American Qigong Ethics (part 2)

Recently I was having an informed and thoughtful conversation about schools with a woman who has a high level job in statewide education when she casually mentioned that she studies qigong with a real master.

"Oh great," I say, "tell me more."

She tells me he leads a cancer group at one of the local Integrative-Medicine hospital clinics. "What makes him a master?" I ask, explaining that Qigong as medicine is a pretty new idea, and that taxi drivers in China are awarded the title "Master" (Shirfu) as well.

"Oh he's amazing." She said, "We do a style of walking Qigong around a small park and one day a drunk homeless guy stood up and moved imposingly toward our path shouting insults. My master just waved his hand and the guy promptly went over to a bench and fell asleep."

"O.K." I thought to myself, "Obe-Wan Kenobi did that in the Star Wars movie too!" "That's an extraordinary claim," I say. "Are you learning how to do that? What other sorts of claims does he make?"

"Oh, he is very modest. He would never make such a claim himself. I just do it everyday because it makes me feel healthy."

Now, eye rolling aside, I'm not a truth junkie. I don't want to pop this woman's balloon. I don't know what he is personally claiming, but she has apparently talked herself into exercising everyday. Who am I to get in the way of that?

Still there is a significant chance that I have been practicing qigong longer than her "Master," who I suspect invented a lineage and an improbable training history. It diminishes me in two ways. First, some people will assume I'm not very knowledgeable because I don't do these sorts of amazing feats. Second, other people may associate Qigong with these improbable claims and disregard my knowledge altogether. Both of these things happen all the time.

Does her master have some ethical responsibility to clarify his powers of agency?  How different is this from Jerry Alan Johnson who wrote a dictionary sized book on Qigong that I wouldn't even use as a door-stop?  Johnson uses the "sword-fingers" mudra to do "needless" acupuncture, and one of his students is the main Qigong teacher at a Berkeley Acupuncture School.
I acknowledge that charismatic Qigong teachers get disciplined health commitments from their students or clients that I don't get. If you tap into a client's insecurities, or their desire for power, by convincing them that they will be freer, or happier, or stronger, or more preceptive, or even more intuitive, if only they quit eating fried chicken and do some groovy breathing exercise--who am I to get in the way? Those commitments are legitimately good for one's health. Other people are free to subordinate themselves to people and ideas.

The first American Qigong Precept that I propose is this (I know, it's a little long for a precept):

When you don't know, admit you don't know! Teach your students to do the same.  Do not make claims about healing properties that you can not substantiate.  Clear explanations are O.K., anecdotes are not unless you say, "This is an un-substantiated anecdote!"

Good storytelling can be a useful teaching method because it has the power to make metaphors memorable.  When you present stories as history, go ahead and give the good-guys white hats and the bad-guys black hats--but beware, your are walking a fine line--make sure your students are sensitive to the presence of ambiguity.
If your knowledge comes from intuition admit that, and don't cross the line of claiming to know with certainty.

American Qigong Ethics (updated)

As Americans we have always come face to face with cultures different from our own. Multi-culturalism is an ethic based on our sense of what is right and good and desirable in a society. Unfortunately multiculturalism often gets conflated with cultural relativism.

We acknowledge that people from other cultures have different rituals and customs, as well as different narratives (historical perspectives) and priorities.
Multiculturalism is the idea that we can all benefit from a cosmopolitan environment where there is tolerance for gatherings with culturally distinct attributes and which nurture traditional or historic world views and practices. This is because such an environment leads to a greater good. Through hybridization and cross-cultural integration, we can incubate creativity and innovation.

This idea grows out of a more primitive one, "Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water." An expression which reveals the tension between innovation and tradition found in cosmopolitan environments.

Cultural relativism is the simple idea that what seems real or true to people from one culture may not seem so to people from another. A further corollary to this idea is that the methods people of a particular culture use to test or measure whether something is true or real are often different than those of another culture.

The idea of cultural relativism opens the possibility that we may be wrong about how we decide what is right. Why? Because when we cross a cultural boundary the measure or test which determines what is real or what is true may have changed. Such boundary crossing can happen in a cosmopolitan environment, but multiculturalism as a value stands clearly in my culture, which also happens to value personal freedom and commerce.

Where cultural relativism and multiculturalism become conflated a kind of reluctance or hesitancy to make ethical decisions can lead to a weakening of ethics all around. Fertile ground for cultural and social fundamentalists.

How do we know when subordination of someone else is wrong? How do we know if, indeed, subordinating ourselves is wrong?

This is all pretty relevant to qigong because there really are no qigong traditionalists or qigong conservatives. Everyone is an innovator because qigong as a distinct concept is a new invention. It is a creation of cities. Mainland Chinese cities had explosions of Qigong in the 1980's and 90's, imagine a thousand people all practicing together in a park. The government felt that Qigong was out of control and dangerous so it instituted certifications and regulations. Some teachers went into exile, some went to jail, some styles were made illegal, some went underground, but most found a way to work with the government.
The ethical issues that arise teaching Qigong in America (and elsewhere) are different from those in China. We don't need certifications or oversight. We do need good cross-cultural communication and ways to assess the value of a particular style or teacher.

Historically speaking, it is safe to say gongfu (one of the roots of qigong) has been practiced for a thousand years, and probably longer. People could study and practice movement or meditation or martial arts routines within their families or villages. The Chinese word for village is "cheng," which actually means "wall."  All the people within the city "wall" shared the same body of  ethics.

China also has a long history of itinerant performers, healers and religious teachers. Most often these were also associated with a family and a village. Even a traveling Gongfu-Opera-Circus likely had a home, a family and a particular religious association. The historic conflation of performers, healers, ritual experts and religious teachers makes it difficult to create ethical standards for teaching modern qigong. It has all of these roots.


If you are teaching "qigong healing" and just happen to pull a rabbit out of your hat, is it ethical to say "My qi is feeling jumpy today?" I think not. I think you should say, "I will now attempt to pull a rabbit out of my hat," do the deed, then say, "Ta-Dah!" and take a bow.

The ethic of multiculturalism requires us to tolerate some weird blending of performance and healing, but those same ethics also require us to hybridize by drawing some dotted-lines between, for instance, performance and healing, or stretching and kowtowing.

In trying to understand and practice qigong and gongfu ethically, we should be aware of the religious meaning in these practices, and the relationship our style has to various healing, performing and devotional traditions.

Chansi Jin (Silk Reeling Power)

I dropped by to see George Xu yesterday and he gave me this great list of the seven levels of chansijin.

1. Like a Three-Section Staff.


2. Like a Rope.


3. Like a Snake.


4. The Dantian becomes a perfect ball that rolls in all directions.


5. The Outside and Inside move together.


6. Sense of space moves the body.


7. The mind spirals. (Only the opponent feels the spiral.)

Chansijin is closely associated with Chen Style Taijiquan, but the idea of spiraling is common to most internal martial arts. Chen Style has spun-off its own qigong system called chansigong (silk reeling work). The metaphor here is the act of transferring a silk cocoon to a spool by pulling just a single filament (strand) of silk out of the cocoon. The filament is gently attached to the spool and then the spool is slowly and continuously turned. Once you have many spools of filament silk, they can be spun together into a very strong thread, which can be made into fabric.

When I studied with Zhang Xuexin he liked to call this same practice "making noodles" which mixed the metaphors of pulling and twisting with the resulting looseness.

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.  

New Students

I live and teach in San Francisco in a well sheltered park which is an old stone quarry.  For the whole summer there have been three large crows hanging out in the park every morning.

About two weeks ago two peregrine falcons showed up in the park and have been make a sport of dive-bombing the crows.  The crows squawk and shift around but they don't seem to have been injured.

One day while I was standing still a squirrel jumped over my foot as an escape route from one of the falcons.  Another morning I was standing still on one foot with my arms up and both falcons swooped me head on, I had to pull my arms back suddenly.

Today the crows were fighting back.  Wherever the falcons landed the crows would perch next to them and squawk.  The falcons were screaming back at them.  Quite a lot can happen during meditation.

The predator, whether falcon, cat, or bear, is so naturally aggressive that its aggression is totally effortless.  This is the quality we are trying to emulate.

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.

Sleep

Getting enough sleep is one thing. Consistently sleeping until you are not tired is another thing entirely.

Everyone knows that if you exercise well, you tend to sleep well. Unfortunately exercise can be overdone. If you regularly begin your practice at night after you are already tired you run the risk of giving yourself insomnia; tapping into that deadly "second wind," and depleting your yuan qi.

Each internal organ has two basic ways of moving, the generative and the re-generative. For example the liver uses jelly-fish-like movement to distribute blood out to the muscles when it is in the active generative cycle. When you get a good night's sleep blood draws towards the liver and it swells up. During the re-generative cycle the muscles need less blood.

In addition to the quality of its movement, the shape or tone of an organ is indicative of its functioning.

Internal Training

The first level of internal martial arts is usually try to do nothing internal so that you can just relax. The second level involves feeling the internal organs moving but do nothing with them. At the third level, we connect the movement of the organs to the movement of the limbs, head and torso. All three levels are actually infinite; we never stop practicing them.

All three of these practices tend to involve changes to the movement, shape and tone of the organs. When this happens it can trigger a need to return to the re-generative cycle. In other words, sometimes an hour of no-sweat Taijiquan at 8 AM can leave us wanting to get back into bed.

This can happen even if you are getting enough sleep because an individual organ may be in the process of changing. Hopefully the internal practice is improving the organ's efficiency (but as we age it is certain that eventually our organs will start to fail). When we resist the urge to sleep, we are resiting the process of re-generation.

Don't Short Change the Organs!

Whenever the seasons change or you change your internal practice, your internal organs will need a new type of sleep and rest.

If you still feel groggy after 10 hours of sleep it is because one or more of your internal organs didn't get the kind of sleep (think: shape/movement/tone) that it needed.

Note: Stillness and other "resting" practices move and shape the organs in different ways than sleep and activity. Rest, sleep, food and exercise are all indispensable

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The Re-generative Cycle

Here is a concept from Chinese Medicine which has a lot of currency for internal martial artists.

The body has two cycles: A generative cycle which is operative whenever we are active, and a re-generative cycle which is operative when we are sleeping and resting.

First I should remind everyone that people cultivate Qi in four ways: Eating, Moderate Exercise, Sleeping, and Resting.

The generative cycle uses up qi, if we stay in the generative cycle we will slowly get more and more tired until, if we are still healthy, the re-generative cycle grabs us and throws us on the couch. If for some reason we don't have an opportunity to rest our reserves of Qi called Yuan Qi, or original Qi, start getting used. This is what people sometimes call "getting their second wind." If we habitually tap into our reserves of original Qi, it often leads to insomnia, and then slow degeneration; the body's ability to store and distribute fluids becomes impaired leading to weakening of the teeth and spine, loss of flexibility, and eventually death (a final return to the re-generative cycle).

OK, that was grim. But remember sleeping and rest allow our bodies to re-generate so that we don't expend Yuan Qi. Eating, Exercising, sleeping, and resting are all essential. A change in one of the four will produce noticeable changes in the other three.

So where do internal martial arts fit in? If practiced correctly they fall in between exercise and rest. It is possible to practice in such a way that you move between the generative and re-generative cycles. The long term effect of daily practice is that you can easily start up the re-generative cycle while you are in slow motion, doing simple tasks, like making tea, or taking a stroll.

More on this soon: Internal Arts and Death

I got the Art work above from Jamie J. Rice, check it out