The Glorious Kidneys

Autumn is the season for clearing heat from the lungs and refining technique.  One of the best foods for clearing heat from the lungs is the pear. The skin of the pear is used if the condition is medical.  So eat pears raw or lightly stewed with a dribble of honey.  The Classic of Medicine (Neijing) says clearing heat from the lungs protects against fevers in Winter.  Not sure what the mechanism is there, but I love pears so I'm sharing.  The suggestion to refine technique is a message about efficiency, the Autumn is about toning it down and taking time to integrate all the wild experimentation of the past two seasons.

And if you've been doing that, in about four weeks you will be ready to start transitioning into Winter practice.  In Winter we store Qi, water the root, and nourish the kidneys. So what does this mean?  In the days before industrial commerce made food cheap and plentiful, to the average peasant it probably meant eat whatever rich foods you can find.  The best way to do that in our era is with nutrient rich bone stock that you make yourself.  If you want organic stock bones, in my part of the country, you are in direct competition with the massive pampered dog population.  However, if you buy bones in bulk it's a little more reasonable.  We filled up our freezer with bones for the Winter for about $60.  'Watering the root' basically means drinking nutrient rich broth the way most of our ancestors did.  Think stews.

The Daodejing says, "to be full, hollow out," thus in order to store Qi one must first cultivate emptiness.  Once emptiness is established, storing Qi is automatic.

Well, not totally automatic.  You must also nourish the kidneys.  How does one do that?  Hold that thought.

Hopefully none of my readers were paying attention last year when I had an argument on the insane internal martial arts discussion website Rum Soaked Fist about whether the terms jin 勁 and jing 精 actually mean the same thing.  As my Indian Dance teacher used to say, "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

Jin is translated by Louis Swaim (I'm doing this from memory) as 'power which resembles the flowing of underground streams.'  Jin is an expression used in compound forms like pengjin (wardoff), mingjin (obvious power), or tingjin (skillful sensitivity), to mean a specific type of power which requires skill and time to develop.

Jing on the other hand is a much bigger and harder to explain key concept in Chinese cosmology.  It is usually translated 'essence,' because of it's association with purification.  But it generally refers to stuff that reproduces itself.  In quasi-medical terms it is sperm and eggs, scabs, what clots the blood, and when it is strong in the body--a full head of hair and strong finger nails.  In Daoism Jing is the most solid and substantial form of Qi. If we posit that the entire cosmos is one giant mind form, then jing is its memory function.  Stay with me...

Any first year Chinese Medicine student will tell you that Jing is stored in the kidneys.  They will also tell you that sex, drugs and rock'n'roll will deplete it.  Daoism has a precept against wasting jing or qi.  The term is pretty amorphous as you may have deduced by now.  In is particular Daoist precept the distinction is that qi wasting is unnecessary effort, while jing wasting is depletion to the point of injury.  So to damage ones body is to damage ones jing.  Why? because the moment injury happens, the kidneys start to release jing-- jing is released from the kidneys because it is what repairs us.

Obviously, jing is one of those concepts which, as Roger T. Ames might put it, offends against the most basic  notions of Western categorical thinking--it is simultaneously an event, a substance, a trend, and an action.  Jing repairs (verb), it is what repairs (noun), it is visible only indirectly and is measured by that which it repairs so to some degree it is the substantive aspect of our bodies.  Jing is the shape of our eye, and the dark circles that accumulate around them after years of not enough sleep.  Jing is the markings of age.  Jing as a substance decreases in either quantity or quality as we age.  But as a substance it remains pure.

Tension in our bodies is simply qi concentrated by the mind.  Disperse the qi and the tension will be gone.  But chronic tension is qi concentrated in the same location day after day.  Qi is pure and has no memory function, the tension's location is remembered by jing.  So chronic tension is regularly drawing jing out of the kidneys where the mind mixes it with qi.  Because jing and qi are both pure, they naturally separate, like oil and water.  For chronic tension to happen at all takes considerable and regular effort.

I would never have gotten into the argument at Rum Soaked Fist if I hadn't been repeating what I heard from George Xu: "Jing and jin are the same."

"What?" I asked, "How could that be, they are different characters in Chinese?"  (精 and 勁)

"It doesn't matter," he said, "They were once the same term and the same character."

Remember way up at the top of this post I asked the question, "How does one nourish the kidneys?"  We're getting there.  The kidneys love sleep.  They love sleep because they love stillness.  The kidneys are like a very fine instrument measuring vibration, shock, tension and fatigue.  If we can feel our kidneys they will indicate when we are exerting effort or experiencing strain.  And...They will tell us when we are using power. Ah hah! You say, power, you mean jin right?  Yes, young Skywalker, any trained or refined gathering of power or release of force is called jin, in Modern Chinese.  The kidneys experience all jin as stress, as a loss of jing.

Thus pure internal (martial arts) should be defined as not using jin/jing.  If an art uses jin, then it is mixing jing and qi.  It is exerting some strain on the kidneys.  The basic Tai Chi adage goes:  "The body follows the qi and the qi follows the mind."  If the mind causes jing to be released from the kidneys, qi will mix with jing in the body, and the mind will move the three all at once--thus destroying the mind-then-qi-then-body order of movement.  On the other hand, if the body is totally quiet, as measured by no loss of jing from the kidneys, then the qi will automatically float off of the body and the mind will easily lead it.  If the whole torso is also empty, it will naturally fill with qi.

And that is what it means to nourish the glorious kidneys.

Mothering and Othering: Making an Immortal Baby

The most basic, primal, reduction of the notion of self-defense is the protection of a baby in the womb.  It totally trumps castle law and threats to life and limb.  If a pregnant woman rips out a man’s throat, or shoots or stabs him, all she has to claim is she was protecting her baby.  As long as she can plausibly make that claim, no jury in any civilized country would convict her.  Even a child would at least have to make the case that running away was a bad option, or that lethal force was justified, but a pregnant woman unaided and under attack can get away with almost anything.

Obviously pregnant women do everything possible to avoid having to fight, above and beyond the rest of us, which is probably why their case for justified self-defense seems so strong, so pure.

But that’s an aside, here is the main question.  What is the psyco-physical state a female uses to protect her fetus and, by extension, small children close at hand?  Pregnant women, in my limited experience are often happy and relaxed.  Compared to the average person they have virtually zero abdominal tension.  We understand this viscerally.  If we were carrying a baby inside our body we would be careful in all our movements to not transmit tension to the baby.  The way we walked, moved our arms and turned our head would all keep in mind treating the baby with loving care.  We would avoid shaking or bouncing unless the baby seemed to like that.  And when the baby was sleeping we’d probably be careful to move in a way that wouldn’t wake the baby.

A woman who is pregnant is doing this all the time.  So in the event that she needed to fight, it seems possible that she would maintain this attitude or at least be physically informed by it.  Think for a moment though, how such a fighting style would look.

First of all, it could not rely on structure or rooting because pregnant women tend to have poor structure and balance.  They have a lot of mass to wield, but the movements of the  arms would likely be used clear a large area around the belly while attacking in circles.  The mind, rather than focusing on death points to attack, would be using massive force to throw an attack back.  In other words, a pregnant woman might fight using the tai chi and bagua notion of a giant rolling ball.

The mind of the pregnant women, if she made the actual jump to fighting, would be fierce beyond reckoning.  A parallel with the concept of “xu” we have written about before is pertinent here.  “Xu” literally means fake, but in martial arts it refers to a body which is not giving off self-identity signals, a body which does not respond to pain, a body which has let go of all tension.  The pregnant woman who has made the jump to fighting is fighting for the baby, not herself.  The experience might be de-personalized, the baby has needs, the baby is the future, what happens to the outer body is secondary, the outer body can risk being destroyed as long as the baby is fully and totally protected.

This seems to invoke the image of two bodies, an inner one and and outer one completely differentiated-- a qi (potent energy) body, surrounded by a jing (relaxed mass) body.  To make this match up with the standard internal martial arts lingo is a small leap.  The inner body (the baby) is qi, it is potential energy, pure animation which is round in shape and when awake, can extend several feet beyond the outer flesh body of the ‘mother.’  The qi body (the baby’s needs and perhaps its will) seems to take over the mother;  however, the qi body is blind to what is happening outside, so it must be led by the mind.  The mind of the mother controls the space and defines the environment around herself.  The mind goes first, the dynamic energy of the baby (qi) follows the mind.  The mass of the mother’s body (jing) always puts the baby energy ahead of its own needs.  The shen (spacial mind) leads the qi (energy body) and the qi leads the jing (body mass).

This appears to be a very obvious, though over looked, explanation of why  Daoists have so often used the metaphor of making an immortal baby to describe the internal elixir practices of neidan, and jindan.

Try this practice: Imagine you have a baby in your lower dantian. Try to move without waking up the baby.  Do this over a period of months and gradually increase the range on motion in which you can move without waking up the baby.  Eventually your body mass will become very quiet.  This is called purifying jing.  This is, of course, also a description of doing a tai chi form, or so called ‘pre-heaven’ Baguazhang.

Once the jing is purified and the body is quiet in motion, then you can experiment with waking up the baby.   While the baby is sleeping there will be no power.  After the baby is awake, power will seem to come from emptiness.

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All this suggests a composite mind and a composite body.  At the moment we are dealing with massive generalizations and oversimplifications but let me sketch it out quickly.  The composite mind has several models.  One model is the lizard, mammal, frontal cortex (human)--a three part mind where the lizard is powerfully focussed on survival and aliviating pain, the mammal is obsessed with status, pleasure seeking, emotions and group bonding, and the frontal cortex is all about planning, imagining and rational thought.  There are other models too.
Models for the composite body come from evolutionary theory.  Our bones were once an exoskelatin, a shell which got covered in a wormy substance we call muscle.  Each part of our brain comes from a different type of body substance which at some point in our evolution was an independent animal.  We are composite forms which tend to organize all these ‘minds’ and ‘bodies’ in standard ways, however, extreme circumstances or carefully designed practices can alter the organizational order of this conscious/unconscious mass of kinetic life energy.  Just a thought.

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It seems to me that in utero, before we get the gender defining hormones, males and females both have a proto-womb.  Perhaps this is even true to some extent for pre-pubescent children.  I would like to propose what must seem obvious to many people, that this proto-womb is what martial arts, theater, meditation and ritual all refer to as the lower dantain.

The womb seems to have some independent connection to mind, as if it was an earlier life form in our evolution, which can re-assert itself when other aspects of our composite body-mind are quiet.

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When a mother fights, the ground belongs to her baby.  Dantian, literally means cinnabar field, red ground.  Everything which enters that field belongs to the baby.  Even the mother’s own body belongs to the baby.  The fighting mind of a pregnant woman has a very unique way of owning space, a unique way of possessing.

Contrast this with the social form of fighting that men do.  One man pees on a tree to mark his territory with his testicular scent.  Another man then does the same thing and they fight over ownership.  The peeing doesn’t actually have to take place, it can just be assumed.  This testicular marking style of fighting involves a sense of ownership too, but it is less absolute.  Subordinate yourself to the dominant male and the fight is off.  Fights for status are rarely lethal and are usually resolved with simple posturing.

The testicular scent fight is a battle of and for identity, “My body owns this! and belongs here! doing this!”  The womb fight is asocial, “Don’t even think about hurting this baby or you will die (after you’re dead I’ll make a decision about whether or not you are good food for my baby).”
When two men fight over testicular scent, they each extend their minds right up to, but not through, their social challenger.  Two testicular scenters engaged in hand to hand combat are usually very close together, but their minds do not extend much beyond their own bodies and thus the jing (body mass) and the (potential energy) remain mostly mixed up within the body.   Because the qijing and qi do not differentiate the power is very limited.
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Which brings us to othering.  Othering is the psyco-physical process of dehumanizing an individual or a group of people so that you can kill them without feeling social restraint or remorse.  Othering is shorthand for:  “Seeing someone as belonging to another species.”  Butchering animals may be totally natural on a farm, or while hunting, or it may need some training.  Certainly us urban people need to get past our squeamishness in order to butcher an animal.  After I caught, gilled, cleaned and iced 128 King Salmon in one day in Alaska I was haunted by fish eyes whenever I looked closely at anything shiny.  But other than that, I had successfully othered them.

If a person is raised to believe that another ethnic group or tribe is inferior, the process of othering is probably already complete.  When a criminal plans an assault, most likely he or she has already gone through a process of othering.  It is important to think about because in some cases you may be able to avert an assault by somehow getting the assailant to see you as a member of his tribe.  Othering is a justification process.

What does the psyco-physical experience of othering do to the mind and body?  To successfully other, is to shut off, like flipping a switch, all immediate social impulses.  So while it may be possible for a human predator to get close to someone by imitating social behavior, the behavior is not tied to a script, so when the range is right the knife simply goes in.  It is nearly always a surprise to the person being othered.  It’s also very quick and uses overwhelmingly superior force.  Although if simply threatening force is likely to allow the predator to achieve his or her goals then there may not be an actual assault.  It seems like the mind in these cases sees a victim as kinetic energy to be controlled or extinguished.  It’s not a contest for ownership, total ownership of the space is established before the assault.

Othering doesn’t require much physical training or energy work or relaxation techniques.   It only requires that the mind sees the immediate environment as inside its control.  In George Xu’s words, “The wolf thinks: ‘This territory is my refrigerator.’”  So in this case, the mind definitely leads the body mass (jing) but it doesn’t matter whether the jing and qi are mixed as long as the predator has enough skill to sneak up on the prey.  (In other words, predators in nature often need extraordinary skill to hunt, and thus they have perfect differentiation of jing and qi, but human predators can use weapons, so they don’t.)

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Mothering is the source of all compassion. Mothering is the psyco-physical process of extending ones mind to include someone or something within ones field of protection.  To mother is to project the sense of “my baby” out into space.  It is a very potent place to fight from.
Othering is nearly the direct opposite of mothering.  It is a process of extending ones mind to surround but totally exclude someone or something from the protection one affords himself.
And Testicular Scenting is just a cute term for "the monkey dance."

Structure Vs. Momentum

Two posts back I was discussing the perfect curriculum.  Part of that discussion, which got a lot of comments on Facebook (can we fix the code so they show up here too?), is about the pros and cons of breaking an enormous corpus of ever receding revelations into bite sized ideas.  While the pros and cons are still being weighed, I have a little something to say about Structure vs. Momentum.

Structure training has many facets and side trajectories.  The most significant in no particular order are, center-line awareness and control, power investigation and development, and  creating potent default stances you can fight your way to when you are loosing in a self-defense situation.

But all that aside, the main purpose of structure training is to learn how to give up control of a fight in exchange for taking a dominant position. This is more or less what I was getting at when I named this blog "weakness with a twist." If you can reposition yourself with a structural advantage, having control over the fight isn't that important.  You can effectively let your opponent buck and roll while you tap them on the shoulder from behind.  It isn't usually that easy to pull off, but it is that simple.

Structure training isn't the whole fight by a long shot, but it is a very important piece.

Electric Volcano

Contrast this with momentum training.  Learning good structure usually involves a substantial loss of power do to the loss of natural momentum.  For instance untrained people often throw their shoulder and head into a punch because they intuitively know that it will increase the momentum of their strike.  We martial artists often un-teach this inclination right at the beginning because throwing your shoulder and head into a strike will likely land you in a worse position, especially if the punch misses it's target.

Again, the order in which this unwieldy mass of teachings are learned is up in the air, but there is some logic to teaching Momentum after Structure is established.

If structure training is about giving up control to gain position, then momentum training is about giving up both control and position in exchange for adding chaos.  The more mass there is barreling through space along spiral trajectories, the more inherent danger.  The less momentum there is in a fight the safer it is.  If the person you are fighting is focused on defense, he is less focused on hurting you.  If your opponent is trying to control or dominate you, adding momentum will likely shift him into a defensive mode.  The more defensive he is, the more rigid and predictable he will become.  The more experienced you are with the chaos of added momentum, the more likely you are to prevail.

Momentum training increases the power of strikes dramatically, but that's a side benefit.  The main purpose of momentum training is to get you to drop the wasted effort of trying to dominate and control.   Tigers fighting other animals don't waste effort trying to dominate and control.  Those are social concerns.  Drop them and you will experience greater freedom of action.

The will to dominate and control arises from the fear of chaos (huntun).  That doesn't necessarily make it good or bad, it just limits our ability to see things as they actually are.

Body Mapping

Lately I’ve had a few students who are professional musicians and one of them handed me an article about a new method called Body Mapping.

Here is a description by David Vining of what they think they are doing:

The body map is one’s self-representation in one’s own brain.  The breakthrough of body mapping is the realization that we move based on how we think we are put together rather than how we are actually constructed.  If the body map is accurate, movement is good; an inaccurate body map causes inefficient or injury-producing movement.  In body mapping, one uses self-observation and self-inquiry to gain access to the body map.  By carefully examining what one believes to be true about his or her body and comparing it to accurate information, one can recognize fallacies in the body map and correct and refine this representation to become more efficient.  During this process, accurate information may be provided by kinesthetic experience, mirrors, books, pictures, medical models of body parts and teachers.  Through body mapping, one can recognize the source of inefficient and harmful movement and replace it with movement that is well-organized and cooperates with the reality of how we are actually built.

Let me start by saying it is wonderful to find a system that recognizes the importance of mind in movement training.  And it is a rare treat to find someone I fundamentally disagree with expressing themselves so clearly and precisely.  The statement “we move the way we think we are put together”  is mistaken.  We actually move by a process of changing spacial imagination.  If you are imagining your anatomical body moving in space, it will seem like “we are moving the way we are put together,” but that is just one of an unlimited number of options.

An Alternative Body Map!

The therapeutic application of Body Mapping is a big improvement over what I usually see recommended by Physical or Occupational Therapists (but those fields are changing fast and allow for a fair amount of experimentation so it’s possible to find a PT with 30 years of Tai Chi under her belt.)

I believe Body Mapping as a method works!  In practice I would expect it to relieve many of the stress injuries musicians get from practicing all the time.  In many cases musicians are practicing with an image of their body which has become a distinct and repeating shape. In the martial arts world we call this “stale qi,” in the Body Mapping community they think of it as a “false map.”  This “stale qi” is usually a small concentrated shape (less than five inches in diameter) and either inside the body or near the surface.  Getting the musician to acknowledge the shape (it is usually unconscious) and to dissolve it while playing their instrument will relieve the stress.  I’m not saying this is easy, people can be stubborn about their routine uses of the mind, and it can disappear one day and snap back into place the next.  Just feeling the ‘false map’ and dissolving it into vast emptiness is what internal martial artists do.  If Body Mapping did just this, it would be enough.

But the Body Mapping advocates then seek to replace the “false map” with a “true” or “truer” map.  This is an unnecessary step. However, it is likely to be helpful in the short term because movement based on an analysis of anatomical structure tends to be efficient movement.  But eventually that too can fail from over use (again, stale qi).  It is also impossible to get a truly accurate map. Our mind is just too good a creating short cuts and simplifications.  Who has the patience to visualize every single anatomical soft-tissue structure, much less every molecular interaction!  Still, some knowledge of muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, and fascia can be very useful as a teaching tool, especially for beginning students.

If I say, “Don’t think of a carrot,” did you think of it? You probably did because that’s just what our minds do.  It happens really fast.  It happens at mind speed, the only speed which really counts in a fight to the death or a virtuoso solo on a musical instrument.  Now, imagine you are a carrot and turn the carrot!  I am not a carrot, but there is no reason to believe that imagining that I am one will make my movement less efficient, or cause injury.

When you play a musical instrument you want your imagination to be free.  We want you to have an excited and totally active spacial mind.  There is certainly a place for “concentration” in the learning process, but I want my musicians' minds playing with the currents of air on the edge of the grand canyon, or the darkness at the bottom of the ocean--not stuck in their instrument or their anatomy.

What the Body Mapping advocates are saying is that if you are playing a trombone and you unconsciously think one of your arms is actually coming out of your neck, over time you will develop inefficient movement which will eventually become debilitating.  They are correct about that.

They go on to say that if you replace that “false image” with an “accurate” structural kinesthetic experience of your arm and neck, you will move more efficiently.
They are correct about that too.

Structure may be a sensible way to teach efficient movement to musicians, but I suspect that at least at the higher levels, music teachers have very strict rules about how structure, alignment, and especially “fingering” should be. I would be warry of messing with that. If I was teaching martial arts and music to a teenager I would consider Body Mapping all his finger movement to the spine so that his movement is always structurally strong and efficient.  Such a practice would most likely have to be done separately from the practice of music and then applied to it because most instruments use each hand differently.  I also wouldn’t want to leave students at that level, having only taught them structure with out freedom! Especially if they plan to be professionals--it is important to reach the heart-mind emptiness levels of performance.

To summarize this article for regular readers:
The body must be inside the mind. Do not put the mind inside the body!

(Also see Zhuangzi chapter 3, On Nourishing Life....)

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One of the consequences of the false contextualization of martial arts as “for fighting only” is the obscuration of the obvious fact that professional musicians and theater artists were both part of the same families and performed together.  Since theater in all of China was “physical theater,” and its training was in fact the movement tradition we know today as “martial arts,” it is almost inconceivable that there were any top quality professional musicians who didn’t have at least some martial arts training embedded in their art.
In fact, I could go further and say that powerful operatic singing is one of the important sources of Chinese internal martial arts.  How could a person sing for 4 hours to a huge outdoor audience without being “internal?”  Italian operatic singing technique may be the closest thing to Tai Chi in all of Western Civilization.

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I sincerely hope that in the future martial arts will be taught with music and theater, and that professional musicians will see martial arts as a resource for how to dance with their instrument.

There is lots of material about Body Mapping on the web.  The Berklee School of Music in Boston is promoting it here.  I see this as a positive trend moving in my direction.  In the article the author makes the point that performing music is a movement  art.
And here is a book about Body Mapping that looks pretty interesting, I just ordered it.

Power Generation

Since you axed me, I'm gonna essplain it to you.

--Rush Limbaugh

A small part of the Rory Miller workshop a few weeks ago was dedicated to power generation. The simple reason for this is that striking a violent threat without doing damage is a waste of time. If you are already receiving damage, your ability to fight is diminishing as time passes.
Rory is able to pass on some very useful material about power generation in a very short time.
Let me start out by saying I think he did a great job of getting people to think about the importance of power generation to self-defense, and how to improve ones power in a short period of time. Tasked with the same goals I would not have done things much differently. However, I’m dedicated to discovering the highest level of martial arts theory available, so we have some taking apart to do.

Here is what he taught.

The drop step is the most immediate way to generate power.
Press the back heel.
Twist suddenly at the hip (kua).
Keep the whole arm and back loose like throwing a baseball.

These all increase power. When put together they dramatically increase power.
I realized a long time ago that I have way more power than I actually need to fight, from a self-defense point of view what I have to say about power generation is trivial. I suppose the charge of esoteric is a fair description of my opinion.
Rory himself raised the issue of why each of these work. With a better understanding of theory we can improve our results. So here are my explanations.

The drop step is used extensively in African dance and many dance systems, it is also the main strategy taught for punching in Northern Shaolin. It works primarily because it adds the force of falling mass. Rolling an elbow forward on the opponent’s arm while doing a drop step puts at least 100 pounds of force, multiplied by a few inches of gravity, onto the opponent. If the opponent’s structure is compromised already, the movement will likely cause damage. It can also shake up a person who has good structure. The flaw of this technique (all techniques have flaws) is that it is vulnerable to a sweep (or a rotation) while in the air, and tends to be over committed at the moment when it lands, particularly if it misses its target.
The same technique can be done internally, without leaving the ground or committing to one foot, but it takes a long time to train.

Pressing the back heel is also a major part of Northern Shaolin training. It’s main value is that it backs up projections-- it is what most people do when they jab with a spear to stop from being thrown back by the forward motion of the wild thing they are jabbing. It is not actually a power generating technique. A foot pushing off the ground (whether with the heel or the toe) generates momentum; however, once the momentum is achieved the foot can leave the ground without any loss of force. Pressing the back heel can have another purpose, which is to uproot. In tai chi, we teach people to uproot off of either foot and generally it is the foot which is weighted over the toe which does the uprooting. So even if your back heel is down to root against the forward motion of your opponent, your front foot can still be used to uproot.
Perhaps the full extension of the back heel adds a little momentum (as compared to leaving it up), but that isn’t its main function. No doubt everyone who studies martial arts should learn this technique and build on it, but eventually it should be abandoned. Its flaw is that it combines with the drop step to create an on/off switch. The drop step entails a loss of stability, the pressing of the heel is an attempt to regain it. A superior theory of fighting seeks to eliminate the gap in power created by this transition between “on” and “off.” Some stability is gained in the front/back plane from pressing the heel, but it is lost in the other planes, making the striker vulnerable to rotational force or up/down force. A superior theory of fighting would never strike in a way that sacrifices the six dimensions of power: up/down, left/right, front/back (called liuhe in Chinese). It is preferable to keep the body moving like a rolling, spinning, expanding/shrinking ball which never comes out to a point. Lot’s of Tai Chi guys take this to mean don’t punch, but that isn’t correct, it just means that when you punch, the punch has to be part of a rolling ball.

“Keep the whole arm and back loose, like throwing a baseball” is correct and needs no amending. The more relaxed and empty the movement, the more whole body integration and weight are available for generating force. In class I actually interjected that some people may experience shoulder injuries if they lack protective shoulder muscle. The injury can happen when a person throws the arm with a lot of force while only relaxing halfway. It’s probably best to work this idea gradually. Eventually ones entire body weight can be added to the force through the sequence relax, empty, unify.

Rory actually told us he was uncertain why “Twist the hip suddenly” helps increase power. Here is my explanation. First, rotation in the hip, what in Chinese martial arts we call 'turning the kua,' adds some rotational force so it makes forward force more difficult to stop, deflect or neutralize. Second, the suddenness of the technique is akin to shaking. It loosens the ‘meat’ from the bones and automatically adds fluid weight to the strike. Third, it cuts the body at the waist. This is actually a flaw, but it works! It diminishes structural force from the feet to the hands, however, it increases the moving mass available for the punch. It basically sacrifices the structure of the legs for the weight of the torso. No doubt many people will think I’m crazy for suggesting that loss of structure is a good thing.
Structure can be broken or uprooted-- fluid, dynamic mass can not.

So to summarize: The drop step can be hidden. The heel press isn’t necessary for power but can help with rooting against an on coming force or uprooting a threat’s structure; however a superior fighter will use your structure against you so eventually heel pressing should be discarded. A loose arm increases power if it integrates with the relaxed emptiness of the whole body. The sudden twist of the hip is a flawed technique but has positive effects on power generation anyway.

The big problem with martial arts is that they work. Since most of us will never need to cause massive damage to another person, if we measure martial arts by “effectiveness” they are all a massive waste of time. Most martial arts training will effectively increase power generation as long as you don’t train yourself to pull punches with free sparing, or subordination to the teacher.
While power for power’s sake is a fools errand, the martial arts I teach should give the student more than enough power to overpower a much larger person, or multiple people. But hopefully that will never need to happen. For me, the never ending search for power is just like a dance-- it is simply a happy consequence of freedom-- it is a unique expression of real joy.

Expand and Shrink

Recently on Rum Soaked Fist someone asked a question about the importance of kai-he, which loosely means ‘opening and closing.’  While this may  be a good translation of the Chinese, the metaphor is confusing because it is easily conflated with the process of emptying and filling which requires opening key gates in the body.  To properly do kai-he, all the gates must remain open, there is no closing action.  The correct metaphor for kai-he is expanding and shrinking the way most wild animals do when they are showing dominance or submission.

As is often the case, the subject of shrinking and expanding does not have an inherent order.  Like so much of martial arts it is actually a process of unlearning (apophatic).  In attempting to invent a curriculum, the goal should be to reveal an underlying order, a natural way of being.  That said, here is one possible curriculum order.

Level 1.  Individuate shrinking and expanding in different parts of the body.  (Kumar Frantzis created a long list of different body systems which can be expanded and condensed, beginning with individual joints, muscles, soft tissues, internal organs, glands, blood vessels, meridians, the nine palaces, and cerebrospinal fluid.)

Level 2.  Shrink and expand the entire body with the breath.

These first two levels do not take long to develop (a year or two at most) but in order to maintain a big range of movement they require regular practice.

Level 3.  Shrink and expand the whole body without the breath.  That is, de-link the movement from the breathing.  This will make the movement softer and will reveal jin, or natural structure. To do level 3 well, requires that the spacial mind relax and expand out beyond the body itself.

Level 4.  At level 4 the spacial mind does many complex operations including shrinking while the body is expanding and the reverse, expanding while the whole body is shrinking.  To do this level well the body must be completely empty of tension and all the gates must be open--then one's power will increase dramatically and one's root will disappear.

Level 5.  Only the spacial mind is actively moving, the body follows unconsciously.

Because we are dealing with an entirely natural process it is possible to skip directly to level five.  In the theater world, the principle of using shrinking or expanding to control space is sometimes called a change in status.  It is the basis of dominance and submission in all animals.  If you see two actors on a stage set as an office or a home you should be able to tell which actor owns the space by his or her movements and positions.  If it is my office I’ll move as if everything is part of my big body, a guest will move only a limited amount of space around his body, if he sits in my chair he will look stiff.  Imagine the physicality of a worker sneaking into the bosses office to smoke one of the bosses cigars when he thinks the boss is away for the week, and then imagine the changes in the physical use of space when the boss suddenly walks in.
Because this is all automatic in real life, it can be taught with games.  Actors can use tricks to get their behavior to seem real.  Unconsciously we are all masters of shrinking and expanding, but when the process becomes conscious it has a disorienting affect and it tends to look fake.  So the trick is to make it conscious and then put your mind on something else so that it becomes unconscious again.

My favorite game for teaching this is called “siblings”:

A lazy brother, who doesn’t work, sits in a chair in the middle of the room.
The hard working brother comes home from work and finds the lazy brother’s underwear hanging from the door nob.  The lazy brother is sitting in the same spot he was when the hard working brother left for work.
The scene begins with the hard working brother making an accusation.  The director tells the lazy brother (secretly before the scene begins) that he is to admit to every accusation and that  when the hard working brother moves toward him, he is to take up more space, he is to expand his body.  They improvise from there.

I first played this game with Keith Johnstone when I was 15.  While I was playing it with a partner I suddenly realized that I already knew the game, that I played it all the time unconsciously with my sister.  I was good at this game, by changing my body size and shape I felt like I could move my partner around the room at will.  That evening when I got home my sister, as she was in the habit of doing, accused me of something I didn’t do, “Did you take my notebook?”  “Yes,” I answered while simultaneously expanding.  “What? You took it!” Her eyes flared, but because I expanded she couldn’t come closer, she had to move away.  “Yes,” I said, “There is some pretty interesting stuff in there.”  I shrunk a little bit and she moved in to take a bite “YOU READ IT!” Casually expanding again, I said, “Juicy.”  She moved back.  I could control her with my movements.  Within a minute I had her rolling on the ground tearing out her hair.

This was, I suppose, an enlightenment moment for me.  I had a choice at that moment to become a sociopath or to dedicate my life to truth and justice.

The monkey dance of dominance and submission that Rory Miller talks about works in the same way. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been in a fight since I was 15.  Almost all fighting is monkey dance, almost all fighting is social and follows unconscious social rules, status transactions.  Asocial violence is a whole different cup of tea.  A desperate drug addict just wants to take your money and get away without being noticed, no need to assert dominance, it doesn’t matter to them whether you are still breathing or not.

This seems to be the source of a lot of confusion because shrinking and expanding is still the most efficient way to fight.  A tiger hunting still shrinks before it pounces.  It is crucial for dominance and submission, and it is also crucial for generating power while avoiding counter attack.  Some things are the same, some are different.  A dog challenging another dog will stare it in the eyes and make a low growl, a dog submitting will roll over belly-up and squeak. Dogs hunting a wild boar will attack the buttocks, and calves.  A policeman subduing a threat wants the threat face down on the ground because it’s easier to control him.  A wrestler wants his opponent pinned face up because it is more humiliating.

Great actors, great martial artists, and great dancers control space, they don’t do technique.  Many years ago I studied ballet.  I noticed that sometimes there were dancers who seem to have good technique but still weren’t dancing.  Ballet is a high status dance form.  The dancers are floating on clouds all the time.  The neck is always exposed, like the alpha wolf.  The legs are always turned out, the chest always lifted.  Sometimes a young dancer is introverted and yet is forced by the training to move like a high status princess.  The physical body can be open, expansive and exposed while the spacial mind, the spirit body, is sucked in close.  This disconnect is probably the source of a lot of compulsive behavior like chain smoking or not eating.

Over eating and muscle trucks among martial artists could be a similar phenomenon.

Extremes of status can be very entertaining.  Think midget wrestling, sumo, and the teachers in the cartoon South Park.

Being a good actor or dancer does not make someone a good fighter, even if they have the ability to manipulate space outside of their bodies.  Even if they have great unconscious shrinking and expanding abilities.  There is more to it than that.  And it is also true that someone can have good fighting skills without having mastered the shrinking and expanding of the spacial mind.  But put them together and they reveal enormous natural freedom.

The order in which one learns,  doesn’t matter.  The levels I described at the beginning of this post can be jumbled up any which way you want. In the end, however, there is an order, it is the order in which social behavior (conduct/qi), our physical body (jing), and our sense of place (shen) interact as one.

Am I Dead Yet Sgt. Miller?

Saturday morning I crossed the bridge to the bad part of Oakland.  The workshop took place in the clubhouse of the notorious East Bay Rats Motorcycle Gang Club.  It’s a block from a small park, which is an open drug market for addicts.  (My Mom lives nearby!)  The clubhouse is a little bigger than my living room, with a bar and a roll-up door to a small yard, but my living room doesn’t have a dirty concrete floor, a motorcycle in the middle of the room, or sharp edges and protruding things everywhere.  And my living room certainly doesn’t have  a motor-ski-plow-sculpture!  The yard had a lot of beer cans, dirt, some broken glass, trash cans, things for grilling meat, tools, and a beat-up all-weather boxing ring.  Twenty men and women showed up for the two day workshop.  Objectively speaking, there was enough room in there to teach Tai Chi to 4 people.  The stage was set for Sgt. Rory Miller's workshop.  (I reviewed his wonderful book Meditations on Violence here.)

Back in the days when I led adventure ropes courses, we would try to create a feeling of maximum risk with minimum actual risk.  At Rory's workshop, right from the get go everything felt risky.  He started off with a safety talk and then had us work with partners doing action exchange drills.  This is a slow motion practice in which one person begins an attack and the other fights back, but the moment of initiative consciously switches back and forth between the two fighters so that if one of them stops, all action stops.

The fact that the space felt so risky helped keep us non-competitive, which was essential for what he was trying to teach.

Sgt. Rory Miller

You know you are dealing with a great teacher if you experience the stuff you practice everyday failing, and yet you leave feeling elated!  My fighting system is based on not stopping at all, I try to fight like a waterfall.  So it’s not surprising that everything I do can fail if it is squeezed into an action exchange drill.  It was a great way to practice because it forced us to release more efficient whole-body violence into shorter and shorter periods of time.  It also allowed people with very little martial arts experience an opportunity to recover against people with a lot.  The exercise is also designed to insure that no one gets injured, while insuring that everyone feels pain, discomfort, disorientation and emotional boundary violations.  I got my nuts squeezed about twenty times.  I had people's fingers on my eyeballs over a hundred times.  We gradually built a lot of trust.

I’m so full of energy today it’s hard to write.  Hormone surges all day long especially during the scenario role-plays on the second day have left me a bit wired-up.  While I really enjoyed my failures, I left feeling that my training is superb.  My stuff transferred well to fighting in confined space and rolling on the concrete. The BJJ-Mixed Martial Arts people, by the way, had a lot of un-training to do.

Back in my twenties I did a lot of two person forearm and shin conditioning.  After a while it became really addictive, I just craved that rough contact, it was getting me high.  This morning when I went to do my practice I was craving that rough contact again.  I never realized this before now, but I think this type of conditioning training is really a way to practice bringing on and dealing with the hormone surge.  My morning classes for the last 3 or 4 years have had about 5 minutes of gentle external arm and leg conditioning.  But I think my internal practice is giving me another kind of really effective conditioning.  My body is primed to instantly pump up when I get the hormone surge.  Today I have that Arnold Schwarzenegger feeling in my body.  Not stiff--just pumped.  I’m sure it will go away in a day or two if I don’t feed it.  But it’s an important lesson about how the body works.

The familiarity with real violence that Rory brings is chilling.  One thing I realized is that George Xu trained me in vigilante violence, which in a dark kind of way is great because it includes many different types of violence-- Self-defense, domination, monkey dance, group monkey dance, police work, and surprise attack. Rory demands that we refocus our training on what is legal and ethical.  He also recommends that we stop training things which may be ethical but would be too much of an emotional identity destroying act for us to pull off (I guess some people have a problem with blood and guts).  What’s legal and ethical is usually clear in retrospect (not always), but rarely easy to act on in the moment.  Which is why training scenarios are essential.  Deciding what acts would be identity destroying is very personal.  I'm not sure where my limits are, all the encounters with violence I can remember have had at least some identity destroying power.

Reflecting on my training with George Xu I see that legitimate self-defense has always been a component of it, but it was part of a larger subject of vigilantism.  For instance I remember getting in George Xu’s head and practicing scenarios in which I was the aggressor with a knife fighting against another aggressor with a knife in which the goal was to incapacitate but not kill (terratorial dueling?).  Rory’s workshop brought up a lot of weird stuff like that.  For everyone I think.  But my somewhat rambling point here is that in order to make what I do fit the self-defense model I have to make a slight mental-emotional adjustment.  It’s an adjustment I made intellectually long ago, but I hadn’t fully considered how imperative it is that I actually change the way I train.

Because boxing is designed purely as a display of dominance it has very little resemblance to asocial surprise attacks or self-defense.  A boxer would have to make big adjustments to actually train for self-defense.  What I do most of the time is close to what Rory is teaching, but I do sometimes think in terms of dominance.  I'll imagine a monkey dance in which I approach a fight eye to eye, attacking straight-on like a rutting buck in order to assert dominance.  This is what he is training us not to do.  Fortunately I'm quite talented at a more Rory-esque self-defense style of training like getting behind someone and throwing them head first into a wall with pictures of guys with tattoos on it.

Readers are probably mocking me, "Ah what a fine ethical distinction."

Rory had us play so many cool scenarios.  He was wearing full body armor and a helmet.  The climax for me was when he came in from the back shooting his gun.  I looked up to see that he had already shot me and I froze as he shot me again and then shot the person next to me.  People near the door, after fumbling with the lock, opened it and started to run, but Rory entered and fired into the space the way a person experienced in killing everyone would do it.  I must have been one of the first to break my freeze because I remember beginning to run the five paces towards him and then the next thing I remember I had him pinned with my hand wrapped around his larynx, one knee on his xiphoid process, the other knee on his arm, and my left hand holding his gun hand flat on the ground.  During the debrief he said I was the hero who took a lot of lead (bullets).  The day before we were talking about how police assess whether people are lying or not, and he said he doesn’t believe it when people say they don’t remember what happened.  But between the time I started running and the moment I was on top of him positioning my knee on his xiphoid process-- I don’t remember what happened.  It is particularly interesting because I’m really good at recreating detailed two person movement sequences that happen spontaneously with my students in class.

He told me later that I scared him.  That coming from Rory felt a little like I accidentally won a gold medal at the Olympics or something.

My biggest criticism is that there were no undead in the scenarios.  Zombies next time!
The biggest surprise was how totally awesome the other people at the workshop were.  It was really fun hanging out talking afterwards.  New friends!  New ideas!  New inspiration! (More to come.)

Unity and Harmony

The Chinese Character "ping"

How is this for dark irony?  The Chinese civil war which took place in the 1850's and 60's was call the Great Peace Rebellion (Tai Ping) and is ranked the world's second bloodiest war of the last 500 years.  The Chinese character 'ping' is a common tattoo in the San Francisco.  I suppose it would be stating the obvious to point out that the term 'ping,' which is usually translated into English as 'peace,' doesn't really mean peace.

The idea of peace resists description because it is so deeply ingrained in the most basic concepts and metaphors of our civilization.  "Peace is just...like, ....peace man, you know?"  Because of this it is easy to unconsciously project our notions of peace onto other cultures.  The Chinese idea of peace as best I've been able to glean, is a combination of yi (unity) and he (Harmony).  And naturally that is the name of another Chinese War, the Boxer Rebellion which is known as the Yi He Uprising.

What is going on here?  Could this unity harmony thingy explain why Google was able to find the compromise of moving it's operations to Hong Kong?

Yi and he are the two most important concepts in Chinese Martial Arts.  But before I get into that let's examine them more generally.  The Chinese calendar seems like a good place to start.  It is thousands of years old.  Chinese governments have been publishing a calendar for the whole country almost continuously since the Han Dynasty (1st Century B.C.E.).  At first glance it is extremely complex because it is a composite of 10's perhaps 100's of local and ethnic calendars.  To name just a few, there is the lunar calendar, there is the stem-branch system of 10's and 12's that make up a 60 day cycle, there are the 28 Lunar Mansions which are also called constellations and since 7 goes into 28 they track with our 7 day weeks, there is the Islamic Calendar subsumed inside the larger calendar, there is a 72 day Yijing divination sequence which reverses its direction at the solstice and equinox, and there are many many more.

When I think of all the little local and ethnic calendars subsumed in the big calender I think of a story I heard about Californian Indians having a calendar which reminded them when it was time to go pick wild onions.  By picking onions in particular locations at particular times they loosened the ground and initiated the growth of more onions. They were making gardens in the wilderness.  (But of course it wasn't the wilderness to them.)  These sorts of ritual cycles are embedded in the Chinese calendar along with innumerable locals celebrations and sacrifices to gods, spirits and ancestors.  It was all in one calendar thus we could say there was unity (yi).  Harmony is a broad concept, but in a basic sense, harmony is achievable through not scheduling a mandatory meeting for work or school on either of the first two nights of Passover!  (To give an example from my own life.)  Harmony is achievable because our conduct, our activities, and our rituals, take place with awareness, sensitivity, and responsiveness to a bigger context or environment.

Any attempt by diplomats or corporate representatives to negotiate with the Chinese government must begin with some understanding of unity and harmony.  Sitting down at a negotiating table with a powerful Chinese representative without incorporating the concept of unity and harmony would be like meeting an American representative without bringing along the concept of "sitting down at the negotiating table!'  It's that basic.

I know I said above that I would explain the importance of unity and harmony in martial arts, but it's not easy to explain.  I fear words are likely to fail me but here goes.

Unity means inclusiveness.  Harmony means simultaneous individuation.  They work together.  But in trying to explain them I get stuck.  I could go to Daoist cosmology and say that huntun, totally undifferentiated chaos, approaches unity.  When everything is undifferentiated we could almost stay it's a single thing. But it is not quite unity because unity can be conceived of as having boundaries, like a country or an egg, whereas huntun has no boundaries.

And of course the Taiji symbol itself is the most ubiquitous image of harmony.  It graphically dipicts simultaneous individuation--two distinct things working together inside of each other.  But that just starts to sound weird, so lets have an example.

Imagine just an egg, without air or ground.  Make it a mammal egg so that the shell is soft.  Unity is the egg, the totality of your awareness is the egg.  The egg is all there is.  The egg can have a distinct shell, yolk and white, or it can be scrambled.  It's still just an egg, it's still a unity and it's still all there is.  In Daoist meditation there is this notion that we can map stillness as a transition between two types of experience which are actually one--the egg with a shell, a white and a yolk, and the egg scrambled.

In the internal martial arts, taijiquan, xingyi, bagua, we are an egg.  The totality of our awareness, our sense of where we are and the boundaries of our perception, is an egg.  Our physical mass is the yolk (jing).   The egg white is clarity and movement, it is what animates us (qi).   We could almost say that the egg white is inspiration and motivation; however, in Daoist cosmology this egg white is just the medium for animation--inspiration comes from Dao, it does not have any apparent origin.

The shell of the egg is the boundary of our perception.  When we practice internal gongfu the shell is the sky and the horizon--as we see, feel, hear, smell and imagine it.  We call this shen (spirit) in martial arts.  It contains the yolk and the egg white.  In basic training we develop the yolk (the body) so that it is smooth, round, and able to shift and change like a thick liquid which can expand and condense in all directions.  Then the yolk itself becomes so quiet that we forget it!  We forget it like we would forget our own body in the presence of a beauty beyond words.  We move only the egg white, shifting and swirling within an enormous shell, and the body follows without effort or inhibition. That's harmony.

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