Feelin' Shen

The concept of Shen has so many meanings in Chinese that it probably deserves a whole book. The shen I'm talking about here is the one that is most often translated "spirit" and is the lighter more expansive aspect of qi. (I'm not going to attempt a comprehensive definition.)

One way to explain shen is to say that it is "how we feel space." During moments of extreme fear our shen closes in on us like plastic wrap around our bodies, in English we use the term petrified to describe this feeling. Conversely, when we are in a warm safe environment with a spectacular view in all directions our shen expands way off into the distance.

(Humans are complex creatures. Some people seek out that petrified feeling, perhaps because they treasure the release which happens when the fear finally lets go and turns to exhilaration. People with agoraphobia become petrified at even the thought of wide open spaces.)

Another way to think about shen is what we sometimes call "body image," that is, the way we feel about and perceive our bodies. Skill in martial arts involves the ability to change your own body image as well as the ability to manipulate other peoples' body image. Few people could step into the ring with Mike Tyson and not feel a twinge weakness and fragility. A great fighter, just like a great actor, can make you feel like you are "king of the world" one moment and "a cockroach under a boot" the next.

I believe that hormones have a big effect on shen. How many of us have known a slender woman who once a month asks if we think she is fat? The first time this happens we laugh and say, "Yeah your a regular hippo." The second time this happens we say, "No, honey, of course not," only to be accused of being patronizing or worse. No doubt most of us have learned, through trial and error, that a failure to respond will be received as "ignoring," and that the best response is an audible but non-verbal response:

"Ahhh," can work but risks implying agreement as in, "Ahhh, I see what you mean."
"Oohhh, can also work but might be interpreted as "Oohh, interesting," which would be patronizing again.
The correct response is, "Uuuhh?" exuding slight confusion coupled with perfect acceptance of the statement.

It should be obvious at this point that shen is affected by physical training, diet and sleep. And also that it is very hard to measure analytically.

One of my students claimed not to be aware of shen for several years until we had a conversation about tension in the center of her back. She broke into a story about how when she was a little kid there was a certain place in the hallway of her house that she would pass through quickly because she always got this feeling that someone (or something) was going to stab her in the back. She overcame the fear by permanantly holding a little bit of tension in that one spot on her back. She relayed that her sister felt and did the same.

Chinese cosmology asserts that all shen experiences have a physical body component and all physical body experiences have a shen component. They are inseparable.

Are young intellectuals 'possessed'?

I couldn't resist this article from The China Post by a guy named Joe Hung.  Is it possible (with a name like that) Mr. Hung is in the wrong profession? (I think I would go with the pinyin spelling: Heng.)

Anyway, he seems to have a fantasy vision of a historical China where people were rational and mental problems didn't exist. Well, it's kind of true, nobody called them mental problems. They called them "Shen Disturbances." No society of humans has ever been rational. Most of us have moments of rational thinking.  People have built Lunar-Landers facilitated by institutions like NASA dedicated to rational thinking. But has anyone met a fully rational human being? (I'm thinking right now about a certain female astronaut who recently wore diapers on a cross-country drive.)

That's why I was shocked to learn that in Taiwan at least one out of every four university students, or young intellectuals who should belong to the class of literati in imperial China, is "depressed enough to benefit from assistance" of one kind or the other. That information was found, among other things, by a John Tung Foundation survey conducted between last May and June. An even more shocking finding was that the kinds of assistance these depressed young intellectuals are seeking include "divination" and "exorcism."

The survey shows at least 1.8 percent and a slightly lower 1.7 percent of the 6,960 respondents rely on divination and exorcism, respectively, for help in dealing with depression. Those who wish to seek counseling from school counselors account for a mere 2.3 percent, much fewer than another 3.3 percent of the students chanting sutras and/or praying for divine help. Still another 2.8 percent believe their folklore religion -- animism, or more often than not, outright superstition -- can cure their depression. Altogether, 11.9 percent of Taiwan's young intellectuals want supernatural powers to get rid of their psychiatric disorder.

Mr. Hung seems quite convinced that exorcism doesn't work, while I'm pretty sure therapy doesn't work either. Actually talisman, divination, drugs, exorcism, therapy--it all works sometimes--it can work when people actually make and follow through on new commitments. But don't be surprised to find humans dedicated to something irrational. The only people who could be surprised by that are people who aren't paying attention.

The Spinal Ligaments

Martial Development and Formosa Neijia (this too) have recently posted about the tail bone. Here is my previous post on the subject.

Chris at Martial Development makes the point that martial artists often get stuck in the idea that their tail bone should be forward. He suggests that people focus on lifting the head and just relax the tail bone.

Unfortunately martial arts also get stuck in the idea of lifting the head which can lead to stiffness or over straightening. As we used to say in the dance world, "Straight is a look, not a feeling." (Think about that one.)

Speaking anatomically for a moment, there are four ligaments which go from the top of the spine to bottom, directly on the center-line. A ligament is a very strong flexible piece of tissue that connects bone to bone. It is not elastic! If a ligament stretches it is unlikely to stretch back. That's why all the muscles tighten up (or lock down if you prefer) around a ligament that is getting over worked.

Each ligament in the spine can be felt. And each ligament can be felt simultaneously for even tension all the way up and down the spine.

So tucking, or straightening, or lifting up can all be wrong if they slacken or tighten one group of ligaments. The spine works as a whole unit, so it is usually a mistake to try to move just one part. Each vertebral-body (bone) can tilt forward or backwards somewhat like Venetian blinds.

But at a higher level if you are thinking inside the body about the details of anatomy you are making the mistake of "letting the spirit leave the body." The same goes for lifting up the head or sinking the tail bone. The mind or the "shen" goes out in all directions, if it goes up (like a rainbow fountain) without obstruction, the spine will follow--like a hungry tiger to its prey.

The notes for the cross section above are here:

Figure 10. A sagittal view of the human thoracic spinal cord, showing the (1) intervertebral discs, (2) vertebral bodies, (3) dura, (4) epidural space, (5) spinal cord, and (6) subdural space. A thick ligament, the anterior longitudinal ligament forms the anterior border of the spinal column. The posterior longitudinal ligament form the posterior border of the vertebral bodies.

What We Like About Food

Seeing as Thanksgiving is coming up in the U.S.A., here is a post on food and culture that might reveal something about gongfu as well.

Americans are most concerned with the way food tastes in their mouth. Thus ice cream is a big hit, and over eating is funny.

Chinese are most concerned with the way food feels once it enters their stomach. Thus the inexpensive noisy restaurant around the corner, which is always packed, is decorated with intensionally unappealing bright orange and green triangles and circles. Why waste money on decor, put your effort in to cooking.
Japanese are most concerned with food appearance and texture. Each type of food has its own rituals of presentation, and people pay close attention to how it feels in their mouth. When eggs are used in sushi they layer them, pouring the beaten eggs from up high multiple times. It doesn't effect the taste just the texture. Of course Japanese eggs also happen to be the best I've ever tasted, but that is because eggs are treated with ritual care.

Koreans are most concerned with survivability. For Koreans to enjoy a meal, there has to be a question in the back of their mind about whether they can actually survive it. Think live octopus! The national dish, Kimchi is huge amounts of red pepper, garlic, something dangerious like raw crab,and a little bit of cabbage--all mixed together and then left to ferment.

Becoming a Taijiquan Transformer

Here is the last installment of the interview I did with George Xu where he talks about the meaning of the Taijiquan Classics, being quiet and in action, being a big meatball in the sky, and how to become a Transformer!

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Just for fun I'm posting this write-up I did for a one day class I'm going to teach to a private group at the end of the month. It's fun:

Taijiquan (also written T’ai Chi Ch’uan or just "Taichi") is one of many traditional Chinese long-life practices which explore the human relationship to nature. When taijiquan is performed daily in conjunction with a healthy diet, times of rest, and regular sleep, it becomes a stable platform for embracing simplicity in the midst of the exciting chaos of modern life.

Taijiquan is a martial art that uses our natural softness and weakness to develop flexibility and integrate the power of the whole body so that everything moves as one. The movements of taijiquan simulate a journey back to the womb, to a state of primordial animation, where we explore the very roots of aggression and how it arises in the body. Traditional Chinese cosmology posits that because all things are mutually self-re-creating, the most potent position to be in is one of interconnected non-action. This potent non-aggressive position is called wuwei

Please join Scott P. Phillips as he leads some fun simple exercises designed to improve circulation, unravel tension and leave us feeling self-possessed.

George Xu's Biggest Mistake

Here is Part 2 of my interview with George Xu.

170ith Post (am I Gay or Chinese?)

This is my 170ith post. I have been writing everyday for half a year. Last month my blog averaged 900 hits per day. I took a little break over the last few days, not because I didn't have anything to write about, but because I just didn't want to sit down at the computer.

Besides being social, I've been reading papers from a recent conference on Daoism and I pulled out my video camera → so I'll have some more video for you soon.
Last week I had a number of server problems which are unsolved, floating in the air. I know very little about computers really, but I manged to add a few plug-ins like this colored highlighting. I suppose I will learn eventually. Meanwhile I'd like to point out that although my list of categories on the right hand column is rather general, the search box works really well. For instance, you can search for every mention of the word "fear," and get an interesting list, or if you like try "death" or "medicine"
I've also been lax about responding to comments, kind of like how some people get behind on their emails and just decide to forget about them. But that reminds me, Dave over at Formosa Neijia asked me a question I didn't have an answer for:

Why didn't I mention homosexuality in my post about the Rabbit God (the Chinese God of Gays)? Why did I do that? For one, I wanted to see if people were following my links. But I think I was also internally conflicted about how I should be talking about gayness to an international audience.

I'm pretty sure that 10% of my international audience is gay and at least 20% of my Youtube audience is gay but in the closet. I'm not myself gay (yet) but I do have a rainbow flag bumper-sticker on my car. This is not just so that if someone cuts me off in traffic I can claim it is a hate crime. No, I actually have an affinity with gayness. As a martial artist who hardly ever gets a chance to really test his skills, I have been hoping that someone will attack me for being gay and I will have a righteous reason to demonstrate my martial superiority!

This reminds me of a rather surprising question which I get quite often: Am I Chinese?

This question is all the more surprising because it is more often than not Chinese Elementary School children or their parents who are asking me the question. Chinese-ness is not as well defined as one might think.

I was teasing a friend of mine from Sichuan the other day. The word Chinese doesn't really exist in Chinese. There is Zhong guoren which means "Center Country People," and there is the term "Han," which is sort of like an ethnicity because citizens of "the Center Country" who do not identify as Han are considered ethnic minorities. (The term Han is really a reference to the first long lasting historic dynasty, the Han Dynasty which lasted 400 years from about 200 BCE to about 200 CE.) So I asked my friend from Sichuan how long her family has been Han and she said, "We registered about 400 years ago during the last part of the Ming Dynasty." I'm not sure there are reliable numbers available, but I'd bet at least half of China could make a simular admission.

I put the question "What makes a person Chinese?" to a rather well informed scholar and she said, "It is clearly not one ethnic group, and clearly not a language either. The cohesive fabric could well be the written language, but most people for most of history have been illiterate. So I would have to say it is Qigong! What all Chinese communities have in common is that people get up in the morning and do long-life movement routines."

Being literate in Chinese written language has some merit as a definition of Chinese-ness. For 2000 years up until the 1800's China had the highest percentage of literate people in the world (unless you include Jews which have had nearly 100% literacy for men for nearly 2000 years.)
I asked a woman from Taiwan if she was Han, and she said "No, my people originally (500 years ago) came form South China which was never part of the Han Dynasty. It would be better to call me Tang! (After the Tang Dynasty 600-900 CE.)

So as the gongfu teacher in several Elementary schools, the answer I usually give to the question, "Are you Chinese?" is: "That depends on how you define Chinese." Which has so far satisfied all inquires.

Zhang Daoling

This is a continuation of my series answering basic questions about Daoism.

Who Was Zhang Daoling?
Zhang Daoling is the founder of Religious Daoism (Daojiao), the Celestial Masters (Tianshidao) and Orthrodox Daoism (Zhengyidao). All Daoist lineages trace their inspiration back to him. He was born in Eastern China and as a child studied with five fangshi, which was a general term used for shaman-doctors. These fangshi were probably experts in ritual, healing, and trance. Still in his youth, Zhang traveled to Western China, to the area we know as Sichuan. There he went into solo retreat in a cave on Heron Call Mountain (Hemingshan).

The revelations of Lao Jun
When Zhang Daoling came out of retreat in 142 CE he began teaching publicly and healing the sick. He said that he had met Lao Jun (Lord Lao), the source and the original inspiration for the Daodejing. His teaching centered on the meaning of the Daodejing, the text was read aloud so that even the illiterate could memorize it.

True for all time and in all eras
Zhang taught that Lao Jun’s revelations had appeared to humans many times throughout history, transmitted through ‘seed people,’ such as himself and Laozi the original author/compiler of the Daodejing. Zhang taught that the Daodejing was the perfect expression of Lao Jun for the time it was written; however, the text was by Zhang’s time nearly 500 years old and the original inspiration had become occluded. Thus he was inspired to reveal its true meaning through his teachings and commentaries. He further taught that new expressions of this essential teaching would continue to appear in each era because these revelations are both true and always available. The characteristics of each era are different and so the same essential teaching may manifest in different ways at different times.

Healing by Commitment
Zhang performed healing ceremonies in which part of the healing process was a commitment on the part of the person being healed to change their behavior. He began the method of making written talismanic contracts called fu, which were burned, put in water, or buried in the earth as a way to reify peoples new commitments. This brought about healing among his followers. Some of the talismanic style of writing he produced is still copied and used today.

A Daoist Country
Zhang Daoling’s following grew steadily and his teachings were carried on by his descendants. By the time of his grandson Zhang Lu, the Celestial Masters had founded a small country. Each family contributed five pecks (a bushel) of rice, and thus for a time early Daoism was called the Five Pecks of Rice school. Zhang Daoling is still represented in ritual as a bowl of rice with the tip of a sword stuck straight down into it.

The country they founded was approximately 40 miles across, was multi-ethnic, and from what we know it was administered very successfully from 190 until 215 CE. When the general Cao Cao swept across China with a huge army, Zhang Lu personally rode out to meet him and the two forged an agreement. The Wei Dynasty which Cao Cao founded was short lived (215-266) but his agreement with Zhang Lu allowed Daoist priests to be spread throughout every part China.

Sacred Texts
Zhang Daoling and Zhang Lu both wrote commentaries on the Daodejing which are still read today (though parts of each have been lost). Zhang Lu is the author of several of Daoism’s founding texts, including the Xiang’er Precepts and The Commandments and Admonitions for the Families of the Great Dao.

Zhang Daoling, his sons, his grandsons and all of their wives reach the highest level of xian known as "rising up in broad daylight with one’s dogs and chickens!" (Xian is usually translated ‘immortality’ or ‘transcendence’.)

A Useful Metaphor

Few people know that as a teenager I joined the Sea Scouts where I crewed on a 100 year old sailing whale boat (see picture, it was black back in my day.)

I got a lot of practice rowing in small boats filled to the gunwales with gear, in wind with choppy seas. If you waste a stroke by trying to muscle it or by inserting your oar into the water at the wrong angle or by digging too deep, you loose several strokes. Efficiency is the only way to get headway in rough seas. Those were the days.

We worked on this all wooden boat and took really good care of it. When we tied the boat up to the dock we used a method called a spring-line. This requires four ropes (called lines on a boat). Each rope if tightened by itself will pull one part of the boat in toward the dock and push another part outward. By balancing the tension between all four lines there is a magic spot where all the ropes are a little slack, and yet the boat is sprung away from the dock. If you crank down on all the ropes or even just one, the beautifully finished and finely tuned boat will crunch against the dock and your hair will stand on end. But if you find that perfect balanced tension the boat floats effortlessly just off the dock.

The coast guard has an O.K. picture of it.

Think of your shoulder as a boat floating in water tied to the dock using a spring-line. The ropes are the little muscles that go between the proximal part of your upper-arm bone (humerus) and both the front and back parts of your shoulder blade(scapula). All the ropes must be loose and yet balanced with all the other ropes, and then the shoulder will float without pulling away and without crunching.

Flexibility

Practicing flexibility is a Daoist Precept. Still, I'm kind of down on yoga. To me, true physical flexibility is the range of motion that you can use to express an emotion, a feeling, or a task. The feeling most people express when they are doing yoga is pain. (I know, it feels soooo good afterwards.)

Let me be the first to admit that if you are already in pain, stretching may be the simplest and most straightforward way to temporarily get rid of it. Fair enough. But until you change the regular activity (or inactivity) which is causing the pain, the pain will keep returning.

Dance is generally a good way to develop flexibility. Unfortunately the standards of ballet and most modern dance are based on teenage bodies, which are far more pliant than adult bodies. Thus injuries are too common. But there are many different types of dance.

I know most martial artists are afraid of dance, but incidentally I was at a serious Kick-boxing gym last night where fighters were jumping rope and doing endurance training. I'm willing to bet that any professional ballet dancer can beat these fighters in an endurance match.

I suspect that most people will not understand what I am saying because they don't have the experience. Let me put it another way. If it hurts, it is wrong. If it disconnects the limbs from the movement of the torso, it is wrong.

If Elvis were alive today he would have put it this way: If your "downward dog" can't chase rabbits (or at least scamper around the kitchen), he ain't no friend of mine.

I know that was some tough talk, but if you still love stretching (think pain), contortion is a great option! San Francisco now has a world class contortion training program, The Circus Center.  Make sure you scroll down to the middle of the Adult classes part of the schedule where it says Advanced Contortion and Mongolian Contortion. This is the real deal!

(Also, yesterday I attended a fabulous show at The Circus Center's Clown Conservatory, for those of you into the high art of clowning!)