Fight to the Death

Is push-hands a fight to the death or an intimate bonding experience where you try to get your partner to blush?

That depends on what rule set you are using. The rule set you choose will be determined by your view-- that base or root which orients you towards experience.

People whose primary orientation is health, are often worriers. Push-hands is just not self-centered enough for them. Put in a push-hands situation, they will be flimsy and blasé. They'll be thinking, "Why would I want to puuuush you?"

People who see life as a struggle will be looking for an advantage because "Baby, if you aren't on top, you're on the bottom!"

Nobody holds on to the same view all the time, it would be too exhausting. I often teach push-hands from the view that aggression is a naturally occurring process which obscures subtlety. Aggression makes it more difficult to see or feel what is happening. At the same time, this view is not a rejection of aggression, after all who wants to live in a world where everything is subtle? A world without sci-fi or punk rock? (OK, I know the answer, Buddhists right?)

So from this view, the rule set should be designed to bring out an aggressive intent which consistantly loses to a less aggressive intent.

I know some of you are reading this and thinking, "Come on, how is that going to train killers?" or "How could we apply that idea to produce the worlds greatest fighter?"

Is it possible that the weakest approach is destine to prevail? This is not about me claiming to know.  It's about having fun trying.

But let's return to the beginning and look at the question of how people determine their rule sets for push-hands.

I was one of several people teaching at a retreat and after class a guy wanted to push-hands with me. He was strong and thin, about 5 inches taller than me and about 30 lbs heavier. He had been practicing martial arts all his life. We agreed on fixed foot rules. As I filled in his empty spaces, he would duck and twist rather than lose his footing. This is what my students and I call, "losing your frame." If I want to win in such a situation (at least at the jin level of practice) I have to apply either shoulder attack, elbow attack, or split. All three types of techniques could be considered an increase in aggression because they have a high probability of producing an injury in the opponent. Since I didn't want to hurt him, I didn't apply those techniques and I didn't win. But he really wanted to win and so after one of these duck-twists his stiff hand came up and hit me in the jaw chipping my tooth.

Afterwards he told me that he usually practices push-hands with a mouth piece. Later he told one of my students that all of his teeth were knocked out, he had false teeth.

Over the years I've had many push-hands matches which I lost because I would not up the aggression when the other person did. In all cases, at the point in which we were playing by the same set of rules, I was winning, but as the rules changed I accepted the loss.

Kuo-lien Ying said, "You can't convince someone that martial arts works if they don't want to be convinced." They will always have a reason why that wasn't the "real thing."

When I'm teaching I give myself handicaps. I create rule sets which allow the student to win if they catch me being aggressive. For instance, rather than trying to sink below my student, I may sink my qi to exactly the level they are sinking to. I'll take out all the tricks I know and try to use the simplest clearest techniques. If I win, the student has a better chance of understanding why. If I lose, the student should be able to show where my defect was.

If my students start to win by aggression I'll change the rule set and my handicap so that they are always looking for the less aggressive way to win.  (People are often so in love with their aggressive strategies, they have so much fun losing, that it takes a long time to get them to progress. )
Unfortunately you can't do that with a friendly challenger from another school, you have to work with whatever rule set you have in common and hope they don't try to change the rules halfway through.

Again, it is not that winning by aggression is bad, we are always winning by aggression even if that aggression is really really subtle.

What is the fruition of this practice? Is it a skill? Do you get really really good at it? The answer to those questions will depend on your view (that which orients you towards experience).

Clearly a fruition for me has been that I have a choice about whether to react aggressively. That choice may have always been there, but I doubt I would have taken it if I hadn't done the practice. Another fruition is that I welcome aggression rather than rejecting it or attempting to flee it or dominate it. Students are free to explore aggression in my classes, if it comes up we play with it.  And that's true in my daily life too.

Is that a skill?  Am I good at it?  The thing about push-hands is that the moment you kinesthetically understand a skill, it becomes a form of aggression--such that-- if you recognize that skill  in your opponent, you can use it to defeat him/her.  If you catch your opponent using a skill you understand, you can easily defeat them in push-hands.  So skill accumulation is not personal, you don't own it, it is something you are learning to recognize.  A skill is something which will cause you to blush if you get caught using it.  Like an old cheesy pick-up line you thought was original.

Breath

Dave from Formosa Neijia asked why I didn't mention breathing as a method for lowering heart rate in the previous post about the heart.

First of all, yes, labored breathing is an indicator that you are over working the heart. But if you are panting, or gasping you have gone too far. In other words it is not a very good indicator of over work because the heart has to be pumping too fast for a while before it effects the breath.

To extend the classic Chinese metaphor. The heart is the Emperor and the lungs are the Ministers. If the Emperor is acting inappropriately, the Ministers are likely to be indulgent for a while and they'll try dropping subtle hints before they run into court shouting.

But all of this misses the point that liver stagnation is rampant everywhere there is a booming service economy and cheep food! (For those of you who don't speak Traditional Chinese Medicine Lingoâ„¢, Couch Potatoismâ„¢ is the modern slang term for liver stagnation.) People with liver stagnation need to breath hard! They need vigor. They need to get their hearts pumping. They need to stimulate the liver to surge blood in and out of their limbs. They need to shout at something other than the TV set.

Another reason I didn't mention breathing in the previous post about the heart is that breathing practices are too strong and very hard to generalize about. I have two basic teachings about breathing: 1) Yin Proceeds Yang. 2) "Breath like the silk spinner and the jade carver."
Teaching about breathing is highly individual. If you have ever had an injury to your pelvis, shoulder, neck, ribs, or spine, there is a high probability that it changed your breathing. When injuries occur the breath immediately comes in to numb the area and increase blood flow. It is a bit of a mystery to me why these injuries linger so long in the way a person breathes, but they do. So teaching breathing is highly personal and esoteric.

In The Fundamentals of Pa Kua Chang by Park Bok Nam and Dan Miller they outline a systematic way of developing breathing. They start with one type of breathing and then move to another and then another. But they are very careful to point out that when you switch from one type of breathing to another has to be decided by a teacher who is monitoring your progress closely. In other words, the method can't really be systematized, it is esoteric.

In fact, over many years, unmonitored breathing practices can be harmful to the heart. I'm thinking particularly of taijiquan and yoga instructors who guide their students to breathe into the arms.

While I'm on a roll I should also point out that during intense exercise the muscles and the heart/brain compete for blood.  Since the heart/brain is more important, your body will close off the perineum at the base of your pelvis in order to restrict circulation into the legs, and sometimes it will do the same thing at the armpits.  You will know this has been happening to you if after exercising you feel all "tingly" in the limbs.

The Heart

Summer is the season of the heart and bitter is the flavor recommended to help with the transition into Summer. In Summer the main change in our practice is that we try not to sweat.

The average human heart beats about 3 billion times and then it stops. The logic of doing exercise which increases the speed at which your heart beats is that after you finish exercising your heart will beat slower than it would have if you hadn't exercised at all. So although you'll use up a whole bunch of beats in that hour of aerobics, you'll more than regain the number of beats you lost in the 23 hours until your next workout. If you exercise regularly it will likely take you more years to reach 3 billion beats.
It's a good theory.

My sister is a swimmer. She loves to race and she trains hard. One of the ways she trains endurance is that she will time herself swimming a given distance as fast as she can. She then immediately takes her pulse. Instead of trying to swim faster the next time, she tries to swim the same distance in the same time, but with a lower heart rate.

Chinese martial arts, particularly the internal arts of bagua, xingyi, and taijiquan, use a simular strategy during the summer months. We try to practice as fast as we can without increasing our heart rates. Some practitioners actually take their pulse in the "play the pipa" posture or another posture where the fingers go to the wrist. But that isn't necessary.

With a little practice it is possible to become very sensitive to the feeling of the pores of your skin opening and closing. You can in fact gain some control over this process, but simply monitoring your pores will tell you if your heart rate is increasing. Of course the pores open to release sweat, and that is what is meant by the proscription to "practice not sweating."

Another way to lower your heart rate, improve your stamina and perhaps lengthen your life span is to attend to the center of your palms. The acupuncture point on the center of your palm is actually about one inch in diameter. It is called the Laogong point (Pericardium 8) and it is associated with the heart. (The name Laogong means "palace of toil.") The center of the palm should remain relaxed. If it hardens, it is likely that your heart is working harder. You can feel your heart in your palms, you can feel an increase in blood surge. You can even feel your pulse continuously while you are doing the form, but that isn't recommended because it requires excessive concentration, which isn't very relaxing.
In bagua, xingyi, and taijiquan (most obviously in the movement lu), the center of the palm is actually pulled back. This can be done manually by expanding the elbow which creates a vaccum which then sucks the center of the palm back up toward the elbow. But that just helps you get the feeling. In actual practice the martial arts postures allow the heart to move effortlessly backwards and down (the kidneys move forward and up) creating a feeling of connectedness between your palms and your heart.

Note: There is no way someone with this knowledge could get carpel tunnel syndrome.

The Endocrine System

This week I'm taking a three day workshop on the Endocrine System with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in Berkeley.

I'll have more to say about it after I've assimilated some of the material.  The one thing I am prepared to say now is that the endocrine system is a source of seemingly effortless power.  What in Chinese is called the kua, the area around the inside of the hips, includes the gonads.  It's the source of what we martial artist call cojones.

Sichuan Earth Quake

I wish to extend my deepest sympathies to the victims of the Earthquake in China.  I lived and traveled around Sichuan for two months in the Summer of 2001.  The people I met were wonderful.  Compared to the loss of life I'm reading about everyday, the two reports below are minor, but I thought my readers would like to know.
I visited Sanxingdui when I was there, I just saw this brief report:

Sanxingdui Ruins Museum, the age-old heritage site, became one of the victims of the Monday earthquake in western China.

I also received this email from a local Chinese herb importer, Emmanuel Segmen:

It's worse than we had imagined. If you follow the map north to Ganus
Province near to the Ming Xiang Mountain village where our dang gui
root comes from, you'll find the highways in ruins and the
communications lines down. I don't know how far that is, but it's at
least several hundred miles to the north by northeast from the
epicenter. We can't get our container of herbs down any road. The
agronomist in Gansu can not communicate with us. The people in
Lanzhou City think that maybe the roads will be passable by fall, but
no one is sure. Amazingly the land is crunched up quite badly up to
about 5 miles away from Lanzhou City. Good luck and good essence to
those living in Lanzhou. Amazing that infrastructure is wrecked 300
miles from the epicenter.

There are a lot of main growing sites that are out of touch right now
and possibly out of commission. Dang gui, gou qi zi, huang qi, huang
lian, tian qi and dang shen just to name the most obvious. We had to
go to those very mountains in western Sichuan Province to find clean
haung lian. It may be a long time before we see that herb again in
it's better format. It takes seven years to grow it.

My thoughts are with you Sichuan.

Hunch Back Masters

When Taijiquan was still new to Westerners, a few Masters claimed that the reason they had pot bellies was because they had so much qi.

We are wiser now. Relaxing the abdominal muscles and breathing into the the lower dantian is quite a change for some people, it may make some people feel fat, or even reveal a little extra flesh that was previously "sucked in." But needless to say at this point in history, cultivating qi will not give you a pot belly. Eating too many greasy donuts is and has always been the most likely cause of that.

But if you look at videos of old masters on, for instance, DPGDPG's Youtube page you'll see quite a few with hunch backs. Age itself causes bone degeneration, and no doubt some of these masters have suffered from starvation, spinal injuries or worse. Still I'm suspicious.

Could the hunch back be from bad training they participated in at some time in their lives? If that is the case, I would hope they let their students in on their errors so that these mistakes don't get passed on to future generations.

I've seen a lot of martial artists who take the weight of their arms in their upper spines. With higher level martial arts it is important that the practitioner takes none of his own weight in his or her joints. All the weight of the arms and head should pour down through the body so that there is no pressure on the joints or the bones.

Update: I wrote this blog about three months ago. I thought it was too mean so I hid it. But now that it resurfaced on it's own (I gave it a date way in the future) I think it's good food for thought--even if most masters don't actually have hunched backs.

Acupuncture Healthcare

My partner Sarah Halverstandt has just opened a new Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic. If you are in San Francisco come on down for the party. I'll be giving a talk on the heart for about 20 minutes, there will be food, music, and free gifts.

What's new?

Acupuncture Healthcare Open House!! You are cordially invited to our Grand Opening Celebration! This Saturday, May 17th, from 2-5pm : 2146 B Sutter Street, San Francisco!

Training tip

I've decided to add a new category called training tips.  These will obviously consist of preliminary steps one can take to achieve perfection.
Try to connect your arm to the opposite side ribs in everything you practice-- forms, single movement  practice, resistance practice, push-hands, opening the car door, whatever.

The bones naturally spiral in such a way that the opposite side ribs are often more important for support and connection than the same side ribs are.  When using both arms, this practice will give you the feeling that your arms are crossing on the inside--since each arm is extending and contracting from the opposite side ribs simultaneously.

It will also give you the feeling of having more leverage in push-hands because your arm is effectively longer. Enjoy.

Notice: In the picture from DKImages, the force goes from the left forward knuckle to the right side of the upper back.

Prowess

I've been thinking a lot about prowess lately. The dissertation Martial Gods and Magic Swords, by Avron Boretz got me going on it. This is a difficult work to review, especially since I had to return it to inter-library loan a few days ago.

The classical explanation of the basic gongfu bow or greeting is that you are covering your right fist, which represents maximum explosive power, with your left hand, which represents the commitment and ability to control that power.

Wen, the left hand, culture, writing, government, civility; juxtaposed with Wu, the right hand, raw power, martial, chaotic, military.

Historically governments, and scholars generally had an interest in having us believe that Wen naturally dominates Wu, and that we should fear the opposite situation. Certainly, the Daoist pantheon gives hierarchical precedent to gods in civil roles and lower status to gods in military or punishment roles, and even lower status to demons and chaotic forces.

But reality on earth is not always so simple, nor should it be. There are no true earthly hierarchies.

Avron Boretz is, I think, the first martial artist to really dive into the blended subject of ethnology and history. As a martial artist and a scholar, he managed to get himself joined up with a cult dedicated to The Dark Lord (I kid you not, but in Chinese it would be Xuandi) in a small town in Northern Taiwan. All the inner cult members were martial artists and many of them were involved in crime, like smuggling and prostitution, fringe of society stuff. They were a brotherhood of sworn allegiance, prone to occasional fighting with other brotherhoods.  In other words, small time gangsters.
The book takes a hard look at the role of rituals in creating feelings of prowess in men who are otherwise kind of marginal. Because he got quite close to these guys, he writes about many different aspects of the cult. They all go out together to do exorcisms dressed up in costumes as demon generals. Sometimes they get possessed by the demon general they are representing. They all wear thick make-up and go into trance, but they only occasionally become possessed.

One of the ways they determine if a possession is authentic is that the person who was possessed has no memory of it.

The second to last chapter kind of surprised me. It is all about partying with the boys. Heavy drinking nearly every night, women, money, status-- all ways that men demonstrate their prowess.

The only time I have done things I have no memory of was after drinking large amounts of alcohol. I wonder if that is what it is like to be possessed. My experience of it was just the opposite of prowess, it was extreme embarrassment. But I have met people who are proud of their black-out moments, perhaps for some rather desperate people, blacking out could be a form of prowess.

Martial arts and alcohol, seems like a bad combo, but so do sports and alcohol and we all know those games used to be played by very drunk individuals.

These martial dances are not martial arts, but they are displays of prowess and they do have many similarities to the martial arts I practice.

One interesting example is the Big Dipper step, or Seven Star step. When a group of demon generals approaches a house or a business they are about to do an exorcism on, they approach it doing the Seven Star step (chixing bu). They then stamp on the ground and run across the threshold into the building.

I realized that everyone of my Northern Shaolin forms begins with a Seven Star step.  In Northern Shaolin, first we stamp on the ground and sink into cat stance, which is like stepping over a threshold. Then our hands shoot out and break apart, as if we were breaking through double doors or the opening in a curtain, and we run three steps, as if we were running into a building or onto a stage, and we do the "monk clears his sleeves" action. I counted it out and it is exactly seven steps. Cool huh?

UPDATE: This is now a book! Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters!

Placebo vs. Placebo

Here is an article about placebo trials that acknowledges ritual may be the decisive factor in a lot of healing, and side effects too.

After 10 weeks, subjects taking sham pills said their pain decreased an average of 1.50 points on the 10-point scale. After 8 weeks, those receiving fake acupuncture reported a drop of 2.64 points. In other words, not receiving acupuncture reduces pain more than not taking drugs.