San Francisco Trip

Teaching Circus Daoyin

We did three hours of intense animal Daoyin.  It was good.  People got so tired they naturally returned to stillness.  Which is the point ofDaoyin, to discover and feel the spontaneous pull between movement and stillness.  In that pull our form becomes pliable because it is freed from our story.  And our story is freed from the limitation of our form.  The movement is designed to push both sorts of boundaries.  This type of class is a very positive experience for most people.  It fully integrates strength, flexibility, body re-orientation, and locomotion.

Read More

Teaching in San Francisco and other News

Teaching in San Francisco and other News

Please come to my workshops in San Francisco/Oakland [Nov. 29th and Dec. 2nd]  Read about them and sign up at the Soja website:  sojamindbody.com/schedule/   (make sure to click on "Adult Workshops").  You can also see Anna Valdiserri's and Rory Miller's workshops there, I highly recommend them.

I would like to spend a little time pitching my workshops here.  The copy text is challenging to write because I'm in uncharted territory.  I'm a cowbody doing my own thing.  

The Circus Daoyin class is my attempt to bust yoga people out of the "prison" of the yoga mat. 

Read More

Self-Defense Dance Styles

 A few hundred years ago, martial arts may have had a self-defense component and it may be recoverable.  But few martial arts classes teach self-defense directly.  Dance can solve this problem.

Self-defense involves situational awareness, scenario training, practice overcoming social-emotional barriers, verbal articulation skills, applying legal knowledge; and context specific movement skills for escaping, scaling force, and neutralizing a threat.

Here is my list of people who teach that: Marc MacYoung, Rory Miller, S.P.E.A.R, IMPACT, and especially check out Protective Offense. There are probably lots of individual martial arts schools that emphasize self-defense as a moral position, but unless they are teaching all the skills I listed above I wouldn't put them on such a list.  (Please feel free to add to the list in the comments below.)

Martial arts as we know them today, did not develop to teach self-defense, certainly not women's self-defense.  I enjoy trying to re-discover and invent self-defense in traditional martial arts.  However, if we want people to develop self-defense skills, martial arts are not the obvious choice.  Martial arts are often a poor choice because they condition complexity. Self-defense should also represent a break from the long training curves of most martial arts classes--self-defense should unleash people from hierarchies of learning and empower them immediately.  

"If he gives you any trouble, Waltz him out the door."  

If the problem is that men or women have been socialized to be nice (or compliant and caring), then the solution is to socialize them to be violent.  The best way to do this is with what I call the "I'm playing" hormones.  The "I'm playing" hormones feel familiar to almost everyone, people say to themselves, "I feel like a kid again!"  

One of the more common forms of violence people encounter is a social situation with a very badly behaved drunk, horny, or angry dominant partner or family member.  It turns out that statistics on domestic abuse are gender equal, just as many men beat women as women beat men (I had heard this from Marc MacYoung, but it was recently verified in a conversation I had at a party with a social worker who works with domestic violence advocacy state-wide in Colorado.)

There are two skill sets that were well known in the 19th century for dealing with this type of violence in many parts of the world:  1)  Improvisational theater, and  2)  social dances like the Waltz and the Samba.  

Good theater skills will teach one how to change the scripts and the social dynamics.

Learning to dance with the assumption that some of the people you dance with are going to be dangerous a--holes, will quickly enable the development of these skills:

 

  1. breaking holds
  2. striking vulnerable areas with whole body momentum
  3. taking control of momentum for making an escape 
  4. breaking the freeze 
  5. injuring and escaping from a threat who attacks from behind  

 

There are problems with dance "classes."  Social-dance classes are often about courting, feeling awkward or "doing it right,"  none of which are helpful for self-defense.  But the original movements of these dances were designed from the beginning for self-defense so the only thing that has to change is the intention.  The methods don't need modification the way they do in martial arts, because these historic dances all developed from martial games, they are already designed for self-defense. Just take out the modern inhibitions and add intent.  

Waltz his face into the wall.  Fun.

Two hundred years ago in Europe, if a person wanted martial skills he or she went to a dance master--who also taught etiquette.

The other half of self-defense is improvisational theater; developing, changing, taking control of, breaking, dropping, and re-writing social scripts on the spot.  One version of this I call "meet the Buddha," and involves a lot of personal insults and complements.  I then progress to slapping games, my goal is to make slapping joyful again.  

I got a chance to work with this material during the workshops I taught in Portland, in the UK, and in Amsterdam--and it was awesome.  Video in the works.  

Chicago this Weekend

This weekend, I'm teaching again at an advanced year-long Shiatsu Program in Chicago run by Michael DeAgro.  This is exciting stuff, I get to translate ideas about bodywork into movement training and personal practice.  The conversations, the depth of knowledge, the spontaneous interactions, and the experience base of the students, is inspiring.    

I teach the mornings of July 10th, 11th, and 12th.  If anyone in the Chicago area would like to meet with me for a chat or for a private lesson in the afternoon of one of those days, please send me a message.  

Tickling and Enlightenment

Meditate as if you are being tickled, but don’t respond to the tickling, pretend you are immune.  If you’ve ever been the victim of tickling over an extended period of time, years in my case, you probably noticed at some point that it is possible to use Vulcan-mind-lock to feel the tickling, but not respond to it.  I developed this skill because I had to deal with my older sister tickling me.  She tickled me mainly because she hadn’t ever heard about water-boarding.  The basic goal of tickling is to get one’s sibling’s organs to explode.  

Once I developed the Vulcan-mind-lock skill, my sister quickly discovered that tickling me was boring, and she moved on to more sophisticated forms of torture.  

This is why people have trouble meditating.  Meditating is a lot like being tickled. People often think the tickling experience is going to stop when they get better at meditating.  When it doesn’t, they think they have failed, and quit.  If anything the tickling experience is likely to become more profound.    

Widespread confusion about meditation also explains why many people find the golden-elixir (jindan/neidan) practice so mystifying.  Judging by the number and variety of descriptions of neidan and jindan--and we are taking about tens of thousands before the twentieth century--I think it is fair to say neidan is an enlightenment practice invented by people with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

A great direction for scientific inquiry in the next few years would be to explore the relationship between ADHD and tickling.  The mindfulness-meditation in the schools movement is great because it is directly addressing nervous system re-orientation problems. Basically, we can think of it as a way to trick disruptive kids into tickling themselves.  Very cool.  

Given all this, and my own self-induced ADHD, let me try (again) to explain jindan (the golden-elixir).  Once the experience of emptiness has been established by giving-in to the experience of being tickled all over one’s body for an hour every day for a year, then it is possible to transition to maximum explosive felt spatial imagination, called shenling (神靈), in Chinese.  Maximum-explosive-felt-imagination, that’s a lot of words strung together!  Well, if that doesn’t work, I give up. You may be on your own.  

Here is the monster in the room--people get good at meditating, standing or sitting, whatever; just like people get good at sitting in a chair in school and shutting off the learning hormones, known colloquially as playfulness.  Don’t get good at meditating!  That was the whole freaking point of Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.  Instead give-in to being tickled on every spot of your body, inside and outside, that is what perfection feels like.  Surrender, not retreat; in the moment, not in-control.  

Of course, I’m not pushing perfection.  Maybe you don’t want that?  Maybe it isn’t right for you?  Perhaps you like to walk around art galleries with your nose upturned sipping wine and nibbling cheese.  That’s cool.

It is a bit like insults.  I encourage students to insult each other early and often.  Complements too.  I also jibe my students towards mastery of the self insult and the self complement.  See, this is what enlightenment looks like when it is expressed and performed.  It isn’t neutral, dead, or boring.  It isn’t all blissed-out.  Daoist enlightenment, and I suspect most other types, too, identifies the fruition as: without preference.  

The practice of meditation is to experience the way things are without preference.  The expression of that experience is to act without preference.  I mean, how do you know a Buddha when you meet him?  He has gangly arms so long they touch his knees, he has been sitting still so long his hair is full of snails, his ear lobes are long enough to bat flies off of his shoulders, when he walks through mud, lotus flowers bloom in his footsteps.  

Seriously, if you want to be enlightened, start seeing these qualities in the people around you and commenting on them.  Why not start by telling the stranger sitting next to you on the airplane that you fart rainbows, and then ask them if they like being tickled?  Or perhaps enlightenment is just too creepy for you?

For my martial arts readers who don't practice meditation, think about it this way, there are two major obstacles to learning martial arts: 1) Fear of being hit; including fearfulness before, during and after being hit, and 2) Fear of hitting; also before, during and after.  Meditation is similar, there are two obstacles: 1) Fear of stillness, and 2) Fear of movement.  

New Workshops

I've got a new Workshop Calendar for 2015.  I'll update as new things come in, and I would like to set-up workshops for visiting teachers in Boulder.  Check it out!

Besides my Calendar, the new Workshop Page has images that lead to pages describing the new classes I'm offering: Pure-IMA •  GamesCircus-DaoyinMartial-Dance •  Classic

_____________________________________________

By the way, Yelp was at the top of the SNAFU list for the full eight years of its existence.  But low and behold! They seem to have it together now.  If you've studied with me and want to write a review--please do, that would be awesome.  And note, they still use some strange divination tool to decide whose reviews people can see easily, but there is hope.  Check out my page in Boulder.

You can write reviews for Google Maps too, search under:

North Star Martial Arts
2525 Arapahoe Ave, Boulder, CO

I do not teach at this address; I teach in North Boulder Park, so thumbs down for Google.  They have the hours wrong too.  I wish it was easier to fix.  

Anyway, if you are coming to class via a Google Car, make sure to enter the correct address, North Boulder Park, or you will end up at my mailbox. Google called me the other day to get the facts right, but they didn't make the updates.  Weird.  They have been trying to fix the Google+/Youtube interface for over six months, no progress and no direct link to my videos.  

Maybe if these tech schools required a semester of "Magic" we would be in better shape!  Enjoy.

 

Teaching in UK, Amsterdam, and Portland

This wood goat year is exciting.  I'm finishing up two papers for publication, and working on another to be delivered at the Martial Arts Studies Conference in Cardiff, UK.  My book, about the possible origins of Chinese martial arts is at a professional editor now.  

I plan to get a Workshops web page up in the next couple of weeks with a complete schedule, but as info trickles in I'll post it:

Portland Shaolin Center, Oregon, May 16th-17th, probably available for private lessons, and jams on that Friday and Monday.

Cardiff, UK.  I'm delivering a paper called Shaking Thunder Hands: Where Martial and Performing Arts Meet in India and China, and I'll be in Cardiff from June 9th-12th, available for private lessons and meet-ups.

Amsterdam, teaching with Alex Boyd, Inner Workings of Chinese and Indian Performance Practice.  June 13th-14th.  (we have a Facebook events page too.)  I'll be there Monday and Tuesday for meet-ups.

Kings Cross, London, UK.  Again teaching with Alex Boyd.  The Energy of Performance Practice: Ways of Moving and Being from the East   June 22-26th.

So many people in Europe and the UK over the last 8 years I've been writing this blog have asked to meet me.  I didn't keep a list.  I will search around in my emails and comment lists before I go, but if you want to meet me, or bring me in for a workshop, please reach out again.

Also, do come to Boulder Colorado for a few days or weeks to study with me, hike or try the beer, things are pretty great here.  I've had a steady stream of visitors!  If this keeps growing I'll be running a year-round retreat center.  

I'm also floating the idea of hosting George Xu in Boulder in the Fall of this year, 2015.

 

Pandit Chitresh Das, dies at 70

It is with great sorrow that I announce the passing of one of my mentors Pandit Chitresh Das.  I got the news last night just before bed.  I dreamt that I was teaching a large class of children when I got the news.  I stopped class to tell them what a great improviser he was, and what an amazing teacher, and how he taught me and so many others new ways of seeing, hearing and feeling.  Then I started teaching the students how to pick flowers, in the Kathak mode, in rhythm, as a man, as a woman, and as a wild man.  

When I woke up, my whole body was full of rhythm.  Laying there in bed, complex rhythmic patterns were coming out of me, from me, and from beyond.  New ones and old ones I hadn't felt in a long time, like emotions spilling over.  

I started studying with Chitreshji when I was 20.  I traveled to India when I was 26 and met up with him there.  He was a child prodigy known throughout India but because of political favoritism in the Guru system he felt under appreciated and when modern dancer Murray Louis offered him a chance to come to America and teach he took it.  For twenty years he didn't return.  He moved to California where he worked intimately with Zakir Hussain and Ali Akbar Khan to innovate new forms of rhythmic mastery.  When I was with him in Kolkata (Calcutta) he was mending fences and building new relationships after 20 years, it was intensely emotional and profoundly gratifying.  He introduced me to a lot of people but sent me alone to visit his Guru brother Bachan Lal Mishra, who was practically in tears after he saw me dance in his tiny studio in a dilapidated building.  He said this was the true martial spirit of the original Kathak, that Chitreshji had kept it alive.  The walls of his studio were covered in pictures of boxers, his inspiration.  

Kathak is an intimate performance the dancer should be close enough to see the audiences expressions, and it is best done on a marble floor to bring out the full range of sounds the feet can make. 

Kathak, North Indian Classical Dance, has changed a lot with time. A hundred years ago it was an intimate style that took on the qualities of an improvised duel between the drummer (tabla player) and the dancer. My teacher was a consummate improviser.  In our first class he channelled the harsh nuns he had known attending Catholic Schools in India, Rambo with a machine gun, and pop star Michael Jackson.  All of this within the strict rhythmic structures of Indian Classical music.  If you’ve never seen Kathak, it is sort of like tap-dance and flamenco done in bare feet and with five pounds of bells wrapped around each ankle.  Das explained that Kathak was developed around Rajput warriors and then moved into the Mughal Courts of Lucknow and as the Mughals fell from power many dancers fell into the role of courtesans. With the rise of Indian nationalism, dance played a role as a marker of Indian pride and identity.  Chitreshji's father and mother were dancers at the center of this revival and Chitreshji grew up in a home that was a major stopping off point for all the great dancers of Indian, most of them probably performed in his living room.  

Martial arts were not taught explicitly, and Chitresh Das was not a fighter, but if you’ve ever tried dueling with blades you know that rhythmic footwork with speed and power is a handy thing to have.  Kathak also has body technique that can be used as chops, sweeps and elbow strikes, joint locks, and drop steps, lots of drop steps.  The bells worn for Kathak are bronze strung tightly together with open facets.  From a martial point of view they were armor for the ankles designed to catch blades and weights for developing speed and power.  In the historic epic the Mahabharata the thunderous sound of thousands of men stamping their feet with ankle bells struck terror in their enemies hearts. 

I saw Chitreshji perform countless times, but the improvisations he would bust out in class when we were completely exhausted were always the best.  As a teacher he put his entire being into it. In a sense he is always right there with me when I teach, he taught me how to be intensely responsive and aware of every sound and movement my students make; precision and nurturing, compassion and fury.  

He wanted to give us students a sense of what it was like to study with his Guru, Pandit Ram Narayan Mishra, so we all went up to a YMCA camp on the Gualala river in Northern California for a retreat.  During the four days we were there I never saw the river because we were dancing the entire time.  We woke before dawn put on our clothes and our bells and started dancing, we ate lamb shank curry for breakfast, which lasted just long enough to eat and take a five minute shower, then we were dancing again until lunch. Lunch was even shorter and we were dancing again, in the late afternoon and evening we did more theatrical movement, singing and reciting in addition to more dancing.  Dinners were a blur and with the last shower of the evening came the risk of falling asleep while standing up. In the morning we did it again, for four days. By the end, all that was left of me was a steady vibration, and feet, the bottoms of which looked like raw hamburger.  

Probably the best performance I ever saw him give was actually a rehersal.  We were staying in the flat of a Calcutta painter friend of his, I remember she had a pet monkey who was completely out of control jumping and swinging about the room.  When Chitreshji was performing a solo he didn't like to rehearse because Kathak is about spontaneity, but also because it is a symbolic duel between the tabla player and the dancer, and duels are not rehearsed.  For about four years I was studying with both Chitreshji and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri (a great tabla player).  When they were scheduled to perform together, both of their students would try to get them to rehearse, with increasing desperation as the event got closer.  Each of them would say things like, "Okay, if he needs to rehearse we can rehearse, ask him if he needs to rehearse?"  Students were sent back and forth with messages, "Tell him I don't need to rehearse, would it be helpful for him?" Sometimes they would talk on the phone I guess.  Anyway we were in Calcutta and Chitreshji was scheduled to perform with what he called a "red hot chilli pepper," that is, a young very fast tabla player, in this case Bickram Ghosh, son of Pandit Shankar Ghosh.  So he consented to a rehearsal.  It lasted about an hour, I sat at his feet while the two of them went through compositions at top speed, often only doing a half or a third of the composition and then saying something like, "Okay, and so on."  This is the thing about Kathak, it is an insider art.  To really see, feel and hear it, one has to have a lot of training.  When they were stopping a composition a third of the way through I was left hanging on a quarter of a beat.  The confidence they had that these complex rhythmic cycles would come out mathematically perfect was itself on show.  

In recent years, Chitresh Das has had enormous success, the father ten schools in India, America and Canada.  His collaborations and innovations are being felt far and wide.

This last week I sent off the abstract for a paper I'm going to deliver in England at Cardiff University in June titled, Shaking Thunder Hands:  Where Martial and Performing Arts Meet in India and China.  It examines evidence that North Indian Classical Dance (Kathak) and Chen style taijiquan share common movement concepts, theatrical representations, and forms of heightened awareness associated with martial enlightenment.  

I've been working on my book everyday too, and my tabla drums are on the same table with my computer.  That's how I've been writing, back and forth between the drum and the key board.  So Chitreshji has been on my mind, visiting me everyday. And by some strange coincidence, I made lamb shank curry yesterday! It has been 20 years since I danced with him.  Still, his memory, his brilliance and his spirit live on in my work.  I am forever grateful to have had him as a mentor.  

Thank you Dadaji.

Chitresh Das, demanding more from his students! With love.

Mixing Styles of Kungfu

I'm headed out to teach in Chicago and then Traverse City for 10 days, if anyone wants to try and meet me, send an email.

________________

This post is just a quick follow up on the previous post: Performative.

There has long been an injunction against studying more than one martial arts style at a time.  The common explanation is that styles will conflict and the student will end up with a mixed style that doesn't represent either style well.  Let me put aside the problem that the student might be just a dabbler, of course if you want to learn real gongfu (kungfu) you have to dedicated hours everyday.  This discussion is for and about serious students of the arts.

In the dance world, students dedicate every day to dance.  But in the dance world the problem is exactly the opposite of the martial arts world.  People who learn many dance styles are versatile and adaptive.  The people who have exclusively studied one style tend to find it harder to dance in other styles.  The most notorious example is classically trained ballet dancers who find it hard to do african dance, they end up looking stiff.  And on the other end there are dancers who do everything with too much flow.  I'm not a fan of the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance," by the way, because they make this claim that the dancers are doing a wide variety of dances, but in reality I see ballet and some "poppie" hip-hop moves in almost every dance.  It should be called, "So You Think You Know What Dance is Because You Watch It On TV?"

Anyway back to martial arts.  The reason some serious students end up blending their arts together is because they think of the different arts in terms of how each art generates power.  So in practice they end up using one style's ideas about how to generate power in the techniques of another style.  

This problem does not come up if the teacher uses the concept of Performative Arts that I outlined in the previous post.  A given art is performed a specific way.  The same way a dance has a specific quality and character.  Each martial art has a performance standard, that is what you are learning.  Using martial arts to learn power generation is a mistake.  That should be an after thought.  

Rory Miller claims to be able to improve most people's power generation in a two day workshop whether they have ten years of experience or ten days.  It simply isn't very difficult to develop power.

I would also argue that the unique types of power any particular style has are entirely accessible through the performative aspects of the art.  

In the end what have you got?  Gravity, structure, unity of mass, and momentum.  No matter how tricky you get, it is always going to come back to these four.

 

Performative

Let's talk about the power of words.  Words can become stand-ins for whole ideas, even whole histories, which makes certain words really powerful.  But strangely these power-words have a half-life, a point at which they lose any actual meaning.  At that point they become simply markers of identity or tribe, if they maintain power it is the power to exclude or ridicule.

Here are some easy examples: sustainable, capitalism, embodiment, spiritual, relax. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments and to devise poems out of them.

After a word has journeyed to meaninglessness it can sometimes be reclaimed.  'Elightenment' is a good example of this.  The word got so over used that it hit the point of self-parody.  But I discovered that if I started using it to mean something real, immediate, present and available, people had to stop and try to figure out what I was talking about.  Suddenly the word had power again, not the same power it once had but at least the power to trigger a deeper conversation.

The paper I wrote last spring which is hopefully going to be published next year is called:  "Cracking the Code, Taijiquan as Enlightenment Theater."  At the same time as I came up with that title I realized the power of another word: Performative. 

The word 'performative' has been framing my teachings and arguments for about six months, it is a powerful word.  Of course I know it is going to become meaningless eventually, but while it still has power I'm trying to get as much use out of it as I can.

The word highjacked my vocabulary because the most common (and effective) argument against the notion that martial arts, theater and religion are a single subject is that performance is differnt from real fighting. 

There are many versions of this argument, for example, "The way people fight on stage is different than the way they fight in real life, therefore performing artists need to train differently than martial artists do."

My response is, no, that is a misconception, a blind spot.  In fact that mistaken view creates training artifacts which prioritize the illusion of utility.  If we start from the correct historically accurate assumption that martial arts are performative, then we won't create false answers to the "why" questions that constantly come from students who don't have experience with lethal violence.  (Another way for teachers to avoid this problem is simply to admit they don't know.  Hey, a guy can hope can't he?)

There is a lot packed into that last paragraph, let me try to unpack it a little.  What is the basic structure of martial arts, be they from Chinese theater or (to take an outlier example), Japanese operant conditioning for living in a castle where assassination is a regular threat?  The basic structure of martial arts is that we train the body to be able to perform certain operations which can be executed under extreme stress (be it the immediacy of a threat or the rigors of physically staying in-character for six hours at a time).  A prince living in a castle has to learn highly specific ritual responses with his body, when to bow, how to bow, what to do with his eyes,  what to do with his sleeves, how to walk into a room.  In Japan, operant conditioning was simply integrated into these exacting protocols.  If someone draws a sword from the left while you are sitting, you do this.  If you both draw at the same time you do this.  If the attack is at this distance you do this, if it starts closer in, do this instead.  It is performative.  It is exacting.  It is all in response to specific "what if's." But it is also part of a much larger performance.  It is the basic training for performing a prince.  

My favorite "why-question" training artifact to make fun of is "the chambered fist!"  This is the idea that the reason people pull their fist back to their hip is so that it will be cocked and loaded, ready to fire!  The real purpose of that whole body posture with the fist at the hip is performative.  As operative conditioning it is a position one fights to, not a position one fights from. As theatrical training it is the base for performing a character.  The core skill one needs to be able to physically stay in character is the ability to keep returning to the same exact body shapes but with specific communicative variations, like context specific walks, mimed actions, or altered facial expressions.  

Enlightenment is perfromative too.  One of the big misconceptions about enlightenment is that it is some sort of process, some type of reactive or responsive way of seeing the world and then acting in it.  I would even argue that the most important element of enlightenment is its performative nature.  Enlightenment is immediate, that is, it is completely un-mediated by any process, it is instantaneous.  

The same is true for gender.  Gender is completely performative.  I can perforom as a woman or a man if I practice those gender norms.  Performing like a woman won't actually change my sex or my biology but it can be liberating to question what is performance and what is biology.  

Identity isn't real; performance is.  "Reality-Based" martial arts aren't real; performance is.  Earthly hierarchies of superiority aren't real; performance is. 

__________________

Now for fun try replacing various subject words from the classic "mystical" chapter 6 of the Daodejing with variations of the word "performance":

The Valley Spirit is Deathless,

It is called the Dark Mare,

The door of the Dark Mare is the root of heaven and earth,

Lingering, it only seems to exist,

Yet in use, it is inexhaustible.  

--Laozi, Chapter 6

Translation by Ellen M. Chen, In Praise of Nothing; 2011: p. 93.