Practicing Internal Arts Will Shorten Your Life!

Continuing on the previous post "The Real Purpose of Internal Arts," I would like to say clearly for the record, Internal Martial Arts will shorten your life.

Why?  You thought they were good for your health didn't yah? Not a chance.  Yang Chenfu, the most famous Taijiquan Master of the 20th Century died at like 54.  Many Internal Masters have died in their 50's.  They were all too fat.  Many internal martial artists have died from fighting injuries and venereal diseases too.

Lets get this clear.  Practicing Internal Martial Arts does not make you a good person.  If you are a ruffian goon, you will live and die like a ruffian goon.  If you think you are practicing everyday for some future attack, to fend off some wild assailant, that view will determine the type of fruition available to you.

Even if you practice the highest level art, with the most supreme teacher, your view will still determine what results your practice produces.  The constant search for power and superiority will shut out the other types of fruition that these arts were in fact created to reveal.

The problem is that modern Masters have been cut off from their own roots, they have historic amnesia.   I know all these history book writers keep telling us that Internal Martial Arts were created by professional fighters because their jobs as bodyguards or mercenaries required it.  Poppy-cock!  It's just not possible.  Why would someone weaken themselves if they were facing actual violent adversity on a daily basis?

No, the Internal Martial Arts were developed by people who had already cultivated a subtle body; a weak, sensitive, feminine (yes I said that), humble, yielding,  and desireless physicality.  A body cultivated with the idea that lack of pretense is not only a moral way of being; but a moral way of moving.

This is not the morality of being good. This type of morality is based on being real.

The Daoist practice of being real produces freedom and spontaneity (ziran). The inspiration to create from that "body" has led to experiments in every walk of life. 

In every realm of living-- effortlessness, naturalness, and the complete embodiment of an animated cosmos, found a way into peoples' daily lives, into the sacred and the mundane.

If you just practice any of the Internal Martial Arts or Qigong you will probably get fat.  Why?  Because these arts were created from a "body" that was incredibly efficient.

When you begin training martial arts, especially if you start in your 20's or younger, you will automatically work hard, and over do it.  When we are young we have too much qi in our channels.  All we can really do with that extra qi is waste it.  Hopefully we blow it off in ways that won't leave a perminant mark on our bodies.

When working hard and training hard, we naturally need to eat a lot.  But if you seriously practice Internal Martial Arts or Qigong, you will become more efficient in your movement and you will have to be disciplined about eating less. If you do that, your appetite intelligence (your spleen function in Chinese Medicine) will become much more discerning. It will tell you what is good for you to eat, and how much is the appropriate portion.  You will be able to trust your appetite(s).

In addition, your digestive system itself will become more efficient over time.  Your body will extract more nutrients from less food.  If, however, you fail to regularly and consistently reassess your appetite, you will over eat-- and you will get fat.

Improved digestion and movement efficiency will happen simply from practicing any Internal Martial Arts method, it makes no difference what you think or what you believe.  But the fruition I'm calling "appetite sensitivity" will only develop if your view is that you are cultivating weakness.

Boom and bust fitness routines, like Boot Camps, are one of the worst thing a person interested in developing a subtle body could do.  Your appetite sensitivity will shrivel up and fall off.

Ailerons

Many people have pointed out that Taijiquan may be an art designed to keep the dynamic quality of our sea legs, while on land.  It is at least designed to get us to give up the predictability of our land legs.  The image often repeated in both martial arts and Chinese medicine of the dantian being an ocean would somewhat support this thesis to.  Shirley seamen realized that the gentle pitching and rolling of the ocean was good for the internal organs.  Perhaps they wanted to keep that quality of health once they gave up the sea life.

So naturally I recommend people try doing their taijiquan on a boat sometime.  I would recommend you try it on an airplane too, but now-a-days that will likely get an over reaction from your fellow air travellers.

Still, if we were making up a new martial art today we would have to consider that by far the most potent images of balance and power are fighter jets.

The first attempts at making an airplane had to solve the problem of creating lift and steering, but once those problems were solved the airplanes still didn't stay in the air because air is not even.  In order to keep an airplane in the air one must constantly correct the pitch and the roll.

That's what ailerons do.  And that is what internal martial arts must do too.  To generate continuious power while maintaining circular motion requires constant correction.  To have unbroken balance and power we must always have an active correction mechanism which allows for adjustments of up and down, front and back, left and right and spiral twisting.  These adjustments must all be simultaneous, we never sacrifice one dimension for another.

Are ailerons a good metaphor for this?

Gaining Control

A female friend of mine was recently attacked by a crazed crackhead half block from her house.  He was big and he kicked her in the ribs.

She thought her ribs were broken, she feared for her life, and she thought about the lives of her two new born infants who were thankfully not with her at the time.  Then she "went crazy on him," and he ran off.

In telling me about the incident she said she wished she had studied martial arts because she wanted to make sure he didn't hurt anyone else.  That, I think was the rational explanation, the more spontaneous explanation, I'm guessing, would be that she wanted to kick his ass.

A few days later while we were sitting at an outdoor table at a local bakery/cafe, she asked me how much martial arts training would have helped her.  I dodged the question and talked to her a bit about self-defense and what kind of training we do.  Then a 300 pound guy sat down next two her on a large green wooden box which had a sign saying please do not sit here.  The purpose of the box was to guide the flow of foot traffic around the tables and chairs, and thus, not for sitting.   It promptly toppled over onto her--bruising her arm.

The guy was naturally embarrassed and apologetic.  But that prompted her to ask me if studying martial arts would have prevented her from getting hit by the box.

So I was cornered.  Would martial arts training help with a surprise attack or a surprise accident?  Yes, probably, maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know,... how could I know?

Hexagram 10 of the Yijing (I Ching) is about just such a situation.  The title reads Treading (Lu):

Treading on a tiger's tail: one is not bitten.  Auspicious.

The image is of an innocent, perhaps a 10 year old child, stepping on the tail of a tiger and not getting bitten.  Why?  We don't really know.  Perhaps it is because the tiger isn't hungry and 'though surprised, it doesn't feel threatened.

Chinese Internal Martial Arts cultivated with a Daoist perspective achieve quite the opposite results of what most people think.  These arts are not about gaining control.  They are not about preparing for some monstrous future attack.  They are not about trying to control or predict the future.

To the contrary, they are about giving up the effort to control.  The basic  assumption or experiment of internal martial arts is that other options will present themselves effortlessly when we give up trying to control.  Does this really happen?  Yes, probably...maybe...How could I know?  I don't know, I simply have the experience that being less aggressive reveals other options.  I certainly don't know in advance what those options will be.  I keep repeating and simplifying the experiments because having options sometimes seems akin to freedom.

In Buddhism they have the expression, "Skillful Means," to describe brilliant techniques on the road to enlightenment.  But it's also kind of a Buddhist joke because the end result requires no skill at all.

In my opinion, this friend of mine who got attacked, did everything right.  She did get some bruises on her ribs, but frankly a couple of weeks training in martial arts could easily produce the same injuries.  After she chased him away by whatever crazy moving, screaming and raging she did, she even had the peace of mind to record all the details about his clothing and appearance for the police.

Her innocent response was good enough.

And that is the point of this post.  Not only are we cultivating weakness, we are cultivating innocence.  The skills we develop in all the Internal Martial Arts involve discarding our learned responses, discarding our preconceptions about what our body is and how it works, discarding our ideas about how events begin and how they come to a resolution.

Discarding pretense, embracing innocence.

Emptiness

Appetite and desire, what's the difference?

Yes and O.K., what's the difference?

Jing and Qi, how can we differentiate them?

When we give a name to something which is subtle and difficult to discern, we risk obscuring it, even losing it, because the hardness or fixedness of the name shines light on something which only exists in the dark.  This isn't an argument against naming, only a reminder that naming is a kind of aggression.

Chapter 15 (Wangbi numeration) of the Daodejing,

The ancient masters of the Way

aimed at the indiscernible

and penetrated the dark

you would never know them

and because you wouldn't know them

I describe them with reluctance

they were careful as if crossing a river in winter

cautious as if worried about neighbors

reserved like guests

ephemeral like melting ice

simple like uncarved wood

open like valleys

and murky like puddles

but a puddle becomes clear when it's still

and stillness becomes alive when it's roused

those who treasure this Way

don't try to be full

not trying to be full

they can hide and stay hidden

This translation is by Red Pine and I think it is great.  He also translates commentaries on all the chapters, like this one by Ho-Shang Kung, "Those who aren't full are able to maintain their concealment and avoid new attainments."

What a contrary piece of advice:  Avoid new attainments.

What does someone who is "empty" look like?  Well, like they are walking on slippery thin ice without breaking it--very light, very delicate, precise with out being confident.

I think the phrase, "worried about neighbors" means attentive in all four directions.

Guests wait to be invited into action but help out generously if they are needed.

Melting ice is always becoming less.

The uncarved wood here is like big pieces of lumber, it is very useful but it is in a potencial state, uncommitted.

To practice being empty is a Daoist precept.  In martial arts emptiness seems like a pinnacle of achievement, but then I read this I'm reminded that fullness is hard to give up.

Empty and full, what's the difference?

Carpal tunnel syndrome

The other day in class I remarked that the cause of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is that people don't extend and contract their fingernails when doing repetitive motions with their fingers or hands like typing. Needless to say, this led to an attack on my authority. Have we entered the era of: 'Everyone Is An Expert?' To modify something my Indian Dance teacher was fond of saying, " A little Google is a dangerous thing." Of course, it is reasonable to ask a teacher, on what basis they are making a claim. Unfortunately, thirty years of martial arts experience seems to be about on a par with one feisty Google search. Beware of any problem ending in "syndrome." That means it is difficult to diagnose because there are many things which could cause the same symptoms. In this case what we are talking about is a narrowing of the Carpal Tunnels in the wrists accompanied by swelling, pain and numbness or tingling. 9 tendons along with nerve flow and blood pass through each Carpel Tunnel. Surgery for "fixing" this syndrome involves the cutting of the ligament(s) that contain the underside of the wrist. I've never had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome myself, and I've never cured anyone of anything. (I have offered suggestions for treating problems in which it was later reported back to me that, due to having followed my suggestion, the problem went away-- but I will always remain skeptical of my own ability to invoke healing.) I have had students who were diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome before coming to study with me, but it is very hard to say with any confidence that a recommendation I made was more important than the 20 other things they were doing to try and cope with the problem. One student I recall was convinced that wearing wristbands with magnets in them completely cured her Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. This all came up because I was teaching a two person partner exercise called joint pulsing (kaihe), the opening and closing of the joints. When I first started teaching this years ago, nobody had seen anything like it. Then one quarter a student who was an assistant chiropractor said his boss had an expensive machine that he hooked people up to which did the same thing. Another quarter, a student said she worked with autistic children and the staff had been taught to pulse the children's wrists and elbows because the compression was calming. This quarter a student said she had already learned joint pulsing as an assistant physical therapist. Ugh!  Of course, nobody had been told that this information came from Chinese internal martial arts. Nobody had been taught that the purpose of pulsing the joints was to have a passive experience of what one's body can do naturally, on one's own. That is, that the manual experience of having one's joints pulsed reminds us of how we moved in the womb, as toddlers, and even up until age 5 or so. Once we are reminded of the experience of this quality of movement, we can recover the ability to move this way at will. The ability to move and animate our bodies the way we did in the womb is sometimes called Yuan Qi, or original qi. While becoming a human rubber band is a cool trick, the purpose here is to make our movement simpler. Simpler movement is more efficient. Efficient movement is more sensitive. Sensitivity to the ways in which we habitually waste qi, allows us to conserve qi. Conserving qi, is the equivalent of non-aggression- wuwei. Needless to say, none of these student "experts" had learned the easiest part of of joint pulsing which is extending and contracting the fingernails. In Chinese practical anatomy, the nails are considered the ends of all the tendons (Perhaps sinew is a better term because it is more general but tendons works fine for this example.)

1. Place any finger tip on the side of the index finger of the opposite hand and then place the thumb on top of that finger nail.


2. The thumb needs just enough pressure so that if it moves it will not slip but will maintain traction on the nail.


3. Gently move the nail inwards for 3 seconds and outwards for 3 seconds, repeating continuously for up to 20 minutes per nail. The motion is gentle and fluid, not forceful. It should feel like you are a cat that can extend and contract its nails/claws, albeit, much less movement than a cat can achieve.

After practicing this for a while, you will be able to extend and contract your nails at will. This is fundamental to internal martial arts training. For instance, in Taijiquan, the fingernails extend during ji and an, and contract during lu and peng. (Note: This is Jin level training. At the next level up, kaihe is left in a potential state.) When extending the finger to push down on a typing pad, one's nail should extend out first. For most people this is normal, unconscious, and happens at lighting speed. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is caused by unconsciously contracting (or drawing in) the fingernails while performing some repetitive finger motion like typing. I know this because when I contract my nails while typing I can feel my carpal tunnels narrowing. After a while they start to swell from the internal friction. But I'm not going to give myself carpal tunnel syndrome just to prove it to anyone else's satisfaction, and I don't know how to cure it once damage has been done to the nerves. So I'm not claiming curative powers here, just that I can teach people a skill that if maintained, will insure they don't get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome at some time in the future. Traditional Chinese long life practices have for centuries been a source for remedial knowledge about the body. Unfortunately the modern tendency to seek out individual methods, fractured from the source, results in a loss of information at best--and a complete obscuration of purpose at worst.

UPDATE: Jan, 2011:

Having just had an older student of mine go through a really bad case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, including surgical intervention, I've changed my views somewhat. I still maintain that kaihe (open/close) skills are key to avoiding this syndrome.  However, nail pulsing should really just be seen as an introduction to whole body shrinking and expanding.

I now believe that there are a whole host of inhibitory movement constraints which can wear out the functional uses of the hands.  Carpal Tunnel should be understood as part of a larger picture with many possible contributors, which is why simple solutions like magnets or massage might work some of the time.

I believe what happened in the case I watched progress is that the inhibitory factors on both the top and the bottom of the hand/arm were both activated at the same time.  This effectively compressed the joints, made stretching very difficult and painful, and slowly reduced all mobility.  (Imagine two pulleys tightening up on opposite sides of  a tent pole at the same time, or pressing on the gas and the brake at the same time.)

The reason the exercise I described above is so good is that it is passive, which means that you can see or attend to the movement without putting your mind into the hand.  Once the mind is in the hand, the inhibitory muscles are on, and if that is the cause of your problem, no amount of "trying" to pulse is going to help.  To get an effective release, the movement has to cut the controlling frontal cortex out of the loop.  I can theorize that unconscious typing like the kind that used to happen in typing pools is not a problem, it is linking up the thinking part of your brain with the action of typing which causes stress.  And simply practicing pulsing an hour a day is a losing battle if you are thinking with your fingers for the other 23.  Like all qigong, the method has to change one's everyday behavior to be effective.

Unfortunately it's a safe prediction that Smart phones are going to make this problem worse.  I imagine people are already "air texting" while they are thinking about what to say to their partner when they get out of the shower.

Post surgery, in the case I watched progress, there was immediate pain relief and increase in mobility.  Very positive results.  However, there is a very strong continuous pulling of the palm downward.  This is an inward contraction from deep in the torso which is causing flexion of the wrist.  It is of course inhibiting expansion of the underside of the arm/hand and inhibiting extension of the wrist.  In other words, the cause, what ever it is, appears to still be there.

(Also see Comment #10 to Belbe below in the comments section.)

More Trouble

While I get excited when I figure out how to do something new on the computer, that excitement is usually overridden by all the problems created by that same new development.

Here is what I got right.

1. Updated version of Wordpress (from 2.0.1 to 2.5.1).


2. New theme with widgets.


3. Changed header image and colors (not finished yet).


4. Added the most recent comments section to the sidebar.

Here's what isn't working.

1. When I get a new commenter, I have no way to approve them...error of some kind. (I think I found a temporary fix: I think I can approve comments remotely through email.)


2. My sidebar links/pages are in the wrong order and don't seem to have the flexibility I thought they would, of course it is better than what I was doing before which was...experimentally cutting and pasting php code. (I put "A1" in front "Classes & Videos" so that it would come before "Blogroll" in alphabetical order...silly, I know.)


3. I pretty sure I messed up the wp-config.php file but most stuff seems to be working.


4. My sidebar issues may be caused by my failure to delete certain files. I only found out about this through troubleshooting, so now I'm wondering if I should start over.

These errors and imperfections are probably things I can live with until I can find someone to help me. Wordpress Camp in San Francisco Aug 16th?

All this took way more time than it should have, but at least I got to see Hellboy 1 and 2 this weekend. Fun stuff. Mix Martial Arts watchers will notice the choreography style and moves used in the Hellboy 2 Troll Market Scene are all taken from inside the MMA Cage. That scene ends with a "ground and pound." La-la-la.

What Makes a Man a Man?

Looks like my homey Sasha Barron Cohen is up to his old tricks again. If you're not familiar with him, he is the voice behind the kid's song, "I like to move it, move it" the title track of Disney's rather entertaining gay agenda movie--Madagascar.

Now, last year I was sitting with my mom out in front of a cafe in the Castro District, the self-described gayest neighborhood on earth. Since gay identity came out of Hippie identity, gays love flowers. So naturally next door to the cafe, was a flower shop. And in the flower shop, mounted on the wall, was a television set. Now, I've noticed that a certain pizza shop on the next block also has a television mounted on the wall which plays gay porno 24/7 (the pizza's ok). But in the flower shop, that would be too much. No, the flower shop uses their mounted television to plays Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

Why might you ask? Because being yourself is beautiful.

So click on the link and check out what Bruno is up to. And make sure you click though the extra pages because there is some funny stuff. I seems like the fighters really came to fight! Is there a lesson here about letting go of what we think we are?

UPDATE: film info:

Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.

Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 2)

Musicians must learn to distinguish between jing and qi.

Most of you don't know that I studied Indian Classical Tabla drumming.  You can hear me playing on a few of my Youtube videos, but don't go back and listen to them for that reason alone, because I never got especially good.  I did, however, approach the study of Indian Classical music the way I approached everything in my twenties--that is, I practiced like crazy (four hours a day for several years).

In Indian music there is a virtuoso  rhythmic pattern which repeats three times called a tihai.  Tihais can be long or short, they come in many different types and they are amazing to hear.  But at the highest level, the level of the greatest musicians, there are actually only two types of tihais, ones from the heart and ones from the mind.

Both of these two types of tihais are improvised.  Tihais from the mind blow you away with their perfect blend of structural precision and complexity.  Tihais from the heart are more difficult for me to explain, they are more relational, emotional, and transcendent.

Zakir Hussein said that when he plays tihais he is actually making and seeing multi-dimensional geometric patterns in his mind.  Ali Akbar Khan said that he is playing with pure light.

When we really play music, our mind is not on the notes, the time signatures, beats, or scales.  When we really play music we want to express mood, sentiment, and emotion.  It's not usually raw emotion either, it is what we might call a crystalline form of emotion--Emotion which has already been explored, plumbed, completed or even resolved.

One's mind must not be focused on the musical details of technique, composition, or if I understand the Indian master's explanations above correctly--our minds shouldn't be on the music either.
In music as in internal martial arts, one must separate jing and qi--the physicality from what animates it.  

Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 1)

When I'm typing, I'm not thinking about the keys I'm hitting, and I'm not thinking about the words I'm spelling, I am thinking about what I want to say. I am thinking about the sentiment I want to convey, the style, the flavor, and the rhythm.

But in actual practice even those things I am consciously thinking about spin in and out of my mind in a very spontaneous way, they don't have any particular order, often they simply emerge fully formed at the moment of expression.

Martial arts are the same. This is as true for fighting as it is for performing forms.

In typing, if my mind goes to the keys, I stumble. In internal martial arts, taiji, xingyi, bagua--the moment you distinguish one muscle group from another, you have made a mistake. You can no longer have whole body power. You can no longer have the differentiation of jing and qi.

When you are learning to type, of course you look at the keys. When you are training martial arts, of course you make distinctions between muscle groups (and a lot of other things.) But once you are performing at the level of an art, once you are an artist, your mind must not get stuck distinguishing different parts of your body.

Monkey View

Monkey sees the peach and up the tree he goes. He doesn't think about climbing the tree, he thinks about the peach.

If he wants the peach badly enough, he may completely bypass the difficulty of climbing, but he may also miss the subtlety of the bark or the softness of the leaves. The peach may even be part of a trap set to capture him.

If you want to make a movement you are doing more difficult-- think about it. If you think too much about running while you are running, you are likely to trip over your own feet.

Many martial artists are motivated by fear or insecurity. Of course, if those were your only motivations, you wouldn't be human, you'd be a ghost. But it is worth thinking about. If you're training for self-defense, it is likely that you are afraid of being attacked. If you are training to look attractive to potencial mates, it is likely that you feel insecure about your current appearance.

The fruition, the peach if you will, of pursuing training motivated by fear, is of course, more fear. Likewise, the peach of training to look more attractive is more insecurity. Fear and insecurity have no end.

A lot of people train because they believe they are likely to be the victims of violence and it often turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Your view, your default understanding of why you practice, is more important than any other factor in martial arts or qigong type training. If your view is narrow, like that of the monkey going after the peach, you may indeed have very clear fruition. You may get what you want, provided what you want is not a fantasy. A very narrow focus is useful for bypassing obstacles and difficulties, but you will also bypass all the other potencial types of fruition. The narrowness of your view may turn out to be its own trap.

I suggest students practice with the widest most open ended view possible. The term view as a metaphor for motivation, understanding, orientation, and purpose is particularly brilliant because it parallels how the eyes should be used in training. Don't lock your eyes on a point, take the widest possible view.

If you practice with a broad view, you will love forms.  Set routines, or forms, are great because they teach you to forget.  When you practice a form over and over and over, it becomes automatic.  You can completely forget the movement, in fact you should. Once a form becomes automatic you can do all sorts of experiments.  You can make an infinite number of subtle or dramatic changes to the quality of the form.  You can also do an infinite number of experiments with your mind.