Fate

Well I took a nice long break from writing. Actually it took me six days to delete all the unopened emails in my box. I also went up north for a few days where I stayed close to a wood burning stove at a Hippy hostel called Jug-Handle Creek Farm. Even considering the conspiracy theorists we shared a fire with, it was pretty sweet.

I would say my fate has been good, even princely perhaps. Most people don't want to believe in fate. They figure only silly people and Asians believe in fate. What is fate?

First of all I should point out that there are Daoist Precepts against predicting the future, and if that wasn't enough to convince you, there is a precept against making a living from fortune telling.

Let's start from what everybody has, a body. The body we get at birth is fate. Yes it may make a difference if your mother ate a lot of rocky-road ice cream during her pregnancy, but there are still some basic parameters that will determine your body type. True, it matters to some degree what we eat over 20 or 30 years. But we don't actually have direct control of our appetite.

Appetite is a key concept in understanding how fate relates to martial arts. Everybody gets hungry, everybody has an appetite, just like everybody gets angry, everybody has aggression that can explode.

Part of growing up is a process of refining our appetites. It's a touchy thing we don't have direct control over, but you can make yourself sick of even the most tasty dish by eating it every night for a week. Imagine how bad tuna casserole would be after eating it six times in a row. Likewise, if you deprive yourself of chocolate for a couple of months and then accidentally bump into a friend eating a bar of Scharfenberger's.... They'll be lucky if they get to keep half.
If you have a wide range of food choices and you understand the different qi qualities of those foods and how to combine them, you can really start to play with your appetite. The qi quality of a particular food refers to the categories of foods which have a similar effect on your body and your appetite. So cabbage and kale are pretty similar while chocolate is in a category by itself (Yes, I agree that carob is good, but it is not chocolate).

The body we have is pretty much fate. But it is a kind of flexible fate. Meaning it is unlikely that I'm ever going to have long sharp teeth, but if tattoos got old and teeth sharpening became like the new hip urban craze, I could at least sharpen my teeth. We do have some control over what we want to eat, but a lot of it is fate. If you are Polish and you haven't had black bread and sausage in like a year, just me saying this is going to make you jones for it. Polynesians and pineapple, Norwegians and lutefisk.

Martial arts work the same way. You have a body that wants certain kinds of movement, it wants certain kinds of stillness too. It's like an appetite. If you have a wide range of training options and you understand how they will effect your body, you can play with that. What you do everyday will actually change what your body wants. A great deal of it is just fate, but there is also room to play around.

Where we live, the kind of gongfu we practice, the languages we speak, what we eat for breakfast--as humans we have some flexibility up to a point, and no doubt you can move to a foreign country, learn a new language and forsake you grandmothers recipe toffee, but most of us, most of the time, have a fate, a rhythm, a set of patterns that make us feel comfortable.

A Golden Thread

There is a common taijiquan metaphor that practice is like making silk brocade interwoven with golden threads.

Brocade has been found in tombs sealed airtight with clay and water dating back to the Fifth Century BCE (or there abouts) in what was then the Chu kingdom. Brocade is a type of woven fabric which can display different images depending on the angle of the light. See this Archeology PFD.

Probably the most widely practiced sinew lengthening routine is called 8 Silken Brocade. Following the metaphor, it has eight movements which reveal eight different images of what the human body can do.

The metaphor of the golden thread is absolutely key to understanding how to practice taijiquan. Each day when we practice we begin with some idea about what we are going to do. That idea may be very complex, or it may be as simple as "I'm going to make circles with my arm and try to make it look like it does when my teacher does it." But during practice, you happen upon some feeling that is new.

Perhaps on this particular day it is a feeling of connection, or a feeling of softness, it could be anything. The first time you feel it, it will feel subtle, even delicate, like a very fine golden thread. If you don't practice the next day, you will certainly have forgotten what the feeling was and how you got to it. Even if you do practice the next day, the feeling may elude you. Or you may refresh this new feeling for a few days, but then you have a wild night and the next morning you forget to look for that golden thread and by the next day it is gone. By the next week it is forgotten.
If you do manage to hang on to one of those new feelings (those subtle golden threads) for a few weeks of practice it will become less subtle and easier to reproduce.

To truly practice Taijiquan or any internal art is to look everyday for the golden thread you felt the day before and to slowly weave it day after day into the brocade that is your whole practice. Eventually these fine threads weave together into pictures that become so a part of you that they shimmer in and out of focus continuously like images on a flexible piece of brocade in changing light.

Historic Discovery

I was delighted that Emlyn found these photos after reading my post on Daoist Shoes. There is no evidence that they were used by Daoists in ritual. But the more orthodox the ritual, the more private it is, so we will never know. But the shoes are used in theater and were widely worn by Manchu women.

They were understood to do at least two things: One, they gave a feeling of potency to the wearer. Two, they were an imitation of Han (Chinese) womens' esthetics, namely bound feet.

Bound feet, and the reason(s) behind them, is one of the most fascinating and disturbing pieces of Chinese culture. Manchu women were forbidden by the Manchu government (1650~1905) from binding their feet. The government was never happy about Han women doing it, but it was out of their control. Some scholars now say that foot binding was an act of female agency. Men showed their acceptance of subjugation to the Manchu rulers by wearing their hair in a cue (shaving the front and leaving a thin braid in the back). Han woman showed their disdain en mass for this act of subordination by binding their feet. This act conveyed stored potency, as if to say, "We will act at a later date! (This did in fact happen in 1911 when women whose feet were not bound were slaughtered.) (Hat tip to Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well, also scroll down the comments section where some heavy scholars go at it. )

The problem with this explanation is that binding ones feet seems to us like torture, perhaps it is even self-mortification for the misdeeds that led to being conquered by the Manchu. To understand foot binding as an act of potency one has to understand the difference between, what we call in Taijiquan, jin and shi.

Jin is power which manifests through the balls of the feet (peng & ji) or through the heels (lu & an). Shi is potential power which is stored up and does not manifest. It is the power of being able to manipulate the spin of a battlefield simply by ones position. It is not overwhelming force or shock troops. To develop shi, one must not use power from the balls of the feet or the heels.  The more common type of jin must be discarded to develop the "higher level" shi.



Thus, by pure accident I discovered that these shoes were actually meant to convey shi (potential power). I was using my memory/dream of them to convey something not well understood about taijiquan and stumbled on the debate about foot binding.

Here is the poem from Frog in a Well:

Get a carpenter’s adze to make the shoe-bottoms
Get a carpenter to make the outside of the shoes
Use a card of yarn
Eight lengths of fine cloth
Altogether it will take three years
To make a pair of embroidered shoes
Call a girl to try the shoes

Whether short or long
The girl stretches her foot
to fit the embroidered shoes
The shoe small the foot large
Constrained and uncomfortable
Awkwardly and crookedly to the back wall

The left foot crushing eight tigers
The right foot crushing nine wolves

Wow, I hope this is taught in the schools some day. (Perhaps they'll even mention my famous blog.)
The best book on foot binding to date seems to be Cinderella's Sisters. I haven't read it yet, I did read Dorothy Ko's earlier book on Chinese women and recommend it for those with a scholarly appetite.

http://www.footwearhistory.com/lotusconstruction.shtml

http://www.shoeblog.com/blog/friday-shoe-history-corner-2/
--For an alternate view of why these shoes convey potency, that may give a little bit of wiggle room to anyone caught with their pants down, read this.

Red or White?

George Xu used to tell us stories about the Wild East. Often he was a character in these stories, and honestly I think they were true stories, but more often than not he seemed to be the cowboy with the white hat. (He was the good guy in morality tales that may or may not have been so black and white.)

One story he told us took place during the Cultural Revolution when he was on "The Farm" (forced re-education camp with inadequate food and shelter). Nearby "The Farm" there was a black-marketeer who dealt in cigarettes and alcohol and, among other nasty things, happened to be a rapist. He was a bad dude, with some kind of back up, and a tough-guy-name like "Black Face."

After some particularly cruel machinations by Black Face, George broke down his door looked him in the eye and said, "Which do you want red or white?"

Dropping his box of contraband cigarettes and shaking in his chair, Black Face asked indignantly, "What do you mean Red or White?"

George replied, "Red, I stop when I see blood. White...Death"

From that day forward Black Face was no longer a problem for the locals, (I think he chose red.)

Systems

One of the basic ideas of Systems Theory is that if you have a complex system and you speed up one part of that system, you will slow down the whole system.

Likewise, if you make one part of a system more efficient you will make the whole system less efficient.

In martial arts, if you have one joint that is looser than the adjacent joints, the body will tighten up somewhere else to compensate for the loose joint, which will make the whole body less efficient.

Likewise, if you have one muscle or one muscle group that is stronger than the adjacent muscles, the system will be weaker and less efficient.

Systems theory, by the way, is really just a collection of observations about how stuff works. An important observation that is practically a rule of industrial commerce, is that for any given output or product created by a system with multiple variables, there is a way to make the system more efficient. I posit that this is why we can always improve our martial arts skill.

If you want to speed up and improve the efficiency of a whole system the best way to do it is to confine the output, limit the product produced, and then run the whole system at different speeds, both fast and slow, to see where the weak links are. Then you can focus on efficiency in that one location or component. Games like Push-hands, sparring, boxing, sumo, and even MMA, all confine output. They all "run our systems" with confining rules that limit output and thus allow us to find the weak links.

________________________________________________________________

 Formosa Neijia responded to my last post with a post of his own.  Systems theory would suggest that strengthening or weakening any one region of the body is a losing strategy unless you have already shown that for a given output that region is the weak link.  In other words, whole body unity should be a priority--both the measure of any intermediate steps, and the final fruition.

Why Sit-ups Make You Fat

Many people want to know why sit-ups make them fat.

The first reason is that building up muscle on your belly will make your belly bigger.

The second reason is that when you stop doing sit-ups, the muscle will turn to fat.

Some people start doing sit-ups because they are trying to get their belly to go away. If your belly is big because of a curve in your spine you will be effectively compressing your spine in order to make your belly look smaller. This compression leads to a bigger curve so it is a self-defeating process. (Also known as "pooching syndrome.")

Another possibility is that your belly is big because you are over-eating. If you are over-eating and you do sit-ups, the extra exercise will "tonify" your appetite causing you to want to eat more! Yum, yum. (This is often conflated with edema or bloating which can have a variety of causes, none of which are helped by sit-ups.)

Another possibility is that you do sit-ups to make your back rigid so that you won't feel a chronic injury. This sort of works but the problem is that it makes you insensitive so you are more likely to injure yourself again in the future (and more likely to over-eat).

Making one's belly and back rigid is popular with some athletes because they are always getting injured from direct impact. If two balls of equal mass collide, the denser of the two will survive and the less dense body will disperse. (This is known on the school yard as the Blamo effect!) For instance, football players often disperse (detach) their retinas this way.

The Blamo effect always works! Its physics! The denser you are the better. Unfortunately there is no art in this. The quickest way to make your body dense is to fall really hard onto a surface like ice or concrete. (A couple times a day and you'll be lookin' like Schwarzenegger in record time. Warning: This may effect your brain.)

Some people like to wear their armor on the inside. Rather than picking up some leather or even chain-mail from the local Walgreens which has the benefit of being effective against sharpened steel, they have decided that they want armor 24/7. Yes, even in the shower! These fighter-exemplars are in constant fear of a surprise attack; they need not worry about over-eating because they are too scared to eat.

There is a group of martial artists who think that making the area between the ribs and the hips rigid will give them more power. The logic here, if we can call it logic, is that a rigid body moves as a single piece and is therefore able to use its whole weight for fighting. If by fighting they mean World Wrestling Federation body-slams, than they are indeed correct. However if your idea of fighting involves mobility, and the possibility of generating explosive power from all the soft tissue in your body, tight abdominal muscles will totally break your power.

Tight muscles reduce movement range and sensitivity. They cut off the flow of power from one part of the body to another and they require constant maintenance. The more alive your whole torso is, the more power and flexibility you will have.

Future Blog: Why are/were some famous Taijiquan masters fat?

We're in the News

The article I have copied at the bottom of this post is from the Wall Street Journal. It is about the battle between Wushu and Shaolin, which is a "fairly artificial" battle as Gene Ching of Tai Chi Kung Fu Magazine puts it. Wushu is the Communist version of the Republican Era (1906-1948) idea of Guoshu.

Wushu means "martial arts," Guoshu means "national art." The idea of a national art was that a strong country is made up of physically strong and healthy individuals. This was meant to counter the Japanese propaganda that China was "the sick man of Asia," and to do it with "non-Western" exercise. (Really I kind of Chavanism, but one which has had a positive effect on world culture.)

Before the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) Wushu was exclusively a performing art for kids and a health practice for young adults. No sparing competitions. I would say that martial arts were illegal during the Cultural Revolution, but that would imply there was actually a legal system. During the Cultural Revolution anyone practicing or even thinking anything "traditional" was a target for public torture.

The claims made in the article about Shaolin should be taken with a grain of salt. I think the actual Buddhist lineages of Shaolin fled China around 1900. The 12 or so people who were occupying the Temple at the end of the Cultural Revolution are a question mark.

The eclectic nature of Shaolin Zen is an interesting topic I hope to learn more about some day, but Gongfu or (Kungfu if you prefer) did not come from Shaolin. Gongfu means "meritorious action," and it has been part of the religious life of China for a very long time, certainly for a thousand years, probably more than two thousand. Gongfu has always been a public demonstration of dedication to a larger body (family, village, state), it has always had a fighting implication, and it has always been practiced with wide variation and local innovation. It has alway been part of ritual procession and festivities, which by their nature include some troops and exclude others. Why should the Olympics be different?

Shaolin Temple had gongfu. Perhaps it had some very good gongfu too. What was unique about it is that you didn't have to be born in the Temple to learn it. You could shave your head take the vows, carry water and scrub floors for a couple of years and then they would teach you! Normally one had to be born (married or adopted) in a Village in order to learn a local style(s) of gongfu. But gongfu was everywhere.

Kung Fu Monks Don't Get a Kick Out of Fighting  (if you get the WSJ)


Read the whole article by clicking below: 

	Kung Fu Monks Don't Get a Kick Out of Fighting Famous Temple Spurns Beijing Games, Sparking Trash Talk From Rivals By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and JULIET YE December 14, 2007; Page A1 Kung fu master Shi Dechao can swing his 22-pound "monk's spade," an ancient Chinese shovel, like a majorette twirling a baton. His lightning punches, in a style the ancients called Iron Fist, generate a thunk! straight out of kung fu movie sound effects. A powerful grunt punctuates his routine. But Dechao, and most of the other martial monks at the 1,500-year-old Shaolin Temple in China's central Henan province, decline to join in one of the biggest kung fu battles of modern times -- a competition to be staged in tandem with next year's Olympic Games in Beijing. Clad in saffron Buddhist robes, Dechao insists that real kung fu monks don't fight. They meditate and practice kung fu to reach enlightenment. "Every fist contains my love," says the 39-year-old Dechao, also known as Big Beard. The Shaolin Temple's decision to stay out of the competition, to be held at the same time as the Olympics and passing out medals of its own, made headlines in China. And it has rekindled a disagreement familiar from the movies: Is kung fu a form of devotion, a style of fighting or both? Zen Buddhism and kung fu have long made an unlikely pair. As legend has it, Zen's founder, an Indian missionary to China named Bodhidharma, worried that too much seated meditation would make monks flabby. So he taught the monks in Shaolin a set of 18 exercises codified as "Yi Jin Jing," or "Muscle Change Instruction," many of them based on animal movements.   WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler reports that the Chinese government wants to promote kung fu as a sport in the Olympics. But, the famous monks of the Shaolin Temple refuse to fight. "Kung fu is Zen practice in motion," says Shi Yongxin, the abbot of Shaolin, sitting in his office next to a sculpture of a meditating Buddha. When he moved to the temple from a devoutly Buddhist family in 1981, Yongxin learned to add kung fu moves to his meditation. Over the centuries, the otherwise peaceful monks have occasionally used their physical prowess in battle to defend the temple and its allies. But they didn't always like it. In lore, the monks went to battle only when they were facing a life-or-death crisis and had no alternative. Now, a debate over the Olympics has transported the classic kung fu monk's fight-or-pray dilemma to the 21st century. For the Games, the Chinese have backed a committee-regulated version of kung fu split into two competitions. One, dubbed taolu, is a sort of rhythmic gymnastics in fast-forward. Individual athletes are scored on the "power, harmony, rhythm, style and musical accompaniment" of their routines, which have names such as Lotus Kick and Dragon's Dive to the Ground. A second form of kung fu competition, called sanshou, involves fighting -- and a fair amount of protective padding. Kung fu itself is also known as wushu. Justin Guariglia Today, kung fu is practiced by more than 60 million Chinese and millions more around the world. At the International Wushu Federation's Ninth World Wushu Championships in Beijing last month, fighter Zhang Yong entered the ring to chants of "Go for it, China!" He won the gold medal in the 65-kilogram (143-pound) combat competition by striking his Russian opponent with a fierce combination of kicks and punches, at one point flipping the Russian into the air. "Sometimes I get hurt during the training," says the 24-year-old Mr. Zhang, a Muslim, pointing to a scab on his right eyebrow. Yet "wushu is something that starts with fighting and ends with spirit," he says. "This spirit isn't a religious concept, but rather love to the nation." To the monk Dechao, the spirit, or qi, in Shaolin Buddhism is embodied in breathing, not force. "I can practice kung fu internally while drinking tea quietly with my friends," he says. After the abbot publicly distanced Shaolin from the Olympics in October, Chinese bloggers and athletes began to suggest the monks are just scared they wouldn't win. At the competition, athletes said their sport was simply not comparable to Shaolin meditation. "We are the best wushu competitors," says Ma Lingjuan, the 21-year-old Chinese world champion in taolu. She has been practicing spinning and jabbing a spear since she was 10. "Our goal is the medal," she says. "The monks in the temple do it as a hobby." Yongxin, the abbot, says monks practice kung fu "with an understanding of Zen Buddhism and love of the temple. On the other hand, the athletes use wushu as a way to find honor. It is easy to tell which one is more sustainable and deep." Whether with blows or rhetoric, it seems, everybody is kung fu fighting. Controlling Kung Fu The government's efforts to standardize the diverse practice of kung fu were also designed to control it. After China's 1949 revolution, the Communist Party at first promoted martial arts but eventually grew leery of kung fu as a subversive self-defense practice. Fighters at Wushu championship in Beijing in November, and monk Shi Dechao (inset) During the Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, the Red Guards attacked the Shaolin Temple and other religious orders. By the early 1980s, after centuries of unbroken master-to-student lineage, only a dozen or so monks lived at Shaolin. Outside the temple, though, traditional kung fu schools, not all of them associated with Buddhism, thrived. 'Chopsocky' TV In the 1970s and 1980s, a blizzard of "chopsocky" TV shows and films, such as the 1982 Jet Li film "Shaolin Temple," helped to sear the Buddhist legends into the popular imagination, both in China and abroad. The 1970s American TV show "Kung Fu" featured David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin monk who travels through the Old West armed only with his kung fu. In flashback scenes to the temple, his master teaches him to "avoid rather than check. Check rather than hurt. Hurt rather than maim. Maim rather than kill." Today, kung fu is practiced by more than 60 million Chinese and millions more around the world -- and its purpose remains a topic of debate. "The Shaolin Temple is only a building," says Kang Gewu, the secretary general of the Chinese Wushu Association. He points out that martial arts had existed in China for centuries before the Shaolin temple began practicing kung fu. He adds: "In our mind, wushu is a sport, not a religious practice." It can be both. The town around Shaolin is home to dozens of wushu schools, some employing monks from the temple who accept as students both the spiritually and competitively inclined. Meeting Place of Paradox "Shaolin is a meeting place of paradox -- tourism, Zen, military, sports, communism, martial arts, history," says Gene Ching, the associate publisher of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine in California. He thinks the debate between the monks and the athletes over spiritual affairs is "fairly artificial." For the temple, maintaining its image as the capital of kung fu is about both expanding its reach and paying its bills. Yongxin, who has been dubbed the "CEO abbot" in the press, has installed a spectacle of his own: a one-hour stage show featuring music by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" composer Tan Dun and the kung fu skills of hundreds of back-flipping students. Tickets cost $32. Even as he distances himself from Olympic competition, "the abbot keeps this stereotype alive that kung fu is about fighting," says Justin Guariglia, a photographer who spent several years getting to know the monks and recently published a book, "Shaolin: Temple of Zen." The "real monks," he notes, are kept far away from the tourists. The abbot, periodically checking his cellphone during an interview, said the temple doesn't actually make that much money from the tourist activities. "What we have done is spread Buddhism and its spirit of universal love," he said. Another monk at Shaolin, named Bodhidharma after the Indian missionary, dismisses suggestions that the monks don't want to play because they are afraid they would lose. "Oh, lord," laughs Bodhidharma, who lives in Malaysia and visits the temple to meditate from time to time. "Monks have a very kind and patient heart. We could win that. But we don't want to hurt anybody." --Sue Feng contributed to this article. Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com and Juliet Ye at juliet.ye@wsj.com

Jiajiang Martial Dance Troops

I've been reading about trance and possession in Taiwan and I've been thinking a lot about new ways to explain the religious roots of Chinese martial arts. Real fighting is usually about going into trance. There are many reasons for this, one being that humans are simply in trance a lot of time. (Thus the success of Youtube.)
Another reason is that it changes a persons relationship to pain. (Self-Mortification Video)
Another is that trance can be used to stop you from having second thoughts or changing your mind in the middle of battle.

Trance and possession can be used to instill fear in others, which has all sorts of uses in fighting.

But just getting your opponent to space out for a split second is often enough to run them through. For some reason, perhaps it is the spooky music or the strange distortions-- this video gave me a fright. I don't know what is happening. I've watched a bunch of these and often the movements of the dance and the clothing or head-dresses cause me to space out for a second.

Milieu

I've been reading the book Qigong Fever, it's good, but I'm not ready to review it yet. However, part of the methodology of the book is to investigate the milieu which inspired the invention, expression, and propagation of qigong as a "movement."

I like this kind of thinking. When I was in high school I was in a School of the Arts and I did a lot of ceramics. I got really interested in Sung Dynasty (900-1200 CE) Chinese ceramics. Then I went to Australia where I had a ceramics teacher who was also totally into Sung Dynasty glazes and was trying to replicate the way they made them with natural local minerals (like ash from near by forest fires) and at the same time adding some scientific analysis.

I also got way into dance, dance history, and improvisation. What these two things have in common is milieu. Modern dance, for instance, came out of a very specific cultural milieu and I think it started to stagnate when that milieu ended. Sung Dynasty ceramics had huge cooperative workshops with dragon kilns that burn once a year up the side of a mountain. Each group got the right to fire its huge kiln from the imperial court which held regular competitions for its patronage. If your kiln won the competition, you supplied the entire royal family for a year or so until they had a new competition. This created a really competitive environment where everyone was making imperial quality work, but only one "kiln" was getting to sell it to the royal family so there was literally tons of extraordinary art work floating around. This milieu created the worlds first antique markets.

So when I was in my early twenties and studying gongfu 6 hours a day it occurred to me that neither my gongfu teachers, nor their teachers had lived in a milieu that was capable of inspiring the creation gongfu as I knew it (Shaolin, Taijiquan, Xingyi, Bagua).

I held and thought about that question for many years.  I was still asking that question when I really started getting into Daoist Religion.  (Daoism isn't directly responsible for the creation of gongfu, but it is in the mix.)

My point is this: The main reason I have been writing this blog for the last six months is to both explain what I have learned over the years about the milieu which inspired Chinese Martial Arts generations ago, and to create a new milieu which will re-inspire the arts.

Proprioception and Kinesthetic Awarness

To feel your body or not to feel your body, that is the question.

If only Hamlet had studied Tai Chi.

The tongue always feels things bigger than they actually are. If I try to feel the size of my hands with my eyes closed, they usually feel bigger than they actually are. I know how big they are supposed to be, but I still feel them bigger. If I keep my hands still for a few seconds with my eyes closed my sense of how big they are starts to morph into other shapes.

Taking drugs can disorient us so much that we do not feel our bodies. They can also cause us to feel our bodies in weird expansive or contracted shapes, or to feel intermittently. But we don't need drugs for this, if you are flirting to someone really hot, you might forget about your own body altogether. A great conversation, reading or writing, watching a movie, all of these everyday experiences can cause us to forget our bodies, to feel them in an exaggerated way, or to drift in and out.

Traditionally strange feelings and disembodied feelings were covered under the subject: trance and possession. Now we have the scientific categories of proprioception and kinesthetic awareness.

Extreme relaxation, or extreme stillness often result in the sensation that ones body has no boundaries.

Pain starts with exaggerated feelings of the body and often leads in and out of feelings of disembodiment. There is nothing like getting hit to make you feel your body, but if you are going to keep fighting you need to "shake it off." What is being shaken off? A contracted sense of space?

When big muscles are engaged and experience resistance they cause us to feel our bodies at the expense of our sense of space and movement. Thus my often repeated comment that they make us insensitive. But more specifically what they are doing is making us feel in a limited way.  Movement orients us, muscle tension reduces our ability of perceive.
There is a continuum of  proprioception ability from superb to dysfunctional.  The Sensory Processing Disorder website is a great place to learn about how to recognize proprioceptive problems in yourself and others.

Here is a really nice article that explains how proprioception interacts with other senses.

Here is an article about consciously training proprioception.  It got me thinking about how my body learns, but practicing internal martial arts does everything these silly exercises do.

Of course there is always Wikipedia.

The traditional Chinese categories of shen, xin, jingshen, yi, jin, and shi all refer to and encompass aspects of proprioception and kinesthetic awareness.  How else could "shi" be translated variously as: strategic advantage, a location at the center of change, potential energy, and the unification of active power with inner quiet.