Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 1)

When I'm typing, I'm not thinking about the keys I'm hitting, and I'm not thinking about the words I'm spelling, I am thinking about what I want to say. I am thinking about the sentiment I want to convey, the style, the flavor, and the rhythm.

But in actual practice even those things I am consciously thinking about spin in and out of my mind in a very spontaneous way, they don't have any particular order, often they simply emerge fully formed at the moment of expression.

Martial arts are the same. This is as true for fighting as it is for performing forms.

In typing, if my mind goes to the keys, I stumble. In internal martial arts, taiji, xingyi, bagua--the moment you distinguish one muscle group from another, you have made a mistake. You can no longer have whole body power. You can no longer have the differentiation of jing and qi.

When you are learning to type, of course you look at the keys. When you are training martial arts, of course you make distinctions between muscle groups (and a lot of other things.) But once you are performing at the level of an art, once you are an artist, your mind must not get stuck distinguishing different parts of your body.

300th Post & Business News

The Three Hundredth post of this blog came and went recently. Maybe I should go out and celebrate, but instead I'm at home cleaning and organizing my room/office.
When I started the blog last year I had a business plan in the shape of a triangle. In one corner was my regular website which promotes my classes, another was the videos on my Youtube page, and the third was this blog. The idea was that they would all be mutually supporting, people who looked at one would be drawn to the other two.

My success has been modest. One of my videos has had 90,000 viewers. Combined with the others my videos have been watched a total of 145,000 times. I haven't made time for more videos in 9 months. My goal for the summer is to produce a video I can sell, and to make more videos for Youtube.

I've also got a plan to make some cool t-shirts to sell through Cafe Press or some such site.

My regular website has basically been doing its job of informing people about my classes and getting me new adult students, but I've done almost nothing to improve it, so that is on my list of things to do this summer too.

Over all I've been happy with the look of my blog but disappointed in my abilities to do more with it technically. I made about $15 from Amazon books linked through the site for the whole year. I'm considering having a separate book reviews page that will sell books, but I've decided not to have them on the main page.

I would like to go through all my posts and put them into new categories so that people can follow the themes I have covered over time more easily. However, that is a big project and I may not get to it for a while. I also want people to be able to see the most recent comments, but the software I'm using has resisted that change, so I may be changing software. Perhaps I'll attend a Wordpress camp or something.

The various tools I've tried for counting how many people read my blog, and how often, have been frustrating. At one point in the spring my yahoo counter was telling me that I was getting 2000 hits a day. Now it's way down at 150. Go figure. Still I'm happy for even one reader. When I started I had no idea whether people would be interested in what I have to say.

San Francisco is usually a great place to practice outdoors all year round, if you don't mind wearing long underwear . At the moment, however, San Francisco has been covered in smoke from fires burning all over California. It's been like this for a week. After practicing outside I come back in and cough. I hope the fires end soon. Despite the fires, my practice has been taking new turns and is a great source of excitement. Of course when that happens it means I change from being a wuwei master who is content with his faults, to striving for transcendence. In other words, I'm back on the track of striving for perfection which leaves me feeling imperfect.

One of the difficulties of teaching children through the schools is that I don't have a way to keep them together after the residencies end. I would like to have a children's performing troupe but for that to happen I think I will have to have a dedicated space, which is really difficult in San Francisco because renting space is so expensive. Most of the martial arts schools either shoot for huge numbers of students, thereby lowering the quality of teaching, or they have a lot of teachers in the same style, or they run their space as a business that rents to yoga and other simple fitness stuff. Renting to other teachers is a whole business unto itself, one that would take away from my role as a teacher. Still the thought lingers.

In the past I've done workshops during the summer but this summer I'm laying low. I'll probably do a couple of ad hoc workshops for my students in push-hands and roushou but by next year I should be ready for something on a larger scale.

The article I wrote in the Journal of Daoist Studies in now available for purchase in electronic form or hard copy.

Thanks to all of my readers, this year has been a great beginning.

The Foot Fist Way

I had to go see this movie, The Foot Fist Way.

It is about an American Tae Kwon Do teacher named Fred Simmons. He says and does all the wrong things. As a teacher myself, occasionally something inappropriate has come out of my mouth while I was talking to a parent or a student. When that happens, immediately I go in to back peddle mode, I do everything I can to try and take it back. If I can't do that I apologize, or deflect, or change the subject. Fred Simmons says and does inappropriate things and then he just keeps going, he makes them worse and worse and worse.

It is a painful movie to watch. It is funny, but not in a way I recommend. I mean I had to laugh to keep my sanity, but I wouldn't wish that pain on another. At one point my friend was bent over with his face in his hands while I was laughing and pounding on his shoulder blade with my fist--If I have to watch this, you have to watch this too.

On my very worst days as a teacher I have thought to myself, "People laugh at me when they hear I'm a martial arts teacher. What am I doing with my life?"

I'm a pretty happy person, I love what I do, those bad days are few and far between. But this film made me think about them. Skip it unless you want to pass through the "Seven Rings of Pain!" (Movie title with in the movie.)

Monkey View

Monkey sees the peach and up the tree he goes. He doesn't think about climbing the tree, he thinks about the peach.

If he wants the peach badly enough, he may completely bypass the difficulty of climbing, but he may also miss the subtlety of the bark or the softness of the leaves. The peach may even be part of a trap set to capture him.

If you want to make a movement you are doing more difficult-- think about it. If you think too much about running while you are running, you are likely to trip over your own feet.

Many martial artists are motivated by fear or insecurity. Of course, if those were your only motivations, you wouldn't be human, you'd be a ghost. But it is worth thinking about. If you're training for self-defense, it is likely that you are afraid of being attacked. If you are training to look attractive to potencial mates, it is likely that you feel insecure about your current appearance.

The fruition, the peach if you will, of pursuing training motivated by fear, is of course, more fear. Likewise, the peach of training to look more attractive is more insecurity. Fear and insecurity have no end.

A lot of people train because they believe they are likely to be the victims of violence and it often turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Your view, your default understanding of why you practice, is more important than any other factor in martial arts or qigong type training. If your view is narrow, like that of the monkey going after the peach, you may indeed have very clear fruition. You may get what you want, provided what you want is not a fantasy. A very narrow focus is useful for bypassing obstacles and difficulties, but you will also bypass all the other potencial types of fruition. The narrowness of your view may turn out to be its own trap.

I suggest students practice with the widest most open ended view possible. The term view as a metaphor for motivation, understanding, orientation, and purpose is particularly brilliant because it parallels how the eyes should be used in training. Don't lock your eyes on a point, take the widest possible view.

If you practice with a broad view, you will love forms.  Set routines, or forms, are great because they teach you to forget.  When you practice a form over and over and over, it becomes automatic.  You can completely forget the movement, in fact you should. Once a form becomes automatic you can do all sorts of experiments.  You can make an infinite number of subtle or dramatic changes to the quality of the form.  You can also do an infinite number of experiments with your mind.

Accidents (part 3)

People sometimes achieve very high level martial arts by accident. Accidents happen when we aren't paying attention, so they are often effortless.

A few years ago I was teaching Northern Shaolin to juvenile delinquents. A program was set up that was a collaboration between the school district, the sheriff's department, and Performing Arts Workshop. It was a lock down school which had a significant performing arts component. My classes always had a probation officer present watching on the side. All the students were between 13 and 16 years old and had been convicted of crimes.

Somewhere towards the end of my residency I brought my friend and Choi Li Fut expert Greg Mooney in as a guest artist. One of my rules is that students bow as they enter or exit the room. On this particular day, like most days, they were unruly, rude and disorganized as they entered the auditorium. As I introduced Greg they started pestering and shouting that they wanted us to fight, "We want to see you fight."

I looked at Greg, he is a performer, a stunt clown (he used to do 500 shows a year), we had sparred enough to know each others stuff. He looked game.
"OK," I said, "I'll make a deal with you guys." "You give us your full attention, you work hard, concentrate, and give todays class the best effort you've ever given, and we'll fight for you-- at the end of class."

As I said it, I thought to myself, 'these kids don't have any discipline, there isn't much chance that they will really concentrate?'

"Really?" They asked, "If we do our best you'll really fight each other, for real?"

"Yes," I said. I knew I was taking a little risk, I looked over at the probation officer and he was motionless. "Alright, it's a deal then let's practice."

That day they practiced harder than they ever had before, it was a fun class. I guess they trusted me. So at the end I had them all sit down and Greg and I went at it.

Neither of us were looking to connect a punch, we were putting on a show. Our strikes were intentionally missing by just enough to make it look real, we each took a couple of dive rolls on the hard floor, our sweeps were slow enough to give each other time to fall the easy way, our kicks were to the meaty parts. The juveniles were screaming with delight.

Then I did a simple bagua zhang single palm change. Greg accidentally turned into it. I was trying to make all my movements empty of force, and at that moment I wasn't even aiming at a target, I was paying attention to my audience. But my elbow connected with Greg's temple and he flew backwards into the air. His temple opened up and blood spurted out everywhere. My movement at that moment was so effortless I didn't even feel my elbow connect.

I helped Greg to his feet and we had an eye to eye bonding moment. The juveniles were completely blown away, their enthusiasm was profound. They also found it incredible that after such an event we were showing all the signs of being best friends.

As they left class that day, each of them bowed with reverence and sincerity I hadn't believed possible. The staff of the school reported to me that a year later the students were still talking about it as their best day ever at school.

Accidents (part 2)

Why are accidents so potent? Have you ever seen that style of both Chinese and Japanese painting which begins by spilling the ink on the paper?

I've seen it done a few times. For instance, a blotch of wet black ink still creeping is led out into the branches of a plum blossom branch. As the ink sinks into the paper, the peddles are added.

I was with George Xu the other day and he mentioned a Chinese Idiom which I didn't quite catch in Chinese. He said it meant, "A Wild Man Beats the Master." In other words, for some reason a completely wild man with terrible technique, who kicks in the wrong place and loses his balance...can beat the trained master of martial arts. It is as if the wild man beats the master because he does everything so wrong, he is unpredictable and unselfconscious. (He is not in his own way--he is not his own obstacle.)

Does this suggest a way to practice? Can you find a martial arts way to spill the ink?

(I accidentally got the cool photo of the ceramic cup/cans from a google search for "spilled ink demo" but the site itself (geekologie.com) was too big for my computer so I don't know the back story, still it is a cool picture. If anyone figures it out please add the artist's name to the comments.)

Accidents (part 1)

Accidents do happen.  The greatest, most effective, fast-acting medicine ever invented was invented by accident.

No, dear reader, I'm not talking about Viagra (although that was also invented by accident), I'm talking about anti-biotics! Penicillin! 

What happened was, someone was eating a sandwich in the lab where they weren't supposed to be and they dropped some bread crumbs into one of the cultures.  The penicillin in the bread stopped the bad germs from growing.  Dude, it like killed everything, but in a good way.  (Tell that to your teachers next time they complain about you eating in class!)

Oh, and by the way, did I tell you I reached the highest level of martial arts the other day?  Yah, it happened by accident. 

Ex-Romantics

I'm Mr. Negative (Mr. "Nego" for short) when it comes to Romantic ideas like; "You've just got to believe," or "Everyone has an inner Genius waiting to be revealed," or "Revolution now," or "Peace," or "How do you feeeeel about it?," or "I need a cleanse," or "Inner truth is found through embracing the mystery," or "Natural is better than synthetic."

There are a lot more of those slogans which define the rigid Romantic mind-set. I could go on ridiculing it all day, but I won't. Sometimes natural is better than synthetic, sometimes not. The reason I bring this up at all is that I used to be a Romantic, I used to believe all that stuff, so I'm sympathetic. I viscerally understand why this kind of simplicity is appealing.

Actually I'm more than sympathetic. As pathetic as this might sound-- being a Romantic was a gateway to learning about the body, the mind, martial arts, and Daoism.

If I can point my students in the direction of a bridge, that is preferable to gate, but if a gate is the only thing they see, then by all means, they should take the gate!

Kung Fu Panda

Yes, I saw it. I'm a very easy reviewer when it comes to anything with kung fu in it. I liked it. If you have a child or two to take with you as an excuse, definitely go see it! It's fun--even if the sweet parts are really too sweet for anyone over age eight.

Philosophically it has something to offer. First of all I should get out of the way that modern-romantic obsession with "you must believe." What a lot of nonsense. Think: Yoda talking to Luke Skywalker about how to get his little rocket ship out of the swamp.

Noooo, kung fu is about hard work my friends, belief has nothing to do with it.

But philosophically the film explores fate, both personal and collective. It gives great attention to the power of accidents. The joke line in the film is, "There are no accidents." But actually it is about how important it is to accept accidents and work with them. Accidents can reveal a lot about how rigidly we try to control our fate.

Perhaps the most important aspect of martial arts is the ability to improvise, and improvisation cannot happen if you are struggling to control outcomes. In an improvisation, an accident is something to embrace, a thing to work with.

Falling on your face is no reason to stop the action, heck, I meant to do that!

Lesson Plan for Kids

One of my Kungfu lesson plans has been posted on the internet at Performing Arts Workshop. Because kungfu is dangerously close, in people's (closed) minds, to a sacred category called Physical Education, and because of Teacher's Union absurdly protectionist rules in the public schools-- what I do is sensibly under the category of World Dance (scroll to the bottom.)

And you can check out my biography too, by scrolling down here--alphabetical by first name.