Walking #3 (Story)

In the religious Daoist tradition stories are considered qi transmissions. To study personally with a great bagua or qigong teacher is of immeasurable value but we can receive qi transmissions in many different ways.

Once during the Qing dynasty in China the Emperor and his courtiers decided to make a sport out of all the outrageous claims martial artist were making. They had many martial artists brought one by one to the palace and asked them to perform many feats, after which they were usually put to death.

The Emperor heard about a bagua master who people claimed could move any stone. So the Emperor had a huge stone brought into the courtyard using long levers and pulleys. He then had the famed martial artist brought to the palace. Upon seeing the challenge he asked to be given 24 hours and some torches to see by. Amused, the Emperor granted the request. The martial artist began crawling all over the of the stone, looking and feeling everywhere. 24 hours later the Emperor and his courtiers returned and demanded to see the stone moved. The martial artist then put one finger on one particular spot and using just that finger succeeded in pushing the huge stone all around the courtyard. The Emperor and his courtiers were so impressed that they granted him his life.

It seems that even stones have acupuncture meridians.

It is said that a bagua practitioner who has reached the height of mastery can step on a solid cobble stone and turn it to dust. I imagine that such steps are extremely light.
The adepts experience of the world is recreated in each step or gesture we make. Qi gong practitioners don't just re-learn how to walk, we are continuously re-learning how to walk. We are demonstrating true openness to the possibilities. The fruit of practice is that walking itself becomes unconditioned.

Walking #2 (Toddlers')

Watching toddlers' movement can be really instructive.  Toddlers are unstable and actually rely not on strength or righting reactions (both of which develop and integrate with time) but on the softness of their bones and the fluidity of their joints.  They can make great errors in stepping and stumbling because they have a large range of motion in their joints.  They easily recover from falls.  Their bodies are buoyant and adaptable.  Their joints acutually pulse, or open and close, as they walk or reach out for something they want and draw it back toward their center (or their mouth.)

"...it's bones are soft, it's muscles are weak, and yet it's grip is very strong,"

(Daode jing Chapter 55, Liu ming)

Qi gong and internal martial arts combine these two approaches to movement, that of the very young and that of the very old. Both approaches can be considered weak.

From doing these practices, as we age, our joints have more space and we use the space that we have more efficiently. We return to balance without much strain or effort.

Somewhere I picked up the saying:  "Walk with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds."

Walking #1 (Older people)

What is it like watching most older people move? Is it a source of pity or sympathy, or perhaps a foreboding omen of what we can some day expect ourselves? If we were to study older peoples' movements with respectful inquisitiveness what might we learn?

Young people walk by falling slightly forward to create momentum and continuously catching themselves with their front foot as they stride forward. This type of movement requires:

1. The ability to suddenly contract muscles should we mis-step or slip.

2. Well integrated reflexes, righting reactions, and equilibrium responses so we can stop abruptly.

3. Buoyancy in the joints(space/fluidity) and a fairly wide range of motion to account for sudden variation.

As people age it becomes more difficult to maintain the muscle tissue sufficient to catch oneself, right oneself and return to balance. As people age they often develop a reduced range of motion do to repeated injuries, including what we tend to call normal wear and tear. Even small injuries often leave scar tissue which reduces pliancy and range of motion. This along with a general loss of fluids in the joints leaves less space in the joints for movement. This not only makes large steps difficult or painful, but the righting reactions needed to re-balance are often out of ones range of motion or would themselves cause re-injury in the joints.

Big steps, or any type of reckless movement, brings the risk of falling and breaking already deficient bones. Thus how do older people walk? Hesitant little steps. They test the ground with each step and find their balance with each weight shift, doing their best to maintain their balance all the time.

Eventually, everyone's muscles and reactions degenerate and we are all, in a sense, forced to except the sensitivity that comes with weakness (in Daoism this process is called return).

When older people walk they draw on all the resources they have, (they'll take your arm if you offer it.)

Those in the past, who cultivated the Way,
Were subtle,mysterious, abstruse, penetrating,
Unfathomable, and so too deep to describe.
Because of this,
I can only tell you how they seemed.
They were cautious, as if crossing a river in winter.
Always watchful of danger on all four sides.
They were ceremonious and polite, like being a guest.
Yielding, like ice beginning to melt.
Plain and unconditioned, like an uncarved block of wood.
As open, as a valley.
Murky, like turbid water.
Who among you can be so murky and yet know
Quiet and Clarity within?
Which of you can enter stillness only to return to movement?
Those who keep this Dao,
Avoid fullness.
Because they are not full,
they can renew themselves and not be worn out.
Daode jing Chapter 15 (Liu ming)

This quality of movement, testing the ground before a weight shift, avoiding muscle contractions, essentially seeking depth and ease, are all things we do when we practice qi gong, taiji, or bagua. Aging may actually make them easier to do!

How to use Taijiquan in a Fight

Here is my latest video offering, enjoy.

What do Daoist's do?

What do daoists do? It can be divided up into three categories: Conduct, Hygiene, and Method.
An example of conduct practices are the Xiang er precepts. These are a first century C.E. summary of what the Daode jing suggests trying, like be honest, be weak, cultivate stillness, and practice wuwei. They are considered scripture for religious Daoists.(see Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures)

Hygiene practices conserve qi and make it easier to follow these suggestions, they include things like bathing practices, qi gong, and an appropriate diet.
Methods include things like zowang(sitting and forgetting), jindan(the elixir practice, internal alchemy), and ritual.

Hygiene practices can also be considered conduct practices because they are meant to have an impact on physical and qi manifestation of our daily conduct.

Qi gong, like taijiquan and baguazhang, is the practice of cultivating weakness in order to sensitize us to our impact on our environment and our environment's impact on us. For instance, I notice that my knee hurts when I walk up a bunch of stairs. If I don't know that qi gong is a 'conduct' practice, I might be inclined to think that my qi gong practice is the cause, instead of considering that the way I've been charging up stairs has been to use strength to cover-up an old knee injury, which practicing qi gong actually revealed.
Practitioners of these so called "long-life" practices, reach their peak level of performance in their 60's and 70's.

Taiji and bagua probably have their origins in ritual dances which rectify qi. That is they dance the qi (time and directionality) of the universe into a condensed moment and then dance it back out into the universe again, (wuwei). Each step containing birth and death, the rhythms of life.
Tracing taijiquan and baguazhang back to their original roots may require such a huge step backwards that it is out of our range, but it is a mistake to think they are purely martial.

Stance Training

All Chinese martial arts schools do stance training. It is often considered the most important training for developing a gongfu foundation.

I estimate that I have stood still for on the order of 6000 hours, probably more. The longest period of time I have held a single stance is 6 hours. My shaolin students learn and train the following stances: Horse, Cat, Falling stance, Bow'n'arrow, Monk, cross leg or t-stance, and natural step (ziran). Every movement in taijiquan should be held, and basically the same goes for xingyi and bagua.

Wang Xiangzhai, the highly influential 20th Century founder of Yiquan said quality stance/stillness training was what all great Chinese martial artists have in common.

My own experience is that deep stance training is more effective than stretching and high kicks for re-making young Northern Shaolin students bodies so that they have a bigger range of movement potential. This is sometimes called, "getting the qi in the channels."
While in my twenties, an hour a day of low stance training initially made my thigh muscles and shoulder muscles bigger, but as time passed and my alignment improved my muscles got smaller and smaller. This is sometimes called, "qi going into the bones."

It's true, my muscles got smaller. My alignment improved and along with it my ability to issue power, to connect (integrate), twist, and pulse (open/close). Believe it or not, I got weaker. Not lazy or deficient but muscularly weaker and functionally more sensitive.

As time has passed I feel my use of higher stance training (still an hour a day) has helped develop more freedom and naturalness in my everyday movement. This is sometimes called, "Writing the Classics (jing) on your bones."

Stances on one leg, both high and low, are essential for developing kicking power, and are of course great for balance (in a future post I'll explain the physiology as I understand it.)

There is a ton more I could say about this subject and probably will in future blogs. I encourage readers to add your comments about what role stances have played in your training. In your opinion, what does and what doesn't stance training achieve?

What does Taiji mean?

The most common translation of Taijiquan (often just called Tai Chi) is great ultimate fist. This is a pretty hilarious translation because it has little meaning in English. With the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and all the irony this implies, it is high time we actually get a working translation.

To do this I must first explain some difficult terms. There is a saying form the Taijiquan classics, "Taiji is born (sheng) of wuji and is the mother of yin and yang." Immediately we have a problem. Wuji is generally translated "emptiness" or "the ultimate void," and it is a term most commonly associated with Buddhism where several distinct types of emptiness are described. While the term Taiji is generally associated with Daoism . It is easy to understand how this conflation of Daoist and Buddhist terminology happened. The vocabulary of Buddhists, Daoists and Confucians has been mixed up a lot in promotion of the idea of "the three religions" (sanjiao). This Sung Dynasty idea, which comes in and out of fashion, recognizes all three religions as important and mutually compatible. It is also the case that many Buddhist terms were translated from Indian languages into Chinese using Daoist terminology, which sometimes led Daoists to then change their vocabulary to distinguish their concepts and practices.
Thus the word that should be used with taiji is not wuji, but huntun.

If you go into a Chinese restaurant and order wanton soup you get a stock made from a combination of beef, chicken, pork and vegetable with dumplings floating in it. Tasting the stock you might exclaim, "hmmm, I can't quite figure out what this is made from, it's a kind of undifferentiated chaos," And that's what the name wanton means, completely undifferentiated chaos--"wanton" in Cantonese, "huntun" in Mandarin. The soup is a representation of a Daoist cosmological concept; the dumplings are the clouds floating in chaos.

An experience of totally undifferentiated chaos is, by definition, the closest a human being, with human senses and anatomy, can come to experiencing Dao. It is what we experience when we taste all tastes at once (thus the soup named for it), or we hear all sounds at once, without any differentiation. It is when we see all color and movement simultaneously, without any references to up and down, in or out, light or dark. It is all sensations- hot-cold, moist-dry, hard-soft,--felt simultaneously.

The funny thing about this experience of huntun is that it is transient. The moment we get there, we start to notice patterns, light-dark, up-down, salty-sweet--suddenly we are observing qi. But what happens right in between the experience of huntun and this recognition of patterns? That is what we call taiji! It is the moment where things have just begun to differentiate, a place where there is still light inside of dark, an experience where up is still inside of down, where warm is inside of cold. The idea is well captured in the familiar yinyang symbol.

Now that we have replaced wuji with the term huntun, the saying from the Taijiquan Classics above would read:  "Taiji is born from huntun." This is still problematic because birth implies only one direction. Sheng, the term being translated here as "born" can also mean "life," and in this case it means "life" in its total sense-- both manifestation and destruction together.

In this cosmology all things are mutually self-re-creating.  Creation is an event/experience without agency. All inspiration emerges from huntun, but also, all ideas die there.  All aggression arises from huntun and it also resolves/returns to huntun. It is multi-directional. All things which come into existence pass through taiji on their way to manifestation, as do all things going out of existence on their way to disintegration or dispersion.

Daoism and Martial Arts

If you read Stephen R. Bokenkamp's excellent Book Early Daoist Scriptures you can learn something about Daoism. There was a Daoist precept against keeping (or collecting) rare or excessively sharp weapons. This suggests that it was pretty normal to have something handy around the house, but that fighting was not considered part of their job (also weapons are talismanic, they are said to attract demons).
There is another precept which is really interesting: Daoists were forbidden to fight in the army, but if they were forced (threatened with the extermination of family) than they were forbidden to serve in a subordinate position--Meaning they had to command troops.
Other important precepts are cultivate: weakness, softness, stillness and non-aggression. There were also prohibitions against wasting qi or jing, or loosing your qi (i.e., getting angry to the point of self injury).
The vast number of Daoists were house holders, married men and women, priests whose job it was to regulate or manage local cults and the rectification of the unresolved dead.
Daoist thinking is important in the creation of internal martial arts, but the connection is not easy to make.
Kristofer Schipper who I mentioned in an earlier blog, says that there were two types of Daoists, black hat and red hat. Red hat were aloud to practice martial arts and black hat were not. The distinction between these two is not a simple one, but red hat's are usually transmediums or shaman (wu).
The idea that certain internal martial arts (taijiquan, xingyiquan, baguazhang) are Daoist or Daoist influenced may not predate the 20th century. It very much depends on what we think Daoism is, and what constitutes an "influence."
I intend to deal with this subject in depth in the coming months, but I thought I might give my readers a head start on the reading.

Our Teenage Qi Bodies

What ever type of movement or training we do when we are still growing has a lasting effect on the shape our physical body takes as adults. As the physical body is developing so is the 'shape' of the Qi body.  The particular quality and flexibility of the muscles we have as teen-agers will give shape to the qi meridians in and around the body, the body we develop as teen-agers will usually be the body shape which for us has the most unrestricted qi flow.  Practices like Northern Shaolin have been specifically refined to maximize qi circulation and should be taught in the schools.
Adults cultivating weakness should consider their development toward flexibility, softness, looseness, and internal connection in relationship to the body they grew into as teen-agers. For instance, someone who developed big muscles and played football as a teen-ager and now has muscles which are much smaller will tend to be sluggish  the circulation of qi will tend to stagnate in meridians that originally developed in a highly active muscular body.  Assuming such a person is not suffering from injuries they should consider building up the muscle a little to re-familiarize themselves with what their body feels like when qi circulation is at it's optimum.  If we take the uninhibited circulation of qi as our measure of health and our measure of how to practice- the best way for each individual to practice will reveal itself effortlessly.  The process of cultivating weakness should be a gentle peeling back of the layers of history, not an abrupt end.

Flexiblity, how important is it

Many people think of flexibility, muscle length or extension, as the opposite of stiffness, but oftentimes people are both flexible and stiff.

Looseness is a quality of movement which includes the ability to change spontaneously, quickly, and easily. Looseness and flexibility each require different approaches to training. Flexibility, looseness, softness, and internal coordination or 'connection' are four distinct qualities of movement which work together. Missing one of these four will create a deficiency. These four together support the uninhibited circulation of qi.

Stretching often feels invigorating, but it is possible to over stretch. In transitioning between stretches, ease and balance should not be over looked. If we focus primarily on developing flexibility by getting our muscles very warm, even hot, and then stretching, but little on transitions, we may end up reducing the flexibility we have when our muscles are cold, thus, making our comfort range in daily activities smaller. The nervous system becomes like a rubber-band: it stretches way out, but then it springs back in response to having been pulled out of its comfort range. This kind of flexibility is usually combined with strengthening, exacerbating the problem further with insensitivity.

In contrast, the qi gong approach is gentle,

and can be done without having to first warm up the muscles. Muscles which are always stretched to their limit don't know what a safe range of motion is, the muscles themselves appear to recoil in fear.

Someone whose muscles are very loose when they are hot but tight when they are cold will have to practice stretching in a much smaller range of motion in order to calm the recoiling effect of their nervous system. Much less common, but equally problematic, is combining over stretching with reckless looseness. Looseness with out evenness and balanced development or internal connection, can create over stretched ligaments. Many of the chronic injuries stemming from this type of looseness will be familiar to dancers.

The natural wrapping and twisting of muscles and tendons is an important developmental stage. Dancers who began their training at a young age sometimes skip this stage of development. The ability of all muscles to wrap and twist can be highly developed but it can also be overlooked in an attempt to get what is called 'a better extension.' Ligament injuries are associated with the impulse to release and extend in order to get the hands and feet as far away from the spine as possible. With out the the twisting and wrapping of muscles and tendons to support looseness in the joints, the ligaments eventually take the strain, and ligaments have little elasticity. People with these kind of injuries are usually taught to strengthen all the little muscles around the injury (a la Pilaties).

The qigong approach to dealing with this kind of an injury or tendency needs to be shown and felt first hand. It involves learning to draw qi into the central core of the body while simultaneously expanding, a sense of 'closing inside of opening.'

Individual muscles are capable of very complex movement, like the tongue which is a muscle that is only attached at one end. Many people think of muscle movement simply as a sort of on-off switch, contraction-release. In the case of most weight lifting the emphases is put on contracting muscles. Modern gyms use all sorts of apparatuses for muscle building, all essentially designed with this contraction-release concept of muscles.

Chronic tension in the spine is sometimes compensating for ligaments which are stretched to the limit by poor alignment. When the muscles around the spine attempt to protect the ligaments and become chronically tense, circulation and ability to feel the area are undermined. If any one part of the spine is restricted, it tends to restrict the movement of the rest of the spine, this is because the muscles and ligaments tend to release either in a wave sequence or simultaneously, not in isolation. When we attempt to stretch chronically tight regions of our spine, we are more likely to over stretch ligaments than we are to release the area of tension. Eventually many people strain ligaments, bone or discs.

The process of unraveling tension in the spine should be gentle and gradual. Having partners who watch or lightly place their hands on each others spine to give direct feed back about how the spine is releasing is the best way to learn this.

Many hip injuries happen in a similar way. People with a chronically tense hip, may have begun with very loose hips. The muscles around our hips twist and wrap in many complex ways. If the ability of these muscles to twist and wrap hasn't been developed in someone who has naturally loose hip sockets, minor dislocations of the hip can lead to strain on the ligaments which causes the hip muscles to contract leading to loss of mobility and sometimes chronic pain. Twisting and wrapping in muscles is a kind of developmental ground for the most dynamic and refined movement the body can do and it is an essential support for the development of healthy looseness in the joints.

When all the soft tissues in the body work together, the bones can move in effortless spirals. It's ironic that learning this is often easier for both young people whose bodies are still growing, and older people, who are losing muscle mass and find it difficult to build and keep new muscle. Those who find it easy to build dense protective muscle tissue tend to rely on bulky muscles to do everything. 'Why be weak when you can be strong?' is the conventional wisdom.