Happy Year of the Rabbit

(hat tip: Language Log/Victor Mair)

Jack LaLanne

Today we mourn the passing of Jack LaLanne, age 96.  LaLanne defined the notion of American fitness.  In the early part of the 20th Century, everywhere we found modernity, we also found the idea of National Fitness.  The idea was that the vigor and discipline of the individual body was a reflection of the power of the state that body belonged to.  Even Foucault and Nietzsche weighed in on this notion.  There is plenty of room for absurdity here--think of the iconic image of Ben Gurion doing a headstand on the beach in Tel Aviv--and I think no form of theater exploited that absurdity better than Japanese post-apocalyptic Butoh, but as movements go, National Fitness has had a profound effect.  (I've written about it's influence on China here.)

Before LaLanne opened his Oakland Fitness Gym lifting weights just to "look" fit was a cultural marker of homosexuality.  I suppose it still is, in some ways, but the idea that fitness itself had a long list of positive things going for it opened abstract exercise routines like weights or jumping jacks to everyone.  Before that change in mindset, athletes and jocks were just supposed to have been born that way.  If you didn't get big, fast, and powerful just by playing the game, too bad, get a desk job!

It's hard to imagine what the world was like back then, just like it's hard to imagine what it was like when everyone thought the world was flat.  Today, "training" is a prerequisite for sports.  Before LaLanne, training was a form of cheating!  Really!

There is an obvious parallel here with the mentality of dueling.  Back in the old days when gentlemen fought duels to maintain their honor, to train in fencing was un-gentlemanly.  It was a form of cheating.  When guns were used for dueling, it was considered un-gentlemanly to practice target shooting for the same reason, it was cheating.  In fact, for over 100 years, the definition of dueling pistols was that they had no rifling!  Rifling is the spiraling etched into the inside of a gun barrel that makes the bullet go straight.

So it's worth considering that the idea of fitness is really tied to the end of class in America.  Many commentators have already noted that fitness has been tied to the rise of the middle class.  It's also worth considering that if "working class" is now just a style of fashion, dressing like a superhero is truly a pardim shift.

I use to love watching Jack LaLanne on TV when I was a kid, he seem to me to be a kind of real-life superman.  But where as Superman was imaginary and made his living disguised as a newspaper reporter, LaLanne was real and made his living actually dressed as Superman!

As a tribute to this great man, now join me in doing 50 Jumping Jacks.

Still News After 111 Years

Here is an excellent article about the Boxer's (Yihequan) in the Economist.

Gao Xingjian, Artist

Worth reading.
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012050261.html

Baby Feet

Much of learning in traditional Chinese martial arts involves re-imagining.  A subset of learning involves re-naming.  The purpose of re-naming is to re-imagine a process or practice you are already familiar with.  We could speculate that the imagination has a built in deterioration and mutation mechanism for anything which has become fixed.  The imagination requires regular refreshing to function properly.

Among the latest re-naming I’m excited about is the expression “Baby Feet.”  This expression refers to both the method and the fruition of practice.  It is a method because I say things like, “Make sure you have baby feet when you are punching each other.”  It is a form of fruition because it really isn't something you do, it is the result of completely emptying the legs of all impulses to “stay balanced” or “generate structural power.”  Of course if you do that it doesn’t feel like much because you probably aren’t moving much.  Only when the dantian (abdominal region of the mind) is relaxed enough to expand all the way to the ground and there is a free hydraulic flow between the two legs and that flow is controlled by movement of the dantian, not the legs, only then can you get the sensation of “baby feet.”  Once you have that sensation it can function temporarily as a signal to let you know all the other stuff is active and operative.

I use to describe this sensation as “putting your foot down like pouring pancake batter on a griddle.”  But that got stale when I quit eating wheat!  Also the sensation started to become bigger, faster and lighter;  Now it’s more like dripping food coloring in water.

Anyway, it is more obviously a Daoist teaching with this new improved naming because walking on “baby feet” is something we all already know.  It has simply been obscured by artifice, coordination, and intelligence.  Yet it is apparently an experience available to everyone all the time.  The Dao of Wuwei is not an achievement or a skill, it is simply our true nature revealed.

Core-e-te or Core-fu?

You may have to say that headline out loud to get it.  Core-e-te is an attempt to combine Karate with core strengthening workouts.  I learned about it from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Now the old me would have said, "That is the $#%^*ist, P#@#$$ng, thing I've ever heard!"

But the new me has reach a higher level, I am now teaching all my students Core-fu!™  Sometime last year a student asked George Xu what he thought of core strength.  His response?  "Great! We have the best core strength, we can gain maximum relaxation power through shrinking, expanding, spiraling and rolling the core!"  Hmmm, I thought, "But George, when they say 'core strength' they are talking about strengthening individual muscle groups, isn't that antithetical to all internal martial arts training?"  George smiled, "Yes, of course....We have the best core training."

My martial arts training up until now could have been called  Submit-Proofing™, that is how I'm trained, one can always keep fighting.  But today, I'm submitting.  If you know someone who wants to do the best core strengthening training this side of the Mississippi River, send them to me!

Super-extreme-ultimate-core-maximum-powerizing = Core-fu.™

______________________

Looking at the Core-e-te article it appears that they are doing an hour twice a week of core strengthening combined with some Karate, some stretching, some meditation and some tea drinking.  I tend to react to these things, but honestly I have no idea what that little of anything does.  It might actually be good for you!  Especially the tea!

______________________

I went to a giant Target last Sunday night.  Wow, that place was packed with people and deals.  If we as a nation can just do with Medical Care and Education what Target has done for consumer goods we will enter an era of prosperity beyond all reckoning!

But I  was at Target to work on my Daoist neidan practice.  As I hinted in an earlier post, my practice has taken a new turn.  I feel the only limitation on my practice at this point is social stress.  Some of you may laugh and say, "Is there any other kind of stress?"  I'm not sure actually but social stress is huge.  Anyway as I wandered the aisles, kitchens, bathrooms, sports, electronics..., I noticed different sorts of social stress, ghosts you could say, rising up in my body as tension.  And as fast as the tension took hold, I released it.  But then I went, with my half-wife, into the women's section and all hell broke loose!  What is that tension?  Some childhood memory of being with my Mom and two sisters bored out of my mind shopping for hours and then getting into trouble and punished for shooting an elastic bra like a slingshot?  I don't know, if there is some recognizable content there I've blocked it out.  Still the tension was extreme, I was only there about three minutes but the tension didn't dissipate until I wandered into the section with compression athletic shirts.  I bought one, by the way.  It doesn't work for cold weather workouts, however, as it flattens down my insulating body hair, but I do like the compression feeling.

What is Medicine?

Hey, don't look at me. I'm not crazy enough to take on this question. It is the title of a book by Paul Ulrich Unschuld, who is one of the top scholars on the history of Chinese Medicine and Medical Anthropology.
The full title of the book is, What is medicine?: Western and Eastern approaches to healing. You can read the whole thing on Google books, but this is his attempt at a popular book so finding it at the library or just buying it is easy. It is a translation from German and you can really tell that because the only way you know he is excited about something is by attending to the exclamation points at the ends of sentences...like this...!

But I did really enjoy the book because it is about ideas, and about how people think, know, and change.  It is a comparison of the History of Western Medical traditions beginning with the Greeks (~500BCE) and moving all the way to the present--and the History of Eastern Medical traditions beginning with Mawangdui (~150BCE) all the way to the present.

Here is the hard cold summary.  There are three distinct categories:

1. Therapies


2. Scientific Theories


3. Medicine

This is counter-intuitive so bare with me.  Therapies are as old as dirt and new ones are being invented all the time.  They include shouting Hallelujah, popping pills, brewing herbs, and surgery.  Scientific Theories are models of what is happening to the body (usually on the inside).  They interpret what is visible, like changes in skin color, and then assign a theory to explain what is invisible.  The theories tend to follow from social and political experience!  The models are based on things like government, geography, mechanics, electronics, or construction materials.  Medicine happens when one of these models is checked directly against real data collection.  Medicine is the adaptation of a model based on evidence.

It's a bit of a brain twister to get with this organization of the three categories, but the conclusion is that the number of models about what a human body is are quite limited and severely limit our ability to think.  On the other hand, we get results so what a lot of fun it is.  Weird view, right?  Check out his table of contents!  All 100 chapters.

I'm happy I read this book, it sharpened my thinking.  Because Unschuld doesn't have a background in martial arts models of the body he is missing the most basic cosmological theories about how our experience of body, perception, and action gets tested in a theatrical-martial-senario-application context.  Thankfully he has left that field wide open for you and me.

Now check out these awesome images from Edo-period Japan!  Here are a couple, but there's more if you follow the link.

What the Heck Does Relax Mean?

One of the things I love about teaching beginners is that they ask the most basic and obvious questions, and I get stumped.

What does relaxation mean? It's being touted from here to Peoria as the end all and be all-- the key to awesomeness in every endeavor under the sun or moon.  But does anyone know what it means?  My sister, who teaches maximum high speed swimming says, "The more relaxed, the better."  I talked to an Olympic weightlifter who says that when he lifts he imagines that there is a video camera framing only his face and neck.  As he is lifting an enormous weight he tries not to show any evidence of it on the video.

This raises another question, "How do we test for relaxation?"  By the way, if I was to teach Olympic weightlifting I would have people lift weights while standing up in a small boat on the ocean--any moment of stiffness and over you go...

So, to be an internal martial artist you have to test, a lot.  I suppose progress in martial arts could be measured by the types of testing one does.  First structure tests, then liveliness tests, then emptiness tests.  Is your structure good in every direction and in every posture?  Okay, then is your intention correct in every movement?  Okay then, have you completely discarded all evidence of structure and made all intent outside the body?

Yeah, I know I lost a few of you there but you'll get this next part.  If I were forced to define relaxation I would say it is an order of phenomena:  Body mass completely quiet, mind wild and aware-- no second thoughts, no contradictions, no social inhibitions, no identity to cling too, only clouds, rocks and water!

Lately my ideas about internal martial arts have become so simple.  I shrink, I expand, I turn off all my impulses, and glory in my original nature.  I am clumsy, vulnerable, weak, and fat.  The layers and lumps of tension float off of me and on to the ocean waves where they join the dolphins and seals in their savage hunt.

Perhaps I only write this blog for myself, like an insurance policy so I won't forget, so I won't endlessly loop.  What I am about to say is so obvious you probably shouldn't read it.

Relaxation is easy to define, it is the absence of stress or tension.   Probably the greatest source of tension, day to day, minute to minute, is social.  I just think about being in a meeting at my old job, or what the school board thinks about martial arts, and zap, the tension bites me.  It grabs, it pulls, it twists, it concentrates, numbs, grinds, and it tries to find a home under my skin! Walk into a room with people in it and zap, the tension is there, instantly.

During every injury I've ever had, my mind was stuck on some social drama.

And thus I have a theory.

Inside each of us there is an animal, I suppose Freud would have called it the Id.  It always moves from the center.  It is un-self-conscious, spontaneous, and asocial.  It is older than old, and younger than young, an ancient seed.  It has no regard for itself, no self-image.  It feels but it doesn't possess.  It knows but it doesn't hold on.

When this ancient seed (Laozi = old seed) finds itself in a social situation it wants to act, it wants to shrink and pounce, to bite, and wiggle, but our social mind overpowers it.  We smile and nod, we speak and gesture, and yet we are hiding what is happening on the inside.  The animal is pushing and pulling.  Because we won't let it out, it bites us from the inside and we call that tension.  We call that stress.

Tension happens when our spontaneous animal mind is out of harmony with our social human mind.  We become the battle ground.  I don't mean to imply that animals don't have social stress, but come on, when the coyote finally catches roadrunner and then starts his own blog we can have that discussion.

Red (Retired Extremely Dangerous)

Just saw Red, loved it.  Not one of those movies you remember much about just fun.  Mr. & Mrs. Smith was about spies living in suburban domestic bliss, this one is about spies in retirement.  Ah the Zeitgeist.

Yahoo Server Crashed

My site was down for a full 24 hours, it's still a little buggy.  Yahoo says a server crashed.  It took them a long time to fix.  When I was a kid we had to walk to school.

UPDATE: Yahoo claims the problem is fixed but 4 days later I'm still getting the occasional 410 notice, if you get one refreshing usually fixes it.  Not always.  I have no idea how Yahoo thinks this is a good enough response to the problem.  Yeah, I know, I only pay $12.95 a month.  It still feels a little like the wild-west.

UPDATE:  I'm getting the 410 error when I try to update, ha ha ha.