Transnational China Project

Stock up on your reading for the Winter break (Summer if you are in the South).  The Transnational China Project has audio and text of some great thinkers.  Check it out.

An Unwelcome Symbol

I was just about to write another post when I thought I'd look back and see if I'd said anything simular before.  I noticed on a lot of my old post that this symbol is scattered all over the text:

Â

What a pain in the Â!!

How does one even search for a way to solve these problems?  Sometimes it seems like I'm the only one that has to deal with this stuff?  Well, that funny hat on the "a" is called a circumflex.  From doing searches for wordpress and circumflex I determined, dudes, that it is like a deep code problem.  Perhaps the symbol shows up every time I hit the save button.  Whatever, it wasn't like that before I did an upgrade.  There seems to be no shortage of things out there designed specifically to increase hair loss.

Do me a favor, look at some of my old posts (anything before October) and tell me if you would still read them even though they have that crazy symbol all over the place.  I've lost all sense of judgment.  Does it need to be fixed or can I pretend it didn't happen?  Should I just go live in a cave or is there hope for this world?

UPDATE:  It only effects posts from June to Oct 2008.  Still it sucks.

Shoulder Stretch Failure

Doesn't Work

I broke my arm skateboarding down a monster hill on a homemade skateboard when I was 14.  It was a hill I had skated many times but there was a section that required slowing down, a section with increased steepness and a sharp turn.  I was late on my way to school and just didn't slow on this particular day until it was a little late.  I slid for a distance on the inside of my elbows and my huge brass beltbuckle--both were shreaded.  I know what you're thinking, "knarly dude."

But it wasn't very bad.  A little disinfectant to keep the exposed elbow bones from getting infected and I would have been fine.  Unfortunately I went to see a doctor, more to get out of school than because I felt I needed anything.  Even though I didn't need it, the doctor put a cast on me for two weeks because he thought it would discourage me from skateboarding.  It didn't.  But it did mess up my shoulder because I was in the middle of a growth spurt.

Waste of Time

So skip ahead to age 23.  I'm doing 6-8 hours a day of Martial arts and Dance and I figure my biggest problem is that my shoulders are stiff and a little uneven.  I get to work trying everything under the sun and moon.  The first thing I figured out was that I needed to sleep with a shirt on because my shoulders would get cold at night and the muscles would tighten up over night.  Without keeping them warm at night any progress I made in loosening them would be reversed by the cold.

Next I did a thousand experiments with bodywork and massage.  About 3 hours a week for 4 years.  I think this was positive at first but over the long term I simply learned more about how my own body relaxes than the people who were working on me.  Now I almost never get bodywork.

At the same time I started creating tools to help me stretch.  I had poles, staffs, ropes, bungee, a range of rubber balls from small to big to roll on, lots of eye-bolts in the walls with loops hanging from them, slanted boards, I even modified a door frame so it would be a better jig for me to stretch in. I was very disciplined.  My housemates were very accommodating.  I think they liked it that visitors to the house asked if our living room was a torture chamber.


The results, nada, nothing, waste of time.  Stretching the shoulders doesn't work.

What does work?   Slow qigong movements.  Expanding and condensing from the dantian.  Arm circles.  Making sure your qi gates are open, that circulation is optimised, and that your alignment is efficiant.

Strange Definition of Qi

George Xu gave me a definition of Qi a couple of months ago which was so strange I had to write it down.  As you probably all know, I'm for keeping the term Qi murky.  Not because I don't like individual definitions, to the contrary, bring'm on.  The more the merrier.

I think Qi needs to have lots of definitions to be true to its origins.

Here is his 3 part definition.

1.  Qi is the endocrine/hormone response.

2.  Qi is when I give the ground power, the ground gives it back.

3.  Qi is anthing that moves.  If it moves, it has Qi.  By this the Sun and Moon don't fall out of the sky.

Pantomime

I took a workshop about teaching performing arts to kids a couple of weeks ago.  The guy leading the workshop was an actor and the vehicle he used to demonstrate teaching techniques was pantomime.  In other words, he taught a class in pantomime with the goal being for us to learn something about teaching kids, not about pantomime itself.

However, when I was asked to perform using pantomime, I got a lot of laughs and gasps and other audience responses.  It struck me that my martial arts training has heaps of pantomime in it.  Chen style taijiquan is particularly good training for creating objects in space, but the precision of Northern Shaolin stance training is also solid ground for pantomime.  I know exactly where my fist is in space, whether it is behind me level with my shoulder or exactly one fist's distance away from my left temple.  I can easily establish a consistent height for the ledge of an invisible window using horse stance.  I can hide the murder weapon on an invisible top shelf for later retrieval using the precise height of monk stance.

Of course this should be obvious right?  I mean every kid knows that when you are doing a martial arts form you are pantomiming beating up every mean kid who has ever set foot in the playground.  No?

Storytelling with ones hands and body is a skill that can come in handy in a lot of situations.  In places where you don't speak the local language it can be used to put money in your pocket or to defuse a potentially violent mis-communication.  (Pirates also need these skills to communicate with each other ship to ship on the open seas.)  I have been disappointed during my travels in China at how rarely I could get people to explain things with their hands.  In Turkey it was even worse, if I tried to use my hands people would become noticeably anxious and upset.

New Blogs (to me anyway)

First I want to plug Sgt. Rory Miller's blog.  It's the perfect thing to read when your sitting shyly in your nightie cooling down after a few hours at the dojo.

Second, I want to draw your attention to Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming.  We should probably put him on the altar as the deity of Martial Arts Marketing.  He has published more books and DVD's than anyone.  His club includes fifty schools.

He is also someone who really cares about preserving the arts and has done a good job of explaining them to non-Chinese.

Now he has started a school in Northern California in the mountains at his retreat center near the town of Eureka.  He accepted 5 students into a 10 year Chinese Martial Arts program.  All day everyday for nine months out of the year for ten years these lucky students will be practicing gongfu.  (Here is the Curriculum) Next year he will accept 5 more students.

The students are expected to learn his marketing skills too!!!  He has them making DVD's and writing articles for Kungfu Magazine.  I know because all five of them have blogs!

I was looking for this sort of thing for myself 20+ years ago.  Because it didn't exist, I created a curriculum with about the same number of hours for myself.  The slow economy at that time actually made this easier.  I paid $215 a month to live in a tiny room in San Francisco with a lot of house-mates who shared the cost of food and supplies (much of which we acquired by hook or by crook).  I had very few expenses: Bicycle maintenance, martial arts lessons, and shoes.  Entertainment was free because I had agreements with every performing arts center in San Francisco, I could get in free for doing whatever last minute work they needed done.  I went on a ten year Hollywood movie fast, so I didn't see movies.  The little money I needed I earned teaching sailing during the Summers.

If you want this kind of intensive training, and you are not one of the 5 picked by Dr. Yang, it is still possible to create your own school--if you have the drive.

Meditations of Violence

Yes, dear reader, it seems I am the last kid (blogger) on the block to read Meditations on Violence, A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, by Sgt. Rory Miller. Many of my fellow bloggers have recommended it but it wasn't until I got hold of it myself that I understood why.

Sgt. Rory is a good writer. He understand his audience really well. His audience is made up mostly of tough-guy martial artists who train a lot, and not so tough-guy martial artists who also train a lot. He talks to us as if we were a bunch of girls sitting around in our nighties at a pajama party. In walks Sgt. Rory with his big boots, body armor, sim-guns, SWAT team-prison guard experience, with talk of predators and the monkey dance. With bravado and humor, he kindly offers to set us straight.

This book makes you meditate on violence. I particularly like his discussion of what happens to your body when you are attacked--What he calls the hormone cocktail. He says we lose dexterity and coordination and not just the ability the think or plan but the ability to see, hear and feel. Our sense of time becomes distorted and we can even freeze up.

Reading this book makes us think hard on the value of our martial arts training. Different types of training serve wildly different purposes. Of course this is obvious, we don't do muscle building to get good at push-hands, we don't cultivate weakness to win wrestling competitions, and we don't practice butterfly kicks unless we have an appetite for showing off. But no doubt, readers will find justifications for doing the practices they already enjoy--Even though he blind sides you with smart quips like this one:

Experience, in my opinion, could not give rise to a new martial art. Given the idiosyncratic nature and the improbability of surviving enough high-end encounters, it would be hard to come up with guiding principles or even a core of reliable techniques. I am painfully aware that things that worked in one instant have failed utterly in others.

There we have it, from the tough guy of all tough guys, the professionals' professional, the marital arts trainers' trainer! Martial arts can not have been created by people with real life fighting experience. Go ahead, bite down on this bullet, I know it hurts.

Still he unwittingly makes a great case for Chinese internal martial arts training. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that the main reason internal martial arts were created was for fighting (an idea my regular readers know I find ridiculous).

In a fight for our lives we fall under the influence of adrenaline and we become very strong. Mark one down for cultivating weakness! Don't waste your time cultivating strength, in a real fight you'll be really, really strong-- automatically...autonomicly.

You will also lose your sensitivity to pain, so external conditioning, training to take blows, is also a waste of time. Sgt. Rory doesn't totally reject conditioning. He says that training surprise impacts, on your face particularly, can help to keep you from going into shock in a situation where you are completely surprised. Familiarity with the feeling of being hit will make it easier to see through the hormonal fog.

Speaking of fog, he gives some statistics on police firing their pistols while they are under attack. Basically, they miss most of time at very close range because they are shaking and they can't see:

...Under the stress hormones, peripheral vision is lost and there is physical "tunnel vision." Depth perception is lost or altered, resulting in officers remembering a threat five feet away as down a forty-foot corridor. Auditory exclusion occurs--you may not hear gunfire, or people shouting your name or sirens.

Blood is pooled in the internal organs, drawn away from the limbs. Your legs and arms may feel weak and cold and clumsy. You may not be able to feel your fingers and you will not be able to use "fine motor skills," the precision grips and strikes necessary for some styles such as Aikido.

The "dis" of Aikido here is totally unnecessary since all styles have these kind of techniques, probably invented for dealing with drunks. But what a great case he makes for internal styles like Baguazhang and Taijiquan!

Internal arts don't rely on focused use of the eyes, in fact my bagua training is full of exercises designed to get you to use your eyes in unusual ways. I would even argue that the different bagua Palm Changes can invoke different experiences of time, distortions if you will. If you are constantly spinning around or turning your head, you can get by without your peripheral vision.

Internal arts are based on the principle that coordination will be impossible in a real fight. That's why we only move from the dantian! (As I noted above, I don't believe fighting is the only reason we move the way we do, or even the primary reason...but it makes a great argument doesn't it?) In bagua and taiji we don't tense up our muscles, all movement is centralized in a single impulse. We use one unbroken spiral as our only technique.

Jumping rope? Waste of time too. It's fun training for sparing games, but in a real surprise attack two things are likely. One, you freeze and stop breathing like you are a frightened animal "playing dead." And two, the hormone cocktail will give incredible speed and stamina--don't bother training those either!

Lest I leave you thinking everything he says is pro-internal arts, I should point out the obvious. Any technique requiring sensitivity will likely be useless in a fight to the death. So is push-hands, which is all about sensitivity, really useless? Maybe it is. But he also makes the case that training to attack from a place of total stillness is great practice for teaching yourself how to get "un-frozen" when you are utterly petrified. Good Stuff!!!

note: I just I just Googled "Meditation on Violence" and I got Maya Deren's 1948 12 minute film by the same title, a classic if you haven't seen it yet.

Pirates Again

Pirates played a major role in creating modern China.  They, and the mercenaries who fought them, are a likely source of martial arts as we know them today.  While there are many other sources of martial arts, I do wish more scholars would focus on the important stuff, like pirates.  Here is a brief but informative article about Chinese Pirates in PFD format.  While pirates in the west were peaking with around 5,500 pirates, the Chinese were sporting 70,000.

Peer Evaluations

Getting an Outside Opinion

Teaching is a skill.  Aspects of teaching are charismatic and intuitive; however, charisma and intuition alone do not make a good teacher.  Obviously competency in the subject is a prerequisite to teaching but competency-- even excellence-- in a subject does not make someone a good teacher.

I believe teachers should ask for peer evaluations with some regularity, maybe once every year or two.  Find someone who teaches groups of people and ask them to watch you teach and give you feed back and suggestions.  The evaluator could be someone who teaches martial arts/qigong but that isn't necessary.  Good teaching is good teaching.  Mediocre teaching skills can be improved once the deficiencies are understood.

Asking someone in your lineage to evaluate your teaching may be a good idea but it is a different process.  The simple fact that they teach the same or similar material is likely to get in the way of good feed back.

I get evaluated as a teacher twice a year by peers at Performing Arts Workshop, and the criticism is always helpful.  I also attend regular teaching skills workshops.  I've been evaluated three times by peers at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

I learned a trick at my last evaluation that other teachers might find interesting.  It's called "One Minute Papers."  Hand out pens and half-sheets of scratch paper to your students and ask them to write to you for one minute-- questions, feed-back, thoughts, whatever.   Do this at the beginning, the end, or during a break in your teaching--let them beanonymous if they want to.  By doing this I learned that students often have questions they don't feel comfortable asking out loud.  I also learned that students can polarize to extremes--like for instance, half the class wants me to stop and explain, while the other half wants silent practice time.

Getting eyes and ears on the outside can make even a great teacher better.