25 Years of the Blind Leading the Blind

I just taught a workshop at the Lighthouse Center for the Blind.  Here is their blog.  It was fun.  The workshop was a two hour introduction to push-hands (tuishou).  Most of the students really couldn't see me or each other.  The title of this post is what is written on the outside of the building.

Most of my teaching methods had to be modified a little in order to work for blind people, it was a fun challenge.  Because I was teaching in their space they knew where the walls were and that chairs were stacked against the walls, which we picked up at one point and used as props and they put away with out any bumping.  But they often didn't know how close or far away they were from each other and  I would have to say, "everyone put your right foot forward," instead of, "put opposite feet forward,"  because they didn't know what their partner was doing.

We did a lot of touching, feeling, and pushing.  As students go, they were fairly aggressive, which I appreciate.  They seemed to get a kick out of my demonstration of school yard fighting styles and the similarity to Taijiquan principles.  The most difficult thing was that I am totally addicted to reading students facial expressions, not to mention relying on student's to read my face for clues when I'm joking.  Blind people don't make a lot of facial expressions even when they are aggressively struggling at push hands like two elk competing for a mate.

The next time I teach at the Lighthouse (probably in April) it will be a class open to anyone.  So if you are one of my private students who complains that you always lose against me, well, here is your chance test your mad skills!

Where does the movment come from?

Where does the movement come from?  Where do I initiate the movement from?  This is the most common question I get as a teacher of adults.  It is also the most basic and important question.  The answers to this question-- from the feet, from the dantian, from your head, sink first, engage the fingernails first, first bend at the wrist...-- are all provisional answers.  The answers to this question are a continuum leading towards the ethereal.  That is the reason we call it Taiji, the answer is in the meaning of that term.

The source of inspiration in Taijiquan is in fact the process of seeking the source of all inspiration.

Theater and Kungfu

Chinese martial arts are historically inseparable from theater arts.  I do not mean to say that one can not look back on any era and find a well trained single minded bruiser.  But that bruiser is likely to have a gongfu brother who worked as a street performer, or an aunt who was a master at going into trance and channeling historic figures (like generals and minsters) for interviews at the homes of the well-to-do.

The term "Qi" can actually be translated "magic," because when a little kid pulled on the lapel of a street magician's coat and asked, "Master, how did you saw that woman in half without killing her?"  The magician answered, "I used my qi! I was able to separate her and reconstitute her with my enormous reserves of qi!"

Everyone who has read the Taijiquan Classics knows that "Taiji is born from Wuji, and is the mother of Yin and Yang."  When a magician showed you the inside of his hat, he said, "Look, look, it's Wuji (emptiness)."  "I will now circle this hat on my dantian... gathering the qi, returning to the primordial chaos (huntun), suddenly Taiji is born!"  "First Yin" (out of the hat he pulls a small black rabbit) "and then Yang," (followed by a white one).

Here is a website by someone who thinks like me.  Here is his youtube channel.  And here is some rocking old time street gongfu:

Harry Potter Goes to Shaolin Temple

The Martial Arts Nerd!

The Martial Arts Nerd is now an American icon.  It is right up there with Superman and Marilyn Monroe.  In fact, in a strange way, Superman, and the guy he shares his body with Clark Kent, may have been an early version of the Martial Arts Nerd. I may look, sound and act like a helpless bumbling straight guy, but underneath this facade I'm a scary powerhouse of flying arms and legs!

It is a good thing that blogs didn't exist in 1993 because Matthew Polly would surely have used a blog to document his year at Shaolin Temple instead of giving us this wonderful book:  American Shaolin.  Besides being a funny almost lovable nerd, Matthew Polly gives us a bone crushing and forced splits account of what it was like to spend a year at the Shaolin Temple.

Polly is honest, so honest you kinda feel sorry for him in an "I'm glad it wasn't me" kinda way.  His story telling skills are delightful.  I especially liked his stories about seeking out a trainer in the drinking game "Playing Hands".  He starts that chapter with a quote from The Dream of the Red Chamber

:

"Drinking games are to be observed even more seriously than military orders."

His "Playing Hands" trainer is his most important master.  He teaches him, through the drinking game, how to achieve goals, negotiate deals, intimidate a criminal Triad affiliate, and get laid.  Then Polly learns that:

"Earlier European and American writers called the Chinese fatalistic and passive.  This was a mistake.  They aren't passive; they are introverts.  They study the patterns and wait for their opportunity.  But if opportunities were continually deferred, they exploded.  This was the reason why luan (chaos) was the most feared word in the language."

Polly was an undergrad at Princeton in Religion and Chinese Language for 3 years before he went to Shaolin.  Unfortunately studying Religion without a lot of History didn't prepare him enough to actually explain why a Buddhist Monastery would be credited with creating martial arts.  But he takes a shot at it anyway:

"Shaolin Kungfu has eighteen different official weapons, but there are forms for more.  Shaolin has five main animal styles-- tiger, leopard, eagle, snake, and praying mantis--but there are more.  It is estimated that Shaolin has more than 200 open-hand forms, but no one has been able to record them all.  Historians of martial arts explain the creation of all of these styles either for self-defense (Shaolin was an isolated monastery often attacked by bandits) or religious reasons (kungfu forms ar e a type of moving meditation), but that doesn't explain the complexity.  It took me all of a week to come up with my own theory: boredom. Put a bunch of sexually repressed young men on a mountaintop with nothing to do but meditate and practice kungfu and the myriad of Shaolin styles is the result."

Of course what he learned there was Wushu, not Shaolin exactly.  The Shaolin Temple was destroyed and then, after Jet Li made the movie Shaolin Temple (1982), it was rebuilt to accommodate tourists and the thousands of kids who swarmed there (or were abandoned there by their parents) to learn martial arts.  Wushu was created by the Chinese government to replace kungfu because the Communists wanted an absolute monopoly on sources of power and authority.  It is a combination of Northern Shaolin (what I teach), Dance, and Acrobatics.  He also learned Sanda (kickboxing with Chinese rules), some traditional body surface conditioning associated mostly with performance (like brick breaking), and of course drinking games.  Buddhism doesn't seem to have been much of a priority when he was there in 1993, although he thinks it may be now.

History aside, the biggest difference between Wushu and traditional Chinese martial arts is that Wushu performers wear out at the same age as ballet dancers, in their late 20's.  Over stretching is the problem they have in common.

It is a really funny book, and it's insightful too, but you'll have to keep reading my blog if you want to find out why a Buddhist temple is so oddly credited as the creator of kungfu.

Pantomime

I took a workshop about teaching performing arts to kids a couple of weeks ago.  The guy leading the workshop was an actor and the vehicle he used to demonstrate teaching techniques was pantomime.  In other words, he taught a class in pantomime with the goal being for us to learn something about teaching kids, not about pantomime itself.

However, when I was asked to perform using pantomime, I got a lot of laughs and gasps and other audience responses.  It struck me that my martial arts training has heaps of pantomime in it.  Chen style taijiquan is particularly good training for creating objects in space, but the precision of Northern Shaolin stance training is also solid ground for pantomime.  I know exactly where my fist is in space, whether it is behind me level with my shoulder or exactly one fist's distance away from my left temple.  I can easily establish a consistent height for the ledge of an invisible window using horse stance.  I can hide the murder weapon on an invisible top shelf for later retrieval using the precise height of monk stance.

Of course this should be obvious right?  I mean every kid knows that when you are doing a martial arts form you are pantomiming beating up every mean kid who has ever set foot in the playground.  No?

Storytelling with ones hands and body is a skill that can come in handy in a lot of situations.  In places where you don't speak the local language it can be used to put money in your pocket or to defuse a potentially violent mis-communication.  (Pirates also need these skills to communicate with each other ship to ship on the open seas.)  I have been disappointed during my travels in China at how rarely I could get people to explain things with their hands.  In Turkey it was even worse, if I tried to use my hands people would become noticeably anxious and upset.

Impulse Control

This is such a good title, I wish I had content that would live up to its promise. Still, I couldn't resist.

My simple offering is that we need impulse control to be successful, but we also need spontaneity. Teachers and students alike can find themselves mourning a loss of wildness, begrudgingly exchanged for the ability to focus, concentrate and persist.

Martial arts are often rightly credited with the ability to instill discipline in the unruly youth-- to curb desires and focus passions-- to turn libertines into responsible citizens.

I myself have often been sited for my patience and my self-disciplined example. Yet, I'm prone to identifying with the indolent prince, the artful dodger, and the easy life.

Daoism, despite its intricacies and difficult methods, has been called an apophatic tradition. Which means it teaches by unteaching, it reveals by showing what is not so, rather than what is so.

So, with Taijiquan (and other internal arts) it is said that all movement initiates from the dantian (the belly region?). To actual do this requires extraordinary impulse control. Why? Because impulses are how we initiate movement. Any impulse which originates in another part of the body will impede the one true impulse from the dantian.

One might even say that tension itself is a rouge impulse stuck in the "on" position. This is usually stated in the positive: "relax," "let go," "melt." But the actual "doing" is "not doing." This "not doing" takes years to undevelop, and comes with a simple guarantee; you can only get as much as you are willing to give up.

In the end all good teachers transmit the idea that the worthwhile result of impulse control is freedom itself.

So people sometimes ask me, "What does qi feel like?" It can be understood as an anti-feeling, a sensation of constant, unbroken, impulse control.

Is 70% Enough?

The following is another essay by a student in my Taijiquan class at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, enjoy:



One concept in particular that I initially had trouble with was the idea of doing at 70%. Instead of using my full range of motion, use around 70% of my range, or less if injured. I also initially had some difficulty with the idea of emphasizing the middle not the ends. I was raised from a very young age on the concept of doing everything at 100% or not doing it at all; in essence do or don’t do. Because of this I have always lived my life according to this philosophy. When I do something I do it to my best ability, give it all I have, or I do not do it at all.

At first this concept of 70% and emphasize the middle not the ends seemed wrong, lazy, half assed, and noncommittal. But, I also decided to have an open mind and try to look at things from a different perspective. After allowing myself to consider that my preconceived perception of how to do things may not be the only way of doing things, I discovered that only going at 70% and emphasizing the middle not the ends was NOT weak, lazy, half assed, etc. but was in fact in its own way a strong, active, committed way of approaching something.

While I have opened up to the idea and see it in a much different and positive light, at times it can still be quite a challenge. The areas in which I noticed it the most was in paired exercises especially when I was following my partner. I had a very hard time following. I always wanted to lead, be in charge, be aggressive, attack or defend at maximum strength. In so doing I found it very hard to perform the exercise. For example, in push hands, I hard a very hard time reacting and following my partner because I was so aggressive, hard, rigid, unforgiving. I had a very hard time staying stuck to my partner because I was rigid not soft. It was only in softness and by not trying so hard that I could even get close to sticking to my partner.

In addition I also found learning and practicing the form to be much easier when I was not trying to be perfect from the get go. At first the idea that it did not need to be perfect and that you did not even want it to be perfect was very uncomfortable and disturbing. However, now I understand and to certain extend even enjoy the idea that it does not have to be precise or perfect or performed with everything I have to my maximum ability. Once I let go of the perfectionist ideology I found the form even more enjoyable and beneficial

In what to me seems a related issue, I never knew and would never have guessed that Taijiquan is a form of martial art. I had always thought of it as some kind of Taoist meditative exercise routine to promote good health and long life. I would never in a million years have thought that it had any martial aspects or applications. Again I saw it as weak, passive, non-aggressive and associated that with weakness, passivity, non-aggression, and allowing oneself to be pushed around. I could not have been more wrong. I now can at least see how weakness, reacting, following, etc. can be a in its own way very strong.

While I have allowed myself to see the world in a different light, I still have a long way to go. I look forward to continuing my Taijiquan practice and further pursuing this new way of thinking.
To me it seemed that you demonstrated many different aspects of Taijiquan, giving us an idea about the many aspects of the subject. Obviously, in 11 weeks or 22 hours of class time, there is no way we can become Taijiquan masters. While at times you definitely challenged my preconceived notions, I think that was in actuality the best aspect of the class – trying to get us to see things in a different light, from a different perspective, to be a little uncomfortable.

One example that comes to mind was when in class we performed the form very slowly. In one aspect I enjoyed doing the form very slowly but it also was very difficult. In doing it slowly I came to realize that I have a very strong issue with double weighting. I do not like at all having all my weight on one foot or the other. For some reason I perceive this as a weakness. During our class discussion on the topic of double weighting, you clearly demonstrated that in all actuality, the weakness is being double weighted. Having discovered this concept I now have something to explore further. After having experienced both sides I believe that less emphasis on double weighting in a number of aspects of my life will have a profound improvement for me. In conclusion, thank you for a different, challenging, and eye opening experience.