Clairvoyance-Annoyance

Many years ago I studied a mixed internal/external system of gongfu called Lan Shou (Open the Door) with George Xu. I was training 6 hours every day. One of Lan Shou's specialties is the development of ripping and tearing power. We were practicing techniques designed to rip off limbs. It was a lot of fun, no one ever actually got a limb torn off. Injuries were infrequent but when they did occur we used the same basic body of knowledge and experience to fix people that we were using to rip them apart. Years later I learned that we were practicing Tuina (healing massage, literally: push-pull).

When you train to tear off a limb you have to develop specialized Yi, often translated: intentionality. We trained our ability to see weaknesses in peoples underlying structure which could be leveraged to rip a muscle, tendon or ligament. The side effect of all this training is that I would get on the bus and see everyone's chronic physical problems. I would look at someone and imagine myself ripping them apart as if they were a chicken. In my mind each person would come apart in a unique and different way.

The more I trained, the more weaknesses I saw in everyone's underlying structure. It got weird. Finally I decide it was too weird walking around ripping people apart with my mind so I stopped doing that type of practice.

Still, I developed the ability to see and correct alignment problems, and to spontaneously create simple exercises that release tension and increase mobility in joints. This ability is a kind of intuition.

All forms of healing, medicine, and bodywork rely on intuition to some extent. Intuition and clairvoyances are closely related, the difference is that clairvoyance includes a claim of certainty. Superior forms of medicine attempt to verifying what is perceived through intuition, both before and after treatment. Clairvoyant claims are usually self-verifying, and tend to be dismissive of challenges.

In my experience, bodywork is between 60 and 90 percent intuition. The other 10 to 40 percent is technique. I strongly encourage people to develop their intuition, and to reject clairvoyance.

While we can get very technical about mechanisms of injury and repair, we can never be certain what causes healing.

Irreversibility

The reason for discipline is to make a practice irreversible.

There is a gongfu rule of thumb, "one day missed, ten days lost." If you start a practice and miss a few days of practice right at the beginning, you basically lose your momentum and have to start over. If you learn something new and don't practice it the next day, it is usually lost by the third day, you'll have to re-learn it. If you have been practicing everyday for nine months and you miss three days of practice, you've basically set yourself back a month.

Chinese martial arts work by momentum, that is why discipline is so important. In English we often say, "Practice it until it becomes second nature." This is a similar idea.

Problems arise when we don't really understand why we are doing a particular practice. Kinesthetic learning often starts out with a method that is supposed to reveal some type of fruition over time. Once the fruition is revealed it can be integrated into everything we do. Sometimes this means we can drop the method. Sometimes the method is itself part of the fruition.

For example, the Kitchen God lives over the stove in Chinese homes. He represents an irreversible commitment to keep the house clean. The method is cleaning on a regular schedule. When cleaning becomes "second nature" the method can become more spontaneous, but it can't really be dropped. The fruition is living in a cleaner, simpler, healthier environment, where things are easy to find, easy to store, and easy to get rid of.

But discipline itself is a hook with out a worm. If the fruition does not reveal itself, or if the fruition we thought we were going to get doesn't materialize, the experiment is a failure--the discipline should be dropped. With kinesthetic practices expect to have a clear idea what fruition will eventually become irreversible after about two months. It sometimes takes a little longer to get the idea. A method can easily take two years to truly become irreversible but you should know long before that what the method is doing and how it is changing you.

Most Daoist inspired methods reveal something about your true nature. Often it is an appetite of some kind. The most obvious example is that sitting or standing practices reveal an appetite for stillness. After about two years of discipline your appetite should be strong enough to direct your practice, rigid or militaristic discipline will actually hold you back. I know my morning standing practice is irreversible because if some anomaly or emergency disrupts my practice, the rest of the day I feel myself being pulled toward stillness--At the end of the day I jump into bed and savor the thought of waking up to my practice.

The rule of thumb is this: We are doing experiments which reveal our true nature; we are not signing up for self-improvement.

Daoist Ritual Standing

Daoism has always maintained its roots to the shamanic and ecstatic worlds and at the same time used them do distinguish itself. Orthodox Daoist's do not practice any martial arts yet Daoists use swords in ritual dance and summon demon armies.

Ancient martial arts traditions are surely an important influence in the development of Daoism, and Daoism has continued to spin-off inspirations for martial arts. I have a bunch of posts dealing with this that I'm working on, but let me start by addressing an interesting quote that "adz" left in the comments sections of my posts on standing.

For me standing is a very active practice (as bizarre as that sounds to some folk). There are so many different aspects that can be worked, but Yao ZhongXun has already said it much better than what I ever could: Training of the mind alone is not Yiquan as is not physical practice alone. The two must be combined. The essence can only be cultivated by integration of the mind and body. Visualization or mental imagery must be employed in relaxed standing (Zhan Zhuang) to direct an integrated neuromuscular coordination that results in a whole-body response. Kinesthetic perception of the internal/external opposing force pairs (Zheng Li) and internal isometrics is developed to seek, sense, experience, cultivate, understand and master the whole-body balanced force (Hun Yuan Li).

This secular attempt to describe jindan (the golden elixir meditation) runs into the same problems Mantak Chia did.

In Taijiquan it is standard to learn "peng, ji, lu, and an" as four separate internal changes and then put them together in a seamless circular motion. The circles then become smaller and smaller. In Xingyi a very similar method is used in, for instance, the metal element to create cutting movement which resembles a forward moving skill-saw-blade.

Wang Xiangzai, the founder of the Yiquan system mentioned above in the quote, may have developed his method from Xingyi. One practice we do in Yiquan is to stand like we are holding a tree. We then move the imaginary tree imperceptibly up-down, left-right, forward-back, and inward-outward. Like taijiquan, this individual training eventually becomes a seamless movement and what starts as small circles becomes smaller and smaller until we can integrate these small circles into our larger movements. We then have power in all directions.

It is a stretch to call this meditation or standing still, no? My friend was joking that it is meditation for people with Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.).

(Here I go digging myself a whole so deep I can't possibly dig myself out in one post.)

In Acupuncture we call the first needle, "calling the qi to order." In Daoist ritual the first act is also called, "calling the qi to order." To call the qi to order one must first invoke the Perfected Warrior, Zhen Wu. This is done by standing still using the physicality of the method described above. It is a totally ready stance--able to instantaneously issue force in all directions.

But Zhen Wu is not just a physicality, he is a whole way of seeing the world, and he is the first stage in the practice of jindan (golden elixir) (Daoist ritual was totally integrated into a solo meditation system during the Tang Dynasty, 600 CE.)

Zhen Wu is visualized in his armor with skin like the night sky drawing inward, chain and silk is woven into his hair. He has bare feet and he is energetically on the edge of his seat. Think of him as holding a sword in one hand, without a sheath, the tip of the blade is dragging on the ground. He is the embodiment of the taijiquan concept song (or sung, let go, sink) he is utterly fearless, the god of nothing-to-lose.

This is stage one. Don't get me wrong, stage one is cool. But these secularists have no way to deal with stage two, and no coherent explanation of fruition. (Perhaps we should have an old-folks home especially for people who can issue power in all directions at once.)

UPDATE: the quote about mentions "whole body balanced force," when I wrote this ten years ago I didn't know what that was. Now I teach it! But I call it the six dimensions and three thresholds of counterbalancing.  

Standing for Weakness

Is standing meditation practice good for posture and alignment?

Here are the two main theories:

1. As soon as we attempt to hold still tension begins arising in locations where our alignment is inefficient.  If we can apply that information, we can improve our alignment.
2. Circulation does not stop when we hold still so locations with poor circulation quickly become apparent.  Slight changes in alignment at these locations may improve circulation, which could be considered an improvement in alignment.

If you do standing practice without correcting your alignment, your muscle tension will actually increase.  It is a slow and painful way to build muscle, and not very effective I might add. However if you are constantly fiddling with your alignment you will become more and more contorted and unstable, that's a big mistake.

Practicing internal martial arts correctly means accepting our natural weakness.  Being weak is okay.  It certainly doesn't inhibit fighting if that is what you like to do. Most fighting systems agree that the ability to relax is valuable because if you are relaxed it's easy to change. Generally fighting systems prefer strength and conditioning with their relaxation. The influence of Daoist precepts and conduct practices on the internal martial arts is most apparent in their rejection of strength and conditioning.

Correct standing practice makes us weak and sensitive and thus more prone to injury.  The type of rest that we get from standing meditation has some healing effects. Most likely those effects are do to the improvement in circulation which supplies nutrients and replaces damaged tissues.  Standing heals the little tiny injuries which otherwise would restrict our breathing and degrade our alignment.  But honestly, slow gentle practice and plenty of sleep will do the same thing.

But...if you like to play rough on a regular basis, (and many of us do) standing will repair those little injuries that would otherwise tend to pile up.  Any improvement in alignment also improves power. But from a Daoist point of view all you are doing is re-establishing what is normal.  It is normal to play rough.  It is normal to heal.  It is normal to have access to highly efficient movement. It is normal to just stand still and do nothing.  It is normal to be weak.

Standing the Hype

I think the main reason some Internal Martial Artists don't do standing meditation practice is because of the preposterous hype surrounding it. You know what I'm talking about:

"Use your intentions to draw-in the Qi of heaven and the Qi earth and mix them in your lower dantian (cinnabar field)."

"The qi you store in your lower dantian can be used to heal all illnesses, physical ailment and emotional imbalances."

"If you practice standing still for an hour everyday without fail, the qi you cultivate will slowly build until you have enough of it to blast swarthy martial opponents across the room."

Please, could we get an English translation? Because my inner-high-school-science-teacher is getting a cramp from laughing too hard.

Standing still for an hour or so is the best way to measure whether or not you are:

1. Getting enough sleep


2. Getting enough rest


3. Eating the right amount and types of food relative to the amount and types of exercise you are doing.

If you have not been doing these things well over the last 3 to 5 days, an hour of standing meditation will be extremely difficult.

That's it, that's my translation! The qi of heaven means fresh air and good ideas. The qi of earth means food, rest and sleep.

To cultivate qi means to monitor and adjust your conduct and habits so that your appetites are responsive, dynamic, and easy to satisfy.

Tomorrow: Does standing practice have any direct healing properties? How? For whom?

Side Note: Soup is good food, and this is an internet miracle.

Appetite and Discipline

One of the biggest challenges of being a teacher is that students are always trying to get me to equivocate. For instance, I say, "Practice standing completely still for one hour early in the morning, everyday, before you eat breakfast."

Some student will always want to know what will happen if they don't? I usually answer, "Sifu will kill you!" But they always laugh, and then ask what if they only stand for 20 minutes? or do it in the evening? or every other day?

The truth is, I don't know. I've always practiced the whole thing, without equivocation. I can guess or I can ask other teachers. But honestly, what I really know is what I've practiced. The reason I don't stop practicing is because I have a real appetite to practice as much as I do. I stand in the morning for the same reason I eat in the morning.

There is another way, and I've used it on solo retreats. It is called the Wandering of the Mare. I have several artist friends who live this way all the time. They eat when they are hungry, they sleep when they are sleepy, they paint, or read, or call up a friend totally spontaneously whenever they feel like it. I'm never surprised to hear that they have been up all night painting.

On a solo retreat, I'm the same way, I sleep until there is absolutely no more feeling to sleep, and then I close my eyes one more time to make sure. I sit still, or stand still, or walk the Baguazhang circle, until I'm done. No schedule, no limits.

But most of us work for a living. We have people to coordinate with.  We have to at least try to stay awake during meetings. Five days a week we have to get the kids off to school with a good breakfast and matching socks.

Hermits and anyone on a long, private retreat, can freely follow their appetites. Many of the most potent and profound Chinese disciplines were created by hermits. What to a hermit is natural discipline, may seem to us, living as we do in the world with other peoples needs and expectations, like "militaristic discipline." To spontaneously follow one's personal appetite(s) is to be in an on-again, off-again, conflict with the social world.

We might do better to think of Taijiquan, Baguazhang etc... as the "ritual resetting" of our appetites.  By "winding" us back to zero once a day, they allow us to follow our appetites spontaneously--within the social world.

A Non-Epiphany Art

Chinese Martial arts and Qigong from a Daoist point of view are non-transcendent traditions.

These arts are primarily about revealing the way things actually are, they are not self-help or self-improvement regimes.

However, most people are on a transcendent path. We want to improve ourselves. We want to heal. Or we want to get a 'leg up' on the next guy, spiritually, morally, physically, or intellectually. So most of us regularly, and all of us sometimes, practice these arts in a transcendent way. We try to get better!

The basic Daoist outlook is that life is not a struggle, we're alright the way we are. We're nice enough, strong enough, smart enough, and we have enough qi. Practice is just a way of tuning our appetites for exercise, stillness, sleep, fighting, nutrition, contact with other people, etc.... We are naturally disciplined and curious.

This outlook is sometimes framed in a quasi-transcendent way as a simplification process, a letting go, a returning to our original nature(s).

Thus, epiphanies are really not part of the tradition. Now and then we learn a trick, or discover something cool, and we get excited. But it's not like most Yoga classes, where people brag about being filled with the glorious pure light of the universe everyday, before knocking back a double soy latte, jumping in the hybrid for an hour commute and then punching the clock.

Anyway, in almost 30 years of practice I've actually had two epiphanies.

1. After years of practicing with very low stances and yet constantly hearing "sink your tail-bone," "go lower," and "song;" one day I did just that, I sank my tail-bone. I simply understood on a kinesthetic level what my teachers had been trying to teach, and from then on I did it correctly.

2. After doing a couple years of chansijin (taijiquan silk reeling exercises), one day my chest just relaxed. For a week after that my appetite for food dropped to about half a meal a day. Presumably I was using so much effort keeping my chest up, that when I stopped my body had some reserves left to run on. After a week my appetite came back, but it's been a little smaller ever since that day.

100% Qi Free?

I took the following quote from Joanna Zorya at Martial Tai Chi:

100% Qi-Free

Our own teaching completely rejects the concept of qi, also known as chi, ch'i or ki. Other instructors coming to the MTA [Martial Tai Chi] should also reject the idea completely. However, on this website there are a couple of articles which specifically deal with the issue. Qi is also dealt with briefly on our "Taiji Concepts" DVD - the clip (in "3 internal harmonies excerpts") is shown on our "Techniques" video clips page. We have found it necessary to address the issue of qi, because most people in the Tai Chi mainstream are utterly obsessed with it, and we wanted to make our position on it absolutely clear. The concept is at best obsolete and at worst dangerous. Significantly, the notion of qi is simply not true.

The way I see it the word Qi is polysemous. It has many different meanings depending on context. So if the teachers at Martial Tai Chi want to ban the word, they aren't necessarily banning the concepts that come with it.

The word qi might in a particular context mean the totality of everything you can feel. Or it might mean the feeling of blood or lymph pulsing through your body. But in another context it means the bubbles in a glass of soda pop. If the term qi is not clearly defined in context, it can be used to create intensional vagueness. Such vagueness is often used by Charismatics to create a feeling of authority among witnesses to a performance of healing or other subordinating demonstrations of power.

However, we really aren't sure what it is we are feeling inside and even outside our bodies. The term qi can be used in conjunction with other words to communicate the density, directionality, size, or relative temperature of something we feel. I'm not going to argue that it is a necessity, just that it can be used appropriately.

Here is my LONG definition of Qi. I wrote this 10 years ago, so it may need some updating, but perhaps readers will have suggestions.

UPDATE: I've had some interesting exchanges with Joanna Zorya in the comments for a previous post on Lineage. I mention these books:

Thinking Through Cultures, On Beauty and Being Just, The Trouble with Principle.

Shen (Spirit?): What does it mean?

Elisabeth Hsu wrote an article in Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, in 2000, called Spirit (SHEN), Styles or Knowing , and Authority in Contemporary Chinese Medicine. The article is a summary of her book from 1999, The Transmission of Chinese Medicine, (Cambridge University Press.) I got the article free through Interlibrary Loan if you are just interested in ideas, but I recommend the book too.

The book tells a cool story. In Kunming, in the late 1980's Hsu signed up to study three different forms of Chinese medicine and compared how they were transmitted. She did this as a medical anthropologist, in other words, she was always looking beyond the subject she was studying to a larger field of knowledge. This is how good social thought gets produced.

First she signed up to study TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) at a government college which taught clinical medicine in a TCM Hospital. Then she found a qigong master, who did treatments on difficult cases. Finally, she found a teacher of the Neijing (Inner Classic of Medicine), really a "doctor's doctor", who had completed his studies before the two big changes in Chinese Medicine took place; the first being the invention of Clinical TCM and the other being the Cultural Revolution.

What she found is that each style of transmission uses the Term SHEN very differently. These differences have profound implications for how these various types of practitioners assert authority and make claims about what is real.

1. Clinical TCM: Shen is a list of observations that correspond closely with what we call functions of the brain in Bio-medicine (you know regular modern medicine.)

2. Qigong Master: Shen is a very vague idea, no one seems to be able to define it, yet people agree that it is what improves (or doesn't improve) with a series of qigong treatment performances.

3. The Neijing expert: Shen means different things in different parts of the text. The teachers uses the text which is often metaphorical or obscure, to impart his traditional knowledge and extensive experience about medicine. Thus the teacher asserts some authority about what Shen means at any one time, or in a particular context. Hsu calls this quality of having multiple meanings polysemous.

In my teaching I falls in to category 3. I use terms like qi, shen, jin, yi, to mean different things in different contexts.

Breathing Spaces

Nancy N. Chen's book Breathing Spaces, qigong, psychiatry, and healing in China, was published in 2003, by Columbia University Press. Before Chen's book there was nothing available about the history of Qigong in the 20th century that would satisfy a curious 12 year old, much less a scholar.

I have at least 45 post-it notes in my book. Why do I love this book so much?

Here is a brief biography form the back cover: "Nancy N. Chen is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she also teaches courses on food, ethnographic film, urban anthropology, China, and Asian Americans."

She grew up in the US studying gongfu, and like me, heard about this thing called qigong sometime in the late 80's. It turned out to be, at least partly, what we had all been practicing and referring to as martial arts warm-ups. But there where also lots of claims being attached to this new "qigong" that didn't seem to fit our experiences. There was a lot of religious feeling and parlor tricks too. There were strange and sometimes very specific claims made about healing powers associated with both the practice of doing qigong and these new "Masters" themselves.

Being a lover of history, the biographies various masters would pull out from the underside of their 'inner cauldrons,' were particularly irksome to me. Nancy N. Chen deals with all this beautifully.
So the only real question now is, why haven't you read it yet?