean different things in different contexts.

Breathing Spaces

Nancy N. Chen's book Breathing Spaces, qigong, psychiatry, and healing in China, was published in 2003, by Columbia University Press. Before Chen's book there was nothing available about the history of Qigong in the 20th century that would satisfy a curious 12 year old, much less a scholar.

I have at least 45 post-it notes in my book. Why do I love this book so much?

Here is a brief biography form the back cover: "Nancy N. Chen is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she also teaches courses on food, ethnographic film, urban anthropology, China, and Asian Americans."

She grew up in the US studying gongfu, and like me, heard about this thing called qigong sometime in the late 80's. It turned out to be, at least partly, what we had all been practicing and referring to as martial arts warm-ups. But there where also lots of claims being attached to this new "qigong" that didn't seem to fit our experiences. There was a lot of religious feeling and parlor tricks too. There were strange and sometimes very specific claims made about healing powers associated with both the practice of doing qigong and these new "Masters" themselves.

Being a lover of history, the biographies various masters would pull out from the underside of their 'inner cauldrons,' were particularly irksome to me. Nancy N. Chen deals with all this beautifully.
So the only real question now is, why haven't you read it yet?

Measuring what Doesn't Happen

The notion of gongfu is new to the world outside of China. Within Chinese civilization gongfu is most certainly not new, but it's fair to say that there are new permutations, qigong as a distinct category being one of them.
Innumerable different methods and styles of qigong have made it into the 21st century. The rush of modernism everywhere has been quick to cast aside what seems worthless in a mad rush to discover and promote whatever will produce short term benefits. In this rush qigong has been stripped of context and pigeon-holed as just a health practice, a way to become powerful, or a mystical fantasy. Does the world need new fantasies? does it need new ways of becoming more powerful? If we take these explanations at face value there is no need to try and understand the origins or the real intent behind the creation and preservation of qigong. I think qigong deserves a closer look.

The experience of practicing qigong for a period of many years is not one of heroic accomplishment, it is more likely one of satisfying blandness.

The effects of qigong are difficult to measure by looking directly into the practice itself, there is more to notice if we look outwards. Our daily interactions with the world is the place where we are most likely to notice the impact of this increased sensitivity and ease.

If qigong is the practice of not leaving a mark on our bodies, then a possible result of working in the garden all day is that our back doesn't hurt. Absolutly worthwhile, yet in the short term it's difficult to measure something, that doesn't happen.

Yes, I know there is such a thing as an "outcome study," where we look at the incidence of say diabetes in the general population and see if a sample of qigong practitioners have a lower incidence rate.  Or we look at survival rates for a sample of people with a terminal disease  who practice qigong verses those who don't.  However the nature of a personal qigong practice, by definition, varies so much, and indeed personal commitment to practice varies so much, that getting a sample on the scale of a 100 or a 1000 people just doesn't seem likely.

So qigong is likely "falsifiable" only in the sense that you can do your own personal experiments.

How Physical Therapy Rattles Qigong

A by product of all the enthusiasm that is generated around sports are changes in the way medicine is practiced. (Enthusiasm about medicine has also changed the way sports are practiced.) Sports medicine is designed to get players back on the field as soon as possible so they can play again. The practice of building up muscle around injuries functions like pain killers, making it possible to return to the sport before the injury has fully healed because tense muscles limit sensitivity to pain, as well as mobility.

This principle is now applied in order to get people back to work faster, to resist all sorts of joint and back pain, and to 'fight' aging. This approach inhibits the natural healing process. From the point of view of Daoism this is a form of aggression known as 'attempting to put off your fate.' Eventually it returns (to all of us) and usually with a vengeance. (see chapter 30 of the Daodejing)

I'm not attempting here to accurately represent the methods of physical therapists, a constantly changing field, which is particularly skilled at getting people walking again after surgery. What I am suggesting is that common notions of how healing works can be obstacles to understanding and practicing qigong. A Qigong approach to relieving pain is to increase circulation to any areas of tension so that the possibilities of healing can take place. We stabilize the area with precise and balanced alignment and we practice moving in alignment within a smaller range of motion. In essence, we create a safe enough environment to let relaxation happen, dissolve tension, and let whatever healing can happen, happen.

Pain tells us an injury has taken place. Pain is often associated with tension. If the injury is so serious that no one thinks it will ever heal, than perhaps building strength (ie. more tension and with time, insensitivity) is the best option. It is a situations in which "you are trying to dig a well after you are already thirsty."(Nei jing,Classic of Chinese Medicine, Commentary on the Inner Classic or Chinese Medicine)

On the other hand, if the injury is associated with an area of strength, or chronic tension, and is exacerbated by habitually tense movement or posture, than strengthening more muscles will make the problem worse in the long run. In the short run the problem may appear to go away because it has been obscured...... but this is not true healing.

Strength and Modernism

The worldwide movement called 'modernism' seems to insist on squeezing everything 'traditional' to see what can be extracted of value. This view assumes that what is of value in tradition can and should be extracted from the valueless mumbo jumbo of belief and superstition. What this aggressive view misses when applied to internal arts is that they have already been refined many times- every generation goes through a process of unfolding the material of the past and making it their own. Internal arts, and gongfu in general, are super concentrated already.

When this 'separate out the chafe from the wheat' notion of modernism is applied to qigong, qigong seems to weaken and wither away. If we insist on examining qigong from the point of view of Modern medicine for instance, or sport based athleticism, at best qigong will appear to be mild hypochondria or a fantasy. It will seem too insignificant, too slow, too ineffective, and too boring!

But don't let that get you down. What happens if we turn the table around and use qigong to examine these other two? Modern medicine seems obsessed with inconclusive tests and invasive procedures, it's way too much- way too late. Sports look like competition induced trance, as a way to achieve glory with out sensitivity.

Such attempts to 'cross reference'-- or as the cliche goes, 'meld east and west'-- are delicate projects which too often bring with them a kind of enthusiasm which lacks sensibility. Fields of knowledge have their own inherent logic only when considered in context. We don't use molecular biology to analyze traffic congestion, or shipbuilding to analyze pastry making. This being said, indulge me in this brief look at what weight lifting is from a qigong point of view. I am often in situations of trying to explain qigong to people who lift weights. Normally I try to use language and terms which bring them into conversation comfortably, rarely do I get to explain what it is like to look out at the world from the perspective of someone practicing qigong. Here goes.

Weight lifters carefully damage muscles and other soft tissues a little bit at a time causing contractions in all the soft tissues around these minor injuries, generally restricting the circulation of qi. This then causes the muscles to grow larger and more rigid in order to reduce future injury to themselves and other soft tissues. Most people do it for the look or the feeling of strength. This suggests that they started out feeling weak, or are perhaps drawn to an idealized image of what they could be. Others lift weights because the work they do or the sports they play are characterized by regular injuries, the added bulk gives them some protection, and the reduced circulation makes it possible to sustain small injuries without feeling them.

The work and exercise people do often leaves a regrettable mark on their bodies. On the other hand, if you are good enough to play for the Chicago Bulls, do it! Why resist? Some fates are easier to unravel than others.

If my arguments seem to strong, perhaps there is a resolution. Daoism has always held that there needs to be many different ways for different people to fulfill their natures and that despite apparent differences we are all participants in a larger collective body and we actually need each other to be different in order to support a community, or a community of communities. The world is big enough for many different ways of being. My guess is that weight lifting has its true roots in the skillful wielding of heavy weapons and that perhaps what seems like two diametrically opposing views actually has a resolution in the practice of martial arts, something close to my heart.

If after reading this you still wish to lift weights, my suggestions are: Be graceful, develop evenly, and use loss of movement range as a measure of when you've gone to far. I will venture that the real distinction between muscular strength and muscular tension is: Strength happens where you want it to happen, tension happens where you don't want it to happen.

In the practice of qigong we do not want strength or tension and we tend to follow this simple adage: If it feels like strength-- it's tension! Qigong practitioners are adept at releasing unwanted tension from anywhere in their bodies.

Understanding Lineage

How does the process of resolving ones ancestors through the practice of gongfu manifest within the lineage of a particular practice?

From within a Chinese cosmological world view--when we practice qigong which has been passed down to us through many generations of adepts, we are receiving the collective "perfected" form of all the people in the lineage receding back through time. This practice resolves us (zheng). It resolves our fate (ming). It gives us a way to literally embody resolved action. If we remain sensitive to this process, the result --the fruition of practice -- is appropriate conduct in our daily lives.

This also works in the other direction. Imagine for a moment that the qigong we are doing seems to overwork our liver. Perhaps it is because someone in our lineage drank to much alcohol and her conduct is manifesting itself in the qigong we were taught and practice. If we keep precepts and practice appropriate action, our own healthy liver and our own healthy habits will eventually change the qigong practice itself, thus resolving the past and passing on to our students a healthier qigong practice. So the practice of qigong not only influences our ancestors and the lineage of our teachers, but also influences our students and our decedents.

Now I'm not a lineage fundamentalist, and I'm not a puritan either. But I think it is a little sad that just because Westerners don't understand Chinese cosmology, they toss it out like so much flotsam and jetsam.
In response to all the hucksterism and Qijocks in the qigong and yiquan worlds we are seeing more and more American qigongers and marital artists who reject any traditional Chinese ideas about how studying a martial art could improve your humanity or your health.

We now have qigong Atheists with a puritanical edge.

Tai Chi and Science

Here is a fun article about the Motion and Gait Analyisis Laboritory at Stanford University.

"Stanford Researchers Record 'Optimal Force' of Tai Chi Master"

The picture is of Chen Taijiquan teacher Chen Xiang, I don't know much about him but he is a senior student of Feng Zhiqiang so he is the gongfu brother of one of my teachers Zhang Xuixin.

I love these devices they have for learning about human movement. I also love that we now have scientific "proof" that Taijiquan is the most efficient movement in the world. (OK I think the article gets a little too enthusiastic but it's still a fun quote.)

It also raises the idea that taijiquan is a form of technology itself. Theory, and there is a fair amount of it, is subordinate to the technology. In fact, the technology is just a continuous transmission of movement experiments and experiences.

Medicine can't explain taijiquan, and probably these scientists won't be able to either, but they may accumulate some really interesting data that could lead to new technologies. And by technologies I mean both tools and movement techniques.  (My modest dream is that a Stanford scientist will someday say that muscle building is not necessarily smart.)
Since this center also studies gait, I would love to see what they think of baguazhang walking technique.  I think this is their main public website, look they have blogs too!

Update:  Here is the Video

Winter Training

Winter is for Storing Qi.  Winter is the time to just maintain your practice.  At this time we try not to lose anything we’ve developed or gained, and of course we try not to get injured.  It is the time to practice lots of stillness.  This kind of practice is called returning to the root, stillness "tonifies" the Kidneys.  In contrast it is also the time to perfect circulation.  Lots of Winter practices have to do with testing or improving circulation, they include, various types of bathing, scrubbing, pounding, slapping, scraping, shaking, etc...
When Winter comes I will share some techniques for improving circulation and developing vigorous weiqi (the qi on the surface of the body.)

Why do we practice differently in different seasons?  Does it have a benefit?  Is there some fruition?