Mistakes

Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just begins by explaining that there are two types of mistakes we make about beauty. The first is the mistake of thinking something is not beautiful and later realizing that it is. The second mistake is thinking something is beautiful and later realizing that we've been duped. She then goes on to argue that it is our experience of these two types of mistakes which gives us our sense of justice. It's a sweet argument. (I'll come back to this.)

What is the role of the artist?  This question has been bugging me lately.  Recently an experienced arts teacher, who is a director of an organization I work for, came to observe and evaluate one of my kids classes.  He gave me a stellar review.  Saying that I'm doing everything right, that my teaching is nuanced, that I inspire creativity, kinesthetic awareness and critical thinking, that my classes produce results, and draw on a deep knowledge of art and culture. He even wants to bring beginning teaching artists to watch me teach, as a model of great teaching.  But, I learned... and this is a kicker... that I'm terrible with other adults and lack professionalism in relationships with other artists and administrators.  For instance, I show my annoyance at meetings by putting my head on the table and groaning quietly to myself, I start arguments and I make shocking comments that no body understands (cognitive dissonance).

Is this what being an artist is for me?  I'm not apologetic.  I dropped out of high school because I didn't want to sit in chairs anymore.  I get a guilty conscious if I think I've been too nice in a situation which required bluntness.

The arts organization I work for used to have a Japanese Artistic Director.  She had a deep respect for artists.  It now occurs to me that part of that respect may simply have been her Japanese upbringing.  In Japan, artists are expected to be outrageous, unusual, spontaneous, unpredictable and moody.  Japanese culture has enormous tolerance for non-conformist behavior from artists.

I hear sometimes from my left leaning friends that artists aren't rewarded enough for their art unless they "sell out."  That it would be a better world if artists could easily find monetary support for making their art, even if what they do doesn't sell or isn't saleable.  I wonder if the opposite is true.  Does our society try to pay-off good artists so that they will be less disruptive?  That is, in effect, what I'm being told, "You get paid to come to meetings, can't you just be more like everyone else?"  No, I answer, it isn't worth the pay.  But I worry that some day someone might pay me enough to be nicer than I want to be.

Then I start to question that list of things in the second paragraph which I'm supposedly doing right.  My teaching is nuanced? Really? More like boldly physical and deeply respectful of natural aggression.  I guess I do inspire creativity, "Invent a new way to break your partner's arm. You have 30 seconds. Go!"  Critical thinking?  I think that was an accident.  How about, I expose people to the profoundly irrational nature of the heart mind connection.

Getting back to the first paragraph, what is the relationship between an artist's role in society and beauty itself?  I believe it is my duty to point out mistakes about beauty.  I believe that recognition of the enormous number of mistakes I've made about beauty inspires me as an artists and as a person who seeks justice.  I feel a missionary duty to make beauty, whatever that may be, available and accessible.  And also to protect beauty from forces which might destroy it.

It's overwhelming to contemplate all the mistakes I've made in my practice as a martial artist.  I look back at the years and I see so many mistakes, things I thought were correct, things I thought would lead to greater beauty, but which later turned out to be distractions or wrong turns.  It's almost as if my practice is simply the process of discovering and correcting errors about what's beautiful.

As a teacher my job is, my calling is, bringing out beauty that otherwise would go unnoticed, unclaimed, uncreated, or unfelt.  In that sense, I am armed and dangerous.

The first time I met George Xu, 22 years ago, he said to me, "What's the point of punching if you don't have enough power to break bones?"  At that moment I realized that there was something beautiful about breaking bones that I had been missing.

Martial History Magazine

Jason Couch of Martial History Magazine sent me this article he put together Chinese Martial Arts in 19th Century China.  He has collected a bunch of short pieces written by Westerners about fighting in China.  I found them all interesting and worth taking the time to read and ponder.   It is just a blog post and I appreciate that sometimes we just want to get something up and out to world, but I would like to know more about the reasons each of these Westerners were in China at that time, and perhaps something about their views on other subjects; where they pro-Missionary?  Were they involved in trade or education?  Did they learn the local language?  Stuff like that.  Maybe that information is not available but as he says there are some contradiction among the accounts and it would be helpful in trying to evaluate the informants against each other.

The first section on grabbing each other's queues is something I hadn't read before but I think it is important to understand that Han people were required to wear their hair in a queue as a sign of subordination which was the hair style that Manchu had historically used for their slaves. Slaves would have been tied up at night by their queues.  The humiliation associated with the queue could get pretty twisted.

It's also quite clear from the texts that there is plenty of overlap between theater and fighting--and there is even some recognition and discussion of the religious component of the arts.  Great stuff.

You might want to check out some more of Jason's articles too,  The Boy Scouts in War, or The First Thanksgiving.

Guns, Whiskey, Kungfu, and Indian Dance

I did not come from a guns and whiskey family.  But I recognize that of the four major American folkways, only one has ever taken any real pride in men dancing:  Rednecks.  For this gift of beauty and freedom, I am an honorary redneck.
Some people might say, “Scott, you’ve been practicing martial arts so long you have gongfu on the brain.”  It’s a possibility, I admit.  Sometimes I get excited and I start to see martial arts in everything (Richard Rorty would call it the narcissistic tendency of powerful ideas).  I can use Kungfu power to scrub the dishes.  I can use maximum muscle tendon twisting to wring-out the laundry.  I can set the table “the way a beautiful woman would do it,” (that’s an alternate name for Baguazhang seventh palm change).

But Chitresh Das, my Kathak (North Indian Classical Dance) teacher always said that Kathak had roots in the warrior tradition.  Ladies of ill repute did the same style of dance, under a different name of course, but that does not discount it’s warrior origins.  All Indian Classical dance has some version of deity invocation as well.  Kathak is done with 5 to 10 pounds of small bronze bells wrapped around the ankles and calves.  While it makes little sense from a guerrilla warfare point of view, an assembly of several thousand warriors stamping the ground with all those bells would rival the terror inducing sounds of a line of M1 tanks.  Besides, they function as armor for the lower leg and weight training.  Oh, and every movement from the warrior dances of Arjuna to the blood lusts of the Goddess Kali, to the dragon-tail pulling antics of Baby Krishna, to the flower picking of Princess Rada --can all be done with martial power and embodiment.  In fact, the stances and silk-reeling of Chen Style Taijiquan feel like kissing cousin’s to the Indian tradition I learned.

I’ve had a taste of several different styles of African and African Diaspora Dances but my actual training was in Congolese and African-Haitian Dance.  My Congolese Dance teacher, Malonga Casquelourd, learned to dance from soldiers on army bases.  Malonga’s father was a high ranking soldier in the Congolese Army and the family followed his deployments around the country.  Malonga had a fighter’s body and spirit.  Both Congolese and Haitian styles of dance have specific war/fighting training in them, but even the dances for funerals (sometimes confrontational), dances for dating/mating (also prone to challenges), and dances for work--all can be seen through my martial artist lens. The embedded fighting techniques are hidden everywhere in plain sight, they only need to be practiced as fighting, with a partner, to become functional.

Without the Redneck contribution to American tolerance, we would, as a culture, be cut off from understanding what it is to be a man who dances.  World-wide, a significant part of what it is for a man to express himself through dance is a demonstration of his ability to fight, a show of martial prowess.  (And I dare say, the same is often true for women.)

Big Muscles

As someone whose job it is to translate ideas from one culture to another, the pressure to use more familiar language is always floating around in the background.

Many people would like me to describe the fine details of Chinese Internal Martial Arts using vocabulary from sports or physical therapy.  This is always problematic for two reasons.  First, one can only go so far describing kinesthetic experiences before one starts  sacrificing subtlety--language is an imperfect tool.  Second, by discarding Chinese concepts, one loses the primary organizing metaphors of Chinese culture, and what might be simple suddenly becomes complex.

Still, sometimes we give in to the pressure.  Today is one of those days.

There are three big muscles on our backs which are extremely powerful and efficient. Unfortunately, the problem with humans is; we don’t use these big muscles very well.  Our arms are just too smart. We habitually use our many smaller arm muscles to do complex and repetitive tasks.  This is the cause of a lot of stress and tends to shorten our lives.  For this reason advanced internal martial artists have developed ways to make use of the three big muscles.

We evolved these three big muscles as four legged creatures with our torsos parallel to the ground.  This is important because on a horizontal torso the three big muscles hang  in a relaxed way towards the front of the body (originally the underside).

• The diamond shaped Trapezius muscle hangs from the spine wrapping the ribcage towards the arms.


• The Latissimus dorsi muscle hangs from the spine around towards the belly and reaches around to the inside of the arms.


• The Gluteal Fascial muscle complex hangs off of the lower spine and pelvis onto the outsides of the legs.

If you naturally move from just these three muscles, you are probably a very strong and efficient cave man--because this is not how humans normally move.

To activate these three muscles is a fairly complex process.  Normal sports training doesn't do it.

First we have to get them to hang loosely.  Most of the time when we are moving around or working, the three big muscles are being used for stabilizing.  They stabilize the pelvis, the spine and the arms.  (This is an important function in the event that we get hit by a car or a buffalo, but it isn't necessary to walk around all the time using these muscles as stabilizers.)

Basic structure training in Internal Martial Arts gets us to stop using these three big muscles for stabilization by getting us to put our weight directly on our bones.  The other 400 or so smaller muscles in our bodies are then used to focus force along our bones through twisting, spiraling and wrapping.  In that sense, the early years of internal martial arts training teaches us to use our muscles like ligaments; or put another way, the primary function of the smaller muscles becomes ligament support.  (To develop this capacity in ones legs requires many years of training.)

Once the three big muscles are relaxed and loose and the rest of the muscles are being used for ligament support, a transition begins.

The transition is difficult because it requires turning off the active quality of the smaller muscles. The main function of the smaller muscles then becomes simply to transfer force or weight from outside the body (like from an opponent or gravity) to the three big muscles of the back.  The smaller muscles also have a minor secondary function of changing the direction of force coming out of the three big muscles.

This minor secondary function is not to be confused with active control.  To make this transition means practicing doing nothing with your arms for hours everyday and connecting the unengaged emptiness of your arms to an equivalent lack of active muscle engagement in your legs.  (In practice, this usually looks like loose flailing or slow spongy movement.)

The three big muscles are already so big they don’t need to be strengthened but they do need to be enlivened.  All three muscles should be like tiger skin or octopi, able to expand and condense and move in any direction.  They then can take over control of the four limbs in such a way that movement becomes effortless--even against a strongly resistant partner. If you accomplish this all of your smaller muscles will be doing the task of transferring force to the three big muscles---preventing an opponent from being able to effect your body through your limbs.  Yet whenever your limbs make contact with your opponent, he will be vulnerable to the force of your three big muscles.

In the Taijiquan Classics they call this, "I know my opponent, but my opponent does not know me!"

(Note: weightlifting/surgical ideas about anatomy are so dominant that the gluteal muscle fascial complex doesn't actually exist as a picture on the internet.)

History in Three Keys

A review of:  History in Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, by Paul A. Cohen, Columbia University Press, 1997.

So I was doing a little workshop with George Xu last month and he was talking about using Spiritual Fist.  Spiritual Fist is what we might call an unconscious level of mastery.  Once all the internal and external types of integration, embodiment, differentiation and liveliness are in the right order, they are harmonized by the spirit.  That is, we experience the motivation for movement coming from outside the body.  This is called Spiritual Fist, or Shen Quan in Chinese.

So I said, "Shenquan?  Isn't that what the Boxers called themselves before the Boxer Rebellion?"

"Yes," said George, "That is what they called themselves.  True.  But all Chinese arts are called Shen at the most advanced levels."  And then after thinking for a moment (we were practicing some circular explosive movement during this conversation) he said, "The Boxer's problem was that they lacked Harmony.  Right?"

Harmony, I thought to myself, what?  Then it occurred to me and I said, "That's what they changed their name to, Yihequan, literally --One Harmony Fist."

George looked perhaps flustered for a moment, but he quickly dropped the issue and moved on to showing us another inner secret.

It was a stunning reminder that ways of knowing and understanding history often do not transcend culture and language.  I have no idea what harmony could mean in that context.  (Yihequan is sometimes translated, Fists United in Righteousness.  Did he mean they weren't righteous? enough?)

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The Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900 was a bloody uprising in north China against native Christians and foreign missionaries and at times Ching Dynasty Troops.  They dressed in Chinese Opera costumes and claimed to be invincible to bullets.  Using swords, spears and magic, they took to burning large parts of Beijing, Tianjin and other cities.  The boxers were finally put down by foreign troops who took the opportunity to demand concessions and loot the imperial palace.

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Paul A. Cohen's book, History in Three Keys, has a simple enough premise which he uses to divided his book into three parts.  The first part is his best shot at what actually happened.  The facts and documents sorted in such a way as to give the most likely account of what happened.  The second part of the book is an account of what people said and thought about the event at the time.  The third part of the book is about how the memory of the events lived on and were manipulated in political debates over the next 80 years.

The first section is only 42 pages long and starts off pointing out that, most people know more details about the Boxer Uprising than they do about the Taiping rebelion, even though the scale of the Taiping Rebelion (20 Million dead over 20 years) dwarfs that of the Boxer Uprising (10's of thousands dead over a year or two), and Taiping was led by a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ.  He then recommends people read Esherick's Book, The Boxer Uprising, because Esherick did such a good job of showing the local development of the Boxer Movement.  But Cohen puts together an excellent summary of the events and adds to Esherick's take details about the wider effects of the event particularly in the far north.  He also includes details on the large numbers of Chinese Christians killed by the Boxers.  The largest Christian groups in China were, ironically like the Boxers, both anti-foreiner and participants in mass possession rituals.

The second section attempts to delve into the mindset and experiences of the people who participated and witnessed the Boxer Movement.  In order to do this, my regular readers will love this! he dives into studies of African religion.  He does this, of course, as a way to gain perspective on Chinese popular religious practices of possession and trance.  (I'm feeling an African Bagua part 3 coming on!)

The entire second section is great.  He presents an enormous amount of evidence that, although the Boxer Uprising was a unique event, it's defining characteristics were far from rare.  Theatrical presentations were the most widespread form of religious activity in China.  So called Chinese Opera is a type of martial arts training.  Accounts of trance based forms of conditioning against bladed weapons are found through out the Ching Dynasty.  Possession rituals were much easier to do and more common in the north than they were in the south (which explains why Taiwan is not a good model for understanding north China).

In chapter 4 titled, Magic and Female Pollution, he explores the boxer beliefs about women and the wider exceptance of those beliefs across northern China.  For instance, when boxers actually got shot and died, or when they tried to burn down a single house they said was owned by Christians and it spread to everyone elses house too, they claimed it was because a woman contaminated the scene.  (I can see how this kind of thinking gets started, whenever I have trouble finding something like my keys or a book, I right away blame my half-wife.  I mean who else could it be, right?)

The book explores how the Boxers' were viewed by other Chinese at the time in many complex and interesting ways.  However, it is safe to say that belief in their magical powers and martial prowess was widespread.  Ideas which connect religious devotion, theatrical (Opera) characters, magic, and martial arts were not only widely held; they were the stuff daily life was made of.

The Boxers regularly attributed the casualties they suffered in fighting with foreigners in Tianjin to the latter's placement of naked women in the midst or in front of their forces, which broke the power of the Boxers' magic.  The story was also circulated and widely believed by the populace that a naked woman straddled each of the many cannon mounted in the foreign buildings in Zizhulin, making it impossible for the "gunfire-repelling magic" (bipao zhi fa) of the Boxers to work properly....

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Dirty water, as a dextroyer of magic, was unquestionably related in Boxer minds to the most powerful magic-inhibitor of all: women, and more particularly uncleanness in women, a category that, for the Boxers, included everything from menstrual or fetal blood to nakedness to pubic hair.  Water was of course a symbol of yin, the primeval female principle in China, and there was a long-held belief that the symbolic representation of yin could be used to overcome the effects of such phenomena as fire (including gunfire), which was symbolic of the male principle, yang.  Several groups of rebels in the late Ming had used women to suppress the firepower of government troops.  During the insurgency of 1774 in Shandong, Wang Lun's forces used and array of magical techniques, including strange incantations and women soldiers waving white fans, in their assault on Linqing.  the imperial defenders of the city were at first frustrated by the effectiveness of the rebels' fighting tactics.  An old soldier, however, came to the rescue with this advice: "Let a prostitute go up on the wall and take off her underclothing...we will use yin power to counter their spells."  When this proposal was carried out and proved effective, the government side adopted additional measures of a like sort, including, as later recounted by Wang Lun himself, "women wearing red clothing but naked from the waist down, bleeding and urinating in order to destroy our power."

Such magic-destroying strategies were clearly well established in Chinese minds.  The nurse who took care of the famous writer Lu Xun when he was a little boy once told him the following story about her experience with the Taiping rebels:  "When gorvernment troops came to attack the city, the Long Hairs [the Taiping] would make us take off our trousers and stand in a line on the city wall, for then the army's cannon could not be fired.  If they fired then, the cannon would burst!"

Paul A. Cohen does not appear to be a martial artist or a person with a performing background, so he doesn't go into depth with either of these.  However, he makes it clear that martial arts and theater were always part of the mix.  Here is an excerpt from an article about a famous martial artist whose martial arts family were leaders of the Boxers.  That means that in addition to being Traditional Chinese Medical Doctors, bodyguards and caravan guards, they performed magical spells to protect themselves while killing Chinese Christians, while dressed in Chinese Opera costumes, possessed by hero-gods of the theater.

Pei Xirong was born in 1913 in Raoyang county in Hebei province. His father was a core member of the Yi He Tuan [the Boxers], and his mother had also participated in the ‘Red Lantern’ movement [the female part of the Boxers movement, dealt with extensively in Cohen's book]. His uncle, Qi Dalong, was a bodyguard in the caravan agency established by Li Cunyi who guarded caravans traveling between Tianjin and Gubeikou. When the Allied Forces invaded Tianjin, he and Li Cunyi battled against the invaders at Laolongtou Train Station. He fought courageously, sustaining several wounds.

The third part of Cohen's book is also good.  (I quoted from it twice in my review of Rovere's book about xingyi in the Chinese army.)  It deals extensively with the process of internalization and self-torturous humiliation that came to produce the modern ideas about pure Martial Arts and the guoshu movement (national arts).

One reason this is personal to me is that in the period directly after the Boxer Uprising, my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying studied and performed the roll of monkey in Chinese Opera as a teen-ager.  The character/god of monkey was one of the most common gods to possess the Boxers during battle. Kuo also competed in Leitai fights (staged on a platfrom), he could still sing Opera parts 70 years later, and he was still doing drunken monkey gongfu too. Kuo was part of the pure martial arts movement, and guoshu, and an early student of Wang Xiangzhai. He worked as a bodyguard too. And he could tie a rope dart around his chest under his coat and shake in such a way that the dart would fly out and stick into a tree. And he could tie up any of his actively resisting students with the same technique.  None of his students learned the rope dart. And the one student who learned drunken monkey no longer practices. I think we owe it to the last generation, who brought these fantastic arts to us, to try an recover as much of the full picture as we can.

The last section of Cohen's book deals with the Cultural Revolution.  It has a few interesting facts.  Probably the most prominent cultural reference to the Boxers during that time, a time when George Xu was fighting in the streets on a daily basis, was a play called Shen Quan, Spiritual Fist.

If we are ever going to have a chance of understanding what the origins of Chinese Martial arts are, we are going to have to drop the stories of purely rational martial tough guys.  There is still so much that can be recovered from these arts, because they were designed as storehouses of knowlege.  Perhaps, once upon a time, there were legitmate arguments for dicarding central aspects of the tradition, but now, that time has passed.  Nobody believes anymore that womens' underpants can protect them from bullets.  It's time to see the whole thing for what it is and what is was---a deeply religious, theatrical, health sustaining, fighting arts tradition.

Five Levels of Muscle Training

This is a description of internal martial arts from the point of view of muscles.  These five levels apply to taijiquan, baguazhang, xingyiquan and (applied) qigong:

1. Moving and Coordinating; running, jumping, rolling, lifting, stretching, etc.


2. Static Structure; The ability to hold a static shape for a long period of time, and transfer force applied on any part of the body to the feet, the back or another limb.


3. Continuous Structure with Movement;  All muscles must move in twists and spirals following the flow of the bones and ligaments.  Muscles weaken and become sensitive.  Force can be applied in motion at any angle from any part of the body.  Force can be avoided without losing whole body integration.


4. Empty and Full at the Same Time;  All muscle tension must be discarded along with all intention to move.   Any solid concept of body structure must be discarded or melted away.  Muscles function like liquid and air.  (Power becomes unstoppable but unfocused and difficult to direct.)


5. Whole Body Becomes a Ball.  Resistance training for big muscles only.  Small muscles are used mainly for sensitivity and force transfer (ligament support).  Muscles move only by "ten directions breathing," they move in all directions using expansion and condensation, not lengthening and shortening.

Notes:

The separation of jing and qi, which happens automatically in stillness, needs to be available in motion to enter level 4.

In order to act through a body, that body must be felt as a dream.  Dreaming is not like the conscious mind.  If you think about running, you are likely to stumble.  In order to run, speak, or do any of these types of muscle training, you must first dream it.  In order to reach level 5, levels 1 through 4 must be felt as dream.  In other words, they can be done spontaneously by feeling, without thinking, or willing.

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Thoughts:

From my experience, this order is essential.  Each level takes a minimum of two years training.  Some internal traditions attempt to start their training at level 4 and then go back and fill in gaps in levels 1 and 2 through diligent forms practice.  The attempt to fill gaps in level 3 through push-hands training.  That seems like a mistake.

The quickest way to get level one skills is through rough play or dance (forms with speed and rhythm).

Level 2 can only be learned through a teacher/partner who tests your structure.

Levels 3 and 4 will be inhibited by strength training.

The key to transitioning from level 3 to level 4 is non-aggression, wuwei.  Aggression is refined to perfection and then discarded.  This transition probably requires working with emotionally mature partners.

Applications do not work at level 4.  Period. But paradoxically, the ability to use weight and momentum improves.

The good news! Yes, it takes at least ten years (two years for each level, and a minimum of three hours everyday), but levels 2 through 5 can be practiced at any age.  Levels 2 through 5 actually get easier with age because muscles become weaker and skin becomes looser!

Fighting is like Performing

The possibility of freezing in a fight, particularly during a surprise attack, is real.  Even for experienced fighters.  Even if we don't freeze, there is a high likelihood that we will experience some distortion of time.  This can be anything from an inability to remember anything that happened, to seeing the event play out in slow motion with very particular details.  The same is true for our perception of space.  We may feel anything from a total narrowing of perception, as if we were looking down a tunnel, to a sense that we are safely floating above the action observing the entire scene.

If I didn't hear  dismissive comments all the time like, "My martial art isn't pretty, but it works!"  I probably wouldn't harp on this point so much.  Folks, if it doesn't apply aesthetic considerations, it ain't martial arts.

As every experienced performer will tell you, freezing during a performance is a real possibility.  It's called stage fright and it feels like your whole body is wrapped up in plastic wrap.  Performers also sometimes have the feeling that they just stepped on the stage, and now they are stepping off--an hour performance can feel as if only a second or two has passed.  A performer can have the feeling that they can just languish in the time they have to take the next action, as if time were standing still.  Likewise, a performer can go through an entire show with out remembering or even noticing that there is an audience out there.  Or they may find themselves stepping out of the performance and watching it from above.

And just to beat a dead horse, Sgt.  Rory Miller has made a big deal of how important it is to give yourself permission in advance to brake social norms, like being nice or polite.  If you have to defend yourself, you have to utterly discard being nice.  The stage is a social environment where we can safely be horrible to each other.

Performance and Martial Arts are one tradition, not two.

Having a Ball Performing Martial Arts

I couldn't help but comment on this little tiff.  Chris started it over here on Martial Development.  I think it relates to Chiron's comments on commitment.

Basically they are excited about a guy who chopped his arm during a martial arts ritual.  I've been blogging about this stuff all year.  Here are a few back posts:

The Real History of Martial Arts and Trance

The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

More Spirit

What David Mamet Understands

Basically it's all performance, even if sometime in the future it might be the thing that saves your life.  But even if it does save your life you won't know for sure that some other factor didn't intervene.  Perhaps your attacker slipped, or better yet he had a flashback to a Flintstones Episode he saw when he was nine and forgot to keep killing you.

Here is a real video!  One that demonstrates why the greatest performers are also the greatest predators! (Watch the whole thing, it keeps getting better.)

George Xu on The Ball

The Ball

George Xu used a surprisingly counter intuitive definition of a ball the other day.

The term "ball" gets used in martial arts and qigong all the time.  Of course there's "ball up you firsts," but there are lots of other uses.  The term ball is used as a metaphor, a verb, and as a spacial description.  George Xu was using it to mean something else entirely.

Here are the most common uses of "ball'

• Imagine you are sitting on a large ball


• Imagine you are holding a ball in your palm


• Imagine you are holding a ball using your arms and torso


• Imagine you are inside of a ball


• Imagine a ball next to you or behind you


• Turn, roll, bounce, shake, spin or compress and expand one of the above balls you have imagined (but actually do the movement


• Align your body and limbs in arcs, which are part of imagined balls, now move the balls


• Have your arms connect to each other through your opponent (this one is actually a ring)


• Connect your arms to each other or a leg or both legs, or through space using an imagined ball

I could probably keep going.  Am I missing anything big?  Any other uses of the term ball in martial arts?

The definition George Xu gave me was in someways more concrete.  He said a ball, like a basketball for instance, has a skin, a surface thickness.  As a ball inflates, deflates, rolls or bounces, the dynamic pressure on the surface of the ball must change.  The surface of our physical body is like the thick skin of a basket ball.  It is capable of changing in tone, or being stretched around a curved surface.  Use the surface of your body like a ball.

When you practice gongfu, you must always "have a ball."