Body-Mind Centering

I don't have a lot of time to write today but I thought I'd give a plug for Body-Mind Centering.

The School for Body-Mind Centering

Body-Mind Centering Association

I studied this stuff a with Rebecca Haseltine back in the 90's, we co-taught a few fun workshops too.

Dizziness

You know that feeling you get when you spin around really fast and then stop? In the cartoons this feeling is usually illustrated with a swirl and some stars around the head. But actually the whole body has this spinning feeling. You can feel it in your knees and elbows too.

With this sort of disorientation it feels as if there is a body that is now still, and a second body that hasn’t stopped spinning yet. As you gain your baring, it feels as if that "other" body comes back inside.

A similar thing happens to me (and I think most people) when I am laying down very relaxed and still. I feel my body start to move around slowly, even though I know I’m not actually moving. I can control it, but it requires that I relax first, it feels like I'm letting myself drift.

Well this feeling of the body drifting out is an important aspect of Baguazhang, Taijiquan, and Internal Martial Arts practice in general. When I soften my movement to the point where I feel like I’m continuously melting, as I turn side to side it feels like my body keeps turning even after I have stopped. If I follow the "other" body, my solid body will lose its integration, so the correct response is to stop and re-integrate. Then I can turn the other way and repeat the experience on the other side.
When doing a form, or practicing push-hands, or even fighting, we control this 'other' body, circling it around and even throwing it like a light silk blanket over our opponents.

A significant number of martial arts techniques gain efficacy through disorienting the opponent in one way or another.  Likewise, a significant amount of training is designed to familiarize us with strange sensations and orientations so that when they happen in a fight we don't get disoriented.

There have been a few studies that show taijiquan training improves balance in older people.  I like to point out that his is "fallout" from, or a  "sidecar" to, the main project of martial training and cultivating weakness, but never the less it is a nice benefit.

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.

Recipe For Pork Shoulder

It's Winter in my part of the world. Time for slow cooking. Since the fire-pig year is coming to a close I thought I'd do something with pork.

If you are training in martial arts, or even if you are hoping to develop the mysterious Daoist inspired "rainbow body," you are in for a long slow process. Still, everywhere I look, people are trying to find a short cut. While I do believe short cuts are possible, most attempts to speed things up end in failure.

Attempts to short cut the process of making high quality muscle and sinew usually produce toughness at best (lets not talk about the worst case scenario).  Taking the muscle metaphor a little further, what quality of meat are you producing in your training?

If you try to cook pork shoulder in the microwave you're going to produce something so tough, you might as well have put your shoe in there. All my attempts to speed up the process of making pork shoulder edible have ended in something that requires a lot of chewing and is short on flavor. So here is Nam Singh's recipe:

• Put a pork shoulder in a dutch oven or heavy pot with a lid


• Half cover it with a 50/50 mix of soy sauce and water.


• Add one whole star anise.

• Put it in a preheated oven at 250 degrees with the lid on


• Turn the pork shoulder every 30 minutes for 5^_1/2 hours


• The finished product has a light sweet black crust and the meat melts in your mouth.


• I like to serve it with homemade pickled cabbage & daikon over rice.


• Don't be alarmed if the people you feed this to find it difficult to speak for a few minutes and their eyes roll back into there heads.

Note:  If you are interested in San Francisco classes on cooking with traditional Chinese herbs with Nam Singh, drop me a note and I'll get you in touch with him.

Michael Jordon's Tongue

In Chinese Medical theory the finger and toe nails are considered the ends of the tendons. In gongfu we treat our nails like cat claws that can retract and extend.

Of course humans don't have the full extension/retraction that cats do but our nails do move and we can learn to have control over them. Developing whole body tendon integration is a preliminary stage for learning whole body power. To do this one must practice initiating movement from the nails, the outer periphery of our bodies.

Just like the nails are the ends of the tendons in Chinese Medical theory, the tongue is the end of the muscles.

The chansijin (taijiquan silk reeling power exercises)  movements of the head have a little known tongue component. For instance there is a "head forward and back" neck roll that replicates the infant sucking reflex all babies develop. If you do the exercise correctly the whole inside of your throat, including your tongue, will involuntarily come outward and suck back inward with each rolling motion.

The seventh palm change in Baguazhang is sometimes called "snake spits out it's tongue" for the same reason; it is possible to tap into whole body power through activating the sucking reflex in which the tongue goes forward and draws back. With practice, the whole torso will be involved in the movement.

In both of these cases, the tongue remains hidden.  This is a type of secret teaching known as "indoor" or "six ears never hear."
Michael Jordan, on the other hand, has not been shy about showing us his tongue. He is by far the greatest Basket Ball player I've every watched.

Now I ask you, is it a coincidence that he also happens to be the only player who constantly sloshed his tongue around in his mouth and regularly stuck it out when he was making full use of his muscles?  Was he just fooling around, or was that a secret source of his power?

A Long Strong Spirited Response

Dave Randolph over at iron-body offered a spirited response to my somewhat comic post entitled, "The Two Finger Rule." He offered several challenges to my anti-strength position so I thought it would be a good idea to explore them.

Do you see all the obese, people out there? People who can barely carry their groceries into the house. Frail old ladies & men who can’t get out of a chair by themselves or have to use an extension thing on the toilet so they don’t have to squat down so far.

Yes, I do see them. Obese people eat too much. People get old and die. I'm not sure, because I haven't done it yet, but I think getting old and dying takes a lot of practice. If you try to do it without practicing, you can expect some extra complications. Internal Martial arts like Taijquan can be understood as practicing for death.

Correct strength training does not impede the flow of fluids or qi.
Are you saying that all the old drawings of monks carry water up and down steps, swinging stone lock etc were wrong in trying to build functional strength??

Are you confusing true strength training with body building? Yes building bodies is wrong. It teaches muscle isolation and creates huge muscles that are not necessarily strong and that will creates circulation issues. But proper strength training, and I’m speaking of barbells & dumbbells, but things like kettlebells, clubbells, sandbags etc, that teach full body integration and coordination, causes so many positive responses the body in terms or weight control, mobility, flexibility, coordination not to mention the positive effects on hormonal balances, sleep, digestion, among other things

If the definition of "correct strength training" is that it does not impede flow of fluids or qi, than I would be inclined to agree. However; the people I've watched training with these AKC Kettle Bells (pictured to the right) do indeed restrict qi circulation, and they compress qi as well.

But let's agree to drop the word qi, because it has too many possible meanings for such a concrete disagreement. What I mean by qi in this case is a quality of animation that is characteristic of active children and predatory animals.

Monks in Asia carry water on their shoulders, people in Africa and South America carry it on their heads. The skill of carrying water is to continuously transfer all of the weight to the ground and not take any of it in your muscles. Since water tends to slosh around, this requires constant movement and is perhaps one of the reasons we see such great hip articulation in dances like the Samba and the Rumba.

I'll concede that if someone is really good at water carrying and they get help putting the water on their shoulders or their head, they can carry a heavy load and avoid loosing sensitivity.

...Part of my strength training includes lots of mobility work for joints and muscles as well as qi gong.

I think the Scott Sonnon, Iron-Body, movement to loosen your joints and use awkward weights to stimulate your body to be more efficient is wonderful! Now just drop the strength part!

I love business, and I love this new health kick. But if you are looking for high level internal martial arts, strength will inhibit your development. My point is not to convince the world I'm right, I don't think sensitivity is for everyone. Perhaps I'm a weakness elitist in that way. Then again, remind what we need strength for?

By the way can you pick up a 75 lb child with two fingers from each hand? No? then how are you going to pick one up & carry he/she if they are injured & can’t walk? Call for someone to help you pick them up?

I would like the world to know that I have two really strong fingers, and I'm undefeated in thumb wrestling. Also, I'm not saying only use two fingers, I'm saying test whatever you are about to lift with two fingers. After the test feel free to add the other fingers, a hip, a chin, or even a whole arm. (And we've all heard the story about the lady who flipped over a car because her baby was underneath it. If you're healthy and you really need the strength, it'll be there.)

As for picking up kids, two fingers in the armpits usually works, but in my experience they are not shy about biting, better to get help.

Since an injured kid is one less kid I have to teach, I should leave it at that but... I noticed the Iron-Body website does trainings for firefighters who obviously are in the business of rescuing people and their kids. This is great stuff. I admire the business model. But it does raise the question, do firefighters really need extra strength?

You know those ninja shoes? Well, they aren't actually ninja shoes, they are called jika tabi. All construction workers wear jika tabi in Japan. That's right, Japanese construction workers think of themselves as crafts people, not laborers. They don't drop things on their feet, so they don't need steel-toed boots.  Sometimes conventional thinking is a limitation.
When I was born, all the fire fighters in San Francisco were straight, white, over 6 feet tall, male, and at least 185lbs. We had a Whites Only Union until 1990! San Francisco currently has twice as many fire fighters, engines, and firehouses as we need. Whenever a city official with balls comes along, the Unions go to the sentimental-fireman-gushing-voters and have that official castrated.

If we didn't have to pay for all that fire fighter corruption we could afford to design and build all new lightweight efficient equipment and we could even have midget fire fighters. Strength is an issue here only because it protects a class of aging, compassionate and heroic men--that should have been let go a long time ago.

The Gerald Warner Taiwan Image Collection

The Gerald Warner Taiwan Image collection is  fantastic.  (Hat tip to: Frog in the Well-China).

Check out the weapons and hunting categories.  These pictures are mostly from Taiwan in the 1930's.  Wow!

Dong Hai-chuan's foot

Just a simple image for today.

Most Bagua zhang practitioners have heard the story about Dong Hai-chuan breaking a cobble stone with his foot. The story goes, one day a junior student asked why as he was required to walk leading with his toes and pressing his back heal while Dong sometimes stepped on his heel and pushed off his toe? After giving the student a good thrashing for asking a question, Dong went over to a solid cobble stone about 6 inches thick, put his foot on it and shattered it into tiny pieces. Then he said, "When you can do that you can walk however you want!"

OK what's going on here? Old man crushes stone by pushing down on it. Even if he put double his own weight it would not be enough. I've crushed cobble stones--with a sledge hammer. It normally takes a very hard heavy object, like a hammer, being swung from a height to break a stone.

So what is the story supposed to teach us? That Dong was a god made out of steel? That we should just shut up and practice otherwise we'll have to listen to silly stories? That Dong had mastered bring down the Qi of Heaven? Whatever. No, there must be a point to the story.

My take on this story is that every stone has fissures and invisible crack already in it. Dong's foot was so sensitive that when he put his foot on the stone he could feel all the places where it would crack. As he applied pressure his foot expanded and spread all the tiny fissures apart and the rock just crumbled.

To do this your foot would have to be wiggly and dynamic like an octopus and it would have to be as sensitive as a baby's cheek! (OK that's your homework.)

Steps of Perfection (part 2)

Here I continue my discussion of, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, by Donald S. Sutton. (see Here for the earlier post.)

This book has implications for how we understand Martial and all other Chinese arts.  To be fare to the author, this post is more about what the book inspired me to think and less about the actual content of the book.
When Taiwan's Jiajiang martial dance troops are traveling in procession, the head of the procession is a guy carrying a board covered in miniature torture devices. His other hand can hold a whip or various other weapons. Some of the boards appear to be like sandwich boards with various traditional torture devises glued or nailed to the surface.

What's going on? Well, part of what is exciting about this book is that nobody knows exactly. That is, people have explanations but the various explanations don't always jive with each other. However, the practice and how these events should be organized and performed is an orthopraxy, it has a clear right way and a taboo wrong way. This is true even taking into consideration that what is right and what is wrong has some flexibility from troop to troop and has changed somewhat over time.

The the author tells us that during the early part of the Ching Dynasty, before people from Fuzhou came to Taiwan, local magestraites organized parades in which they exhibited the actual devices used by the courts for torturing confessions. As you probably know, all convictions in a Chinese court required a confession. Very often this required a bit of torture. (Trance-mediums were also sometimes used in courts. For instance they might be hired to channel a recently murdered person in order to ask the person, "Who killed you?")

Processions for popular Heavenly gods mimicked the parading that magistrates and other representatives of Earthly government employed. In one account, Sutton describes how a magistrate and his entourage are forced to wait for some offensive amount of time while a god (often a youth with a painted face) passes by in a sedan chair dressed in magistrate like robes with a simular but perhaps larger entourage.

In the West, for reasons I won't go into here, we gradually decided that torturing a confession was a bad idea. But in China, torture by degrees took on various meanings which where not all together bad.

At a basic level, a confession can play a role in creating a feeling of resolution. This is true for society in criminal cases, but it is also true in personal relationships. An honest reckoning is actually essential for progress in any field or practice. A martial artist that doesn't admit the mistakes they have made in training will surely fail to progress. A person filled with shame who continues to avoid a confession or an honest reckoning will continue to do shameful things. For people with pour eating habits or hygiene, an honest reckoning can extend their lives.

Thus confessions were associated with both healing and merit. The threat of torture in the near future or by ghosts and demons during the slow process of being re-assimilated by heaven and earth at the time of ones death, was and is still thought to motivate people to confess their indiscretions.

Daoists framed this discussion in terms of qi. Indiscretions could be thought of as qi crimes, which were graded from the most extreme, killing people for fun, to the most subtle, using too much effort for a simple task like opening a door.

Social reforms, from a Daoist point of view generally incorporated the idea that bad behavior, like wasting qi, has consequences for the actor that take effect very quickly after the act. In other words, humans are self-correcting entities. We torture ourselves. The problem is that people aren't always paying attention to these consequences. This is one of the reasons that Daoists developed so many methods that develop sensitivity to are own body.

Hard styles and soft styles of martial arts can be understood this way. A hard style is a form of self torture in which the pain you cause in practice acts as a corrective agent, leading you to acts of merit (which is what Kung Fu means!) A soft style like taijiquan, is based on the idea that on any given day we are committing numerous qi indiscretions (or small qi crimes if you prefer) and that we ought to dedicate an hour or two a day to practicing not wasting qi.

Aggression, of course, is a constant "cause" of qi wasting. From a Daoist point of view, if you lose your temper, you probably caused yourself a very minor internal injury, but you also caused some kind of reaction in the world around you. That reaction, like a ripple in a pond might dissipate gently, but it also might lead to a tidal wave somewhere down the line. And since we have no way of really knowing, losing your temper is seen as inappropriate. I think it is important to note, that from a Daoist point of view, well timed aggression may be worth the risk.

At the Acupuncture college where I teach it is well known that if given a choice between two treatments, most native born Chinese will choose the more painful treatment. I believe the inspirations for this, perhaps buried deep in the unconscious, is that acupuncture and moxabustion are like mini-torture sessions in which worldly and other worldly "causes" of pain and illness are forced to confess and correct their ways!

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?