Xu - Fake - False

The term xu is a key concept which ties together daoyin, the ritual body, trance, and all types of martial arts.  The first definition my dictionary gives of xu is “empty” or “hollow” but this is misleading as the term kong is generally used to describe emptiness in martial arts, meditation or ritual.

The second definition in my dictionary is more helpful, “fake;” interestingly, the fourth definition is “virtual.”

The radical for the character xu, is hu (tiger).  When a tiger stalks, he forgets his body, he thinks only of the prey.  Xu is the character used by Chinese Medicine in the expression shenxu (kidney depletion). When we go without food or sleep our bodies often become deficient and depleted, we lose fine motor control, the ability to focus, and concern for the flesh.

In the context of internal martial arts, xu is the fruition of the whole body moving as a single liquid unit.  Xu is a description of the physicality of an “I can sense what you are doing, you can not sense what I am doing” situation.  A body which is xu is unstoppable because it doesn’t apparently respond to resistance.

I know what you are thinking, zombies are xu. That’s right, if zombies could talk they would be like, “Yo, I don’t care if you chop off my arm, I’ll still eat you.  Shoot off my leg, no problem, I’m still coming...” I hesitate to say that xu is a form of disassociation because it is not necessarily a psychological problem.  However, the first time I bang my body or my leg against the ground teaching daoyin, people wince.  They think, “Are you crazy?”

Xu is external martial conditioning.  Xu is the result of pounding and slapping the outside of ones body as a way to be comfortable with heavy contact.

It is also what allows self-mortifiers to pierce and pummel themselves.  There is a long history in China of using a ritual trance initiation to induce xu.  Often it involves a ritual emptying, as in nuo theatrical exorcism where the hun and pö spirits are removed from the performer’s body and placed in jars using talisman and mantras.  But it is also a quick way of training troops.  During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) each boxer went through an initiation process which made him immune to pain and of course (he believed) bullets.

In trance the mind is totally preoccupied.  The boxers would invoke their personal deity and they would become, for instance, the Monkey King.  By preoccupying the mind with all the attributes of the Monkey King the individual boxer must have been able to disassociate from any injury to his own body.  He may also have been hungry and been entranced by the idea that he was purifying the country of evil Christians.

Other examples of training troops quickly involve group chanting.  Qawwali music from Pakistan, for instance, is all about invoking love.  It is the idea that while you are butchering your enemy you feel intense love for them, as you send them to god, you also make them one with god.  Because you are so focused on love, you disassociate from your own body.  Intense anger, revenge, and envy work too.  As Laozi says, “When we are possessed by desire, we experience only the yearned for manifest.”

Many spiritual traditions think of xu as a form of transcendence.  Putting on my rational 20th Century hat, I’d say that xu is the result of two forces; hormones (probably adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, epinephrine) and mental focus.

(While mentally focusing on an idea, a goal, or an object outside the body can create an experience of xu, "focus" is a really bad word choice because the more spatially expansive (capacious) ones awareness is, the more xu the body can become.)

For those who practice internal martial arts xu comes about simply through relaxation.  In fact I would tentatively say xu is relaxation. When every sand sized particle that makes up your entire body is relaxed it is xu.  (Xu is used in the Chinese character for atom.) A body which is xu does not intentionally respond to resistance.  It is heavy, liquid and unified.  Actually it does respond to resistance, but it does so in an unconditioned, unconscious, uncontrolled automatic way.

Everywhere I look these days people are abusing the poor word “embodied.” Everything needs to be “embodied” these days, if you want to sell it--it better be embodied with some awesomeness.  Exercise, politics, education, shampoo, coffee, even the truth is supposed to be embodied.  But I’m telling you people, if you take this ride to the top of the hill, it ends with a totally disembodied experience.  But words are misleading, truly internal martial xu should be both embodied and disembodied at the same time.  When all the controlling, micro-structural, 'I own this body,' 'this is me,' 'this is me-ness,' voices get turned off what is left is xu.  Xu and emptiness (kong), of course.

I’m not exactly describing an ego-free experience here.  The ego just becomes bigger, it lifts off of the body and becomes spacial.  One experiences a lively, dynamic form of perceptual-motor spacial awareness.

Everyone is at least a little bit xu all the time.  And everyone is capable of getting really xu in short order.  Most of the drugs you can name off of the top of your head increase ones experience of xu.

What inhibits the experience of xu? Only one thing: Feeling in possession of your own body--believing that what defines you is limited to this empty bag of flesh.

National Living Treasures

I really don't know what to do.  Paulie Zink has another video up on Youtube.  His Daoyin is the link between Daoist hermit rituals, Shaolin, the martial theater tradition, and internal martial arts.  I don't know of anyone else that has even come close to receiving the complete transmission of this knowledge.  Paulie Zink has it, yet hardly anyone appreciates that fact, even worse, I don't think he appreciates it!  For crying out loud, why call it Yin Yoga?  You're killing me.

For those who have missed this story, here are some of the details.  Paulie Zink learned Daoyin and Monkey Kungfu in Los Angels in the late '70's early 80's from a guy, Cho Chat Ling who learned it from his father and taught no one else.  The Monkey Kungfu is made up of 5 different Monkey forms and qualities all of which Paulie then taught to his close friend Michael Matsuda.  I interviewed Michael last year in Santa Clarita and he told me that he never learned any of the Daoyin and that Monkey Kungfu and Daoyin were completely different systems.  It's my opinion that Monkey is one of about 20 Daoyin animal movements, but it happens to be by far the most developed of the animals because Monkey was such a popular stage role in every part of China.  Michael dismissed this notion by saying that it was purely a martial arts system.  He backed up this statement by telling me that a group of Paulie Zink's teacher's father's Kungfu cousin's  disciples (got that?) came to visit Los Angels from Hong Kong twice in the 1980's to compete in tournaments and Michael got to travel with them.  He said they were superb fighters, unlike Paulie Zink who never had an interest in fighting.  But Michael also said that none of the visiting group knew Daoyin, and none of them knew all 5 monkey forms either.  That means Michael is also a National Living Treasure and more people need to get down there and study with him.  I took his class-- that's some serious gongfu!  (Buy a video!) (There is more of Michael's argument here, but the idea that there was some wall of separation between fighting skill and performing skill does not stand up to historical scrutiny.)

The purpose of Daoyin is very simply to reveal the freedom of our true nature.  That's the purpose, or I could say the fruition.  One of the reasons this thing has gotten so screwed up is that people are always confusing the method with the fruition.  They think that physical looseness and flexibility is the fruition, when in fact it is only the method, and only a small part of the method at that.

The method of Daoyin is very simply to distill what is inside from what is outside so that we might become aware of this other thing, call it emptiness, call it freedom, call it original qi, call immortality, call it whatever you want.  The world outside of us is always pushing or pulling, and the world inside of us is always pushing or pulling.  The premise of Daoyin is that there is a place in between inside and outside which is always pure and always free.

Thinking back to how Daoyin was created, there were two ways in.  One way was to cultivate extraordinarily plain stillness and emptiness, and from that experience begin moving.  The other way was to tap into the spontaneity of the animal mind, to move, think and feel like a wild animal.  In order to have the complete Daoyin 'experience' you would have to go in one way and find your way out the other!  So in a sense, Daoyin can't really be taught, it has to be found.

One of the many differences between Yoga and Daoyin is that Daoyin has what we call in the martial arts world, "external conditioning."  Somewhere in the middle (1:26) you see Paulie putting his legs together and flopping them side to side, whacking them on the ground.  His torso becomes like water and his legs like someone else's legs.  Who cares?  Just throw them around.  This is one of the doorways in.

Later, when he does the pig, he is banging his knees on the ground in a rapid fire vibration.  Then near the end he does the caterpillar (changing into a butterfly) which looks totally smooth, but I've taught it to kids a lot and I always have to explain that "gongfu teachers like me are the model of toughness and dispassion!" and "I don't care if you get little purple bruises--the cure is more practice!"

In the video he starts with the frog, then the stump, the tree, then the crab, the transition to lotus sitting, then the pig (at 1:59, I've never seen that before!), then the caterpillar into the butterfly.

The music is barely survivable.  It should really be done on a hard, unforgiving surface.  The production quality is even lower than the stuff I do.  I'm pretty sure that most people will look at this video and say, it doesn't measure up to this or that standard--but that's partly because people don't know what they are looking at.

He is doing only a tiny fraction of each animal. Viewers should know that all the animals have meditation postures, and they all come totally to life, like the pig did for about one second (1:59).  The pig is particularly interesting because like the dog, it was the lowest status role there was in the Chinese theater tradition.  Think about it, to be an actor was lower status than a prostitute or a thief!  Playing the role of a dog or a pig was really low.  The animal role specialists would draw straws to see who the unlucky guy was who would have to play the pig!

Given that Paulie's teacher probably inherited a really low social status, it isn't all that surprising that he would want to abandon it himself and go into the import-export business (no one actually knows where he is now), but he obviously valued it enough to believe that it should be passed on to someone in it's complete form.  I can even understand wanting to free it from it's original Daoist/Theater context, even if I think that was short sited and highly problematic given that Paulie does not seem to understand what a treasure he is or has.

Body Mapping

Lately I’ve had a few students who are professional musicians and one of them handed me an article about a new method called Body Mapping.

Here is a description by David Vining of what they think they are doing:

The body map is one’s self-representation in one’s own brain.  The breakthrough of body mapping is the realization that we move based on how we think we are put together rather than how we are actually constructed.  If the body map is accurate, movement is good; an inaccurate body map causes inefficient or injury-producing movement.  In body mapping, one uses self-observation and self-inquiry to gain access to the body map.  By carefully examining what one believes to be true about his or her body and comparing it to accurate information, one can recognize fallacies in the body map and correct and refine this representation to become more efficient.  During this process, accurate information may be provided by kinesthetic experience, mirrors, books, pictures, medical models of body parts and teachers.  Through body mapping, one can recognize the source of inefficient and harmful movement and replace it with movement that is well-organized and cooperates with the reality of how we are actually built.

Let me start by saying it is wonderful to find a system that recognizes the importance of mind in movement training.  And it is a rare treat to find someone I fundamentally disagree with expressing themselves so clearly and precisely.  The statement “we move the way we think we are put together”  is mistaken.  We actually move by a process of changing spacial imagination.  If you are imagining your anatomical body moving in space, it will seem like “we are moving the way we are put together,” but that is just one of an unlimited number of options.

An Alternative Body Map!

The therapeutic application of Body Mapping is a big improvement over what I usually see recommended by Physical or Occupational Therapists (but those fields are changing fast and allow for a fair amount of experimentation so it’s possible to find a PT with 30 years of Tai Chi under her belt.)

I believe Body Mapping as a method works!  In practice I would expect it to relieve many of the stress injuries musicians get from practicing all the time.  In many cases musicians are practicing with an image of their body which has become a distinct and repeating shape. In the martial arts world we call this “stale qi,” in the Body Mapping community they think of it as a “false map.”  This “stale qi” is usually a small concentrated shape (less than five inches in diameter) and either inside the body or near the surface.  Getting the musician to acknowledge the shape (it is usually unconscious) and to dissolve it while playing their instrument will relieve the stress.  I’m not saying this is easy, people can be stubborn about their routine uses of the mind, and it can disappear one day and snap back into place the next.  Just feeling the ‘false map’ and dissolving it into vast emptiness is what internal martial artists do.  If Body Mapping did just this, it would be enough.

But the Body Mapping advocates then seek to replace the “false map” with a “true” or “truer” map.  This is an unnecessary step. However, it is likely to be helpful in the short term because movement based on an analysis of anatomical structure tends to be efficient movement.  But eventually that too can fail from over use (again, stale qi).  It is also impossible to get a truly accurate map. Our mind is just too good a creating short cuts and simplifications.  Who has the patience to visualize every single anatomical soft-tissue structure, much less every molecular interaction!  Still, some knowledge of muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, and fascia can be very useful as a teaching tool, especially for beginning students.

If I say, “Don’t think of a carrot,” did you think of it? You probably did because that’s just what our minds do.  It happens really fast.  It happens at mind speed, the only speed which really counts in a fight to the death or a virtuoso solo on a musical instrument.  Now, imagine you are a carrot and turn the carrot!  I am not a carrot, but there is no reason to believe that imagining that I am one will make my movement less efficient, or cause injury.

When you play a musical instrument you want your imagination to be free.  We want you to have an excited and totally active spacial mind.  There is certainly a place for “concentration” in the learning process, but I want my musicians' minds playing with the currents of air on the edge of the grand canyon, or the darkness at the bottom of the ocean--not stuck in their instrument or their anatomy.

What the Body Mapping advocates are saying is that if you are playing a trombone and you unconsciously think one of your arms is actually coming out of your neck, over time you will develop inefficient movement which will eventually become debilitating.  They are correct about that.

They go on to say that if you replace that “false image” with an “accurate” structural kinesthetic experience of your arm and neck, you will move more efficiently.
They are correct about that too.

Structure may be a sensible way to teach efficient movement to musicians, but I suspect that at least at the higher levels, music teachers have very strict rules about how structure, alignment, and especially “fingering” should be. I would be warry of messing with that. If I was teaching martial arts and music to a teenager I would consider Body Mapping all his finger movement to the spine so that his movement is always structurally strong and efficient.  Such a practice would most likely have to be done separately from the practice of music and then applied to it because most instruments use each hand differently.  I also wouldn’t want to leave students at that level, having only taught them structure with out freedom! Especially if they plan to be professionals--it is important to reach the heart-mind emptiness levels of performance.

To summarize this article for regular readers:
The body must be inside the mind. Do not put the mind inside the body!

(Also see Zhuangzi chapter 3, On Nourishing Life....)

_______________

One of the consequences of the false contextualization of martial arts as “for fighting only” is the obscuration of the obvious fact that professional musicians and theater artists were both part of the same families and performed together.  Since theater in all of China was “physical theater,” and its training was in fact the movement tradition we know today as “martial arts,” it is almost inconceivable that there were any top quality professional musicians who didn’t have at least some martial arts training embedded in their art.
In fact, I could go further and say that powerful operatic singing is one of the important sources of Chinese internal martial arts.  How could a person sing for 4 hours to a huge outdoor audience without being “internal?”  Italian operatic singing technique may be the closest thing to Tai Chi in all of Western Civilization.

__________

I sincerely hope that in the future martial arts will be taught with music and theater, and that professional musicians will see martial arts as a resource for how to dance with their instrument.

There is lots of material about Body Mapping on the web.  The Berklee School of Music in Boston is promoting it here.  I see this as a positive trend moving in my direction.  In the article the author makes the point that performing music is a movement  art.
And here is a book about Body Mapping that looks pretty interesting, I just ordered it.

The Primeval Tongue

It is a staple of Chinese movement and religious studies that the tongue should be on the roof of the mouth.  In Daoist ritual and ritual meditation the tip of the tongue is sometimes used to draw talisman on the roof of the mouth.  But in Zouwang (sitting and forgetting) the basic emptiness meditation practice, which is very much like Zen, part of the posture instructions for stillness include putting the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth behind the teeth.  I’ve also heard people say to put the tongue on the soft pallet.  The identical instruction is standard in Tai Chi and other internal martial arts and qigong classes.

There are two explanation commonly given.
The first is that keeping the tongue in that position allows the throat to open so that saliva can travel downward without stimulating the gag reflex or the need to swallow.
The second explanation is that it somehow connects the meridians which travel in a circle up the back, over the head, and down the front-- popularly called the “micro-cosmic orbit” of the du and ren acupuncture channels.

A while back I wrote about Michael Jordan’s amazing tongue.  In an interview he said he learned to do tongue lap-rolls from his father who always rolled his tongue when he was chopping wood.  I’ve been experimenting with this for a long time.  How does movement of the tongue help the movement of wood chopping?  I think I have the answer.

The sucking reflex babies are born with is a whole body movement which comes up from the belly and presses the tongue to the roof of the mouth.  Not the tip of the tongue!  A spot about a centimeter back from the tip of the tongue presses upward into the roof of the mouth. This creates a rolling effect pushing the tip of the tongue downward and out (to surround the nipple).

If you don’t have a baby handy to play with, find a cat and interrupt her while she is licking herself.  She’ll probably stop with her tongue just slightly out of her mouth on a downward arc and give you this Jewish grandmother look like, “What? You want something? No, what makes you think I’m busy?”

If you put your own tongue in this position and try to talk it will sound like, “blublah.”  I find that practicing with my tongue in this position is very similar to having “baby feet” (see previous post).  It is an even better position for getting saliva to flow down the throat without stimulating the gag reflex.  It also seems to interrupt my tendency to think in words.  Why did it take me 20 years to figure this out?

This is a very relaxed position of the tongue, it is not held with pressure.  Any movement of the dantian (the abdominal region of the mind) will be felt as a subtle change in the shape or fullness of the tongue if it is relaxed.  If the tip of the tongue is curved upwards this feedback loop will be broken.

Perhaps this experience is what was originally meant by “connecting the du and ren meridians” but if that is the case, the method and purpose really got mangled in the translation, or the transition to modernity.

(please, no “baby talk” in the comments)

Here is a video of an infant sucking:

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.

The Cat Walk

Tanka

It was raining hard the other morning so I did my practice inside and I really got into working on the cat walk.  I've got these walks down: the dog, the bunny, the monkey, the phoenix, the crab, the dragon and probably a bunch of others I'm not thinking of right now.  But the cat has been tough.  This is the Paulie Zink Daoyin I'm talking about here, and he showed me the scared cat, the cat licking, and the stretching cat but not the walking cat.  It's hard to walk like a cat!  But it's only a matter of time and deduction before I get it.  After all I have Xinyi cat-washes-his-face practice to help me.  So I was doing some experimenting and I realized that the cat prowling is different than the cat walking, and the prowl started happen for me.  Cats have a narrow ribcage and they walk with a really narrow base.

After practice I went on-line looking for videos of cats walking and I found this amazing study, "Whole Body Mechanics of Stealthy Walking in Cats," comparing the way cats and dogs walk!  Here is a summary, but check out the study link it's got so much juicy content and equations too.  Make sure you watch the videos.  (I couldn't figure out how to embed them, but I used a program I have called VLC to watch them with out any trouble.)

Here is what I got from the article.  Dogs (and by inference, humans) walk in an very efficient way. (Wolves must be even more efficient, George Xu told me to practice like a wolf running in the sky!  --One movement, three hours, not get tired!)  Prowling cats on the other hand are 100% inefficient!  They use absolutely no forward momentum.  Well, that's what happens when you practice xinyi, taijiquan or baguazhang walking with whole-body shrinking-expanding emptiness too.  The momentum happens when you pounce or strike, not in the walk.

The article poses "a tradeoff between stealthy walking and economy of locomotion."  My opinion, as far as humans go, is that we can master both if we return to the source of walking.  Walking is a trance, an extremely complex trance.  When we walk we are doing something on the order of the mental complexity required for visualizing a Tibetain Tanka in perfect detail and animating ourselves in it! This is what Daoyin, real Daoyin, is supposed to do.  It takes you all the way back to the origins of movement, where all movement inspirations come from.

Tim Cartmell

Back in June of this year while I was attending the Daoism Today conference in Los Angles I had the opportunity to visit and take a Sun style baguazhang lesson from Tim Cartmell.  Tim is one of the most well known teachers in the American internal martial arts world.  His book Effortless Combat Throws is widely acclaimed.  His more recent book The Method of Chinese Wrestling, which is a translation of Tong Zhongyi's book first published in 1935, is one of the most beautiful books on the market.

I made my way down to Tim's studio in Huntington Beach around noon.  His studio is all mats with big windows and great lighting.  It turns out that he currently only teaches the Chinese Internal Arts (Taiji, Xingyi, Bagua) in private lessons and workshops.  The classes held in his studio are all Jiujitsu Mixed Martial Arts oriented stuff.  There were a few guys in their twenties hanging around and a few showed up around the time I did.  Tim told them they could practice their grappling over on the side while we used the center of the space for my lesson.

My sense is that Tim has created a sold institution.  His studio is a place where mostly guys in their twenties can come and let loose.  A place where it is safe to learn ethics and explore natural aggression.  This kind of milieu is an enormous gift to any community and I was both impressed and inspired by it.  If students are interested, the internal arts are their for them too, but they are not the main product he is selling.  I like that, it takes the economic pressure off of a tradition which really requires adoption levels of intimacy to learn.

Personally Tim was warm and welcoming.  His teaching was very clear and it matched his theory.  He showed me the first two palm changes of the Sun style of Baguazhang and tested my structure through out the movements.  He showed a couple of applications which involved close contact throws.  Over the years I've learned many versions of the single and double palm change but each time I learn a new one it is like opening a different window into the original physicality of this arts distant past.

At one point in the second palm change there is a heel spin with both feet turned out.  A bit like Indian Classical Dance but since we were working on a mat I was having trouble with the spin.  So Tim showed me a straight line practice in which turning in (kou) and turning out (bai) alternate with a spin.  I immediately recognized the stepping pattern from a diagram for walking an Yijing (I-Ching) hexagram found in Jo Riley's book Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance.  We had a short discussion about it and he seemed genuinely interested but obviously it was a much longer conversation for another time.  (I don't have Riley's book handy but if anyone does and wants to scan that page for me I'll post it in an update.)

I only had one lesson with Tim so it is quite likely that I misunderstood something or only saw a small part of what he does.  But this is what I got.  Tim's idea is to use a very soft-light touch with precise footwork to attain a strategically superior position.  From there he uses superior structure to close in, at which point an effortless throw happens.  During the throw I noticed him melting his structure some what, becoming heavier like water.  So he appears to have three modes: soft-light touch, structure, and water.

I think this is an excellent method and I highly recommend Tim as a teacher for anyone living near Huntington Beach.  The method is very close to the one I practiced for may years but I've since changed my theory.  However, I still believe that what Tim is teaching is necessary to learn, it is probably more exact to say that that I think of it as a developmental stage in a larger theory.

I've explained my theory countless times but it comes out a little different each time, so once more with gusto.

Structure training is necessary because everyone is already using structure even without any training.  Structure training teaches you exactly what the best possible structure is so that 1) you can break someone else's structure when you encounter it and 2) so that you are familiar enough with the feeling of structure in your own body that at a more advance level you can totally discard it as a strategy for yourself.

Water training is a necessary stage leading to total emptiness.  Water is not very effective for fighting on its own, but it is a superb aid to fighting in close contact --throw or be thrown-- situations because it allows you to add weight anywhere at will.  Water is also useful for avoiding strikes and for rolling on the ground.

The importance of learning to achieve a spatially and structurally advantageous position should not be underestimated.  The best way to learn this is to practice with a very light sensitive touch, weakened, so as not to rely on strength.  In this weakened state you will lose unless you truly have the best position, the position of dominance.  With practice you will slowly get better at finding that position.  Once you are good at this, you will always know if you have a great position or a terrible one.  The next step is to always practice from a terrible position, that way no matter what position you get into you can still fight.

In order to fight well from a terrible position you need to transform from water to steam and from steam to emptiness.  Steam will give you the superior power but it is slow.  Emptiness will make you fast again and make it impossible for your opponents to feel your intent until it is too late.

Most of my current theory developed from recent encounters with George Xu, and since he is constantly changing his theories I suspect my theories will keep changing too.

Tim has tons of videos and discussions available on the web...Check it out.  Tim was very cool about setting up lessons, so if you are near Los Angles drop him a line.

Baby, Baby, Babies

Being baby-like is used as a metaphor to describe the Dao in several key chapters of the Daodejing.  I've ventured into this particular play-pen many times before, but each time I see things differently.

Speaking of seeing, did you know that babies learn to track with their eyes at two months of age.  The ability to track moving objects continues to improve for a few months until the baby can actually reach for things and grab them.  This is usually called Gross Motor movement.  But interestingly, they can reach for things without grabbing before that.

Babies can reach for things before they have control over their arms!  How do they do this?  Well the theory is that when their arms come into their field of vision, they can position them where they want them by moving other parts of their body, like their torso and head.  In Tai Chi terms, they move their dantian and the arms follow!

The ability to track a moving object with the eyes requires imagination.  Our mind creates the illusion that our entire field of vision is clear and focused.  But if you look at a single word on this page you will not be able to see the other words in focus.  The part of our eyes that focuses is a very small part of our vision.  This is probably why people experiencing intense fear or excitement usually see with tunnel vision.  It's actually the only part of our vision which focuses.  Normally our focused vision is dancing around and attending to whatever interests us and that memory-image becomes part of the whole picture we "see."  Our eyes can normally spot movement and color changes in the periphery but in order to track a moving object and grab it, we probably need to have an image of the whole field of vision in our mind.  This is a an "automatic" function of the imagination. But it is a function that develops with age and practice, during the first 2 to 6 months of life. It is a type of effort.

But children often have some difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is imaginary.  It's easy to see how this might come about, especially if most of what we think we are "seeing" is actually being organized by our imagination.  We usually see ghosts out of the corner of our eyes.  Magicians use 'slight of hand' which basically means they get you to focus one way and imagine the other.  When someone shouts in a crowd, "He's got a knife!" lots of people will be certain they saw it, even if it never existed.

The ability to distinguish what is real from what is imaginary is a developmental process.  It develops out of something called an "action cognitive sequence."  I'm new two this theory but it seems simple enough.  Basically, you see it and you notice it change, then you see it and you imagine it changing, then you see it, you imagine it changing and you change it.   After a couple years of this you have touched everything, put nearly everything in your mouth and you are ready to enter politics.

Because the ability to distinguish reality from imagination develops out of a type of action, it is possible to turn it off!  It is an ability related to tracking objects with the eyes, which is also a type of effort which can be relaxed.  Before gross motor control of the arms develops, babies have the ability to see without focusing, and they have the ability to reach for things without controlling their arms.  This is of course a description of the internal martial arts, tai chi, xingyi, bagua and qigong.

There is so much more we can learn from babies.  All of the above theories have been tested in one way or another.  The tests are imperfect, new theories keep showing up, and new tests bring old ones into doubt.  The paper that inspired this post is here if you want to check it out.  (The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2009, 50, P. 617-623)

The paper was sent to me because I told someone I thought the idea of reflexes was a bit flimsy.  The paper offers evidence to counter the idea that babies have reflexes.  The "rooting" reflex used by babies to find their mothers breast seems to turn off after they have eaten!  And the "sucking" reflex is very dynamic.  Babies adjust how much they are sucking moment to moment depending on how much milk is available.  They also change their sucking patterns in order to get their mother's to vocalize.  In other words, babies are in control!

And that leads to my final point, in the practice of internal martial arts we can turn off:

1. The focus-tracking function of the eyes,


2. The distinction between what is real and imaginary,


3. The impulse to articulate the limbs,


4. The use of feed-back from the eyes to "correct" balance,


5. And the "felt" awareness of where our body is in space.

Once these impulses are turned off, once these learned types of effort are relaxed,  there is still something alive and in control.  Neo-nates, little babies, move by shrinking and expanding, by twisting and spiraling.  They seem to move from the belly...which is the dantian...which seems to include everything.

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.

Unconscious Power

I have been quite reluctant until now to use the term unconscious.  Expressions like "the thousand yard stare,"  "trance-possession," or "a completely melted body" have been less jarring to my ears.  When trying to translate the esoteric meaning of a Chinese phrase like 'the jingshen moves the body,' expressions like, "over-come by a presence outside of the body" --such as fear, or love at first sight-- have seemed less confusing than the term unconscious.

But martial arts expert George Xu has been throwing around the terms unconscious and subconscious for a couple of years.  I've tried to dissuade him from using them because they have so much psychological baggage.  The average person is going to have to drop his or her preconceptions about what unconscious and subconscious mean anyway, why not start with a word they don't know?

George asked me: "When you are watching a great movie and you forget your own body--is that unconscious or subconscious?"

Me:  "I don't know.  These two terms refer to aspects of the mind which cause us to either act in a way we didn't intend to; or to act in a way we did intend to but didn't know it--and still might not know it even after the act."

The Chinese term jingshen is most often used in the negative.  For example, when a student is spacing out in class the teacher will scold, "You've lost your jingshen!"  So in a sense jingshen means presence in, or awareness of, ones environment.

Can we move our body unconsciously?  If I am not conscious of a movement, how can I be its cause?  On the other hand, how do we know that so called conscious movement is really conscious?  Maybe conscious movement is actually unconscious movement observed and then a split second later justified?  Maybe conscious movement is actually unconscious movement which we just happen to have planned in advance?  Or put another way, maybe all movement is unconscious, but some movement has a kind of mental tension surrounding it, attempting to guide it and control it.

Is it possible then, that we could drop this mental tension we normally call "conscious," and replace it with a kind of active spacial awareness?  And there by gain some control over unconscious movement?  Can we move our bodies using only awareness of our environment?  Can actively changing only ones feeling of "presence" actually move the body?

Jo Riley, writing about Chinese Theater, has chosen to translate "qi" in English as "presence."  Turning for a moment to  the theater realm, all of this talk of unconscious seems more reasonable.  Some styles of acting for instance instruct the actor to find a single gesture or movement-idea which represents the character he or she is trying to portray or embody.  That gesture is then injected into all the actors stage actions, and from this the actor will unconsciously begin inventing a whole way of moving which looks authentic.

So after a long hard struggle, I might have to admit that the term unconscious is as good as it gets.

An infant baby moves unconsciously.  Right?  How about a tiger stalking its prey?  That one is a little more difficult to pin down.  What about a baby tiger?  Just kidding.

What about a mother protecting her young?  We've all heard the stories of mothers lifting up burning cars to save their children.  Is that unconscious power?

Is it possible that we have access to this unconscious power all the time?

(Sometimes I think the pharmaceutical industry would like us to believe that everything from love, to super human strength, to good acting, is just a chemical discovery away.  Hormone theory is very enticing, but until I can see in front of me something as complete as the Periodic Table for the whole endocrine system, I'm going to reason that there are other mechanisms involved.)

This is where I start getting excited.  I've begun seeing unconscious power in other people.  I can see it in people waiting for the bus.  This natural power is in my opinion available all the time when people are relaxed.  I see the unconscious power but I also see two forces inhibiting it.

The first inhibitor is conscious intentional movement.  It is as if people are trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on and the power steering shut off.  Their maneuverability is restricted and they appear to be, in George Xu's words, carrying their own weight.

The second inhibitor is segmentation.  This is when we cause individual parts of the body to work independently.  For instance, when we sit down to write we turn off most of the balancing movement functions in our body and activate only the fine motor hand and eye coordination.  The result of this process is stiffness, which tends to occur at the location of segmentation--in the case of writing, at the shoulders, upper back, neck and for some people the forearms and the backs of the eyes.  Any segmentation whatsoever, inhibits power.

Just as a side note here, my ability to see this unconscious power has developed in conjunction with my own ability to express unconscious power.  But I also believe that my own mental training was for a long time inhibiting my ability to see unconscious power in others.  The type of analytic anatomic physiological thinking which allows us to see individual body structures like muscles, may be replacing what is actually happening with a mental proxy.  And thus, by eventually dropping those complex ideas about what we are, suddenly something that was always there appears.

_______

How did we get here?  Are humans victims of our own success?

Unconscious power is unconscious for a reason.  Human society requires us to plan out our intentions so that we can build things large and small, manifest visions, and carry out tasks.  It also allows us to be delicate and careful so that we don't break the things we create.

Unconscious power is familiar to everyone.  I guess it is how we felt as small children.  To a normal adult, unconscious power feels disorienting, vulnerable, weak and clumsy.