Learning

Confusion is the mind’s response to learning, to looking into the unknown and attempting to make sense of it.  It happens when we come to our own experience, our senses, with a pre-conception about the way something should look, sound, taste, smell, feel, or function.  Confusion is the first wave in the process of dropping a pre-conception, or resolving a conflict between multiple pre-conceptions.  

Frustration is the mind’s experience of a type of compressed breathing that arises from combining effort with learning.  It is also used socially to communicate that something yearned for is out of reach.

Enthusiasm is the mind’s response to the likelihood a core human appetite is going to be nourished.  

Among the greatest expressions of happiness in the Jewish tradition is,  “My son’s have surpassed me!”  It means:  I am wrong and you are right.  It expresses the pure delight in learning and changing ones mind by the influence of another.

When I was 14 I bought a plane ticket to Europe and a train pass for the Summer.  It must have been 1981.  I had worked a lot of different jobs by 14, but I made most of the money for the trip selling political t-shirts for a Communist surfer, dude.  I debated international law with the young, beautiful, and articulate while sleeping under beached small boats in the South of France.  I swam in warm Swedish lakes watching the sun come up and down while having mad sex on smooth granite.  I met Krishnamurti in a rural area outside of London.  I remember his light rolling walk.  I remember his talks, always referring to himself as “the speaker,” in a big white tent.  He went on for hours, I fell asleep, snoring.  I remember how he talked about the illusion of memory and the illusion of the senses.  

I suppose it is no surprise that when I came home, high school was beyond boring.  Hah, I’m not writing my memoir yet, but I would like to understand how my ideas about teaching and learning came to be.  I quickly discovered high risk activities and dangerous people, wilderness, and people who fought with baseball bats and dodged bullets.  I also learned how to convince adults to give me responsibility.  Pushing both boundaries at the same time.  I became entranced by improvisation and dance.  

I tried to welcome contradictions and irony.  I tried to be the student my teachers were ecstatic about teaching.  I tried to find pure learning, to transcend the crutches of punishment and reward, to eschew competition.  

I worry that I can’t keep a secret.  I realize that teaching is almost always a ‘head-fake,’ like in football when you look one way and throw the other.  But a little teaching can go a long way, less is more, right?  And yet, I get consumed my own enthusiasm.  A little showing off of my skills or smarts gives me pleasure.  When I sense a student is comprehending something new, I feel compelled to pile on sensory information and ideas.  I’m excited by the challenge of constantly re-defining, re-imagining and re-experiencing what internal martial arts are.  I have no desire to settle down.

Can I, and should I, learn to withhold teachings?  Can I learn to give students some small practice or idea to cling to, and just let them believe they understand for months on end without bursting their bubble?  In the name of “development?”  Can I be convinced to believe in curriculum?  in progress?  in step by step piling up knowledge and experience?  

I suppose the alternative is to get a giant sign to float over my head that says, “If you don’t love being wrong, you can’t learn.”

Two Talks at Soja Martial Arts

Two talks at Soja Martial Arts in Oakland this month.  Join the fun.

Exploring Theatricality in Chinese Martial Arts with Scott Phillips 

Saturday, Date: 6/23/2012From: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

For Soja's 2nd Summer Lecture series: Scott Phillips will be presenting a workshop/lecture on: Exploring Theatricality in Traditional Chinese Martial Arts Saturday, June 23, 7 – 9 pm Soja Member pre-registration price $20, or $25 @ door. Non-soja members pre-registration price $25 or $30 @ door. The mix of Martial Arts and Theater Arts has captured the popular imagination through super stars like Jackie Chan. But few people realize that before the 20th Century most martial arts were connected to some form of theatrical performance. These ranged from the numerous distinct styles of both folk and classical physical theater, known as ‘Chinese Opera,’ to festival skits, public exorcisms, martial processions, street performances, and improvisational games--all intimately built around actual fighting skills. This workshop will present the seamless confluence of martial arts basic training as a way to explore physical character development, mimic gesture, and as a tool for improvisation and crafting stage presence. This workshop will consist of a mixture of lecture and movement formats. All experience levels are welcome!

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The Shared history of Yoga, Dance & Martial Arts with Eric Shaw 

Saturday, Date: 6/16/2012From: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Eric Shaw will be lecturing for Soja's Summer lecture series: The Shared history of Yoga, Dance and Martial Arts Soja Member pre-registration price $20, or $25 @ door. Non-soja members pre-registration price $25 or $30 @ door. The Great Sage Bodhidharma is said to have traveled to from South India to China in the sixth century, where he taught Ch’an Buddhism and fighting arts to the monks at Shaolin. In the Kerala region he came from, they practice Kalaripayattu, a martial art that is also used by dancers to prepare for the stage. This is only one of many connections in the historical lineage, structure and purposes of these three practices. Come learn the complex story of their rich interweaving in Asian history from ancient days to our living moment, in this presentation rich with images.

Update on 2012-07-09 02:55 by Scott Park Phillips

Here is the Talk I gave!

Amazing Teachers

I've been teaching Northern Shaolin as a performing art in public schools for about 12 years.  A lot of these classes are residencies in which I visit an elementary school class once a week for an hour for a period of anywhere form 8 to 35 weeks depending on funding.  I usually do back to back classes in a gym or a cafeteria and sometimes outdoors.  The number of students ranges from 15 to 35, usually in the mid-20's.  Current rules require that a credentialed teacher be present in the class while I am teaching. Some teachers ignore this rule and leave their students with me.  Some sit in the corner grading papers and ignore what is going on.  Some try to "help" me teach.  Some, by their very presence,  inhibit students or cause over reaction in students. Some try to actually take the class as if they were a student themselves.  Some stay close by to help manage a student or two they personally have trouble with.  Some try to help me manage student behavior in general.  Some watch attentively and nothing else.  I've gotten a close look at a large number of teachers, good, bad and mediocre.  Let me describe two of the best teachers I've worked with.

One teaches second grade.  She stands tall and has a slight southern accent.  I get the sense that she is very "direct" because she doesn't move her head very much when she is talking to me.  She also has a generous smile, and has lately been walking with a limp.  Her second grade students consistently dominate the fifth graders in the school wide spelling bees (unless the fifth grade competitor was fortunate enough to have had her in the second grade!).  I generally meet with teachers the week before the residency begins, and that was the case with this teacher.  I remember very clearly how she brought her students into the cafeteria and then said to me, "Ok, then I'll be back in an hour."  A bit surprise, and worried, I said, "Really, you're just going to leave?"  "Yes," she replied, "You seem extremely professional and experienced and I'm certain my students will behave well."  I've had the opportunity to teach her students 5 or 6 years in a row and they consistently learn at nearly twice the rate of other students.  They are attentive, enthusiastic and supportive of each other.  They are also, and this is frankly amazing, capable of doing much more physically challenging material than most classes.

Another teaches third grade.  He is tall and has a buoyancy about him.  He wears bright colors, like pink and orange, and rides a big fast motorcycle.  He teaches bilingual Japanese and by the end of the year his students are conversant.  He has a full drum set in the room too.  I've worked with his students 5 years in a row and whenever I've had a reason to walk into his room, his students have accosted me with some request.  For instance, a student with a small note book in hand and a pencil behind her ear asked me one time, "Would it be OK if we estimated your height weight and shoulder width and then measured you?"  "Sure...I said."  Seconds later I'm surrounded by students with pads of paper in their hands and pencils behind their ears calling out estimates as they write them down.  Then they cooperated in the "fun" of measuring and weighing me, sharing in the shock and delight of recording real numbers next to guesses.  This teacher actually takes my class as if he were a senior student, sometimes reminding "other" students what the proper way to be a student is.  The second year I taught his class he told me that after taking my class the year before, he got his wife and kids involved in martial arts and that it is now something they love to do together as a family.  His students also learn at nearly twice the rate of other classes, they are comfortable asking complex questions about history and culture and tend to bring out aspects of my curriculum I didn't see coming.

I just finished teaching a 15 week residency with two back to back classes, a 4th and a 5th grade.  These are "new comers," meaning they don't speak English, so I have to teach them without much spoken language.  The 15th week was a 20 minute performance for some parents and the rest of the school.  It went really well.  These two teachers are very happy with my teaching (their both delightful to work with too by the way!).  A comment I often hear is that students are better able to focus in the classroom when they take my class.  My theory about this is that I value not-focusing in my classes as an appropriate way to learn martial arts.  When students have a context in which they are valued for being un-focused they are much more willing to accept and try to improve their ability to focus in other contexts.  I've worked at this school for 6 or 7 years, this year on the 14th week a student teacher with a PE credential happened to notice my class and decided to watch.  She was very excited about what I was doing; acting, dance, music, martial arts, strength, flexibility, complex motor memory, spacial awareness, cultural awareness, improvisation, interpersonal cooperation and competition.  She came back for the performance and expressed incredulity at the notion that I had only been working with them for 14 hours and had gotten them to develop, memorize and perform so much material.

I dare not compare myself to these amazing teachers but I can at least hope that some of their magic has worn off on me.

These two teachers teach at different schools.  It has occurred to me that if I had kids of my own I would fight to get them in these two teacher's classes.  But alas, there is a lottery for schools in San Francisco and the chances of getting either one of them is low.  Neither of these amazing teachers are doing what they do for the money or the pensions, ('though I do sense they cherish their long Summers!)  but I can't help thinking that if these two teachers were paid in some relationship to how much they are in demand, how much they are worth, that other teachers of this caliber would come out of the wood work, perhaps from other professions.  I don't want to dwell on the negative, but it seems worth noting, that as good as these teachers are, there are teachers out there who are as bad as these teachers are good.  And in the case of bad teaching, time spent in their classes...is damage.

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Reflecting on my own experience as a teacher is truly hard to do.  Can I trust my evaluations of myself?  Can I trust the evaluations of others?  Can I even hear them?  Here is my thought.  There are somethings that are important for students to learn that I am not particularly good at transmitting.  And there other important things which I'm an absolute marvel at transmitting.  I ought to be finding people to collaborate with on teaching.  A group of teachers who know and value each others strengths would be an amazing resource for students.

Teaching Without Teaching

I just won an award for this post!  I submitted it to a blogging carnival, where you can read other great offerings on the topic of Bullying!

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I have been doing much thinking about teaching and the nature of teaching and the purpose of teaching.  My ideas are incomplete but I thought I'd do some sharing anyhow.  I got the great pleasure of hanging out with Rory Miller the other day.  We took a long walk.  It is rare (for me) to be in the presence of someone I can talk about anything with.  So unusual.  It made me reflect; am I like that? Most of the time people are exerting a enormous amount of effort to hide their true nature.  We also spend tons of energy pretending to ourselves that we don't see what is happening socially.  What a relief to meet someone who is truly unpretentious.

I got Rory to read Impro by Keith Johnstone, and now he is running around telling people that Martial Arts is to Fighting, as Acting is to Improvising. A significant part of Johnstone's book is about teaching, and we talked a lot about it.  How much of teaching is just failure of the teacher to deeply understand the subject?  How much of teaching is un-conditioning negative behavior learned from loving parents who care so much they can not see what they have done?  How easy it is to be unaware of what behaviors we are reinforcing and what behaviors we are suppressing.  When I woke up the next day after talking to Rory it occurred to me that I may love teaching because I lack confidence.  I may even intentionally put myself in difficult teaching situations because I get a physiological thrill from the see-saw effect of the fear that I will fail miserably followed immediately by elation when things go well.  How would my teaching change if I actually felt confident? or indifferent?

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Anti-bullying is one of the latest fads in education, and it is being used by a lot of martial arts teachers to market their programs.  When I think of bullying I think of my experience with Johnstone.  Bullying is a social game.  It can be taught as a game.  The idea that --a person being bullied is not in control-- is an illusion.  Talking about this is stupid.  You can either play a bullying game and experience it for yourself or you can talk about it for the rest of your life.  Such games can raise fascinating questions about whether or not we are in conscious control of our actions.  I had a kid claim he absolutely could not stand still, and that I could ask his mother about this for verification.  At that moment I was really wishing that a tiger would wander into the dojo and test his thesis for him.

As Rory pointed out, one of the consequences of "zero tolerance for violence" in schools is that now there are bullies who are physically smaller than the people they are bullying.  I had verification of this from some students who came to me a few months ago asking about how they could deal with this kid who constantly hits them, usually on the head.  He is smaller than all of them and they were claiming powerlessness.  Joss Whedon made a film about "zero tolerance" policies.  It's called Serenity.  In the film, as in real life, such policies have horrifying unintended consequences.  No doubt we are training a generation of super-bullies.  I responded to my students by having them play insult and complement games.  It's pretty simple, you face off and insult your partner (keep it personal, keep about him), he thanks you and insults you back, you thank him and then you complement him, then he complements you back, then back to insults, over and over.  The faster the better.  At first most students will make weak offers like "your shirt is messy,"  and they will forget to thank their partner.  As they get better at it, the insults are more and more real like, "your bald spot is a crusty white puke." Then we add self-complements and self-insults.

This leads to my 'Rules for Bullies' number one, which is also my rule of self-defense number one:  accept all offers.  If someone hits you with a baseball bat, keep playing the scene.  Never pretend it didn't happen.  If you get killed come back as a ghost and haunt that #%$@# right away!  Keep the action moving.  If you are trying to bully someone stay focuses on it being their fault!   That annoying twerp (with "zero tolerance" it could be--a handsome jock) is just taking up space, time and air that rightfully belongs to you!  You are the bully, exercise your birth right!  Make them pay! If you are being bullied, for God's sake man, accept all offers! Confess to all accusations immediately and admit to all wrong doing, it's even OK to make up bad things you did and confess to them as well.  But to play this game you must understand that the space belongs to the bully and you are only there to have fun at their expense.  There are two ways to play, if the bully gets closer take up more space, get languid, put your feet up on the cafeteria table, better yet, lay back on the table with your legs spread if necessary reach out in all direction, yawn, drool, as they move away, get smaller. You will control them like an insect with a chip in it's head. The game also works just as well if you shrink and whimper as they get closer and you get bigger as they move away.

Our perception of space is plastic.  It is only when we think it is fixed that we get into problems.  Bullies are not predators.  They are purely social animals.  Social animals are constantly trying to maintain and manage their identities, belongings, and status.  Non-attachment to those things is social freedom.  Knowing this intellectually means nothing.  Knowing it kinesthetically is total social freedom.  But knowledge of this sort is also expertise in trance.  The ability to go in and out of a trance is a skill.  But it is also a risk.  The traditional Chinese way to think about this is that there are ghosts and demons lurking about all the time, attracted by passion, and fear, and when you go into a trance they start eating your kidneys.  Go there too passionately or for too long and you will get stuck in the trance, you may even acquire a ghost body that stays with you...because you are it's food supply.

This is the essence of what I teach:  How you live in your body is determined by the rituals you use to inhabit animated space.

Rory had an interesting rule of thumb; it is to the extent that you really care about something that you are likely to make poor decisions about it. That's because our sense of caring is the limbic system of our brain, not the rational part.  There are strategies one can use to get around this, like actually taking other people's advice, or externalizing the decision by giving it to another person or using an astrological calculation.  The Sunzi has a good story about this:  One general sent the opposing general a jar of wine that actually contained his piss.  Having tasted the piss, the general got so angry that the next day he made a bad decision on the battle field which exposed his vulnerabilities and that was his final battle.

What is the lesson? if you get a jar of piss sent to you--keep playing the scene!  Drink a few glasses and wonder why you aren't getting drunk.  Or send a return jar filled with peach schnapps!

Rory talked about his teaching as giving people permission to act on what they already know to be true from their own experience.  A potent idea.  I believe I'm doing that in the kinesthetic realm too, but I wonder sometimes how deep or far away that experience might be.  For example, can people go straight to remembering how they moved before the first time they got frustrated trying to put two tiny Legos together?  Can they remember all that wasted effort?  Can they return to that effortlessness without the shame of clumsiness or the shame of being too damn cute?

There are two basic ways to deal with bullies.  Make it too much trouble for the bully to bother with you, or get a group of friends together and beat the bully up.  It sounds simple, but these are important and newanced social skills.  However, and this is a big however, a lot of what passes for education is actually bullying.  To teach these skills to kids means that they will have a choice. Have no doubt, kids able to make choices for themselves will bring down the education system as we know it.

Two Events

I'm starting my very own:

Lecture Series

- Daoism and The Martial Arts:  Is there a missing link?

Sunday, April 22nd, at 10:30 AM.   At East Bay Hatha Yoga Shala 2050 4th Street, Berkeley, CA.

Here is the flier (pdf) if you can think of a place good to posted it (your refrigerator is ok.)

How could notions of softness,

gentleness, ?uidity and even

weakness have gotten tangled up

with martial arts?

What exactly is the link between

ritual trance, meditation and tai

chi super hero skills?

Were ancient Daoists some kind

of elite ?ghting group?

Or did they just play that role on

the stage?

Could these ideas and practices

have just melted into each other

over centuries?

Does qigong or yogic daoyin

have anything to do with all this

stuff or is that a different road all

together?

This talk will cover the latest

research into these questions

and more.

How could notions of softness, gentleness, fluidity and even weakness have gotten tangled up with martial arts?

What exactly is the link between ritual trance, meditation and tai chi super hero skills?

Were ancient Daoists some kind of elite fighting group?

Or did they just play that role on the stage?

Could these ideas and practices have just melted into each other over centuries?

Does qigong or yogic daoyin have anything to do with all this stuff or is that a different road all together?

This talk will cover the latest research into these questions and more.

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Also I'm participating in a "Pop-Up" for a new organization called We Are = Movement.  On April 21st @ 1 PM I'm going to be doing solo practice in a storefront with windows at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco.  There are lots of other solo practices to watch over the week and some cool looking evening talks.  Check it out!

Camp Jing!

Basic Chinese Internal Martial Arts 5-Day Training

Lafayette, CA

Session 1 - JUNE 11th-15th
Session 2 - JUNE 18th-22th

The internal martial arts are famous for the cultivation of qi and effortless power; however, the qi levels
and spirit levels can only develop from a physical base.  Without a solid base of practice the higher
levels are in accessible.  This class will focus on physical prowess and high-level body mechanics.  We
will use spiraling, lengthening, shrinking, and expanding to connect the whole body into a powerful
platform for spontaneous freedom.

Zhanzhuang - The practice of standing meditation also called yiquan or wuji.  No one ever got good by skipping this step.

Neigong - Internal power stretch and whole-body shrinking and expanding. This is all the soft stuff!  It develops the four corners of martial fitness -  Unliftable, Unsqueezable, Unmoveable, and Unstoppable.

Jibengong - Basic training for internal martial arts, which includes individual exercises to develop irreversible body art (shenfa), exquisite structure (xing), and refined power (jin). Taiji, xinyi, or bagua focus, depending on your experience.

Lecture-encounters will include a Daoist text studies introduction and history, along with group exploration of the experimental links between theater and meditation. All instruction will be given in the classical one-to-one naturally disheveled style in order to meet and match each person?s unique experience and insights.

Two Person Practices develop spacial awareness and technical spontaneity while systematically testing every part of our physical and emotional bodies. This includes everything to do with resistance, light contact, throws, rough footwork, tui shou, and roshou. How can we discard our social need to dominate or submit, and embody nonaggression without giving up marital prowess?

Schedule
Begin in the parks around Lafayette, CA
6 AM  Zhan Zhuang
7 AM  Neigong
8 AM  Jibengong
*9 AM  Breakfast  (Optional: rice porridge made from bone stock with pickled foods)
10 AM Two Person Practices Training
12 PM Lunch - bring your own or eat locally.  Take a nap, drink tea...
2 PM Lecture/Encounter
4 PM End

*Breakfast will be based on Traditional Chinese Nutritional Theory.

Sleeping
There is camping in the area, hotels, youth hostels, and many other options. We will be walking distance from a BART train stop which means you can stay pretty much anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cost per session - $350

To reserve your spot send a check made out to:
Scott P. Phillips
953 Dewing Ave., Lafayette, CA 94549

Feel free to email gongfuguy@gmail.com or call 415.200.8201 to discuss details.

Applications, Not

When you get some time, look at this article (pdf) that proves convinsingly that teaching martial arts applications slows down or inhibits, kinesthetic learning!  It begs the question, are martial arts teachers consciously or unconsciously holding students back by teaching them applications?  Also, is Youtube in league with the devil?



I've been suspicious of apps since before I ever started teaching, my first teacher, Bing, didn't teach apps.  (Martial applications have become such a standard part of martial arts curriculum that people often refer to them simply as "apps" for sort.)

It is fascinating that apps have taken over.  If I had to bet, I wouldn't put the blame on teachers, aggressive students demand apps!  And teachers are probably seduced by the role of being the candy man--'hey, dude, they are paying me to keep them at a low level of learning --how can I say no?'

George Xu did teach us applications, but his theory at the time (and back then we had a lot of time...4 hours a day, 6 days a week) was that the student should have at least three applications for every inch of movement.  And after a while, the student will develop disdain for all technique and move on to a level of practice where any and all movement is an infinity of open possibilities.

After reaching that level, apps seem silly, 'though, as collectors, we might occasionally be stimulated by a novel or creative app.

But students love apps.  They're always askin' for them.  George Xu explained to us that in and around those dark days of the Cultural Revolution, if a person was unwise enough to asked his xinyi teacher about an app, the student would for sure walk home bloodied.  George told us this casually, but years later when his brother Gordon Xu came over to the States I asked him about George's xinyi teacher and he was like, 'Oh that guy was treturous, the skin on George's shins never had time to grow back.'

In the past, I have sometimes given in to my student's requests to teach them apps, and have lamented that iphones and microwaves have given us neither more free time nor a stronger sense of commitment.

But putting all that aside, enlightened-genius-former-jail-guard Rory Miller solved this problem for me!  He articulated a point which, the moment I heard it, stopped my heart.  "What? Oh my gosh, it's so obvious, how is it that no one articulated this to me before?"  The insight is that we fight to established martial stances, not from them.  Once a student knows the given stance I can put them-- or myself-- in a seriously compromised I've just been surprise attacked position and from there, fight to the stance.   This allows me to point out, or for the student to spontaneously discover, target options, angle variations, or changes in orientation. This way the information goes into the correct part of the brain without becoming a technique to remember  or forget, and it doesn't inhibit learning.  Good angles are good angles, vulnerable targets are vulnerable targets, there is no good reason to link them to particular movements.

Since surprise attacks tend to leave people disoriented, it seems important to practice fighting from disorientation.

Unconditioning

I highly recommend Rory Miller's workshop this weekend.  It's at Soja Martial Arts in Oakland.  Here is the phone number: 510.832.7652"

And here are some more details for sighing up:

https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/ASP/home.asp?studioid=22451

And here is Rory's site incase you want to read more:

http://chirontraining.com/Site/Seminar_Information.html

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Rory recently wrote this blog post about teaching and I posted a comment over there that I liked, so I'm posting it here:

Teaching is about putting people in situations which cause/trigger the collapse of illusions.

Training is about doing exercises which reveal aspects of our true nature. (It is often apophatic).

Conditioning is about creating unconditioned spontaneous responses to situations- as they arise.

Discarding Yes and No

If you've ever been around teens or tweens, or were one yourself at some point, then you are familiar with 'discarding yes and no.'  It is a look they give you that tells you they aren't listening, don't really care to be listening, and many not even be aware that you exist at all. Or as we use to say in Australia, 'I just couldn't be bothered.'

So what do you think happens when I tell my adult students that I expect them to 'discard yes and no?'  That's right! they all look at me quizzically, bring their faces forward a bit, sometimes tilting a little to one side, and nod 'yes'  --Thereby demonstrating that they have no idea what I'm talking about.

If someone I know is walking alone in the distance and I call over to them to get their attention, as they turn they will look first, and then direct an 'I recognize you' face in my direction.  With normal vision one can recognize this face from 100 yards away.  And even if one has very poor vision, he or she will still display the 'I recognize you' face in return.

Comic Ellen Degeneres has a bit where she waves and shouts to get someone's attention and then realizes it isn't them.  It's funny because she reveals how much socially stimulated pain this causes.

The effort it takes to communicate with our faces is usually completely unconscious.  But I would suggest to my readers that normal social communication using the head and face requires enormous strength and torso tension.  That's why teens and tweens sometimes just drop it.  You never actually know if they are listening unless you quiz them afterwards, and even then they may decide not to participate.  And the same is actually true for adults, they may be nodding 'yes' without hearing a single thing you've said.  It could even happen with a loved one on Valentines day!

At about 6 months of age, babies can lift their head and they are capable of a lot of communicative facial expressions.  However, their heads are so big relative to the rest of their bodies that they have to move their chest underneath their head in order hold it up.  At some point they also learn to nod 'yes' and 'no,'  but if you hang out with 5 year olds you'll see that, although they will give a very attentive 'I'm listening face,' they are often reluctant to nod 'yes' and 'no.'  When they do stoop to this adult mode of communication they often exaggerate it with a whole body movement-- undulating with a slack jaw for 'yes,' and shaking horizontally for 'no.'

So.  What's the point?

In martial arts and qigong, the head must be included in whole body movement for it to actually be whole body movement.  If we are using our head for communication, it is very likely that we are exerting enormous torso tension in order to keep it in that state.  As adults, stress is our default position in social situations.

I want to make a distinction here between structural integrity and whole body liquid mass.  A person can be holding their head in an 'I'm ready to nod yes or no' position and still have structural integrity.  As people age, the quality of the structural integrity tends to diminish, but it may still be there.  However, it is not possible to have whole body liquid mass and hold ones head in such a stressful position at the same time.

I suspect that until a student figures out how to get their feet inside their dantian, inside their perception of space, this awareness of the head may be fleeting if it is possible to experience at all.  When the whole body is inside the spacial mind it automatically includes the feet and head.  It is by looking at the relationship between the torso and the head that, as a teacher, or a dude watching too many sub-standard 'masters' on Youtube, I can tell if a persons body is inside their mind--or not.

The head weighs a lot.  Holding it in positions of dominance or submission is a major source of tension.  Holding it in positions of dominance or submission is an obstacle to whole body power.

Outer Inner and Secret

One way to get at the cosmological organization of knowledge in Chinese arts is to think about Outer, Inner and Secret.

Outer is the stuff I can teach by showin' and tellin'.  It is by far the biggest category of knowledge in Chinese martial arts.  A given movement, action, posture or position is either correct or incorrect.

Inner is the stuff a student can learn from interacting with me in a dynamic push-pull/yes-no physical conversation.   It's all stuff that is hard to name.  Though not as big a category as Outer teachings, it is still huge.  Probably the most talked about Inner teachings are structure and root.  These two terms mean different things in different situations.  They can be pressure tested in numerous contexts and nobody really agrees exactly what they mean in words.  But two people fired up in the midst of practice can easily agree on what is what. We know it when we feel it.

Secret teachings take a lot of abuse.  Keeping secrets is widely denounced as a moral offense against modernity.  But the truth is, the real secrets keep themselves.  Secret teachings are concepts, revelations, and experiences which can not be taught.  I can talk about them.  I can show them.  I can write about them.  And to a certain extent, my actions might help transmit them.  But it is just as likely that I'm confusing people and sending them off in the wrong direction.  Secret teachings have to be discovered.  And for such a discovery to happen there has to be a particular openness, a certain milieu, a series of experiences, and a perceptiveness about where to look and what not to do when the secret is found.  The dark irony is that people are discovering these treasures all the time and then just burying them again, unaware.

But the purpose of this post is not to talk about Inner or Secret.  Outer teachings are actually the most neglected. The Outer teachings take loads of practice and hard work.  The Outer teachings store everything else.  They were made by people who lived the secret and inner teachings.  They are the container.  Outer teachings get discarded because people don't understand why they matter, they are easily misunderstood.  Laziness is a problem too.  As is the tendency to be overwhelmed.  Setting aside the time commitment for both student and teacher is so daunting in this day and age that even though the interest may be there, the Outer teachings almost always suffer.  And as my Kathak teacher often bemoaned, "A little learning is a dangerous thing!"

I don't know how to get around this.  Students want Inner, and teachers want to teach it.  But without the Outer container the Inner just spills away.

This fact of modern life leads many teachers to re-formulate their teachings, to create contexts which go directly to Inner teachings, the Aikido dojo is a great example.  Teachers sometimes create whole new simplified Outer teachings to get around this problem, think Jeet Kundo or simplified Tai Chi.  And many teachers just give up.

Ideally we ought to be capable of creating new milieus which will transmit the whole Outer teachings.  When I try to imagine this I see myself focused on a group of 20 year old students.  I suspect that to work in depth on a daily basis with people in their 20's I'd also have to teach economic literacy skills, cooking, simple living, and some kind of emotional release (theater/therapy?).

It makes me want to step back from the whole project of teaching and think about how I might create institutions which would produce students who were ready to learn.  A sort of "Drop out now, ask me how," kind of thing.