Monkey Swings

Last month I was at a family gathering and there was a five month old girl who was crying. Her aunt, who has several wild children of her own, tried rocking her and then bouncing her, but the baby was still crying. Then with a big grin she announced, "We are going to have to try Monkey Swings." I can now verify from my observations that monkey swings are an effective crying control mechanism.

The standard Taijiquan, Xingyi and Bagua zhang instructions tell us to lift up our heads from the Baihui point on the very top of the head. Some Shaolin and meditation schools say to lift from a point a little further back so that the chin comes in slightly. Further, I have heard lift from the roof of the mouth, lift from the base of the skull and even lift from a point in the air about one foot above your head.

All of these instructions are useful gates. It is vitally important to develop awareness of head position, centerline, dingjin (upward power), and zhengqi (upright, self-correcting vigor). However, I think these instructions alone will not produce a high quality final product.

I've now spent way too much time looking at baby pictures on google images, I may need some time to recover my manliness. Unfortunately I could not find a single picture of a monkey swing so I'll have to describe it. Here is how you do a Monkey Swing^TM:

While sitting down place the baby on its back in your lap with the its feet facing you. Take hold of an ankle and a wrist in each of your hands. Then lift up and swing the baby's bottom toward your face and then it's head out and away, using your forearms as the pivot. Continue swinging until the desired results are achieved.

As you are imaging this, you might think that the baby's head would flop backwards like that of the child on the swing above. But it didn't. The baby's head stayed right in line with its torso. This was a five month old I was watching, a younger baby probably would have had a floppy head. An older child would certainly be able to do this, but in most cases it would be obvious that they were using voluntary neck muscles.

The baby I watched did all this automatically. Her head was inside her dantian!

The highest level martial artists put their head inside their dantian.

Here is:
A baby development site.

Slow Down?

You would think, that Taijiquan being known almost universally as the "slow motion" martial art, that actual taijiquan push-hands practitioners would consider slowing-down a self-evident method. But most don't.

I could make a long list of all the reasons for practicing Taijiquan slowly, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to talk about one reason.

There are probably a hundred ways of practicing push-hands. Judging from Youtube videos, most people use push-hands to practice applications. I think that's fine, but applications can just as easily be taught as a separate subject. Push-hands is better understood as a competition.

There are many continuous linking set routines in push-hands, the main purpose of which is to make sure both people have continuous power (jin) while moving through various ranges of movement. When one person's power is broken they lose; however, if their partner compensates for them, then the routine can continue repeating itself. If either person is trying to win, it is not possible to do a continuous linking routine because as soon as one person's power is broken, the other must act.

In spontaneous push-hands, there is no routine, just a set of rules or parameters. The two most common rules are no punching and no moving your feet.

Anyway, last year I took a workshop with Master Yun Yin Sen and George Xu together. At one point about 6 of us were taking turns pushing hands with Yun Yin Sen. These were all people who had being practicing for years. He was pushing with each person for about 20 seconds and then he would push them out and call for the next one. But when I pushed with him he never tried to push me out. Like 5 minutes past and I started to feel guilty that I was monopolizing him so I just stepped out. Then everybody got another 20 second turn and it was my turn again. The same thing happened.  We pushed for about 5 minutes until I gave up, in order to give someone else a chance.

What was happening? Every time my fellow students got in a tight spot, they tried to get out of it by adding something; either speed, technique, power or aggression. Every time I got in a tight spot I simply slowed down. Master Yun Yin Sen would always respond by also slowing down and giving me a way out. We could practice forever like that.

Even if you are practicing with a superior opponent who wants to beat you, still the appropriate response when you get in a losing situation is to slow down and give all your attention to understanding/feeling what your opponent is doing.

I don't think I need to point out that this might be a good strategy for living, in general. When things are challenging or full of conflict sometimes it is a good strategy to slow down. Obviously that doesn't hold when you're crossing the street and the light changes color.

If any of my readers have ever tried bullfighting, I'd be curious to know if they think slowing down could be a good strategy there.

Shaped by the Sea

The way martial traditions are shaped by the environment is an interesting topic at many levels. In a hundred years Californian martial arts will have been re-formed by and for people who spend lot's of time in cars, drinking coffee, and typing on computers.

Southern Shaolin, like Choy Li Fut, seems like it was formed by people familiar with fighting in confined spaced, narrow corridors, and tight corners.

Northern Shaolin, on the other hand, seems like it was formed for wide open fields of battle, spear training particularly.

Liuhe (Six Harmonies) style of Xingyi seems like it might have developed on narrow rice paddy pathways.

Baguazhang is harder to place, but from my experience walking in the mountains, I would say there is a strong case to be made that carrying something around on narrow or steep mountain ledges is a likely possible origin.

Taijiquan comes out of the water.

Years ago I had the opportunity to meet Willem de Thouars who, as a child in Indonesia, studied Silat. After achieving a significant level of martial skill at an early age, his family told him to ask the Chinese people living down the road if they would teach him.

The man he ended up studying with eventually taught him Baguazhang, Taijiquan and other arts. The teacher's first condition for allowing young Willem to become a student was for him to go to the river and jump off of the bridge onto the slippery floating logs that were part of a local logging operation and balance there. He said it took a long time to learn and it was very brutal.

(If you are not going to try this method yourself, at least think about what it would feel like. How relaxed do your legs need to be? How much mobility do you need in your torso?)

If you've watched all my Youtube videos you know that I have a little experience fighting on fishing boats in Alaska. The first couple of times I went to sea, I got seasick, but with a little coaching I learned. To avoid seasickness first you have to keep your eyes gazing out on the horizon. Looking at the boat or the water will make you sick. This is very simular to the kind of vision we use in Taijiquan, we soften our focus and gaze way off into the distance.
The second part of not getting seasick is just relaxation. If you try to "hold" your balance, or "hold" your internal organs in place, you will vomit. You have to just let your whole body move around on its own. Trust the rolling of the sea-- again, very simular to taijiquan practice.
We worked 20 hour shifts on one of the worst fishing boat in the fleet (worst because the skipper's brain wasn't equipt with the re-evaluation process). All the guys got sore knees, except yours truly.

The secret to my knees not hurting like everyone else's was that I was rolling my dantian and keeping my knees bent the whole time I was on the boat. At that time, when I wasn't working 20 hours, I was doing about 4 hours a day of Chen Style Taijiquan Chansijin (silk reeling exercises).

When I came back to San Francisco my teacher at the time said to my fellow students (probably hoping another student would use his words as an excuse to challenge me to a fight), "You all have been practicing here with me all Summer, the Priest (that's what he liked to call me) has been away in Alaska and he has progressed more than any of you have." (Yikes, competitiveness encouraged.)

The last thing I want to say about water is that if you've ever poled a boat through the water or used a Chinese style stern oar, you might have noticed that it is a lot like the Taijiquan movement, "Grasp the Birds Tail."

Oh, O.K., one more thing. If the founders of Taijiquan were actually fisherman, then it would explain how the modern day practitioners' picked up the habit of exaggerating (the size of the fish that got away).

Summer Training Camp

George Xu just put up new information about the Summer Camp he co-teaches every year with a different Chinese Martial Arts Master. The Camp is held in the woods in a place called La Honda, near Santa Cruz California. Here is the scoop on his co-teacher this year:

Master Yu Chen Yong Born in 1943 Tian Jing, China. Started his training as a wrestler in 1953 then moved to Tai Ji in 1957 with famous Master Wu and Master Niu. He also studied Ba Gua with famous Master such as Gao Yi Sheng and Yang Ban Hou large frame Tai Ji with Master Niu Lian Yuan and Zhao Bao Style Tai Ji with Master Hou and Master Yue. One of his teacher is the very famous master Han Mu Xia whom defeated the Russia champion wrestler in 1930, which he then went on to win 10 gold metal from 10 different countries. The metals are now in the China National Historical Museum. In 2000, the master performance in Tian Jing master Yu got 1st place for the title of "best Master performance". In 2005, Master Yu acquired famous master Zhao Bao Tai Ji title from Wu Dang Mountain.

Master Yu will be teaching all his secrets in this year's summer camp in California

Keep Your Fingers Straight

I have a friend of a friend who, last I checked, has been studying Shaolin and Taijiquan with the same teacher for nearly 20 years. This friend is convinced he is becoming the greatest of fighters. This particular teacher claims an important lineage and has both nurturing qualities and a fierce temper.

There is a shadow side to the previous discussion about metaphorically passing through difficult gates or crossing over bridges of unnecessary practice.  That shadow is the sometimes desperate pathos of the student-teacher relationship.

Perhaps if you are a teacher you've thought to yourself, "Why are so many of my students lesbian vegetarians? Is it something about me?" Perhaps if you are a student you've wondered, "Why do I keep accidentally calling my gongfu teacher MOM instead of shirfu? He doesn't look or act anything like my mom!"

When I think about it, I doubt that the younger me would have studied martial arts at all if my teachers had been the sort of people that expect me to call them "Master."

There are many teachers out there that make good second mommies or daddies. In the South Asian traditions they just go right ahead and call the teacher some version of Ma, or Dada.

I find it hard to resist having a little laugh at this phenomenon, but in all honesty I have great respect for people who provide this kind of support to the emotionally needy. I have known a great many people who have attached themselves to a teacher who really cared about them, and through that particular type of intimacy made disciplined and rewarding changes in their lives.

Some people need a fierce father figure in order to thrive. Others need a nurturing mother figure to give them the confidence to face decisions the rest of us see as routine. I'm rarely fierce or nurturing, so students that come to me looking for those qualities tend not to hang around.

But we digress. I have this friend of a friend I mentioned at the begining. The teacher he studies with has been very exacting and demanding and has truly nurtured him in a way that brings out his better qualities. As far as martial arts goes, he gets posture corrections and that is it! He has gotten one Taijiquan instruction in 20 years, the same one over and over, "Keep your fingers straight." He keeps expecting that some day he is going to get to learn push-hands, and many other secrets too.

It would all be sad and pathetic if not for two factors. The posture corrections are good, so his Shaolin and Taijiquan forms, which he practices without fail everyday, are pristine. The second factor is almost funny. The instruction, "Keep your fingers straight," is wrong by most accounts. But because he believes in it and practices it so diligently--because he uses it as a measure of everything he does-- he has actually made it mean something true. Every millimeter of his body movement is calibrated to "keep the fingers straight," what ever that even means.

He has no knowledge of functionality or applications, no subtle power or push-hands experience. But I have to admit, his form looks good!

And on that note, here is a quote from Henry David Thoreau, (from memory of course)

Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps if is because he hears the beat of a different drummer, let each step to the beat which he hears, however measured, or far away...

1000 Times a Day!

I heard a story about a guy who wanted to study martial arts from a Master who lived up in the Mountains in Taiwan.

Just getting to the cave where this guy taught his few dedicated students was a dangerious rocky slippery climb. He found the Master teaching outdoors and went up and begged the Master to teach him. The master shouted some garbled expletives and signaled for him to put his arm out so he could show him some technique. Upon making contact the student was promptly thrown to the ground. Disgusted, the Master shouted, "WHY ARE YOU SO WEAK?"

The student jumped to his feet and again begged the Master to teach him, and again the Master shouted, "WHY ARE YOU SO WEAK?" And then he shouted at all of his students, "WHY ARE YOU ALL SO WEAK?"

No one had an answer but the student again begged to be taught. The Master then sank down in to a horse stance, stretched his arms out to the sides and began opening and closing his hands, stretching his fingers wide apart and then squeezing them into fists in rapid succession. He then said, "Go away and do this 1000 times a day for a month. If you come back in a month and you haven't done what Sifu has told you, SIFU WILL KNOW, AND SIFU WILL KILL YOU!"

The master then moaned, "Why are you soooooo weak? Get out of here!"

A month later the student came back, having done what he was told and began his studies.

I wrote a great post (if I do say so myself) about the difference between Gates and Bridges just before Thanksgiving. I'm linking to it now because I'm not sure anyone saw it then, and because Formosa Neijia had a funny link that is related.

Journal of Asian Martial Arts

I was excited to see Douglas Wile, one of the heavies in terms of martial arts scholarship, writing an article in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts.

Fifteen years ago when this magazine first came out I was ecstatic. Imagine a martial arts magazine which insists on footnotes and bibliographies in every article! I thought it was a dream come true after years of wishing I was still 10 years old so I could appreciate martial arts writing.

The current addition has 13 contributors. There are two without degrees, two have M.A.'s, one has an M.S., one is an Acupuncturist (M.A.), and eight have Ph.D.'s. Wow, and still most of the writing leaves me wishing for younger days. To be fair, most academic writing is genetically predestined to be boring. At least this stuff is mostly written by people involved in the arts, not by "objective outsiders."

I guess I am a child of the Internet, because I'm finding it harder and harder to read full length books and articles. I still love old media, but it takes so long to get to the point. I mean this stuff should have one of those "Don't operate heavy machinery" warning labels. Again, to be fair, I'm addicted to pithy blog posts and I needed to catch up on some sleep.

Douglas Wile's article is called "Taijiquan and Daoism; From Religion to Martial Art--and Martial Art to Religion." To really do it justice I would have to read the whole thing again. Honestly, I'm in one of those deep practice phases where a few hours of profound internal training makes me want to sleep-- y'all will have to settle for my vague dream like memories.

The gist of Wile's article is that facts about Taijiquan prior to 1900 are really hard to come by but that hasn't stopped lineage holders and historians from freely making sh-t up and pretending it's factual.

One can easily understand why a lineage holder would want to make stuff up. It makes them seem like they have the only key to the chest of treasures while at the same time allowing them the (false) modesty of claiming that their teacher's teacher's teacher was like, dude, really, really good.

It's harder to understand why historians would make stuff up. In America if we catch a historian making stuff up, we use their books for compost. But then again, the various "wings" of the Communists and the Nationalists, were in a propaganda war to prove that only their (death cult) ideologies and allegiances would make Chinese people better and stronger.

Even though Wile spends a lot of time explaining what all these 20th Century scholars thought, I have the feeling he would agree with me when I say, taijiquan has picked up so much baggage we ought to throw out all the books and start over.

Wile dances around the question: Why in light of so little direct evidence for Taijiquan's Daoist roots, are there so many people trying to prove a connection? He writes about Taijiquan's "inventor," the magical dreamer Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng:

For sheer contentiousness, the Zhang Sanfeng case can only be compared to issues of racism, sexism, abortion and homosexuality in American culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, the pendulum has once again swung towards the myth-makers. Western practitioners of taijiquan, with their monotheistic, atheistic, or "only begotten son" backgrounds are apt to view Zhang Sanfeng as simply an historical figure with some innocent Daoist embellishments. They are not likely to understand China's culture wars, polytheism, or embodied immortality..."

In summary, his point is that Taijiquan never really had much to do with Daoism, until 20th century people started mixing in a lot of Neidan (inner alchemy), TCM jargon, some quotes from the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, and claims about health. Oh yeah, and some stories. And then a bunch of fake modern scholars said none of that is true-- but what they said wasn't true either (so there!). Now that running a business isn't banned in China, there is this new feel good, feel strong, feel Chinese, feel Taijiquan-is-part-of-Daoism, marketing ethos. No real content.

And Wile gets kind of mad about it,

"Daoist Chauvinism should never be underestimated, and we need only remind ourselves that some Daoist apologists have claimed that Buddhism sprang from seeds planted by Laozi when he rode westwards on his ox."

Them's figtin' words. Bumper stickers have all but disappeared from San Francisco (which I attribute to uniformity of thought); however, I spotted one today. It read, "Lighten Up!"

For the record, those Daoist "apologists," were not writing history, they were writing secret scripture. The name Laozi means "old seed," but if we are talking about the Santianneijing (3rd Century), then it was Laojun (the inspiration behind the Daodejing) which actually incarnated as the Buddha so that the western barbarians would have their own version of "The Way," and would thus have their own home grown basis for mutual cooperation and understanding. Never mind, that's an argument for another day.

I respect Wile's contribution to understanding the history of Taijiquan, I thank him for letting us know it's all a bunch of lies!

My argument with him is this: Orthodox Daoism never claimed Taijiquan as a Daoist art and I doubt it ever will. Monastic Daoism has of late decided that Taijiquan is part of its shtick. Since the 1980's is has also decided that gongfu movies are part of its shtick, big whoop. Monastic Daoism never really had a central authority, from the sidelines it kinda seems like Buddhism with a little inner alchemy for the "we must appear to be loyal Chinese" set. All this means very little.

If you want to know what the origins of Taijiquan are, you are going to have to soften your definitions, and blur your categories. Taijiquan only came into being because it was able to obscure it's origins in religion, popular culture, and secret societies. By the start of the 20th century participation in trance cults or exorcistic and processional dance, was considered politically dangerious and ideologically backwards. That's why they invented and then tried to tack on the suspicious label, "purely philosophical" Daoism.

Likewise, some combination of fear, modernity, and ideology led people to strip down their communal ritual performance traditions into pure "Martial Arts."

People over here were arguing about why they took the Fajing (power issuing?) out of Yang and Wu styles of Taijiquan. I'll tell you why. Fajing is a way to strike terror into your audience, a way to let people know the god has taken possession of the dancer.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put the Fajing back in my form!

Happy New Year

Well after making it through that very twisty tail of the pig, I'm already enjoying the soft sensitive pillow nose of the rat! (Because I live in a Chinese city, I only had one class this morning and I spent the rest of the day in bed.)

Gong Hay Fat Choi (which means: Congratulations, Get Rich!)

Here is my prognostication:

Rats are the smartest of the twelve animals. They like to tear and chew things into tiny pieces and put them in piles. If you haven't throw it away already, you might as well wait until the ox year. Rats are not actually good organizers, but they save everything and know how to find it again by sheer mental prowess.

So it's a great year for beginning a course of study, for taking exams, and in depth research, starting a collection, or adding a room onto your house (for storage).

After the pig, and the snake, the rat is the most sexy year. This being an Earth Rat year it is good for partnerships, nesting, and babies. Rats like company so it's a good year for people in businesses that thrive on social activity.

If you are a tiger, be particularly careful of over-eating, rats make easy meals but too much of a good thing will lead to lethargy by the summer months.

If you are a dragon it could be a tough year, get people to help you with the small stuff, the normally grand plans of the dragon are likely to get bogged down in minutiae. Ditto for the horse.

It's a good year for monkeys, rabbits and oxen.

The nose and whiskers of the rat are extremely sensitive, so the first part of the year is great for planning and seeking out new solutions to old problems. Look for new sources of income and new markets.

The rat year is great for experiments. Heightened sensitivity makes intuition more reliable. And even if you botch things up rats are always good at getting out of a corner or squeezing through a tight spot.

Start preparing now for next Winter. It's likely to be a long, tough one where things (like the rat's tail) get strung out. If you get a chance to finish projects in October or November, take it and then go into retreat, otherwise you may find yourself working on the never ending project--lingering into the ox year.

The key to a good rat year is knowing that rats are very flexible about what they eat, as long as they don't bite off more than they can chew.

Continuum

I'm old enough, and was born in the right place, to remember the real New Age. The basis of the New Age movement was the hippy idea that we could change the metaphors we live by. If we changed the games children played from competitive ones to cooperative ones, and we change the stories--the mythologies-- our society perpetuates, we could bring about a new way of being, a New Age. Frankly, it was a fun time to be a kid, even if putting my Cheerios underneath a pyramid didn't really change the taste and even the most cooperative game can be made competitive if there are enough eight-year-old-boy hormones to go around.

That experience was still not enough to stop me from cringing at the New Age bravado apparent in these videos and web-links about the bodywork system known as Continuum. (I recommend watching the "research" video first.)

Still, I think it is one of the cooler bodywork ideas out there. They take the Chinese ideas of huntun (totally undifferentiated chaos) or hunyuan (original chaos?) and really make them tangible. And while I doubt I'll ever say it quite like Emilie Conrad, I find myself agreeing with most of what she says about fear, change and the nature of human movement. (Her book.)

In the mood?

My g-friend and I were talking about going to a party tomorrow. She described her busy schedule and then said, "I want to go, but I don't know if I'll be in the mood."

A few years ago I was doing a lot of ceramics in my free time (instead of blogging). At one point I was working at a local community college with a guy that was really into Song (900-1200CE)and Ming (1300-1600CE) Dynasty glazes. These glazes are really cool, many of them were developed to represent cosmological principles and to demonstrate different stages of the elixir practice (jindan). Glowing translucent celadons, jun-ware that turns from green to purple, a transparent black that reveals hidden patterns when put in direct sunlight.

The glazes were easy to make but hard to fire. In order to get the correct reduction of oxygen, he had to get the kiln very hot over a day and then add too much gas so that it would start to smoke and the temperature would stall and after several hours start to fall. It was a really finicky process. If he didn't add enough gas, the temperature would keep climbing, and if he added too much if would fall too fast. Both scenarios would ruin the glaze. To make it work he had to watch and continually adjust the process for many hours. And it's not like he could just look at a thermostat, the critical issue was how hot the clay was. When the temperature was rising he could look at clay cones which are pre-formulated to melt at specific temperatures, but that didn't work when the temperature was falling or stalling.

Basically there was a lot of guess work, and he would get really frustrated when he guessed wrong. (It didn't help his liver or his mind-set that he had a habit of running out for fried chicken in the middle of the process.)

So I did a little reading and I realized that kiln firing in China was always done according to the Daoist Calendar. The design of the Daoist Calender makes it easy to calculate an auspicious or an inauspicious day for firing a kiln. So I said to this guy, "The people who invented these cool glazes you are into always used astrological and calendrical calculations to decide when to fire their kilns. Maybe they knew something you don't know? Maybe it would make things easier?"

His frustrated response was, "That's all hokum!"

Wouldn't it be great if you could look ahead on your calender and predict whether you would be in the mood for a hair cut? a movie? doing research? washing the car? or going out to a party? Well, you're dreaming. The future is unknowable.

The Daoist calender doesn't predict anything. It is just a bunch of time (rhythmic) cycles that overlap. Each day (or segment) of each cycle has a lists of activities which are auspicious or inauspicious. Some of these cycles or patterns have a logic to them-- not everyday is a good day to clean the house, eat vegetarian, or work in the garden, but such days should come with some rhythmic regularity.

Why should I care? There are lots of reasons to care. Every time you schedule something in your calendar or decide whether to do it or not, you have to ask your self, "Am I going to want to do that on that day?" "Why not pick the day before, or the day after?" "Will I want to rest or party?" Often there is no rational way to make such a decision. So we make the decision irrationally, or emotionally, or by some strange fleeting quirk.

The Daoist calender externalizes our irrationality. The practice of following the calendar
points out just how irrational we are, but it also allows us to distance ourselves from it so we can be more comfortable with the way we are. More self-respecting of our own rhythmically irrational nature.

If the calender says it's a good day to party, we party, if not we're in bed by 9. No more wishy-washy maybe I'll see how I feel kind of dates. From the moment you discover the Daoist calender, your commitments will be clear, strong and unselfconsciously irrational!

Of course when it comes to gongfu practice never forget, one day missed is ten days lost!