An Unwelcome Symbol

I was just about to write another post when I thought I'd look back and see if I'd said anything simular before.  I noticed on a lot of my old post that this symbol is scattered all over the text:

Â

What a pain in the Â!!

How does one even search for a way to solve these problems?  Sometimes it seems like I'm the only one that has to deal with this stuff?  Well, that funny hat on the "a" is called a circumflex.  From doing searches for wordpress and circumflex I determined, dudes, that it is like a deep code problem.  Perhaps the symbol shows up every time I hit the save button.  Whatever, it wasn't like that before I did an upgrade.  There seems to be no shortage of things out there designed specifically to increase hair loss.

Do me a favor, look at some of my old posts (anything before October) and tell me if you would still read them even though they have that crazy symbol all over the place.  I've lost all sense of judgment.  Does it need to be fixed or can I pretend it didn't happen?  Should I just go live in a cave or is there hope for this world?

UPDATE:  It only effects posts from June to Oct 2008.  Still it sucks.

Shoulder Stretch Failure

Doesn't Work

I broke my arm skateboarding down a monster hill on a homemade skateboard when I was 14.  It was a hill I had skated many times but there was a section that required slowing down, a section with increased steepness and a sharp turn.  I was late on my way to school and just didn't slow on this particular day until it was a little late.  I slid for a distance on the inside of my elbows and my huge brass beltbuckle--both were shreaded.  I know what you're thinking, "knarly dude."

But it wasn't very bad.  A little disinfectant to keep the exposed elbow bones from getting infected and I would have been fine.  Unfortunately I went to see a doctor, more to get out of school than because I felt I needed anything.  Even though I didn't need it, the doctor put a cast on me for two weeks because he thought it would discourage me from skateboarding.  It didn't.  But it did mess up my shoulder because I was in the middle of a growth spurt.

Waste of Time

So skip ahead to age 23.  I'm doing 6-8 hours a day of Martial arts and Dance and I figure my biggest problem is that my shoulders are stiff and a little uneven.  I get to work trying everything under the sun and moon.  The first thing I figured out was that I needed to sleep with a shirt on because my shoulders would get cold at night and the muscles would tighten up over night.  Without keeping them warm at night any progress I made in loosening them would be reversed by the cold.

Next I did a thousand experiments with bodywork and massage.  About 3 hours a week for 4 years.  I think this was positive at first but over the long term I simply learned more about how my own body relaxes than the people who were working on me.  Now I almost never get bodywork.

At the same time I started creating tools to help me stretch.  I had poles, staffs, ropes, bungee, a range of rubber balls from small to big to roll on, lots of eye-bolts in the walls with loops hanging from them, slanted boards, I even modified a door frame so it would be a better jig for me to stretch in. I was very disciplined.  My housemates were very accommodating.  I think they liked it that visitors to the house asked if our living room was a torture chamber.


The results, nada, nothing, waste of time.  Stretching the shoulders doesn't work.

What does work?   Slow qigong movements.  Expanding and condensing from the dantian.  Arm circles.  Making sure your qi gates are open, that circulation is optimised, and that your alignment is efficiant.

Strange Definition of Qi

George Xu gave me a definition of Qi a couple of months ago which was so strange I had to write it down.  As you probably all know, I'm for keeping the term Qi murky.  Not because I don't like individual definitions, to the contrary, bring'm on.  The more the merrier.

I think Qi needs to have lots of definitions to be true to its origins.

Here is his 3 part definition.

1.  Qi is the endocrine/hormone response.

2.  Qi is when I give the ground power, the ground gives it back.

3.  Qi is anthing that moves.  If it moves, it has Qi.  By this the Sun and Moon don't fall out of the sky.

New Blogs (to me anyway)

First I want to plug Sgt. Rory Miller's blog.  It's the perfect thing to read when your sitting shyly in your nightie cooling down after a few hours at the dojo.

Second, I want to draw your attention to Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming.  We should probably put him on the altar as the deity of Martial Arts Marketing.  He has published more books and DVD's than anyone.  His club includes fifty schools.

He is also someone who really cares about preserving the arts and has done a good job of explaining them to non-Chinese.

Now he has started a school in Northern California in the mountains at his retreat center near the town of Eureka.  He accepted 5 students into a 10 year Chinese Martial Arts program.  All day everyday for nine months out of the year for ten years these lucky students will be practicing gongfu.  (Here is the Curriculum) Next year he will accept 5 more students.

The students are expected to learn his marketing skills too!!!  He has them making DVD's and writing articles for Kungfu Magazine.  I know because all five of them have blogs!

I was looking for this sort of thing for myself 20+ years ago.  Because it didn't exist, I created a curriculum with about the same number of hours for myself.  The slow economy at that time actually made this easier.  I paid $215 a month to live in a tiny room in San Francisco with a lot of house-mates who shared the cost of food and supplies (much of which we acquired by hook or by crook).  I had very few expenses: Bicycle maintenance, martial arts lessons, and shoes.  Entertainment was free because I had agreements with every performing arts center in San Francisco, I could get in free for doing whatever last minute work they needed done.  I went on a ten year Hollywood movie fast, so I didn't see movies.  The little money I needed I earned teaching sailing during the Summers.

If you want this kind of intensive training, and you are not one of the 5 picked by Dr. Yang, it is still possible to create your own school--if you have the drive.

Pirates Again

Pirates played a major role in creating modern China.  They, and the mercenaries who fought them, are a likely source of martial arts as we know them today.  While there are many other sources of martial arts, I do wish more scholars would focus on the important stuff, like pirates.  Here is a brief but informative article about Chinese Pirates in PFD format.  While pirates in the west were peaking with around 5,500 pirates, the Chinese were sporting 70,000.

Elbows

I've started a new anti-practice.  Often times practice is not enough to transform our bodies, we actually have to stop doing something.  In this case, I'm trying to achieve George Xu's elusive, "shoulders like soybean milk."  I decided that leaning on my elbows creates tension which I release when I practice, but if I go and lean on my elbows again after practice the tension comes back.  The habit is pervasive but breakable.  I've identified 4 situations in which I have committed to changing my behavior.

1. When I'm sitting in a chair with arms.


2. When I'm on the commode.


3. When I'm reading while laying down on my side.


4. When I'm sitting at a table.

There is a 5th situation which is potentially problematic, sleeping on my side.  When I sleep on my side my shoulders pop around in their sockets.  If I succeed in changing  the basic 4, I may be faced with the more difficult task of changing my sleeping habits.  I've been working on this anti-practice for about a month now, and the preliminary results are promising.

Ice Water Steam

Internal martial arts, qigong and meditation often use the metaphor of water to explain what they are doing.  Water is one of the primary metaphors used in the Daodejing to describe the principle of wuwei ("Like water it does nothing, yet leaves nothing unnourished.")

A simple way to know if your standing meditation posture is correct is that all the tension in your body (ice) melts (water) and pours down and out your legs.  It is then possible to experience ten directions breathing (steam) expanding and condensing in all directions from the dantian.

In the Internal Martial Arts, taijiquan, baguazhang, and xingyiquan, there is a basic sequence which allows for natural, uninhibited freedom to reemerge.  There is no inherent order to this sequence.  It can all be learned simultaneously; however, it makes some sense to conceptualize the stages:

1. Ice Man: Jin, and jing-- the revealing of our most efficient underlying structure.  This stage is characterized by unbroken power.  Continuous expression of uprightness, twisting, wrapping, whole body power, and opening and closing the joints is achieved.   While muscle tension, over extension, limpness, and collapsing, are all discarded.


2. Water Man: The fluid aspect of the body is emphasized to the point of discarding impulse control or defensiveness.  This stage is not very effective for fighting, it is more defensive in the limited sense that your attacker finds nothing solid to push or hit.  In a push hands match the opponent may lose to a "water man" only if he/she makes a mistake, like leaning or exerting a lot of effort against something that isn't there.  Heaviness is achieved.


3. Steam Man:  It might be better to call this one "air man" or "mist man" because "Steam" implies hot or under a lot of pressure, which is not the case.  In this stage the mind discards its focus on the body in the sense that movement becomes effortless.  All movement becomes unified and multi-directional.  Attacks become unstoppable.  Lightness is achieved.

The Funny Cat

There is a funny post over at Tabby Cat (hat tip to Chris).

He seems to have not noticed that I am the greatest martial arts blogger ever, perhaps he just forgot. But then he goes too far. He disrespects the Daodejing.

MIGHT is defined as machines guns and so on. So I know perfectly well that the spirit expressed in the Dao De Jing below is total nonsense:

Nothing in the world is softer than water,

Yet nothing is better at overcoming the hard and strong.

This is because nothing can alter it.

That the soft overcomes the hard

And the gentle overcomes the aggressive

Is something that everybody knows

But none can do themselves.

Yet... yet... yet. I can't help myself. That's my only real interest in martial arts.

He is quoting half of chapter 78, which threw me off for a second because it reads like a bad translation of chapter 43:

The most yielding thing in the world

Can overcome the most resistant thing in the world.

That which has no form can enter

Where there is no space.

This is how I know the Dao of wuwei.

The teaching with no words

And the Dao of wuwei

Are beyond common understanding.

I'm here to say I've met the most yielding thing in the world, and she is hot. As for chapter 78 above, here is a comment from Li Hung-Fu (10th century) that I think sums it up:

"The soft and the weak do not expect to overcome the hard and the strong. They simply do."

(Translation by Red Pine).

And by the way, while it is true that "might makes right;" it is also true that machine guns confronted with water tend to rust.

Donations

OK there it is.  I've added a donations button.  A few people have requested ways to make donations so I'm happily complying.  I would like to have a separate page for books and t-shirts someday too.

On a completely different tack, a nurse friend was talking to me about cracking joints.  She said she was dubious of the chiropractors' view that a popping or cracking joint is gas suddenly escaping, "What do they think we are anyway?  Bubble wrap?"