Top Predators Practice Internal Martial Arts

I’ve been working with the “ball” material I wrote about in the last post and I’ve decided that there is an other way to explain it.

The top predators I’m likely to see in San Francisco on any given day are falcons, hawks, cats, and raccoons.  Occasionally I see a coyote or a heron too.

All of these predators are able to fluff up their bodies.  We tend to think of these moments of fluffing up as autonomic responses to fear because they parallel the goose bumps we get when we are watching a horror movie.  We also learn in school that some animals fluff up so that they will look really big to an attacker or a competitor,  and that has a parallel in the expression “I feel pumped up” which athletes sometimes use.
But of course we don’t know for sure why these predators fluff up and we definitely don’t know whether or not they consciously control it.

I used the term autonomic above.  The nervous system is divided into two types of nerves, the ones that control obviously voluntary actions (yes that would include ear wiggling even if you aren’t very good at it yet); and nerves that control much less voluntary things like pupil size and heart rate.  The less voluntary system is called the autonomic nervous system and it is also divided into two parts. One part that is active when you take a deep relaxing breath while sitting in a hot tub, and another part that is active when you hold your breath, tense up your muscles, pull back your lips and grit your teeth.  The relaxing nervous system is called para-sympathetic, the stressed out nervous system is called sympathetic.  (I know the names are ridiculous, they refer to anatomy you only see when you are doing a dissections.)

The ball practice that I wrote about yesterday is the practice of making your whole body fluff up and its opposite, shrink-condense.  This happens at the most outer layer of the physical body, between the muscles and the hair follicles.

In this practice it is key that you keep your breathing relaxed, that you do not activate the stressed out nervous system even a little bit.  Through this practice you will eventually be able to do more than just fluff up and shrink-condense.  You will be able to spontaneously change the entire surface of your body in any way you want.

I suspect that the top predators are able to do this without becoming stressed out, while prey, like bunny rabbits, only do it when they are stressed out.

This kind of practice has lots of health benefits but the fighters out there may be thinking, “How could I possibly fight using such a subtle mechanism?”  The answer is that the practice trains your body to not get stuck, to keep changing even in a situation of stress.  It will increase your power too, because there will be less inhibition in your body.

And of course when the predator ball becomes second nature, you don’t think about it, it just becomes part of everything you do.

The following Hagiography is from To Live As Long As Heaven and Earth:

"During the reign of Emperor Cheng of the Han, hunters in the Zhongnan Mountains saw a person who wore no clothes, his body covered with black hair. Upon seeing this person, the hunters wanted to pursue and capture him, but the person leapt over gullies and valleys as if in flight, and so could not be overtaken. [But after being surrounded and captured, it was discovered this person was a 200 plus year old woman, who had once been a concubine of Qin Emperor Ziying. When he had surrendered to the 'invaders of the east', she fled into the mountains where she learned to subside on 'the resin and nuts of pines' from an old man. Afterwards, this diet 'enabled [her] to feel neither hunger nor thirst; in winter [she] was not cold, in summer [she] was not hot.']
The hunters took the woman back in. They offered her grain to eat. When she first smelled the stink of grain, she vomited, and only after several days could she tolerate it. After little more than two years of this [diet], her body hair fell out; she turned old and died. Had she not been caught by men, she would have become an [immortal]." (Campany 2002:22–23)

"The earliest representations of Chinese immortals, xian (?), dating from the Han Dynasty, portray them flying with feathery wings (the word yuren ?? "feathered person" later meant "Daoist") or riding dragons."

[Thanks Wikipedia, for saving me from having to type these two quotes in myself!]

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."

Pure Internal Power

I'm hoping to create a little controversy with this video as I get the hang of my new editing software.

The first part is an attack on application demo's we see all the time on Youtube-- without shaking power most of them are useless.

The second part is a challenge to all the people who make a distinction between long power and short power.  The issue came up in Taiwan talking to Marcus Brinkman and Formosa Neijia, and it is in Nam Park's bagua books too.  It's a pretty common way of talking about internal power.  The distinction between long power and short power certainly is effective for fighting, there is no conflict here.  My challenge is for them to explain how they can do it without creating an on-off switch in their power.  I argue that short power needs a root and is thus vulnerable to uprooting.  In short, the theory of long and short power does not conform to the Internal Classics idea that, "I know you, but you don't know me."

In putting out this challenge it is my hope that I can learn more about my own limitations, no doubt they are legion.  Let the sparks fly.

Baguazhang in Tainan

Saturday morning Sharon Lee came to my hotel with her young friend Kevin (a tri-athlete) and his girl friend Yixian. They took me to his bagua class. I guess we were a little early because instead of going straight to the park we went to his teacher’s house. He and his wife were selling breakfast in sealed plastic cups (like they use for bubble tea). We got to try both types of breakfast, one was a pearl barley wolf berry (gojizi) thing, and the other was a more fruity beanie thing. They were both good. I concentrated on the barley one because pearl barley is known to “drain damp,” and believe me, I got damp. (For those of you who don’t know any Chinese Medicine, damp is how you feel after eating fried food with beer.)

Meeting Master Lin Miaohua I was immediately struck by his long neck relaxed shoulders and open chest. He had the same drum I use in his house and he had a lot of weapons. Next door was his painting studio, all traditional, lots of great looking flower scrolls and calligraphy. He is 71 years old.

He took us to the park and we did a little warm up. Then he demonstrated his Baguazhang. He is a student of Zhang Cilong who was a student of Sun Lutang (1861-1933). So this was great stuff to see. Sun Lutang was famous for his fighting ability, for creating a synthesis of Baguazhang, Xingyiquan and Taijiquan. He taught with "Yang Shao-hou, Yang Shao-hou, Yang Ch'eng-fu, and Wu Chien-ch'üan on the faculty of the Physical Education Research Institute where they taught T'ai Chi to the public after 1914. Sun taught there until 1928, a seminal period in the development of modern Yang, Wu and Sun style T'ai Chi Ch'uan. (quote from Wikipedia) Man, even I’d go back to school for that!

Master Lin is a master of hard and soft. Feeling him attack is like fighting with an electric switch. If he touches you he is sure to give you a shock. He specializes in two legs off the ground fajing explosive power. He has shaking power too. He showed me a whole bunch of forms including some Shaolin and a low ground fighting system called Diliang (I think, it means lay down on the ground). His baguazhang uses small steps and focuses on explosive power. The key to his power is in making the torso like a vacuum which can suddenly suck in the limbs and then cause them to pop out like a fire cracker. Here is a quick video with more to come.

Fighting in Space

I recently heard that some astronauts spent 6 hours trying to loosen a bolt on a space station.  It’s extremely hard to get leverage in space.  This led me to asking, just how much fighting is gravity dependent?

The answer is, almost all of it.  In space if you try to poke someone in the eye, you will both spin away from each other.  However I think you could poke a persons eye if you were simultaneously pulling them towards you by the neck.  Anyway nearly all strikes, kicks and throws are gravity dependent.  Probably about 70% of joint locks are too.  Most of them would be impossible to get on a resisting partner in space.  Even hair pulling is out.  We are left with squeezing grabs to the groin and neck--and head locks.

Since everyone knows, space is the next wild, wild west (Firefly fans?), I think we should start training for zero gravity fighting.

It’s also a good way to explain why relaxation is superior to tension in a fight.  Almost everything we do in a fight is gravity dependent.  The best fighting methods force an opponent to carry not only their own weight but your weight too, at the worst possible angles. Even with throws in which the opponent is picked up into the air, momentum is used in combination with a destabilized base to create a circular force around a center of gravity and a gravity dependent still point--ending of course with a smack down.  (I just wanted to say smack down.)
So start analyzing fighting methods in terms of gravity and they will become more effective.     As long as you are controlling the exchanges of momentum, your opponent should be carrying as much of your mass as possible.  So, for example, if you punch someone you want all of your weight to hit them with momentum.  If you do it right, strength is completely irrelevant.

Fine Motor Control

Fine Motor Control and Gross Motor Control are not exact terms.  We hardly think, ok, now I’m going to use fine motor control to fix this thing.  But the terms do approximate something real.
Sgt. Rory Miller points out that fine motor control is highly unlikely to work in a high stress situation because the hormone cocktail released into our system shuts down fine motor control.
One useful way to think about internal martial arts is that we want to make our movement routines utilize gross motor control only.  Even the feet must be loose and floppy, as if your legs had become like jello from shaking.
Grabbing is one of those movements which could be fine motor or could be gross motor.
It’s important to teach people not to grab too much.
First, grabbing is often defensive.  It is done to limit the other persons movement. This kind of thinking puts you at a distinct disadvantage because your opponent is now free to hit you.  Of course it can work, especially if your grab is truly disabling, like a grab of the neck, or a grab with “bone crushing force,” or a quick yank intended to dislocate a joint.  Smaller people grabbing larger people doesn’t seem like a very good idea though.
The Second reason not to grab is that the center of the palm is supremely insensitive.  If someone touches my arm with their palm they simply won’t feel the punch coming.  Touching with the palm is usually defensive and ineffective.  Striking with the palm is a different story.  You don’t really need sensitivity when you are striking.

We tend to think of gross motor control as being insensitive but it is not.  Gross motor movement is just one big mass of sensitivity, the way babies move.  In that sense fine motor control is less sensitive because it effectively shuts out whole body movement in favor of local control and precision.

UPDATE:  I had a video here showing another teacher using palms in push-hands but I removed it because I couldn't think of anything nice to say and in all fairness each teacher should have the opportunity to explain their methods before being judged, even on youtube!

Haramaki

Haramaki

I've been wearing a haramaki everyday for two months.  The fashionistas among my readers already know that this ancient Samurai undergarment is fast becoming a must have.  Here is the Wiki page.

I can think of no other article of clothing more likely to improve your gongfu than a haramaki.  They help you establish a "frame" and relax the dantian.  My advice, toss in the towel with all that core strengthening gobbly gook and just get yourself a haramaki!

I have one wool and two stretch cotton haramakis.  This is the type I have, (Item No. mn-1002, mn-1003) scroll down...find the products second from the bottom!

You can read more about fashion and health benefits here, and here, and then there is Haramaki Love.

In China the generals used to wear a very heavy tiger skin attached where the haramaki is, it would hang down to their knees and probably felt something like an x-ray apron.  A softer lighter version was worn by children and used by women for the month after pregnancy, when they were most vulnerable to spirit invasion.  The tangki, or spirit mediums of Singapore and other places where Hokkien culture is strong, wear this kind of bib (tou-ioe) when they are possessed by war gods and when they are possessed by baby or child gods.  The tiger skin is worn ritually in Tibet and of course Shiva wears one too.

For internal martial artists the image of the heavy tiger skin apron is a reminder to first let the muscle mass of the lower body hang heavily before the mind moves the qi (and the mass follows the qi, of course).

Tibetan Ritual Tiger

Red Haramaki

3-D Feeling

The first chapter of the Daodejing (Laozi) begins;

The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao,

The names that can be named are not the true name,

(Dao ke dao fei chang Dao, ming ke ming fei chang ming)

Generally, "names" is understood to mean four things: actual words, images, concepts, and metaphors.

This is not an outright rejection of these four types of "names."  The chapter deals with how "naming" functions in relationship to experience.  (See this previous post on the Quest for Power.)

In order for a human body to function it must have a mind.  Minds move bodies.  How do minds do this?  I'm not seeking a "scientific" explaination here.  I'm asking, how do we experience the process?

Can a human be still?  The answer is no, it is not possible to be still (even in death).  Only relative stillness is possible.  In relative stillness, the mind continues to move the body.  It is fair to say mind and body are inseparable, and for this reason Orthodox Daoism teaches that in stillness practices the mind should be given no more attention than a toe or a rib.  Every square millimeter of the body is a cherished blessing.

However, Daoism and Tantric Buddhism sometimes use "visualizations" within their stillness practices; and they certainly use "visualizations" when practicing ritual.  The beginning visualizations are often military, generals or characters known for extraordinary discipline.  The images then transition towards subtler, softer, and lighter images.

Infinite architectural design

But the terms "visualization," "images," or "picturing" are not adequate terms to describe this process of mind.  It might be better to think of them as 3 dimensional feelings.   For a human to function we need to feel.  We need to feel in 3 dimensions.  Any movement we do is organized by a 3 dimensional feeling.  It is as if this 3dFeeling holds us together and gives us order.

When we are walking down the street, we have a particular 3dFeeling.  We need this feeling to function, without it we wouldn't be able to stand, walk, or look around.  These 3dFeelings are infinite, even this particular 3dFeeling we use for walking is infinite. But it is the kind of infinite that happens within boundaries.  That particular 3dFeeling is very stable, it is changeable, but it doesn't change very much.  However, when we were children learning to walk, that particular 3dFeeling was very unstable.  Each time we tried to find it, it was a little different, we had to learn to replicate the same 3dFeeling day after day in order to walk like the adults around us.  As a teenager, I decided my walk wasn't cool enough and I actively changed this 3dFeeling, which in turn changed my walk to the degree that my new cooler walk became automatic and unconscious.

The affects of a particular 3dFeeling are sometimes noticed by other people.  We say, "That guy looks like he has a dark cloud over his head," or, "She looks like she is about ready to break out in song!"

These Daoist and Tantric Buddhist 3dFeeling-stillness-ritual-practices free us from the 3dFeeling habits we have developed through our lives.  They un-lock the absolutely normal everyday 3dFeelings which order our movements, giving us the ability to be at play with 3dFeelings.

This is what we call an adept.  This is what we call the earthly immortal "dancing with qi."  Internal martial arts  are simply not internal if they lack this type of freedom.  And it is freedom, not power.   It is potency, not a tool.  Yes, applied to fighting, it can unleash unstoppable power.  Yes, applied to healing, it seems to produce amazing results.  But to use it as a tool is to limit it.  The adept cherishes freedom, accepts fate, and leaves his/her potency unexpressed.  But even this freedom is not the Constant Dao, it is only a "name."

4 stages of Qi

George Xu has simplified his explanation of the basic process of making martial arts internal.

First there is External-Internal, which means that the jing and qi are mixed.  Most martial arts use this method to great effectiveness.  It is high quality external martial arts-- muscles, bones and tendons become thick like chocolate.

Second is Internal-External, most advanced taijiquan, xingyiquan, and baguazhang practitioners get stuck here.  It means that the body is completely soft and sensitive.   While power is constantly available, the yi (mind/intent) is trained to never go against the opponent's force, so that when this kind of practitioner issues power it is in the opponent's most vulnerable place (in friendly practice it is often used to throw the opponent to the ground).  Unfortunately, if the opponent gives no opening there is no way to attack.  Also, at the moment of attack all jin, no matter how sneaky or subtle, becomes vulnerable to a counter attack.

The third is Pure-Internal, this is very rare.  All power is left in a potential state.  Because there is no jin, one is not vulnerable to counter attack. To reveal this aspect of a practitioner's true nature requires completely relaxing the physical body so that jing and qi distill from one another.  The body becomes like a heavy mass, like a bag of rice, Daoists call it the flesh bag.  Then one must go through the four stages of qi:

1. Qi must go through the gates.  The most common obstacle to this is strength, either physical, psychological, or based in a world-view.  After discarding strength the shoulders must be drawn inward until they unify with the dantian.  The same is true for the legs; however, the most common obstacle to qi passing freely through the hip gates is too much qi stored in the dantian.  Qi must be distributed upwards and released in order for it to descend.


2. Qi must conform to the rules of Yin-Yang.  As much qi as goes into the limbs must simultaneously go back into the torso.


3. The qi must become lively, shrinking expanding and spiraling.  (This is what I'm working on.)


4. This one in Chinese is Hua--to transform, like ice changing into water and then steam.  But George Xu prefers to translate in as melt the qi.

----

Personal Update:  I'm going on a classical music only fast.

Uniform Density

George Xu gave me a great correction this weekend.

Level one:  The whole body should be experienced as having uniform density.

Level two:  The body and the surrounding environment should be experienced as having uniform density.

Of course this is training for what we often refer to as "mind," but in this context it is somewhat absurd to call it mind since it is equally an experience of "body."

I had already done this practice, I just hadn't tried to put it together with my fighting skills.  The basic invocation of the deity Ziwei used in Orthodox Daoist ritual and jindan (internal alchemy) includes the description, "His skin is onyx-black like the night sky."