Tendon Twisting

This is a continuation of the series on jin, that started below with a discussion of pulsing.

Twisting integrates the body and is essential to make the mechanics of Taijiquan operative. Most sports, and even most martial arts, do not emphasis twisting enough. Twisting integrates the body because as you twist you take the slack out of tendons; if all the tendons throughout the body have an equal amount of twisting, the movement of the hand will be simultaneous with the movement of the foot.

This principle can be simply illustrated by stepping on one end of a towel and twisting the other end until it is like a thick rope. Movement at one end of the towel while it is slack at best sends a wave through the towel. After you have twisted it the whole thing moves as one flexible hunk.

Twisting unevenly will cause lots of damage. That's how joint locks and breaks work. Practice on a chicken if you want. For instance, to bust the wrist, just twist it while immobilizing the elbow.

This practice is the main reason that Chinese martial artists do not have or need big bulging arm or leg muscles.

Again, twisting is part of jin, it creates underlying dynamic structure. It is not itself a source of power, it does make the use of power more efficient.

Image: I got the image of the towel from this Heller Bodywork site, they are making a different but related point about the process of balancing.

Joint Pulsing #2

If you practice pulsing all the joints in the body, with a partner and on your own, many aspects Taijiquan will come to life. This is considered an original qi (yuanqi) practice because it is really obvious that babies do joint pulsing all the time. Most people loose much of this pre/post-natal action as they mature.

The wonderful thing is that this buoyant mobility is recoverable, even at advanced ages, because it relies on fluids not muscles. (Of course older people loose fluids as they age too, but not as fast as muscle.)

From a fighting point of view joint pulsing really amps up one's ability to hit with a lot of force using very little movement, and no wind up. In other words, fajing.

On the down side, there is a tiny delay in between opening and closing the joints that can be exploited by a fast and sensitive opponent. So if you want to reach the top level, you will eventually have to phase out the pulsing.

Here are the 6 stages of becoming a joint pulsing superhero:

1. Make the joints open, make the joints close.


2. Make the joints close, let the joints open. (the second part is passive)


3. Make the joints open, let the joints close.


4. Put opening the joints inside of closing the joints, and put closing the joints inside of opening the joints.


5. Dissolve the closing and opening of the joints.


6. Dissolve the intention to open and close the joints.

Three Schools of Chinese Medicine

I have said before that most medicine comes from war.

Why? because that's when famine and pestulance are most likely to happen. That's when injuries, trauma, infections and disentary can be treated on mass. Infectious diseases have a habit of spreading quickly through troops living in close proximity to each other.

Knowledge about womens health, pediatrics and degenerative illness is more likely to be advanced during times of great wealth and prosperity.

Chinese village doctors were often part of a "big family," which meant that they were treating most of the descendants of known lineages. Because of this they were likely to see all the hereditary expressions of a particular genetic line. This made it possible to accumulate great knowledge about weaknesses and diseases which are inherited.

While medical knowledge in China was often past down father to son, and too often was secret. There is also a long tradition of publishing best practices.

Starting in the Tang Dynasty (600-900 CE), Chinese governments gave exams, and officially certified competent doctors.

The two dominant metaphors of Chinese medicine are the circulation system and the digestive system.

Circulation is associated with the North and acupuncture. It conceives of health in terms of a complex plumbing system, clogs, narrowing, pooling, not enough pressure, etc....

Digestion is associated with the South and herbal formulas. It conceives of all parts of the body in terms of digestive function, assimilation, elimination, appetite, fermentation, purification, etc....

A third metaphor, which tends to be associated with martial arts, is a well integrated structure. It conceives of every part of the body as having it's own optimal shape and way of moving. Each part contributes to a complete, well integrated whole moving form. If one part of the body is not moving the way it is supposed to, it will effect all other parts of the the structure. For instance, a liver that doesn't move like a jellyfish when active, will slowly, over years, change the shape and alignment of the bones. An injury to the neck will effect the dexterity of the hand.

Strength vs. Weakness

Many people find that the idea of "strength in softness" challenges everything they've ever been taught about how to be. When I say "experiment with cultivating weakness and not controlling outcomes," I really mean it. Embodying this may change your experience of the world and all the little things you do, like opening doors, picking up spoons, and brushing your teeth. I am not asking you to take what I am saying on faith, do your own experiments, trust your own experience.

That being said, it is not easy to communicate the "reason" we do certain practices, like standing still. I'm glad I didn't ask a lot of questions about the purpose of standing still when I first learned it. The truth is I made a bunch of assumptions, some of which were actually wrong. Fortunately in my case, I got help and figured it out. Most people hang on to their false assumptions (or their teachers misleading explanations) and end up disenchanted. (And here I mean both definitions of disenchanted.)

I'm not convinced that someone can understand the reasons for standing still until they have done it without fail for at least a year. Understanding would at that point emerge spontaneously in conversation. Perhaps I can sit here and type out a brilliant explanation of standing, but the truth is, it's too simple for that. The purpose of standing is that it reveals what we actually are.

Appetite and Discipline

One of the biggest challenges of being a teacher is that students are always trying to get me to equivocate. For instance, I say, "Practice standing completely still for one hour early in the morning, everyday, before you eat breakfast."

Some student will always want to know what will happen if they don't? I usually answer, "Sifu will kill you!" But they always laugh, and then ask what if they only stand for 20 minutes? or do it in the evening? or every other day?

The truth is, I don't know. I've always practiced the whole thing, without equivocation. I can guess or I can ask other teachers. But honestly, what I really know is what I've practiced. The reason I don't stop practicing is because I have a real appetite to practice as much as I do. I stand in the morning for the same reason I eat in the morning.

There is another way, and I've used it on solo retreats. It is called the Wandering of the Mare. I have several artist friends who live this way all the time. They eat when they are hungry, they sleep when they are sleepy, they paint, or read, or call up a friend totally spontaneously whenever they feel like it. I'm never surprised to hear that they have been up all night painting.

On a solo retreat, I'm the same way, I sleep until there is absolutely no more feeling to sleep, and then I close my eyes one more time to make sure. I sit still, or stand still, or walk the Baguazhang circle, until I'm done. No schedule, no limits.

But most of us work for a living. We have people to coordinate with.  We have to at least try to stay awake during meetings. Five days a week we have to get the kids off to school with a good breakfast and matching socks.

Hermits and anyone on a long, private retreat, can freely follow their appetites. Many of the most potent and profound Chinese disciplines were created by hermits. What to a hermit is natural discipline, may seem to us, living as we do in the world with other peoples needs and expectations, like "militaristic discipline." To spontaneously follow one's personal appetite(s) is to be in an on-again, off-again, conflict with the social world.

We might do better to think of Taijiquan, Baguazhang etc... as the "ritual resetting" of our appetites.  By "winding" us back to zero once a day, they allow us to follow our appetites spontaneously--within the social world.

Perfection

There is a line from the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) that goes:

The purist white is easily soiled.

or sometimes

The purist white appears soiled.

From earliest times, Daoism has played with the paradoxes inherent in the human quest for purity and perfection. During the Sung and Ming dynasties the Chinese government gave out official titles to Orthodox Daoists. (Actually, even at times when the government had an anti-Daoist outlook, Daoshi, invested priests, had the status of "prince" if they were dragged into a magistrate's court. When the British won capitulation at the end of the Opium Wars, one of their demands was that Christian Missionaries be given the same status in court as Daoists. This was later one of the grievances of the Boxer rebellion.)

Anyway the titles were funny like: The Perfected Immortal of the Purple Mist, or The Most Perfected Immortal of Mysterious Moon-light.

I lectured on perfection to this mornings class and at the end one of my students said, "My problem with perfection is that it is boring."

I've said before that Daoism is not a self-improvement scheme. But Daoism also doesn't reject self-improvement as an experiment. If a person has an "appetite" for self-improvement, Daoism has many methods for exploring that "appetite."

The problem with perfect alignment is that it is so easily disturbed. If your alignment is really perfect, you'll be totally thrown off by a little kid who crashes into you screaming and crying, "Help me rescue my dolly!"

For years I've practiced regulating my diet. One of the methods I used was to eat rice porridge (jook, congee, baijou) every morning as my main meal of the day. I'd look at my tongue, take my pulse and feel my appetite. Then I'd select different ingredients to go in the porridge, everything from mustard greens and beef stock, to chestnuts and pork-ribs. Still the base was the same and the additions were always based on bring me back to balance, really a type of purity.

My digestion was spectacular, and my practice really benefited from it. But I couldn't travel, or go out to eat. I went to stay at my sister's house for a few days. She made some fancy fried thing one morning and my tongue turned black. The variation was too much of a shock.

So after that I kept the same porridge diet, but twice a week I would spontaneously have something weird instead; like eggs, granola, or a cheese danish. This created a kind of syncopated jazz rhythm in my diet that allowed me to travel, eat-out, and experiment further afield.

The Daoist concept of "Perfection" is really about experiencing and accepting what we actually are.

Talisman (Fu)

Formosa Neijia posted the last two paragraphs of this article by the Author of Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals, Brian Kennedy.

The Dark side of Talismans
It was March of 2006. A pregnant woman and her unborn baby had been murdered. The Taiwanese police had narrowed their suspects down to one person, the boyfriend. A police raid is conducted on his house and the police find a most eerie thing when they burst through the doors.

The murderer has plastered hundreds of Taoist talismans over every square inch of his apartment. His purpose was obvious, at least to Taiwanese observers, and that was to protect himself from the ghost of his murdered girlfriend and their unborn murdered child.

Although Taoist priest and pundits were quick to try and distance "legitimate" Taiwanese Taoism from the dark evilness of the murderer, nonetheless folk belief in Taiwan is that such talismans are, for better or worse, "morally neutral," meaning they will work regardless of the motive or personal morality of the users. It is noticeable to any observer of Taiwanese Taoism or any observer of Taiwan's criminal element that the two things often go hand in glove. For example Taiwanese gangsters often wrap their illegal firearms or knives in Taoist talismans.

First of all let me recommend a really great Horror Movie on the subject, Double Vision (Taiwan, 2002) [review].

Kennedy is right that Talisman (as a whole category) are "morally neutral," but so are Emergency Rooms, Technology, and the Law. An emergency room will take anyone who bleeds.

Confucius listed four categories that he would not discuss. One of them was random/domestic violence. His reason was that it is so common, it happens everywhere to all types of people. The horrible scene above is all too common, a young man, probably in a possessive rage, kills his pregnant girlfriend. If the story is like so many others, he was instantly filled with unbearable guilt.

Kennedy says the Talisman are Daoist. It would be more accurate to say "Red-Hat Daoist," sometimes referred to as Wu, and in this blog what I have been calling Trans-mediums. However, there is no central authority in Daoism, so if someone puts on a black hat and calls themselves at black-hat-orthodox-Daoist, they may be able to get away with it, especially where people are uprooted from their traditional communities.

The Chinese term for Talisman is fu. Fu means contract. A fu, in this case, is a contract between the living and the unseen world. Those talisman he put up around the murder said something. Probably not "I'm sorry" and also probably not, "burn in hell," they were likely an attempt to protect the man from his own intense feelings of guilt. He was afraid, as anyone in that situation would be, that he was going to carry feelings of guilt for every minute of the rest of his life. The newly dead, had in a very real and even physical way, implanted themselves in his body.

These fu were likely a request that the dead be resolved as quickly as possible. When people die, especially young people, and especially people who die violently, they often leave intense unresolved problems, and feelings behind.

Does ritually creating and hanging a contract asking for resolution actually bring about resolution? I don't know, but I'll bet he is going to do some time behind bars.

footnote: The ad photo for Double Vision at the top, has a slogan for the English speaking audience about belief. It ain't in the movie.

Eyes and Baguazhang (continued)

In the fourth Palm Change (zhen), the eyes smoothly transition back and forth between looking far off into the distance and zeroing in on a point, like clouds forming and then dispersing and then forming again.

In the fifth Palm Change (li) the eyes are trained not to respond to, or get drawn off when arms come in and out of the field of vision. This is done by circling the arms in the coronal plane, while turning and walking. It is also used for training us to not blink when bursts of air or hands come suddenly toward the eyes.

In the sixth palm change (kan) the eyes do the same thing they do in the third palm change, but instead of spinning the body, the head looks spontaneously form side to side, creating a similar blur or whirl effect while doing the palm change.

Again, it is easy to imagine these uses of the eyes becoming different types of possession. The fourth, taken to extremes is what people who are manic look like after not sleeping for a few days.

The eyes of the fifth are important for any type of fighting, but would be dangerous walking through brush because we need to close our eyes quickly if a branch is snapping toward them. I know of an old Gongfu master who worked bank security and kept a bit of metal-filings dust in his pocket to throw in peoples eyes if necessary. Better hope your blink reflex is operating if that happens. Taken to a possessed extreme, these are the bug eyes we sometimes see on crazy people.

The eyes of the sixth can be many things, among them an Exorcist head spinning type of effect, also seen in African and Chinese possessions.

If it is not obvious already, there is some danger in trying these yourself. The danger is minor as long as you:

1. Are relaxed, the eyes should never ever feel like they are doing work.
2. Understand that you are learning what not to do.
3. Are comfortable trying to be just below average.
4. Know in your heart that cultivating weakness is O.K. because we humans are strong enough already.

What is a root (part 3)

• Using sensitivity to attach to a forward moving opponent and then spinning them off of one's center.

This type of rooting is also pretty easy to teach. There are a few keys that make it easier like getting your weight to one foot, matching the pressure at all points of contact with the person pushing, and being careful not to lean.

• Various types of dynamic integration which allow one to neutralize/dissolve or simply relax an opponent's attack.

This part of rooting is really infinite and there are many ways to do it. Both of the above methods are essentially about the relationship between two people and the ground. They can both be done while stepping. If you touch someone who is really good at this last type of "rooting" you will probably feel like there is no place to attack, but you will also feel like you have no way to attack.

The bigger problem however is that people try to use all of these types of rooting as a defensive strategy. A corollary of this problem is that people fight with their qi on their back instead of surrounding their opponent. Training the root is really practice for something you don't need to do.

Another way to put it is: It's a fun game which teaches you what not to do. In order to understand what not to do, you have to practice and develop a really good root!

What Demon Possessed me?

Here is an open thread to discuss blog/comment ethics...

If ever I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior; what demon possessed me that I behaved so well?-- Henry David Thoreau.

Kenny at Joanna's website wrote me an email and then posted a blog about it. I thought it was pretty funny and in good taste.

He brings up a good point, which is that if you don't get good at cooking in your thirties, your gongfu is going to suck in your 50's. Also, for you history buffs: The ubiquitous Chinese cooking implement known as the Wok, was originally a shield used by the military as a makeshift cooking pot.

As to sinking low enough to add a tag on the end of a certain person's comments, implying that the said person used a dictionary and found common ground with me. I have no regrets. If you bite, don't complain when the next blow comes in lower than you expected.

Challenges, disagreements, sarcasm, irony, modest rants, and even the occasional dig are all welcome in the comments section of my blog. But if you break "Queens Rules" and switch to "Rough-and-Tumble," that is, if you disregard my arguments and start ridiculing me, expect to have your comments edited to my pleasure.

"As thou soweth, so shall ye reap."

Update:  Now at the bottom of Kenny's blog Joanna has posted a few of the tamer comments she posted here claiming that I'm somehow afraid of her views, whatever.  I hesitate to say it... but (I'm already banned in China), anyone who is a Communist, as she claims to be, is almost certainly a liar too.