Moral Superiority

No, don't worry this post is not about all those Aikido hotties who believe they can whoop your butt with out even hurting you!

There is a more pernicious vibe that has been eating me: People who claim that a teacher who doesn't charge a fee to students is somehow superior to those who do charge.

In Europe this idea is historically inseparable from hatred of Jews. A Jew, by definition, lacked virtue. The European definition of a noble gentleman was of course predicated first on being born to a father and mother of noble birth. But that title could be revoked if you failed to protect the honor of your women or your name. Opening a store or pedaling goods was a quick way to lose your nobility.

The word luxury has come to mean something nice that isn't cheap, but it used to be a sin. To commit the sin of luxury was to have objects or products and services that were reserved for people of a higher class.

Offering a service for free meant you were avoiding the taint of money. Aristocrats controlled everything, land, church, food. Aristocrats did not concern themselves with money, that was the way of peasants and merchants who coveted the luxuries of a life they were excluded from at birth.

In the Middle-east, prices are still set by complex family tribal relationships, anyone outside of that system lacks virtue, and automatically gets a higher price. To offer services for free in this context would simply mean that you are accumulating social obligations in a society where those obligations trump money.

China was somewhere in between. A system of merit existed by which individuals could take an exam and gain a rank in the government or the army. People were also promoted within this system on the basis of their competence. Of course there was nepotism and corruption, but the basic idea was to promote a person because he was the best person for the job.

This existed simultaneously with big family networks. Chinese power can be viewed as multiple overlapping and concentric rings of family influence, each of which makes alliances with other circles of power, the government simply being the biggest most powerful family.

I'm not exactly sure why a certain strain of traditional Chinese thought has felt merchants, and itinerant performers were people of lower virtue. Perhaps it is an extension of the Confucian precept against calculating your advantage over others? More likely it is just a fear of people who are more worldly, people who have a drive to seek their fortune outside of the often stifling confines of village life.

Now add to this that the Communists made a totalitarian state religion out of hating independent business people. After all, business people travel and have a way of undermining the status quo by creating alternate sources of authority.

Doctors in Communist China in the 1980's had to see everyone for free. Gordon Xu (George Xu's brother) worked in a Hospital. He would arrive at 8 am and wasn't allowed to leave until everyone waiting in line had been seen. Most days that was after 8 pm, about 80 patients a day. The state paid him a small salary for his service.
There is no virtue in not charging a fee. If you want to reward low income students who demonstrate merit by giving them free lessons, that's great. But that's because you want to have great students, not because you are doing some great deed for society. Not charging money is often a way of creating social obligation, which has its own value. If you are already rich and don't charge, so what, it means nothing. If you are low income yourself and you don't charge, so what, it just means you don't need the money.

If honor and virtue are diminished by charging money, then they are things not worth having.

The Return of Paulie Zink

I made a point of asking Paulie Zink and his wife to please get some stuff up on Youtube and I probably wasn't the only one. They've done it. And here too.

Even better, he is coming out of retirement to teach Monkey Kung Fu. I also talked to both of them about how extraordinarily wonderful it would be if this Monkey Daoyin was being passed on to kids. I'm thinking here of a Mr. Rogers with mad Kung Fu skills. The wild dynamic world of animation coming to life.

I've been teaching the little bits of his system that I learned to my Northern Shaolin students and they love it. I think I'm going to try to get to Southern California for the workshop.

Training for Failure

Dave over at Iron-Body and I have been having an exchange of ideas. I was really hoping for a seriously heated disagreement but those southerners are so polite, he’s practically ready to open up a branch of my school in Kentucky. (I'm joking.)

Feeling a little desperate, I was reading over his excellent website and I came across this:

Why shouldn't I train to failure?

Training to failure on a consistent basis is training to fail. We want our students to succeed, to push hard and occasionally exceed their limits, but mostly staying just below the threshold of failure.

Training to failure for most people creates a negative mindset and causes undesirable breakdown in the musculo-skeletal and Central Nervous systems.You should leave feeling better than when you came in and you should be able to finish your day feeling great and with lots of energy.

Our focus is on quality of movement. When you are training to failure your form will degrade to such an extent that you dramatically increase the risk of injury.

I have to admit two things: One that he explains the problem well, and two, that I basically agree with him.

This reminds me of a student I had that would make a face and either grunt or purse her lips and make farting sound every time I gave her a correction (which was several times each class). She was training hard and wanted to get it right, but the demonstration of self-punishment meant that she added a negative emotion and physicality to my correction. It was too much for me.

I give corrections all the time, if a student doesn’t enjoy getting corrections, they shouldn’t be studying with me. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she had been taught that people would be nicer to her if she showed a willingness to punish herself. She may even have been rewarded for demonstrating frustration.

So actually I don’t really agree with Dave. He is right, but he is not going far enough.

Unhappy students are going to blame me, the teacher, eventually anyway, I might as well take responsibility for everything that goes wrong from the beginning. So I tell my students, "If you don't understand something, if you get something wrong, if you fail, blame me, it's my fault!"

Rather than teaching people to avoid experiences of failure, I teach people to enjoy failing! The more good-natured people are about failing the more willing they are to take risks. The more fun they have failing, the more likely they will be to try something new and challenging. Contests and drama would be cold gruel without both failure and success.

If you can fail and enjoy it, people will love being your partner and the teacher will love using you for demonstrations.

Without failure, loss, death and decay around to prop it up, beauty would be much diminished.

Two Talismanic Questons

I started a new Northern Shaolin teaching gig today, three classes of 1st graders. Yes they are sweet and cute and enthusiastic. That brings my weekly teaching total to 11 kids classes and 9 adult classes. Which leaves me just enough time to write one weakness inspired blog post every day.

I have more to say on yesterday's post but it will have to wait until tomorrow when I have more time to think.

Six months ago I wrote down two questions which I posted on the cork board above my desk. Besides being talismanic, the questions have functioned as a daily mini-mantra check-in.

My practice has seen more positive change in the last six months than it did in the previous two years. I, of course, credit you all, my virtual audience, because writing and exchanging has forced me to re-think and unravel all the metaphors and methods I employ in my practice. So thanks!

But then again, maybe it was those questions. So here they are. And feel free to make them into a talisman or a mantra.

Do you own your legs?

Do you trust your arms?

A New Word

The word orthodox is pretty common. It means a right way of thinking or a correct standard way of understanding.

When it comes to taijiquan and really any Chinese martial art there really isn't an orthodoxy. There are definitely lineages which transmit explanations and define concepts, but really it is the practice which holds to a standard, not the ideas.

A lineage holds together a list of practices. If you ask a teacher or a practitioner why they do a certain movement, or what it's function is, or even what one should try to accomplish with a particular aspect of practice--you'll get wildly different answers. And it's not just that different people in the same lineage will give you a different answer, ask the same person twice and you're likely to get a different answer the second time.

For instance, what a teacher says about the function of the movement "play the pipa," can vary tremendously-- one day it has some health or relaxation feature, another day it is a foot hook with a shove, another day it is a joint lock, another day it is a foot trap with a slap, another day it is a technique for breaking the neck, another day it is a throw from the hip, another day it is a throw from the neck, another day it is a way to catch the eyes............................................................................................Hey don't go thinking I'm a broken record (for you youngsters that's an old fashioned musical devise that sometimes repeats itself). I taught gongfu to kids for 4 hours today, at two different sites and adults for 3.5 hours at two different sites, and I had a business meeting at another site--all this in the rain...I am tired!...but my appetite for blogging is over powering my appetite for sleep. (See yesterday's blog below.)

Anyway I was telling you dear reader about a new word: Orthopraxy. Taijiquan is an orthopraxy. A martial arts lineage is an orthopraxy, it is a correct way of doing something. It is not a correct way of thinking about or explaining something. Get it?

I'm sure you get it. But immediately this raises another question.  I practice an orthoprax style of taijiquan, fine, but I've been innovating new movements with my xingyi, what do I call that? Not heterdox but heteroprax!

When you are just doing your own thing, we can now call that heteropraxy!

Note to the Oxford English Dictionary: I suspect you will be including heteropraxy in your next addition. Please include my URL when you site me as an example of first uses. Thanks!

Proprioception and Kinesthetic Awarness

To feel your body or not to feel your body, that is the question.

If only Hamlet had studied Tai Chi.

The tongue always feels things bigger than they actually are. If I try to feel the size of my hands with my eyes closed, they usually feel bigger than they actually are. I know how big they are supposed to be, but I still feel them bigger. If I keep my hands still for a few seconds with my eyes closed my sense of how big they are starts to morph into other shapes.

Taking drugs can disorient us so much that we do not feel our bodies. They can also cause us to feel our bodies in weird expansive or contracted shapes, or to feel intermittently. But we don't need drugs for this, if you are flirting to someone really hot, you might forget about your own body altogether. A great conversation, reading or writing, watching a movie, all of these everyday experiences can cause us to forget our bodies, to feel them in an exaggerated way, or to drift in and out.

Traditionally strange feelings and disembodied feelings were covered under the subject: trance and possession. Now we have the scientific categories of proprioception and kinesthetic awareness.

Extreme relaxation, or extreme stillness often result in the sensation that ones body has no boundaries.

Pain starts with exaggerated feelings of the body and often leads in and out of feelings of disembodiment. There is nothing like getting hit to make you feel your body, but if you are going to keep fighting you need to "shake it off." What is being shaken off? A contracted sense of space?

When big muscles are engaged and experience resistance they cause us to feel our bodies at the expense of our sense of space and movement. Thus my often repeated comment that they make us insensitive. But more specifically what they are doing is making us feel in a limited way.  Movement orients us, muscle tension reduces our ability of perceive.
There is a continuum of  proprioception ability from superb to dysfunctional.  The Sensory Processing Disorder website is a great place to learn about how to recognize proprioceptive problems in yourself and others.

Here is a really nice article that explains how proprioception interacts with other senses.

Here is an article about consciously training proprioception.  It got me thinking about how my body learns, but practicing internal martial arts does everything these silly exercises do.

Of course there is always Wikipedia.

The traditional Chinese categories of shen, xin, jingshen, yi, jin, and shi all refer to and encompass aspects of proprioception and kinesthetic awareness.  How else could "shi" be translated variously as: strategic advantage, a location at the center of change, potential energy, and the unification of active power with inner quiet.

Gates vs. Stone Bridges

A teacher's greatest dilemma is whether to teach gates or stone bridges.

Getting around a traditional Chinese city, village or home is all about going through gates. Thus "going through a gate" is a primary metaphor used to describe learning something or getting something done. It is also a primary metaphor for describing movement of qi around the body. For instance, the shoulder and the hip each have a major gate that allows qi to move between the limbs and the torso.

I did a lot of skateboarding in my teens. Every day I skated steep hills with (by todays standards) large 70 millimeter Kriptonics wheels. I'm what the kids today call O.G. (Old Gangster). There are very few people with this particular experience around. Downhill skiers and snowboarders have some comparable skills, so I can at least communicate with them, but snow is softer than concrete and there aren't a lot of cars on the slopes.

Skateboarding was a gate I passed through to get to my current understanding of internal martial arts. It still informs my practice. When I heard the taijiquan saying "You must go left in order to go right" I understood it immediately, skateboarding works the same way. If you are going to make a high speed 90 degree turn into traffic you have to feel your pathway through space and along the ground before you make the actual sequence of turns that will get you into the little space between the the moving cars and the parked cars. Just turning to the right will get you squished.

Now when I teach, I'll say something like "Do this," or "Copy me," but nine times out of ten the student doesn't quite do what I'm hoping they will do. So I'll describe what I'm doing, or let the student feel my torso moving. But often they still don't "get it." I think, o.k., if I was in their body I would just do "this" and "this" and "that other thing." From where I'm standing I can see exactly what they need to do to get to where I am. It is as if there were a stone bridge that, if they could see it, they could just walk across.

But they don't see the bridge. So I have a choice. I can either keep trying to get them to see the bridge, or I can take them through some of the gates I passed through on my way to achieving my current skill level.

I do have some memory of the hundreds of gates I passed through to get to my current skill level in internal martial arts. From a teacher's point of view, the only proven method for getting to where I am, is to pass through all the same gates I passed through. However, it isn't realistic for me to ask all my taijiquan students to take up downhill skateboarding.

What most teachers do at this point is to make up a list of gates (exercises, experiences) that will hopefully be a shorter route to excellence than the one the teacher took to get there. Some of the gates I teach are ones I passed through myself, some are gates that I think are improvements on the ones I passed through, and some are gates I put there because I'm hoping that the student might notice the stone bridge off to their left on the way through.

Every teacher, whether he is rigid, traditional, experimental, or inspired, has to decide whether to point to the stone bridge, or guide students through gates. I wish I understood this when I first started studying gongfu.

Bowing

There is a Daoist precept against subordination. In fact there is a precept (one of the 180 of Lord Lao) that says, "Do not serve in the military. If you must serve in the military do not serve in a subordinate position." I take this to mean join as an officer and be in a position to make decisions about life and death.

I think people living as we do in a commercial society find the idea of not being subordinate both appealing and at times unworkable.

(Currently I feel subordinate to my web hosting service and my ISP which are never able to solve all the weird intermittent and indeterminate problems I have in my daily struggle/walk-in-the-sun to publish my blog. 2 hours on the phone, zero results. If you occasionally get a “Yahoo 404 Error� or a "500 error" when you try to read my blog, I’d love to hear from you.)

What is the purpose of bowing? A traditional class has at least three bows. The first bow is done upon entering the space. Why bow to the space? This tradition comes out of the shamanic practice of subordinating oneself to allies (gods, spirits, ancestors) in exchange for power. The power one gets through subordination is then used to exorcise, scare away, or subordinate all other beings in a given space. It is often called "purification." (Today at the farmer’s market I watched a large man attempt a rather weak version of purification while swinging a bible and shouting in a horse voice about revelation.)



The Japanese term Dojo means Hall of the Dao. It most likely comes from Sung Dynasty (900-1200 CE) Daoism. Clan halls, trade halls, and halls associated with the mega-deity-category "Earth," were used as community centers, places for everything (Dao). When you entered one of these halls to practice gongfu (meritorious martial training) it was important to clear the space of spirits that might try to possess you--dangerous spirits are particularly attracted to weapons and those who wield them.

When a shaman purifies a space, she uses her acquired strength to forcibly evict all the ghosts and spirits that have taken up residence there. Since Daoists did not practice subordination to other entities and they were weak by precept and commitment, they didn’t actually purify the space immediately. Instead they bowed. The act of bowing is a declaration that human beings are going to temporarily use the space for meritorious actions. Bowing doesn’t scare away ghosts, or banish them. Bowing is a way of asking spirits to temporarily clear out. It is a declaration that the practice about to be performed will not be of any interest to ghosts. A ghost is an entity defined by weak, deficient, or lingering commitments.

The second bow is usually to the teacher. The teacher joins this bow because the bow is not to the person but to the teaching itself. It is as if all the teacher’s teachers are standing behind him and he ducks so that the bow of the students will fly over his head to be received by all of the ancestors of the teaching itself.

(In many schools, before and after working with a partner people will bow to each other as equals. This bow again represents a declaration to practice only acts of merit.)

The third bow is to give up the space to who ever or what ever is going to use it next. It cautiously invites the spirits back. After doing this ritual in a space for several years the spirits attracted to dangerous behavior or people with weak commitments will have had time to find another place and will have moved on. Through this continual demonstration of acts of merit (gongfu) some spirits will have found the strength to complete themselves and become one with Dao. Thus we call this place a Dojo, a hall of the Dao.

The Era of Conditioning

I want to announce that we have officially entered the Era of Conditioning.

Conditioning has now become one of the primary ways we think about the world. It is not enough to learn good habits, we have to make them permanent. People ask questions like: How can we condition people to put their garbage in the trash? To not over eat? To work more productively? To not run red lights? To get on an airplane efficiently? To smile?

Sports, physical therapy, and parenting are all dominated by theories of conditioning. I did some boxing yesterday with gloves and mitts, issuing combinations of punches as the trainer calls them out. The whole idea is to condition a response in a cycle that is intense for 3 minutes and then rests for 1 minute. Release a combination when you see an opening, get your body out of the way when you are attacked.

Medicine is moving fast in the direction of conditioning. Like drugs that condition a particular response from the body. And more shockingly, we now have genetic engineering and stem cell research predicated on the idea that we can grow people the way we want them.

People are even trying to condition their hair!

I'm anti-conditioning. I believe in doing things form the inside out. If I said, "I believe in beginning from the heart," you could accuse me of being a silly romantic. But it's not because I want to bring out genius, or preserve mystery, I just prefer spontaneous unconditioned responses.

I try to teach people to have unconditioned responses. For me, teaching Shaolin to kids is about meeting completely self possessed human beings and presenting them with a tool they can use to keep their bodies unconditioned. A tool for countering or side-stepping conditioning. When a student enters the room the first thing they do is bow. The act of bowing is a declaration that only completely self possessed acts will happen in this room. Students are not permitted to say the words "I can't" because those words mean "something outside of you is in control." Teaching is not something one gives away, it is too difficult for that. It is something students must take for themselves.

In Chinese the term ziran means unconditioned and is often used to describe great art. It means: natural, so-of-itself, and spontaneous. There is even a style of gongfu called Ziranquan (Natural fist) famous for its loose light stepping. (Sun Yat-sen used a Ziranquan guy for his personal bodyguard.)
There is a fine line between super-high-level internal martial arts conditioning and a completely unconditioned, spontaneous, ziran response. It is the same fine line I have talked about before between "perfection," and "wuwei."

For instance, there are three approaches to jindan, the Daoist golden elixir (meditation/alchemy).

1. We could have the embarrassing idea popularized by Mantak Chia that we are moving qi around the micro-cosmic orbit (up the back and down the front), for no particular reason except "orgasmic power." That would be a type of qi conditioning, an act of inviting external forces to possess you.
2. Or we could have the perfection model of jindan, where through perfect visualization and embodiment of various deities and their attributes we become acutely aware of simultaneous movement and stillness. Here specific pathways of qi circulation become the measure of that swing between movement and stillness. That would be transcendent conditioning.

3. Or we could just naturally trust being still.

American Qigong Ethics (part 2)

Recently I was having an informed and thoughtful conversation about schools with a woman who has a high level job in statewide education when she casually mentioned that she studies qigong with a real master.

"Oh great," I say, "tell me more."

She tells me he leads a cancer group at one of the local Integrative-Medicine hospital clinics. "What makes him a master?" I ask, explaining that Qigong as medicine is a pretty new idea, and that taxi drivers in China are awarded the title "Master" (Shirfu) as well.

"Oh he's amazing." She said, "We do a style of walking Qigong around a small park and one day a drunk homeless guy stood up and moved imposingly toward our path shouting insults. My master just waved his hand and the guy promptly went over to a bench and fell asleep."

"O.K." I thought to myself, "Obe-Wan Kenobi did that in the Star Wars movie too!" "That's an extraordinary claim," I say. "Are you learning how to do that? What other sorts of claims does he make?"

"Oh, he is very modest. He would never make such a claim himself. I just do it everyday because it makes me feel healthy."

Now, eye rolling aside, I'm not a truth junkie. I don't want to pop this woman's balloon. I don't know what he is personally claiming, but she has apparently talked herself into exercising everyday. Who am I to get in the way of that?

Still there is a significant chance that I have been practicing qigong longer than her "Master," who I suspect invented a lineage and an improbable training history. It diminishes me in two ways. First, some people will assume I'm not very knowledgeable because I don't do these sorts of amazing feats. Second, other people may associate Qigong with these improbable claims and disregard my knowledge altogether. Both of these things happen all the time.

Does her master have some ethical responsibility to clarify his powers of agency?  How different is this from Jerry Alan Johnson who wrote a dictionary sized book on Qigong that I wouldn't even use as a door-stop?  Johnson uses the "sword-fingers" mudra to do "needless" acupuncture, and one of his students is the main Qigong teacher at a Berkeley Acupuncture School.
I acknowledge that charismatic Qigong teachers get disciplined health commitments from their students or clients that I don't get. If you tap into a client's insecurities, or their desire for power, by convincing them that they will be freer, or happier, or stronger, or more preceptive, or even more intuitive, if only they quit eating fried chicken and do some groovy breathing exercise--who am I to get in the way? Those commitments are legitimately good for one's health. Other people are free to subordinate themselves to people and ideas.

The first American Qigong Precept that I propose is this (I know, it's a little long for a precept):

When you don't know, admit you don't know! Teach your students to do the same.  Do not make claims about healing properties that you can not substantiate.  Clear explanations are O.K., anecdotes are not unless you say, "This is an un-substantiated anecdote!"

Good storytelling can be a useful teaching method because it has the power to make metaphors memorable.  When you present stories as history, go ahead and give the good-guys white hats and the bad-guys black hats--but beware, your are walking a fine line--make sure your students are sensitive to the presence of ambiguity.
If your knowledge comes from intuition admit that, and don't cross the line of claiming to know with certainty.