Chi Kung for Making Babies

Year after year, day after day, I hear people expressing enthusiasm for qigong.  I suppose we could say I share their enthusiasm, after all, I've spent many, many years practicing qigong every single day.  The problem is that qigong is not an enthusiastic tradition.

After something on the order of 30,000 hours of practice  all I can say is, I don't know anything.  (According to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory, I have accumulated enough experience to have mastered qigong three times!)

To me, the practice of qigong is about becoming a baby.  It is about returning to innocence.  It is about discarding knowledge for the simple reason that babies have it all, already.

Healing?  No one knows what causes healing.  If your life is causing you stress or pain, return to simplicity.  Start from the beginning.  Qigong is a series of movement strategies to coax you back, back to the beginning of the process, or the project, or the job, back to the movement, back to the original inspiration which started to take shape in your body.  Qigong is a process of unraveling, it is a type of forgetting.  Is it medicine?  I dare say it is not.  Can it result in healing? I think it can.

Discovery?  Yes, you will make discoveries along the way, but then you must discard them.  If you build them up into a system of levels and achievements, treat those levels the way any 2 year old would treat a castle made of wood blocks.  Cast them asunder.  Because orthodoxy must have a way to renew itself or its qi will become stale.

Forms?  Forms take you back to before you were born.  They are a way to dance in your ancestor's body.  They collect the width, and breadth, the boundaries of movement knowledge.  They are empty.  Honor that emptiness.

If you write about your discoveries, have the child-like humility to memorize them, and then eat them.

In two years of writing this blog I have not recommended a single book about how to do qigong.  This is not because I'm an asshole.  It's because by the time these books are printed the qi is already stale.  Babies like to chew on books.  I've yet to find one that tasted the way a book should taste.

Top Predators Practice Internal Martial Arts

I’ve been working with the “ball” material I wrote about in the last post and I’ve decided that there is an other way to explain it.

The top predators I’m likely to see in San Francisco on any given day are falcons, hawks, cats, and raccoons.  Occasionally I see a coyote or a heron too.

All of these predators are able to fluff up their bodies.  We tend to think of these moments of fluffing up as autonomic responses to fear because they parallel the goose bumps we get when we are watching a horror movie.  We also learn in school that some animals fluff up so that they will look really big to an attacker or a competitor,  and that has a parallel in the expression “I feel pumped up” which athletes sometimes use.
But of course we don’t know for sure why these predators fluff up and we definitely don’t know whether or not they consciously control it.

I used the term autonomic above.  The nervous system is divided into two types of nerves, the ones that control obviously voluntary actions (yes that would include ear wiggling even if you aren’t very good at it yet); and nerves that control much less voluntary things like pupil size and heart rate.  The less voluntary system is called the autonomic nervous system and it is also divided into two parts. One part that is active when you take a deep relaxing breath while sitting in a hot tub, and another part that is active when you hold your breath, tense up your muscles, pull back your lips and grit your teeth.  The relaxing nervous system is called para-sympathetic, the stressed out nervous system is called sympathetic.  (I know the names are ridiculous, they refer to anatomy you only see when you are doing a dissections.)

The ball practice that I wrote about yesterday is the practice of making your whole body fluff up and its opposite, shrink-condense.  This happens at the most outer layer of the physical body, between the muscles and the hair follicles.

In this practice it is key that you keep your breathing relaxed, that you do not activate the stressed out nervous system even a little bit.  Through this practice you will eventually be able to do more than just fluff up and shrink-condense.  You will be able to spontaneously change the entire surface of your body in any way you want.

I suspect that the top predators are able to do this without becoming stressed out, while prey, like bunny rabbits, only do it when they are stressed out.

This kind of practice has lots of health benefits but the fighters out there may be thinking, “How could I possibly fight using such a subtle mechanism?”  The answer is that the practice trains your body to not get stuck, to keep changing even in a situation of stress.  It will increase your power too, because there will be less inhibition in your body.

And of course when the predator ball becomes second nature, you don’t think about it, it just becomes part of everything you do.

The following Hagiography is from To Live As Long As Heaven and Earth:

"During the reign of Emperor Cheng of the Han, hunters in the Zhongnan Mountains saw a person who wore no clothes, his body covered with black hair. Upon seeing this person, the hunters wanted to pursue and capture him, but the person leapt over gullies and valleys as if in flight, and so could not be overtaken. [But after being surrounded and captured, it was discovered this person was a 200 plus year old woman, who had once been a concubine of Qin Emperor Ziying. When he had surrendered to the 'invaders of the east', she fled into the mountains where she learned to subside on 'the resin and nuts of pines' from an old man. Afterwards, this diet 'enabled [her] to feel neither hunger nor thirst; in winter [she] was not cold, in summer [she] was not hot.']
The hunters took the woman back in. They offered her grain to eat. When she first smelled the stink of grain, she vomited, and only after several days could she tolerate it. After little more than two years of this [diet], her body hair fell out; she turned old and died. Had she not been caught by men, she would have become an [immortal]." (Campany 2002:22–23)

"The earliest representations of Chinese immortals, xian (?), dating from the Han Dynasty, portray them flying with feathery wings (the word yuren ?? "feathered person" later meant "Daoist") or riding dragons."

[Thanks Wikipedia, for saving me from having to type these two quotes in myself!]

No More Changes

That was a lot more drama in my life than I need.  I won't bore you with the details but I lost my blog and my new website for a few days and they kind of took my mind with them.  I like work and I like solving problems.  But I'll take a screwed up plumbing or electrical system over software and a database any day.

So check out my site!  And I have no plans to change anything else on this blog for some time to come.  Well, maybe I'll work on improving the categories and tags, and seeing if I can get that "related posts" plug-in to work again, I thought it was cool.

By the way the search engine in the sidebar is a little better now.

Changes

I've been busy.  You can look forward to a video called Playground Taijiquan in the next week.  I wish I could say the look of the blog is now stable, but it will probably keep changing a bit.  That button on the right will lead to my brand new site with video and pictures and new content with in a day or so...knock on wood.

Also expect to get a FAQ page in the next week or so.  Any suggestions for that will be warmly welcomed.  My idea is to use it to make the site more search-able (523 posts, oy vey!).  The new search seems like an improvement.  Also on the sidebar I put the Donaton Button back up for those of you who asked for it, also I went with a "tag cloud"  because it is so random...kind of like spin the blog...where it stops nobody knows.

I also have some new theorys from George Xu in the works.

Also, just a thought..., since I'm creating one of those hopefully not too tacky "what our fans are saying" pages on my website for classes, if you consider yourself a fan (in the broadest sense of the word which could even include adversary) feel free to write me a line or too of cosmic praise.  If your goal is to embarrass me than go ahead and put it in the comments section, otherwise send me an email:   scophillips "at" yahoo.com

Thanks

Ye Xiaolong

Ye Xiaolong was an important transition teacher for me.  I studied Lan Shou and Push-Hands with him for three months, 6 days a week, 3 hours a day.  There was usually one or two other students around.  His main method of teaching (besides saying "Bu Hao!*" all the time) was to put his hands on me and physically correct my movement.  It was very satisfying.

I'm putting up a new website soon, and while looking for images of my teachers I came across these videos of him doing Yang Style Taijiquan.  I think of him as a Lan Shou Master so if you watch these videos look for the sudden long tearing motions characteristic of Lan Shou.  There are also a bunch of old George Xu Videos if you hunt around on this Youtube Channel.  (Warning, you'll probably want to turn the sound off.)





* Bu Hao means 'No Good.'

Big Mistakes

Youtube is picking up speed.  More and more martial arts stuff is showing up every second.  While offering constructive criticism of people who put themselves on Youtube is not always welcome, it should be.  We should encourage thoughtful criticism and feedback. I say bring it on.

Other peoples mistakes can be really instructive.  I don't want to make a video showing everyone the wrong way to practice, but I don't have to because this guy Michael Pekor did it for me.



He has two major problems:

1.  When he hits the padded pole sometimes part of the shock of that hit goes back into his body.  You can see this because his head shakes.  This is especially obvious around 1:00.  Doing this for even a short time can damage your heart because force issued through the arms leads straight back into the heart.  He should back off.

2.  His shoulders are leaving the dantian.  Again this is most obvious around 1:00 in the video.  The shoulder comes forward and out.  In this "out" position, power and connection are lost in every direction except the one he is hitting in.  I'm not saying it won't hurt to get hit by this guy, it most certainly will hurt.  Taijiquan is not just about power and fighting is also about perfecting ones art, and "shoulders outside the dantian" is a flaw.

It is imperative that if he chooses to experiment with my corrections that he fix the shock problem first!  If he were to fix the shoulder problem first the shock problem would become dramatically more dangerous!  The shoulder problem is currnetly functioning like a trip-switch, defusing much of the power travelling back toward the heart.

Fix the shock problem by getting rid of the padding and just hit the solid pole.  If even the slightest bit of shock travels back towards your torso, your structure is wrong.  Don't hit very hard or you will break your hand.

Fixing the "shoulders outside the dantian" is more difficult.  The arms must first be completely empty-- drained of tension, intension, form, and conception.  From that state they can gently be drawn into the dantian.  Once the whole body is unified with the dantian, jing and qi are much easier to distinguish.  Thus it is a simple progression from there to allowing the mind (Yi) to lead the annimated part of us (Qi) which will, without any conscious act, take the whole body mass (Jing) for a ride.

Our Health Care is Amazing

One of my blogging categories is "Health," but I advise my readers to skip this blog if you are allergic to politics.

The American government has a superb health care plan.  Let’s review the details.

Fresh water available everywhere for drinking and cleaning.  Large numbers of people use to die from water borne illness, and small skin infections.

Fluoride for the teeth.  Before fluoride and other universal dental hygiene, people had “tooth-aches” so often that it was standard to have two drinks of hard liquor with lunch everyday to kill the pain (and speed death).

Plagues use to come along every generation or so and wipe out 10 to 50 percent of the population.

Famine was once a regular occurrence.
Today, the infectious diseases spread hand to mouth like colds and flu's are a mild annoyance, they no longer kill off large numbers of people every year like measles, mumps,  polio, and small pox once did.  We could probably eliminate colds and flu as well if we were willing to wear masks at the first signs of illness.
If you do happen to get an infection, anti-biotics are so inexpensive and readily available that they are being over used.
The government makes sure that doctors have degrees which makes it less likely that they will kill you.
So what’s left?

Genetic diseases are still around, some of them are mitigated by medicine, some not.  Some can be avoided by testing before pregnancy.

That leaves degenerative diseases which sometimes coincide with death in later years.  Not getting addicted to drugs, alchohol or inhaling large amounts of smoke, all reduce the likelihood of developing a degenerative disease.  It is still being debated whether or not government should make controlling these behaviors part of its health plan.

Over eating is a killer which may not have been very common in the past, but it is also entirely preventable through personal discipline.  Only war and communism have been successful at stopping industrial commerce from putting food in peoples mouths.  But government plays an important (if imperfect) role in making sure the food we buy doesn’t kill us.

On the subject of personal discipline, getting enough sleep and exercise, and being part of social networks, all have enormous benefits in keeping illnesses at bay.

Accidents are really a different animal--some are easily avoided, some are not.  Our emergency wards are half full with people hurt by drugs and alcohol.  Emergency rooms also care for people who have heart attacks and strokes, and seniors who have fallen down.  Accidents are only a percentage of emergency room problems but the system of caring for people who have accidents and allowing them to pay for it over time works well, even though all the drug addicts’ expenses are averaged into their bills.  As a society, we have a choice, we can take away the civil rights of people caught abusing drugs or we can use our emergency rooms to play catch and release with them, either way the cost should be a number we all know so that we can debate how to pay for it.

Pregnancy should be an entirely separate system.  If as a society we believe that preemies, and severely deformed or oxygen deprived children should be kept alive and nurtured, and we do believe that, then it makes sense to create an insurance pool for them, or fund this entirely by charity the way all our hospitals used to be funded.

(I’m sure many people choose not to get married or to wait until after they have children to get married, just in case they have an expensive child-birth.  With an expensive child-birth the independent mother can throw herself on the mercy of the state and the father can keep his bank account.)

The commercial drive of our society has been bringing the costs of health care down very, very fast.  But constant new innovation and experimentation in medicine is enormously expensive.

I don’t really have an opinion on medical insurance except to say that it has always seemed too expensive for me by a factor of 10.  I’d be willing to pay what I pay for car insurance to pre-empt the cost of an accident or a surprise degenerative or genetic disease, but not ten times that amount. I’d probably be willing to pay more if I thought it was protecting me from losing my house, if I owned a house.

The debate is very complex, and there is no reason to believe it will be resolved in my lifetime.  That shouldn’t stop us from acknowledging how fantastically successful our government run health care system already is.

It may seem like I’m drifting into the realm of politics here, but I’m not.  The main reason I’m writing this blog is to point out that it is really hard to understand what religion used to be.  The ways of life and death that nurtured the world’s religions are often in direct competition with modernity and air conditioning.  Today, the realm of what we are calling religion or faith or ritual or sacred --simply does not have to deal with the same forces it once did.  It’s not that we are less religious, it’s just that the world is so different it’s challenging to even imagine what it used to be like.

Gongfu, ritual theater and possession rituals developed in a China in which people got sick and died a lot more often than we can imagine.  Chinese medicine was for a thousand years the most developed form of medicine around, but it never came close to doing what we take for granted in the 21st Century.

PS.  I wrote this about 3 weeks ago and didn’t publish it because I know how fast a blog can turn sour when it starts talking politics.
But, heck, now that the United States Health Bill seems near death I feel I can at least point out that as an uninsured, one-person business owner, there didn’t seem to be anything for me.  In fact, since I work for several institutions part time, I was probably looking at a pay cut because these institutions were likely to be required to supply health insurance to their full time employees.  And I’ve heard nothing at all about the role personal conduct plays in health care.  Should we folk who take really good care of our health be paying the medical expenses of people who are sick do to laziness or self-destructive behavior?
Compassion is a natural treasure. But unlimited compassion as an ideal will slowly degenerate a society into fighting and chaos.

Forwarding and Hacking

A person looking for me can now type in http://WeaknessWithaTwist.com and they will automatically be forwarded here.
Also I noticed that somehow a hacker has gotten into at least one of my posts and added at the bottom "and here is an interesting link" --linking of course to some spam. Some images link to spam too. If you see it, I'd appreciate you dropping me a comment because it's subtle, I'm likely to miss it. Once I know about it, it's easy to fix.

Tangki image 2

Who needs a tool belt?