Expand and Shrink

Recently on Rum Soaked Fist someone asked a question about the importance of kai-he, which loosely means ‘opening and closing.’  While this may  be a good translation of the Chinese, the metaphor is confusing because it is easily conflated with the process of emptying and filling which requires opening key gates in the body.  To properly do kai-he, all the gates must remain open, there is no closing action.  The correct metaphor for kai-he is expanding and shrinking the way most wild animals do when they are showing dominance or submission.

As is often the case, the subject of shrinking and expanding does not have an inherent order.  Like so much of martial arts it is actually a process of unlearning (apophatic).  In attempting to invent a curriculum, the goal should be to reveal an underlying order, a natural way of being.  That said, here is one possible curriculum order.

Level 1.  Individuate shrinking and expanding in different parts of the body.  (Kumar Frantzis created a long list of different body systems which can be expanded and condensed, beginning with individual joints, muscles, soft tissues, internal organs, glands, blood vessels, meridians, the nine palaces, and cerebrospinal fluid.)

Level 2.  Shrink and expand the entire body with the breath.

These first two levels do not take long to develop (a year or two at most) but in order to maintain a big range of movement they require regular practice.

Level 3.  Shrink and expand the whole body without the breath.  That is, de-link the movement from the breathing.  This will make the movement softer and will reveal jin, or natural structure. To do level 3 well, requires that the spacial mind relax and expand out beyond the body itself.

Level 4.  At level 4 the spacial mind does many complex operations including shrinking while the body is expanding and the reverse, expanding while the whole body is shrinking.  To do this level well the body must be completely empty of tension and all the gates must be open--then one's power will increase dramatically and one's root will disappear.

Level 5.  Only the spacial mind is actively moving, the body follows unconsciously.

Because we are dealing with an entirely natural process it is possible to skip directly to level five.  In the theater world, the principle of using shrinking or expanding to control space is sometimes called a change in status.  It is the basis of dominance and submission in all animals.  If you see two actors on a stage set as an office or a home you should be able to tell which actor owns the space by his or her movements and positions.  If it is my office I’ll move as if everything is part of my big body, a guest will move only a limited amount of space around his body, if he sits in my chair he will look stiff.  Imagine the physicality of a worker sneaking into the bosses office to smoke one of the bosses cigars when he thinks the boss is away for the week, and then imagine the changes in the physical use of space when the boss suddenly walks in.
Because this is all automatic in real life, it can be taught with games.  Actors can use tricks to get their behavior to seem real.  Unconsciously we are all masters of shrinking and expanding, but when the process becomes conscious it has a disorienting affect and it tends to look fake.  So the trick is to make it conscious and then put your mind on something else so that it becomes unconscious again.

My favorite game for teaching this is called “siblings”:

A lazy brother, who doesn’t work, sits in a chair in the middle of the room.
The hard working brother comes home from work and finds the lazy brother’s underwear hanging from the door nob.  The lazy brother is sitting in the same spot he was when the hard working brother left for work.
The scene begins with the hard working brother making an accusation.  The director tells the lazy brother (secretly before the scene begins) that he is to admit to every accusation and that  when the hard working brother moves toward him, he is to take up more space, he is to expand his body.  They improvise from there.

I first played this game with Keith Johnstone when I was 15.  While I was playing it with a partner I suddenly realized that I already knew the game, that I played it all the time unconsciously with my sister.  I was good at this game, by changing my body size and shape I felt like I could move my partner around the room at will.  That evening when I got home my sister, as she was in the habit of doing, accused me of something I didn’t do, “Did you take my notebook?”  “Yes,” I answered while simultaneously expanding.  “What? You took it!” Her eyes flared, but because I expanded she couldn’t come closer, she had to move away.  “Yes,” I said, “There is some pretty interesting stuff in there.”  I shrunk a little bit and she moved in to take a bite “YOU READ IT!” Casually expanding again, I said, “Juicy.”  She moved back.  I could control her with my movements.  Within a minute I had her rolling on the ground tearing out her hair.

This was, I suppose, an enlightenment moment for me.  I had a choice at that moment to become a sociopath or to dedicate my life to truth and justice.

The monkey dance of dominance and submission that Rory Miller talks about works in the same way. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been in a fight since I was 15.  Almost all fighting is monkey dance, almost all fighting is social and follows unconscious social rules, status transactions.  Asocial violence is a whole different cup of tea.  A desperate drug addict just wants to take your money and get away without being noticed, no need to assert dominance, it doesn’t matter to them whether you are still breathing or not.

This seems to be the source of a lot of confusion because shrinking and expanding is still the most efficient way to fight.  A tiger hunting still shrinks before it pounces.  It is crucial for dominance and submission, and it is also crucial for generating power while avoiding counter attack.  Some things are the same, some are different.  A dog challenging another dog will stare it in the eyes and make a low growl, a dog submitting will roll over belly-up and squeak. Dogs hunting a wild boar will attack the buttocks, and calves.  A policeman subduing a threat wants the threat face down on the ground because it’s easier to control him.  A wrestler wants his opponent pinned face up because it is more humiliating.

Great actors, great martial artists, and great dancers control space, they don’t do technique.  Many years ago I studied ballet.  I noticed that sometimes there were dancers who seem to have good technique but still weren’t dancing.  Ballet is a high status dance form.  The dancers are floating on clouds all the time.  The neck is always exposed, like the alpha wolf.  The legs are always turned out, the chest always lifted.  Sometimes a young dancer is introverted and yet is forced by the training to move like a high status princess.  The physical body can be open, expansive and exposed while the spacial mind, the spirit body, is sucked in close.  This disconnect is probably the source of a lot of compulsive behavior like chain smoking or not eating.

Over eating and muscle trucks among martial artists could be a similar phenomenon.

Extremes of status can be very entertaining.  Think midget wrestling, sumo, and the teachers in the cartoon South Park.

Being a good actor or dancer does not make someone a good fighter, even if they have the ability to manipulate space outside of their bodies.  Even if they have great unconscious shrinking and expanding abilities.  There is more to it than that.  And it is also true that someone can have good fighting skills without having mastered the shrinking and expanding of the spacial mind.  But put them together and they reveal enormous natural freedom.

The order in which one learns,  doesn’t matter.  The levels I described at the beginning of this post can be jumbled up any which way you want. In the end, however, there is an order, it is the order in which social behavior (conduct/qi), our physical body (jing), and our sense of place (shen) interact as one.

Carhart Push-Hands

Tabby Cat has really ruffled his fur over the question, "What is push-hands?" In a slight-of-paw he has decided to avoid a direct confrontation by pulling a "Prince." He now refers to what he does as the Drill Formerly Known As Push Hands (DFKAP).  I can probably come up with fifty push-hands genre games or training experiments.  Why fixate on one?  Well, he tells us.

This one DFKAP is a method for revealing Deep Unconscious Tension (DUT).  He keeps telling us that we probably don't know the difference between Surface Unconscious Tension (SUT) and DUT.  I don't know why he is saying this.  In my experience reading a book reveals both SUT and DUT, my arms get tired after about 15 minutes, so do my eyes, at some point my spine too--that's SUT--the root of that SUT is deep in the torso and is distributed all over the body--it is Deep Unconscious Tension (DUT).  I understand the concept but I don't like the terminology.  Why?  Because it's neo-Reichian.  Just for the record, Wilhelm Reich said that the Function of the Sexual Orgasm is to release DUT.  So basically Tabby Cat is saying that push-hands is like an orgasm.  No wonder some people like doing push-hands with him and some people freak out!

I believe he is making a Cosmological Order Error (COE).  Reich was also obsessed with apocalyptic concerns, by the way.  Instead of DUT, I prefer to think of Inhibitions of the Spacial Mind (ISM).  How great are my ISM push-hands powers you ask?  So great that I already defeated Tabby Cat at Push-Hands last Tuesday and he wasn't even aware of it!  He still requires touch to reveal unconscious tension while I can do it from right here in the cockpit of my F160 Fighter Jet.

Not able to fully solve this problem myself I have asked a friend for help, so let me introduce guest blogger the MIT* Daoist:

"Tabby Cat stop worrying about peak oil.  The planet earth is a battery.  Half of this battery is being recharged by the Sun at all times.  The gaseous part of the battery only holds energy for a short time but the liquid and solid parts hold it for much longer, and life has all kinds of creative ways of capturing and storing energy.  All the world's oil is like baby fat, it's nice when you have it, nice when you don't.  Speaking of baby fat, humans are batteries too.  We take in water and air to keep the acidity levels optimum.  We recharge with food and sunlight.  We store energy in fats and sugars.  The purpose of push-hands is to extend our battery-life.  Push-hands does this by revealing both Energy Leaks (EL), and Energy Transmission Inefficiencies (ETI)."

Thank you MIT* Daoist.

What's that buzzing sound?  A mosquito?  It's whispering something in my ear...

Invest in loss.

Here is my unsolicited advice.  If Tabby Cat is so good at using DFKAP to reveal DUT he might enjoy giving up the combat mindset.  How about finding new ways to lose?  Can he still reveal DUT with just two claws of contact?  How about when starting with one paw in his pocket and with his opponent's hand on his face.  How about allowing his opponent to put him in an arm-lock and beginning from there?  How about putting both paws in his pockets and allowing his opponent to grab hold of his jacket and beginning from there?



While I'm giving unsolicited advice perhaps trying to never win would open up new possibilities.  Can you consistently stop yourself from winning?  Try to not win with your hands up by your head and yet still reveal DUT or ISM?

Tabby, you just scratched your ear with your foot didn't you?  See, I did that. Well I didn't actually do it, I just revealed your ISM and they you did it yourself.

I call it ISM because when I truly let go of DUT my Spacial Mind immediately changes.  Pure Tai Chi fighting establishes unity through completely melting DUT.  Once unity is established the Spacial Mind is free to dance with chaos and harmony.  Things like structure, technique, root, or intent are swept aside like those wooden stir sticks at Starbucks.  All mass is available to change without inhibition like a Transformer!  Why not do push-hands rolling on the ground?  It's fun!

Maybe the funniest thing about Tabby Cat's position is his insistence that push-hands is non-cooperative... Oh, never mind, let's do it your way.

===========================

*Monkey Institute of Technology

Kong Ling - Empty and Alive

Over at millionaire genius Tabby Cat we have a little piece I can riff on.  Anyone who has ever done push hands with a Cheng Manqing lineage person has probably encountered the "why do I need to defend my head defense."  It is so weird, they never admit that they are making a mistake.  But Tabby does something interesting.  He claims that the difference in push hands methods is an indicator of a difference in the fruition that each person is seeking.

Here is what Tabby says the purpose of push hands is:

The Push Hands Drill of Tai Ji Quan is a diagnostic practice to identify tension in oneself and a partner and a developmental practice to foster skill in the application of internal energy to such identified tense zones to move the partner's entire body with a light physical touch.

He contrasts that with many other schools who teach push hands as a safe way to approach combat skills development.  He then points out the flaw of the combat approach by saying that the observable fruition does not support it's stated purpose.  For example, defending a position in fixed step push hands (the way many people do) simply doesn't work in combat.

He is using the observed fruition to examine the method.  What he should be doing is using the observed fruition to examine the view which inspired the method.  All views produce an experience.  Tabby Cat has made his view known on his blog countless times, he believes the human race is doomed and therefore he has chosen to become a cat.

For me, views always come first.  My view of push hands is that it is a game designed to get us to drop our aggression.  As the first Chapter of the Daodejing explains, when you drop your aggression the order of the cosmos reveals itself (note: there is no "it" or "self", the use of language creates some limits here).  One might ask, "After I have seen the order of the cosmos, why would I want to do push hands again?"  And the answer is that the order of the cosmos reveals itself differently each time.  Experiencing the order of the cosmos is not an advantage, it doesn't make us superior or more powerful, it is simply a moment of inspiration.

Can you use this 'order of the cosmos' inspiration to fight?  Of course you can.  It would be a very mundane usage by society's standards, but the cosmos doesn't care.

Now let's go back and analyze the method.  The method of push hands is to meet your opponent hand to hand while maintaining, embodying and expressing kong ling.  Kong means emptiness and ling means liveliness.  What I gather from Tabby's description is that his recent push hands partner (lets call him Mr. Pause) was ling but not kong.  I surmise this because Mr. Pause declared he could knock Tabby upside the head if he wanted to (a demonstration of ling), yet he was losing the matches because Tabby could feel Mr. Pause's tension and up root him demonstrating that Mr. Pause was not kong (empty).

Tabby on the other hand must be kong (empty) but not ling (lively) because he only feels obligated to cover his head when he is boxing.

How did it come to this?  If you are aggressive, you are going to have a strategy.  Having a strategy will occlude your ability to see the order of the cosmos.  Tabby's strategy is to be like water.  If he is like water his opponent will find nothing in him to push on, while he can simultaneously use extraordinary sensitivity skills to find a little sliver of tension in his opponent.  Once he finds that tension in his opponent he can expand condense or spiral his qi against the sliver of tension and the opponent will up root himself.  The problem with this method is that it works.  (Most martial arts methods have that problem.)  However, does it work when Tabby has his hands up at head level?  My guess is that it does not.  The test is not a quick hook punch to the head, it is a slow hook punch to the head with a soft lady-like hand.  It doesn't actually matter whether Tabby or Mr. Pause does the hook punch it's the hands going up that matters.

We already know the answer to our test because Tabby believes that boxing is a superior way to hit.  In boxing the body is like an on/off switch, it goes from dodging and weaving like water, then sudden switches on with an icy strike to the jaw.

Ali Video...



Of course boxers don't protect their groin because it is illegal to strike there in the game of boxing.  So what are we doing? trading the groin for the head?  No.  All the push hands teachings about protecting the head or the groin or the space on the ground (fixed step push hands) or the center line or whatever, they are all just mind forms, all limitations, all preliminary experiments meant to show you what not to do.  Even Tabby's idea about finding tension in the opponent is just a trick to get the student to see the limitations of focused sensitivity.  OK, you found the tension in my left baby toe?  you feel it?  You got it?  Now feel this right hook on your chin, subtle huh?

If you are kong the opponent can not feel the slightest bit of tension in your body, they can only feel a big unified whole.  If you are ling you can do anything, you can punch or kick, run around like a monkey, or eat some salad.  Kong and ling are pretty easy to do separately.  In order to do them simultaneously one must have a view which matches how things actually are.  Because we humans are always wanting stuff and setting goals and confusing what we see with what we wish we saw, our view gets out of sink with the way things actually are.  There is a Starbucks on practically every corner.

It's enough to make a person wish to be a cat!

When our view is in sync with the way things are, mind and movement are in harmony.  Then qi automatically fills the space between the quiet body and the active mind.   The body is kind of like a hotdog, wrapped in mustard and lettuce which is the qi, and surrounded by a bun which is the mind .  When you want to take a bite you pick up only the bun and move it to your mouth, don't touch the hotdog or the mustard.

The active mind is not busy or distracted, it is spacially involved like a person standing on the edge of a cliff.

Like crossing a river in winter.

--Laozi

When a person is kong and ling, empty and alive, at the same time he may still sense his opponent's tension-- but he doesn't need to look for it.  He just does whatever movement he fancies and the opponent will not be able to stop him.  With kong-ling there is no impulse to defend or to root.  That doesn't mean there is no defending or dodging.  Like punching or reciting poetry--they are options.

I'm always happy to debate these things over a bowl of coffee-flavored milk in Seattle, or to test them out next time I'm in Tokyo fighting Godzilla.

When Singing is like Fighting

I may be having an effect on George Xu.  Recently he compared singing on a stage to fighting.  He said the first time a person goes on stage before an audience they usually hunch up their shoulders look at the ground and sing in a soft squeaky voice.  After years of training and performing when a singer goes on stage before a large audience, it just gets them excited.  The bigger the audience the more heart they put into it.  This is because they have trained their spirit/mind to match the size of the audience, a bigger audience  will automatically produce a louder voice with greater projection and grander gestures.

With fighting it's the same.  The beginning fighter tenses his shoulders up even before the enemy makes contact.  He shrinks and defends, he freezes and thinks of escape.  However, with experience, the fight becomes a moment of excitement.  The greater the challenge, the greater the excitement.  "Oh, look a big guy.  Great!"  "Oh, he has a knife. Even better!"  "What's this? he has a friend with an iron bar coming too?  Wow, my lucky day!"

The fighter automatically expands his spirit/mind to match the size of the challenge.  The bigger the challenge, the more power and agility the fighter will use.  It is thrilling and exhilarating.

Readers may be thinking, "What? Is he talking to me?  I never get into actual fights so how could I learn to turn fear into excitement? And why would I?  I have a mortgage to pay!  I have to drive my kids to roller derby lessons!"

But this misses the point.  For a song to have meaning it must include its audience.  Whether we are singing to our shower head or a stadium of 10,000, the song has to be for someone (or something).  If you are singing to your lover about a bluebird you have to include both of them in the song.  You have to feel both of them viscerally.  To really get good at singing a song you have to emotionally embody it over and over.  After a time the emotions aren't surprising or overwhelming but they can still be exhilarating.  They are still real.

Fighting is the same.  In fact, all movement training works the same way.  If a person is running fast down a hill through the woods spontaneously dodging trees, leaping logs and avoiding pot holes, he is not going to be thinking about body alignment or ankle flexion.  That person is going to have his mind "outside" of his body.  His mind will be spatially excited and agile.  The same is true if you are training in a quiet park, a walled garden, or a serene dojo.  Or rather it should be.  The best quality movement training uses a totally quiet, relaxed body with a wildly active mind.

So now go back and do your cute little qigong exercises or peaceful taijiquan form and imagine you are on the edge of a thousand foot abyss.  Imagine you are surrounded by hungry tigers.  Imagine you just jumped out of an airplane and you are in free-fall.  And don't just imagine it, feel it-- be afraid, be very afraid.

Golden Bell vs. Iron T-Shirt

Hammering a Gong

At the recent Daoism Today conference in LA, in addition to presenting my unfinished paper, I did a participatory demonstration of many of the elements of Northern Shaolin, daoyin, taijiquan, and baguazhang which are theatrical, and appear to be connected to exorcistic rituals.  Most of the responses were positive and encouraging.  I did the demonstration on the first day of the 4 day conference so I had lots of time to respond to peoples comments and to hear suggestions.  Zhou Xuanyun is a Daoist priest/monk who is married and lives in Boston.  He describes himself as Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity) but he was trained on Wudang Shan which is a center of Quanzhen (Perfect Reality) monasticism and martial arts.  His comment, which he made through an anthropologist, was that he didn't understand how I could practice both Daoist (taijiquan, baguazhang) and Buddhist (Shaolin) styles of practice simultaneously--wouldn't the training methods undermine each other?

My first response was that my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying, practiced theater, Shaolin, taijiquan, and baguazhang.  The anthropologists loved this answer because finding an actual person who embodied both traditions and saw no contradiction in practicing them both is their gold standard.  The anthropologist view is that the continuity of culture is unbroken.  To say continuity or tradition is broken is to apply some external idea of purity to a culture which never had it.  So actual informants are king.  I may not be doing them justice but I think that is the gist of their view.  I tend to see the idea that Shaolin (Buddhist) and Taijiquan (Daoist) would need to be kept separate as a contemporary political contrivance.  But I must add here that the anthropologists are doing a wonderful job of gathering detailed accounts of living and recently passed Daoists. This is fantastic stuff.  (More on this in a future post.)

Hammerng by hand

Zhou's challenge is still serious.  He is right that the practices seem different and sometimes contradictory in methodology.  Teaching a lot of Shaolin does disrupt my bagua and taiji practices.  But I think this has less to do with method and more to do with the type of trance and energy expenditure necessary to teach kids classes.  I might just as well ask, how can a person do Daoist practice in Boston?  Isn't the chaos of urban America too much?  I would hope that the answer is no, disruptions are not enough to negate strongly held commitments.

Historically speaking, I could spin this argument a lot of different ways but taking the time right now would be too much disruption of my own practice.  Instead, I can make the argument simply and quickly.

One of the founders of the Boxer Rebellion (Yi He Quan) was a martial artist famous for his "Golden Bell" practice.  This practice was said to be the original basis for what became the much derided Boxer Rebellion claim of invincibility to bullets.  Golden Bell is still a common form of conditioning.  The term conditioning here means a method of developing resistance to, or protection from, strikes to the body.  It is a kind of toughness.

Tuning a gong

The other common type of body conditioning is called "Iron T-Shirt."  Golden Bell and Iron T-Shirt are good stand-ins for the larger argument between the internal practices of taiji and bagua on the one hand, and the external practices of Shaolin on the other; Golden Bell is internal, Iron T-Shirt is external.

The methodological difference between inner/outer or Shaolin/Wudang (Buddhist/Daoist) is resolved by looking at the convergence of these two practices.  Iron T-Shirt is a process of rubbing, pounding, massaging, scraping and hitting the surface of the torso.  Over time it makes one tougher and more resistant to strikes by thickening the surface, strengthening the bones, and desensitizing one to the shock of being struck.  Over time the differentiation between outer toughness and inner softness becomes stronger and more prominent.  At that point the process begins to reverse itself.  The external surface becomes quiet while the inner softness becomes more lively.  One no longer fears strikes to the surface because the differentiation of a lively, soft interior makes it is easy to move the vulnerable inner organs out of the way.

Golden Bell works by the opposite methodology.  It starts from the inside.  One relaxes and empties the torso of all tension, initially testing the torso for uniformity as a container of qi, like casting a bell, or tuning a gong.  The density of the surface of the bell must be uniform, and the interior of the bell must be free of tension, imperfections or obstructions.  Over time, the differentiation of inner liveliness and outer stillness becomes more distinct.  Once this distinction is achieved it is tested the same way Iron T-Shirt begins, with rubbing, pounding and strikes to the torso.  If the process has been completed correctly strikes to the quiet relaxed surface of the torso do not disturb the internal organs because they can be easily moved out of the way.

Learning martial arts, whether internal or external is always a disheveled process.  No two teachers use exactly the same methods.  External and internal methods are both defined by long lists of preliminary, basic, advanced, and extra-curricular experiments or exercises.  Two different schools rarely produce the same fruition, regardless of whether they share the same "internal" or "external" designation.

I see the fruition of martial arts as a type of freedom.  People are very nearly robots, our actions are usually predictable and automatic.  Martial arts training, both internal and external, is a way to become unglued from our robot nature.  Whether we call that robot "inner" or "outer" doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

(more on gongs, here and here)

Taoist Master Zhuang

Michael Saso has his own Youtube Channel.  Saso is the author of many books on Daoism and Tantric Buddhism.  His early work on Daoist ritual in Taiwan was ground breaking and he remains one of the few people ever to become a Zhengyi Daoshi (Daoist priest).

This video of his teacher and one of his teacher's sons is amazing.  The roots of baguazhang are not totally obvious in this video of pacing the void,  but imagining this ritual done on a national scale and refined over 1700 years, it isn't hard to imagine that baguazhang (the martial art) is just a variation.  In the last part of the series (6 parts) you see the priest alternating between walking the magic square and walking a circle something we also do in baguazhang.

You'll also notice that the shoes do not allow one to press through either the ball of the foot or the heal, creating a walk infused with unexpressed power, shi we call it---potential.  In basic taijiquan for instance, the four powers peng, ji, lu & an, are each executed from either the ball of the foot or the heel.  Eventually emptiness, as ritual action, replaces this type of forceful intention and one paces the void without any agenda.  This weakness, as I've been known to call it, is actually profoundly potent.  Many people over the years (including me) have criticized Aikido for having a "love your enemy, don't hit him" namby pamby approach to martial arts.  But Aikido is correct in describing the potency of emptiness in action as having no intent to harm your enemy.  Does anybody want to argue with me when I say it is quite possible to do harm even when you don't intend to?

Unity and Harmony

The Chinese Character "ping"

How is this for dark irony?  The Chinese civil war which took place in the 1850's and 60's was call the Great Peace Rebellion (Tai Ping) and is ranked the world's second bloodiest war of the last 500 years.  The Chinese character 'ping' is a common tattoo in the San Francisco.  I suppose it would be stating the obvious to point out that the term 'ping,' which is usually translated into English as 'peace,' doesn't really mean peace.

The idea of peace resists description because it is so deeply ingrained in the most basic concepts and metaphors of our civilization.  "Peace is just...like, ....peace man, you know?"  Because of this it is easy to unconsciously project our notions of peace onto other cultures.  The Chinese idea of peace as best I've been able to glean, is a combination of yi (unity) and he (Harmony).  And naturally that is the name of another Chinese War, the Boxer Rebellion which is known as the Yi He Uprising.

What is going on here?  Could this unity harmony thingy explain why Google was able to find the compromise of moving it's operations to Hong Kong?

Yi and he are the two most important concepts in Chinese Martial Arts.  But before I get into that let's examine them more generally.  The Chinese calendar seems like a good place to start.  It is thousands of years old.  Chinese governments have been publishing a calendar for the whole country almost continuously since the Han Dynasty (1st Century B.C.E.).  At first glance it is extremely complex because it is a composite of 10's perhaps 100's of local and ethnic calendars.  To name just a few, there is the lunar calendar, there is the stem-branch system of 10's and 12's that make up a 60 day cycle, there are the 28 Lunar Mansions which are also called constellations and since 7 goes into 28 they track with our 7 day weeks, there is the Islamic Calendar subsumed inside the larger calendar, there is a 72 day Yijing divination sequence which reverses its direction at the solstice and equinox, and there are many many more.

When I think of all the little local and ethnic calendars subsumed in the big calender I think of a story I heard about Californian Indians having a calendar which reminded them when it was time to go pick wild onions.  By picking onions in particular locations at particular times they loosened the ground and initiated the growth of more onions. They were making gardens in the wilderness.  (But of course it wasn't the wilderness to them.)  These sorts of ritual cycles are embedded in the Chinese calendar along with innumerable locals celebrations and sacrifices to gods, spirits and ancestors.  It was all in one calendar thus we could say there was unity (yi).  Harmony is a broad concept, but in a basic sense, harmony is achievable through not scheduling a mandatory meeting for work or school on either of the first two nights of Passover!  (To give an example from my own life.)  Harmony is achievable because our conduct, our activities, and our rituals, take place with awareness, sensitivity, and responsiveness to a bigger context or environment.

Any attempt by diplomats or corporate representatives to negotiate with the Chinese government must begin with some understanding of unity and harmony.  Sitting down at a negotiating table with a powerful Chinese representative without incorporating the concept of unity and harmony would be like meeting an American representative without bringing along the concept of "sitting down at the negotiating table!'  It's that basic.

I know I said above that I would explain the importance of unity and harmony in martial arts, but it's not easy to explain.  I fear words are likely to fail me but here goes.

Unity means inclusiveness.  Harmony means simultaneous individuation.  They work together.  But in trying to explain them I get stuck.  I could go to Daoist cosmology and say that huntun, totally undifferentiated chaos, approaches unity.  When everything is undifferentiated we could almost stay it's a single thing. But it is not quite unity because unity can be conceived of as having boundaries, like a country or an egg, whereas huntun has no boundaries.

And of course the Taiji symbol itself is the most ubiquitous image of harmony.  It graphically dipicts simultaneous individuation--two distinct things working together inside of each other.  But that just starts to sound weird, so lets have an example.

Imagine just an egg, without air or ground.  Make it a mammal egg so that the shell is soft.  Unity is the egg, the totality of your awareness is the egg.  The egg is all there is.  The egg can have a distinct shell, yolk and white, or it can be scrambled.  It's still just an egg, it's still a unity and it's still all there is.  In Daoist meditation there is this notion that we can map stillness as a transition between two types of experience which are actually one--the egg with a shell, a white and a yolk, and the egg scrambled.

In the internal martial arts, taijiquan, xingyi, bagua, we are an egg.  The totality of our awareness, our sense of where we are and the boundaries of our perception, is an egg.  Our physical mass is the yolk (jing).   The egg white is clarity and movement, it is what animates us (qi).   We could almost say that the egg white is inspiration and motivation; however, in Daoist cosmology this egg white is just the medium for animation--inspiration comes from Dao, it does not have any apparent origin.

The shell of the egg is the boundary of our perception.  When we practice internal gongfu the shell is the sky and the horizon--as we see, feel, hear, smell and imagine it.  We call this shen (spirit) in martial arts.  It contains the yolk and the egg white.  In basic training we develop the yolk (the body) so that it is smooth, round, and able to shift and change like a thick liquid which can expand and condense in all directions.  Then the yolk itself becomes so quiet that we forget it!  We forget it like we would forget our own body in the presence of a beauty beyond words.  We move only the egg white, shifting and swirling within an enormous shell, and the body follows without effort or inhibition. That's harmony.

George Xu Speaking at the UN

George Xu has put out his schedule of workshops for the year, check it out.

He is also teaching at the Open Center in New York in May.

And he is going to be at the United Nations while he is in New York being interviewed by Feng Shui GEO Steven Post.  Steven (who is also a long time student of George's and set up the NY events) tells me this is part of the process of getting Chinese Internal Martial Arts some kind of "Living Treasure," "World Heritage" type of designation.

Here is a recent quote from George:  "You have to make what is imaginary real, and what is real imaginary."  Normally that sort of quote causes me to roll my eyes.  It sounds ridiculus.  But this time he said it in a context that made perfect sense to me.  (We were trading upper-cuts.)  When a person is truly relaxed and "quiet," the only thing which can cause the body to move is what we normally call "imagination."  Normally motivated movement will create tension or resistance in the body and will disturb the experience of "quiet."  Likewise, movement devoid of normal muscle sensory activity, will be perceived as imaginary.  It is as simple as that.

Please share your ironic thoughts.

Martial Arts and Meditation

Standing still practices are widespread in the Chinese martial arts world.  Most styles have some type of standing still practice, and most qigong is derived in some degree from these practices.  For the sake of explication I'm going to divide stillness practices into two halves-- meditation and power-stretch.  Power-stretch is a group of methods dealing with the transitions from stillness into movement and will be the subject of a future post.

Meditation is only half of the big subject; "stillness practices."  But meditation in the martial arts happens in both movement and stillness.  The most difficult thing for modern people to understand is that meditation training requires no instruction.  It is not something we do with our minds.  Meditation is not a clearing process or a form of mind-body repair.  The martial arts are loaded with many different types of trance which do such things, but meditation is simply not a mental process.

The most common type of meditation in the martial arts is the practice of a form.  In order to practice meditation using a martial arts form one simply does the form.  (This is true regardless of the style, shaolin, taijiquan, baguazhang, or something else.) Do the form without self-correction.  Do the form without any attempt to make improvements.  Do the form without thinking of applications.  Do the form without any agenda or focus, and you will be practicing the most basic and essential form of martial arts meditation.

Standing meditation is essentially the same.  Stand in a posture which makes it easy to be still and discard the idea that stillness has an agenda, a focus or a reason.  Some postures are easier than others, and for this reason having a teacher to correct your posture is very helpful.  But whether you have a teacher or not, basic standing is practiced daily for one hour.  After about 100 days the posture itself should start to reveal effortlessness.

The subject of trance in the martial arts can be divided into three basic categories, all of which are total sensery experiences.  However; for the purpose of explication, each of them can be distinguished by the ways in which they use visualization.

Before I describe them, let me make it clear that I believe one should first practice a form, devoid of planning, agenda, magic, power, or utility.  However, being a realist, I know that it is a rare student who comes to the martial arts without an agenda of fighting, prowess, heroism, health, vanity, or the desire to dominate.  The old masters got around this by insisting on total subordination to the teacher.  In my world I offer limited fulfillment of these "martial wonders" up front-- from day one.  Through developing a personal relationship with my students I can slowly introduce the practice of emptiness and having a "zero" agenda.

In other words, the "zero" of martial arts meditation, and the one, two, and three of "power-healing trance" (see below), have no inherent order.  They can be taught in any order-- in a disheveled go-with-the-flow way.  However, at some point that zero-emptiness meditation practice must be established or the student will not have a dantian for their practice.  The word dantian (literally cinnabar field) refers to a large empty space for doing ritual.  It is most often described as a location in the center of the body; but as metaphors go, we could also describe it as a container, a vacuum, or silence.

The three types of visualization:

1.  Deities.  These are aspects of truth and nature.  Some have biographies, or histories, and some do not.  They are known by a list of their attributes which are then visualized in front of the martial artist, then above one's head and then descending into and merging with the visualizer.

2.  Environment.  One can visualize walking on a lake, in mud, through clouds or on a high mountain ridge.  There is really no limit here.  In baguazhang for example there are visualizations of walking through a tunnel of spiraling fire, or being surrounded by five mountain peaks.  One can also visualize abstractions like the eight trigrams of the yijing (I-Ching) transforming into each other.  Probably the most common thing to visualize is martial applications of fighting techniques.

3.  Visualizing spaces within the body.  For instance a huge palace can be visualized at the throat notch, or two deities sitting on your kidneys.  Spaces can be empty or full, vacuous or active, dark or light.  Spaces can be finite and solid, or infinite and formless.   Basic "dissolving" practices like ice to water, water to steam fall into this category.

The three categories can overlap each other.  A deity can be both inside and outside the body.  The boundary between inner and outer can dissolve.

Next week I'll deal with the power-stretch half of stillness practices...ways of understanding transitions to movement.

Animal Flavor

Back when I was in my early twenties and training all the time with George Xu he would go on theme jags for months at a time. At one point, everything we did had to have "Animal Flavor."

I know what you're thinking, and yes, this is when I decided that I was going to give up being a vegetarian. If all my movement had to have animal flavor, than so did my diet.  But I had three rationales, the first two were nutritional; 1) My joints were too flimsy for the type of training I was doing, George told me that something about eating meat thickens the joints, 2) I was prone to sinus infections, 3) I decided that the arguments for no meat were mostly local, and that most people in the world wanted more meat, not less--I wasn't going to convince very many people to join me--since meat tastes so good.

But when George used the expression Animal Flavor he wasn't talking about eating. He was talking about dynamic twisting and wrapping usually to one side or the other. During this period everything we did was twisted up to one side, ready to pounce, strike, or evade. We also watched videos of wild animals and of various martial arts masters to analyze their movements for Animal Flavor. Usually animal flavor was off center with one eye a little more open then the other.

Animal flavor is a great example of an aspect of martial arts which is equally useful for performance and fighting. Animal flavor makes movement much more interesting to watch, it's bold, disheveled, and tonic! For fighting, Animal flavor brings out a kind of 'do what needs to be done' mentality, it makes you appear more dangerous, and more serious. From a power point of view, it allows you to pull your 'bow' back a little further.

Here are some videos of Liuhe Xinyi (the style I do), performed at a high level with animal flavor: