The Illusion of Conscious Will

Wow, isn’t it ironic that I sometimes want to write about something but can’t find the words.  It’s actually so common an experience that we hardly even notice the irony.  It’s as if I have to not care too much to be able to write.  I have to let go, or trick my conscious will out of the way to improvise the actual text through my fingertips.  Martial arts have similar requirement; and  healing does too.  I suppose that letting go is the fruition of non-conceptual meditation.  Is the ability to improvise is an indicator that a person is seeing things as they actually are?

I generally don’t like psychology much.  Perhaps it is because I have a tiny lingering unconscious desire to do damage to the psychiatrist I saw from age 4 to 7.  In my 20’s I went back and found that very psychiatrist. My mother, my father and the psychiatrist all have different explanations for why it was desirable to sequester me twice a week in a room with a desk and venetian blinds.  Not only was communication lacking in the process, but no one could agree on what the intention was.  It makes me wonder whether agreement is actually a significant factor in cases of consensus activity, even in situations where people say they agree.

How do we know what we know?  What causes unconscious behavior?  How do we attribute agency? Asian arts present us with a challenge in that they are rooted in a cosmology which presumes that all agents are mutually self-re-creating.  Is the art making me? or am I making the art?

So with all that in mind I recently read The Illusion of the Conscious Will, by Daniel M. Wegner, which is an exploration of how conscious will effects our actions.  It is a very wide ranging survey of mostly psychological studies and experiments dating back to the 1800's, with some anthropology and neurology studies as well.  With an eye to exposing the mechanism of conscious will and how it interacts with spontaneous action and unconscious action; the book explores multiple personalities, hypnosis, trance possession, and many other more mundane ways in which we doubt whether a persons actions are consciously willed.

Chew on this:

Perhaps the experience of involuntariness helps to shut down a mental process that normally gets in the way of control.  And, oddly, this mental process may be the actual exercise of will.  It may be that the feeling of involuntariness reduces the degree to which thoughts and plans about behavior come to mind.  If behavior is experienced as involuntary, there may be a reduced level of attention directed toward discerning the next thing to do or for that matter, towards rehearsing the idea of what one is currently doing.  A lack of experienced will might thus influence the force of will in this way, reducing the degree to which attention is directed to the thoughts normally preparatory to action.  And this could be good.
The ironic process of mental control (Wegner 1994) suggests that there are times when it might be good to stop planning and striving.  It is often possible to try too hard....

He concludes that conscious will is an illusion, we feel like we are willing our actions because our actions usually correspond with our experience of willing them, not because our conscious will actually causes our actions.  But conscious will is like a compass on a boat.  It tells us where we are going, makes us feel guilty so that we change course, or proud so that we charge ahead.  It manages our preferences.

Re-reading what I just wrote, I imagine it is hard to follow.  This particular conundrum resists language; if you are not in control, how can you change coarse?  The book is great because it doesn't rely on philosophical or psychological language, instead, it describes experiments one after another.  For instance, when a person wills themselves to not do something, they make themselves statistically more likely to do the thing.  Despite my intentions, I always use to throw the Frisbee at my elderly neighbor's window just at the moment when she was looking.

We are not our minds.  We don’t actually know what we are.  If we use our conscious mind in a fight we will probably lock up or freeze.  But that remains an interesting debate.  When  faced with an opponent who we believe intends to do us harm, what happens to our will?  It seems that intent also has a great potential to get in the way of our ability to respond.  We talk about intent in internal martial arts a lot.  I argue, following Wang Xiangzhai, that if an opponent's intent comes to a point or to a line or a curve, he will be easy to control.  Only if my intent is spherical can I really hope to reliably defeat a larger opponent who is trying to hurt me.

No shortage of irony here.

From reviewing the scientific experiments in this book,  I find evidence of an active awareness underneath our conscious will.  Freud pointed to the Id, a primal self.  In Daoist cosmology we refer to a qi body which can act very freely and spontaneously.  In observing that this qi body coincides with a person, we could brake all protocol and just call it Laozi, an old baby, (lao=old, zi=baby).  This Laozi doesn’t have it’s own stop button.  Without the conscious will to inhibit it, it would do silly things like walk off of cliffs or try to squeeze through keyholes.  The qi body is both the source and the ingredient of inspiration, but it is not at all articulate.  It doesn’t have preferences or opinions or hidden agendas because it has no memory.  All memory belongs to the realm of jing, not qi.  All inhibition comes from trying to use the mind to control the composite body-structure-memory.

Thus, if we want our jing, our structure body, to be free, it must follow the qi; but if the qi leads, our fighting techniques will stagnate at the developmental level of a 2 year old.  So, we say, the spirits (shen) must lead the qi.  What are the spirits?  Perhaps they are a blend of our imagination and the kinesthetic experience of our environment, without the conscious will?

This is a great book.  It isn’t easy to read, but hardly anything I recommend is.  Terry Kleeman recommended this book when I met with him at the food court under Ikea in Taipei.  I was presenting my theory of Baguazhang’s original connections to Daoist ritual, describing how bagua can be organized around different trance states.  He was very friendly and skeptical, pointing out as so many others have, that perceiving Taiwanese rituals in terms of trance is a Western intellectual construction.  On the other hand he said that his Daoist priest informants consider their martial arts prowess to contribute to their ritual efficacy and potency.

But back to the book.  It is a really good Eastern-Western bridge to understanding why Internal Martial artists talk about experiencing shen (spirit) outside of the body.  It also threw me into a spiral of self-doubt.  I started asking a lot of, “Am I fooling myself?” type questions.  Am I hypnotizing myself? Am I hypnotizing my students?”  For this reason alone I would recommend it.  I decided that the possibility that I am fooling myself or my students is high.  Not all the time, but certainly sometimes.  And that’s not always bad either, but ignoring it is a recipe for disaster.  I’ve started catching myself in the act of self-hypnosis.

For instance, I was teaching push-hands the other day and I stopped myself from striking a student who was making the mistake of forcing my hand into his head. This is a flaw in my teaching even if I stop and explain it to the student because the student probably won’t learn from his mistake unless he gets hit.  But even worse, it’s a bad habit because I’m training myself to not hit in certain situations.  So whether in the dojo or the cafe, beware of nice people! Only princes, psychiatrists and con-artists are charming!  The next time he made that mistake I clocked him.

Now that I’ve done all this writing, by tricking my conscious will out of the way, I’m going to re-establish control, good-bye.

Empty Like a Puppet

I have written elsewhere about martial arts forms being an inheritance from the ancestors of that art. That practicing a particular tradition is a process of reanimating the movement of the ancestors who created it.  I have also written about how practicing a form may correct the errors in the form you inherited, in effect healing those in the past.  And I have also written about how practicing a form can heal your parents, your genetic ancestors, through gongfu as a conduct correcting process.  Gongfu can be understood as a process of developing efficiency which rectifies the inappropriate, aggressive, and wasteful movement (jing) and breathing (qi) habits which we learned from our parents.

All of this is akin to a daily personal exorcism.  I have also argued that traditionally it was understood as an exorcism, which goes a long way toward explaining why, when itinerant beggar-monks and priests wanted to ask for money, they would perform martial arts-- demonstrating the merit-worth they had accumulated and shared through this process.*

A common criticism of Chinese Martial Arts is that it is full of empty forms.  Most schools make an effort to teach "applications" for each movement in a form.  Applications are demonstrations of how a conflict might transpire.  But applications themselves don’t really work.  Gongfu is what works.  Gongfu is a quality of movement which has efficacy regardless of the techniques employed.  If you have gongfu, you have it when you are taking out the trash or setting the table--or even when performing an exorcism.

Conceptualization of the underlying metaphors of Chinese art and culture is key to understanding the arts in greater depth. Because people generally bring their own concepts and metaphors to the arts they inherit, it is very easy to lose sight of the vision which created the art in the first place.  That loss of vision leads first to frustration and then to either radical modification or outright destruction of the arts.
But I'll come back to that later.  Here is a quote from History in Three Keys:

Some of the conclusions derived from the serious study of Chinese popular culture in the postwar decades are relevant to our understanding of the embeddedness of Boxer religious experience in... [Northern Chinese] culture.  One such conclusion is that, at the village level, the sharp boundaries between the "secular" and the "sacred," to which modern Westerners are accustomed, simply did not exist.  The gods of popular religion were everywhere and "ordinary people were in constant contact" with them.  These gods were powerful (some, to be sure, more than others), but they were also very close and accessible.  People depended on them for protection and assistance in time of need.  But when they failed to perform their responsibilities adequately, ordinary human beings could request that they be punished by their superiors.  Or they could punish them themselves.  "If the god does not show signs of appreciation of the need of rain," Arthur Smith wrote toward the end of the nineteenth century, "he may be taken out into the hot sun and left there to broil, as a hint to wake up and do his duty."  This "everydayness" of the gods of Chinese popular religion and the casual, matter-of-fact attitude Chinese typically displayed toward their deities doubtless contributed to the widespread view among Westerners, both in the late imperial period and after, that the Chinese were not an especially religious people.  It would be more accurate, I believe to describe the fabric of Chinese social and cultural life as being permeated through and through with religious beliefs and practices.

But not always with the same degree of intensity and certainly not with equal discernibleness in all settings.  This is another facet of Chinese popular religion that, because it does not entirely square with the expectations of Western observers, has occasioned a certain amount of confusion and perplexity.  Sometimes religion appears to recede into the shadows and to be largely, if not altogether, absent from individual Chinese consciousness.  But at other times it exercises dominion over virtually everything in sight.  Thus, the martial arts, healing practices, and the heroes of popular literature and opera often inhabit a space in Chinese culture that seems unambiguously "secular."  But it is not at all unusual, as clearly suggested in the accounts of Boxer spirit possession transcribed at the beginning of this chapter, for these selfsame phenomena to be incorporated into a fully religious framework of meaning.

Confucianism is founded on the idea that we inherit a great deal from our ancestors, including body, culture, and circumstance.  We also, to some extent, inherit our will, our intentions, and our goals.  The Confucian project is predicated on the idea that we have a duty to carryout and comprehend our ancestors' intentions in a way which is coherent with our own circumstance and experiences.  In practice, it is entirely possible that we have two ancestors who died with conflicting goals, or an ancestor who died with an unfulfilled desire, like unrequited love, or an ancestor who wished and plotted to kill us.  Our dead ancestors have become spirits whose intentions linger on in us to some extent in our habits and our reactions to stress.  It is the central purpose of Confucianism to resolve these conflicts and lingering feelings of distress through a continuous process of self-reflection and upright conduct--so that we may leave a better world for our descendants.  The metaphor is fundamentally one of exorcism.  We empty ourselves of our own agenda so that we might consider the true will of our ancestors (inviting the spirits), then we take that understanding and transform it into action (dispersion and resolution).  Finally we leave our descendants with open ended possibilities, support, and clarity of purpose (harmony, rectification, unity).

As gongfu practitioners we are emptying our practice of the inappropriate conduct of our ancestors and our teachers.  The forms should be empty.  That is part of the original vision of what they should be.

The theatrical exorcistic traditions (Nuo) which I have been reading about in Jo Riley’s book Chinese Theater and the Actor in Performance, begin with a ritual emptying of the performers/exorcists bodies.  They remove the three hun and 7 po (together ten spirits, which polarize in our bodies and which disperse at death, hun up, po down) and using protective talisman they put the hun and po in vessels for safe keeping.  They can then perform the exorcisms while possessed by martial deities, spirits or powerful allied demons, without fear of harming themselves.

Jo Riley explains that the physical training of jingju (Beijing Opera) begins with a process of emptying.  The movements of Northern Shaolin form the basis of jingju basic training.  She posits that the actors have a duel role as exorcists and as performers who must be empty in order to fully embody the theatrical and religious rolls they are playing.  My experience studying Noh dance/theater in Japan directly parallels this.  My Noh teacher taught us two forms and two songs to go along with them.  When we were performing we were instructed to be as empty as possible.  It was explained to me that a great performer is sometimes empty enough that the actual spirit of that particular dance will descend the tree painted at the back of the stage and enter the performer.

Daoist Meditation takes emptiness as it’s root.  All Daoist practices arise from this root of emptiness.  The main distinction between an orthodox Daoist exorcism and a less than orthodox exorcism is in fact the ability of the priests to remain empty while invoking and enlisting various potent unseen forces (gods/demons/spirits/ancestors) to preform the ritual on behalf of a living constituency, or the recently dead.

Calligraphy was historically understood in the same way.  To learn calligraphy was to copy the exact calligraphic movements of a righteous accomplished ancestor.  First one would empty themselves and meditate on the ink and the blank piece paper, then on the writing to be copied.  Through the brush, one would execute movements which would manifest on the page while simultaneously transforming (zaohua) or rectifying ones heart (zheng xin).  In the mature expression of Calligraphy both as an art and for talisman making, potency is a direct result of the artist or priests ability to first empty, and then manifest the characters internally as well as on paper.  That potency (qi) is then transmitted to those who see the writing; transforming, inspiring, protecting, purifying or healing them.

Music, medicine, and cooking can all be understood this way too.

Puppetry performances,--according to my informants in Taiwan, as well as the writings of Kristofer Schipper, and Jo Riley-- are sometimes considered the most potent of all forms of ritual exorcism.  This is because puppets are truly empty.

Emptiness is a key metaphor of Chinese culture.  A culture which favors actions over explanations.  Actions become polysemous, embedded with layers of meanings, meanings which can even seem contradictory.  There is rarely an orthodoxy of meaning.  The meaning of a particular action, in this case "emptiness,” can change as it traverses through strata of society, time, region, gender, family, or identity.  Emptiness is a key metaphor in a “realm of action” which is operative in a very wide and varied set of contexts.

In martial arts, particularly the internal martial arts, emptiness is the basis, the ground, the root of action.  We should expect the forms to be empty.  We should expect to feel nothing, taste blandness, see darkness, and hear silence.  When you do your forms and routines, be empty, like a puppet.

______________________

*It's probably also true that people would donate because they thought the monks were entertaining.  It's a lot less likely that they would donate because they thought the monks were ruffians.

Martial History Magazine

Jason Couch of Martial History Magazine sent me this article he put together Chinese Martial Arts in 19th Century China.  He has collected a bunch of short pieces written by Westerners about fighting in China.  I found them all interesting and worth taking the time to read and ponder.   It is just a blog post and I appreciate that sometimes we just want to get something up and out to world, but I would like to know more about the reasons each of these Westerners were in China at that time, and perhaps something about their views on other subjects; where they pro-Missionary?  Were they involved in trade or education?  Did they learn the local language?  Stuff like that.  Maybe that information is not available but as he says there are some contradiction among the accounts and it would be helpful in trying to evaluate the informants against each other.

The first section on grabbing each other's queues is something I hadn't read before but I think it is important to understand that Han people were required to wear their hair in a queue as a sign of subordination which was the hair style that Manchu had historically used for their slaves. Slaves would have been tied up at night by their queues.  The humiliation associated with the queue could get pretty twisted.

It's also quite clear from the texts that there is plenty of overlap between theater and fighting--and there is even some recognition and discussion of the religious component of the arts.  Great stuff.

You might want to check out some more of Jason's articles too,  The Boy Scouts in War, or The First Thanksgiving.

Scratching The Uncarved Block

The Uncarved Block is one of the primary metaphors for the concept/anti-concept known as wuwei. The Daodejing suggests that we be like an uncarved block of wood.  The implication is that once a block of wood is fashioned into something, it loses it’s potential to be something else.  Once we make a decision, it cuts off certain options.  In other words, it is often good to wait.  But the Daodejing isn’t telling us to be indecisive.  It doesn’t say, “in difficult situations--waver!”  It also doesn’t say be slow, like a tree; or “be inactive,” like a log or a stump.  It says be like a partially processed block of wood.  Since the Daodejing doesn’t give us any idea how big this block of wood might be, or what it might be for, we can speculate.  Our block of wood could be carved into any sort of deity or icon, or perhaps a boat, a cabinet, a ladle, or a coffin.  The Daodejing is using this metaphor to point to a process which takes place when we make something.  It is not saying, “Don’t make stuff.”  Sometimes a decision can position us for more possibilities, sometimes a decision can limit us. Is this better than that? Be comfortable with ambiguity, but have a few uncarved blocks hanging around in case you need them.

There are a couple of other ways to look at this too.  A block of wood is simple, a block of wood has no preferences, a block does not calculate it’s advantages.  A block of wood can be an image of innocence, and of embracing the unknown.

The process of carving a block changes our nature as human beings.  It changes the carver.  Carving is a skill which requires particularly fine motor control, and a very specific sense of three dimensional mental imaging.  It is a sort of trance.  A sharpened focus.  It creates patterns of conditioning in our bodies and habits of mind.
Thus, the concept/anti-concept of wuwei is not a method. It is a challenge to the type of thinking which looks at everything as a method.

Yes, this type of method might be better than that one. But methods are just vehicles for transforming a vision into an experience--a result...in process.  A method always comes from something, like an uncarved block, and always gets discarded in the end.  Making and measuring is an aggressive mind-set which easily causes us to loose sight of the bigger picture.


Internal martial arts can be understood as a vehicle for discarding methods.
_____________

I’ve been reading Tabby Cat’s blog irregularly and I noticed that he has been ranting against any other blog which describes or promotes a method which involves alignment, structure, or anatomical and physiological analysis.  He even dismissed my reluctant post on the three big muscle groups, and hinted that I might be an Posture Nazi. What is this all about?   It seems our little Tabby wants to be like the uncarved block but just can’t seem to pull it off.

His Taijiquan tradition is all gush, gush about Ben Lo, and gushy, gushy about Ben’s teacher Chen Man-Ching (the "Professor"), and, of course, ultra gushy wushy about Chen’s teacher, Yang Chenfu.  All that gushing is a form of Shamanism.  I define Shamanism as:  Making contracts or alliances with powerful unseen entities in the hope that one will acquire that entity’s powers. A word to the wise, do not get in the way of other people’s contracts with unseen forces.

In that school there isn’t much teaching.  There isn’t much attempt to create methods which will help people develop.  There is an emphasis on relaxing.  Do the form a lot, get the postures just the way you’re told, with out explication or modification.  If you lose  a bout of push-hands to a senior student, it is because you aren’t relaxed enough.  Now, honestly, there is nothing wrong with discarding methods.  --Remember the uncarved block!

Taijiquan really can be practiced as a revealing of our true nature without any inquiry or experiment.  Heck, who needs the form?  Who needs a teacher?  Just stop carving! Stop making and measuring, stop calculating and stop seeing everything as a method!  I concur!

Readers may be thinking, oh, yeah, I could move to a cabin in the Montana wilderness and live a life of quietude and leisure and then my every movement would become Taijiquan, right?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  If it isn’t working for you right here, it isn’t all that likely to work for you out there either.  But so what?  Wuwei is the idea that a return to simplicity is always an option.  Always a possibility.  Everywhere.  Always.

The moment I start writing a blog post, or you start reading one, the danger that we will lose sight of wuwei increases.  Because reading and writing is a form of carving. The moment we put pen to paper we risk crossing over into the land of methods.

Does embracing a method mean we have lost sight of wuwei? Maybe, maybe not.  This is one of the essential questions the Daodejing asks.   Some people have translated Dao-De-Jing as "The Classic of the Way and It’s Power” (Dao=way, De=power, Jing=text) meaning that it is a book of ultimate methods.  But Dao and De resist definition.   We could say there are Dao style methodless-methods, and De style methods which perfect us back toward simplicity.  The two together are one, Daode.

Our true nature is without limits.  Sometimes we go into survival mode and make contracts with the unseen world in hope of getting an advantage, a leg up, or accumulating power (Shamanism).  Other times we are content to explore, inquire, and experiment--wandering at ease (De).  And sometimes we find ourselves without an agenda at all (Dao).  These three categories of human experience, Shamanism, De, and Dao, are practiced to some extent by all humans.

If Tabby Cat ever stops scratching his post and decides to come down from his anonymity and share a bowl of milk with me--we might find ourselves together with no agenda.  (Yes, I’m offering!) He certainly makes a habit in his blog of purring in the direction of methodless-methods: “Just Rrrrrelax, it’s just Mmmmind, nothing but Eeeeenergy.”  But then he hits himself with his own bludgeon.  He goes to Ashtanga Yoga for alignment, and thinks Boxing is the perfect method for learning to hit.   Au contraire my fair kitty, I surmise from this that he has become trapped in a method.  He believes that Taijiquan works through using sensitivity to find an opponent’s weakness and channeling energy/power effortlessly up from the ground to uproot his opponent.  This is a perfect description of a water woman reverting to an ice woman.  This would also explain why he thinks he can’t hit someone using Taijiquan.  At that level he gets some power from weakness, but using sensitivity for power and advantage is a form of aggression which will block further fruition.  Power (jin) and energy (qi) have limits, weakness has none.

Guns, Whiskey, Kungfu, and Indian Dance

I did not come from a guns and whiskey family.  But I recognize that of the four major American folkways, only one has ever taken any real pride in men dancing:  Rednecks.  For this gift of beauty and freedom, I am an honorary redneck.
Some people might say, “Scott, you’ve been practicing martial arts so long you have gongfu on the brain.”  It’s a possibility, I admit.  Sometimes I get excited and I start to see martial arts in everything (Richard Rorty would call it the narcissistic tendency of powerful ideas).  I can use Kungfu power to scrub the dishes.  I can use maximum muscle tendon twisting to wring-out the laundry.  I can set the table “the way a beautiful woman would do it,” (that’s an alternate name for Baguazhang seventh palm change).

But Chitresh Das, my Kathak (North Indian Classical Dance) teacher always said that Kathak had roots in the warrior tradition.  Ladies of ill repute did the same style of dance, under a different name of course, but that does not discount it’s warrior origins.  All Indian Classical dance has some version of deity invocation as well.  Kathak is done with 5 to 10 pounds of small bronze bells wrapped around the ankles and calves.  While it makes little sense from a guerrilla warfare point of view, an assembly of several thousand warriors stamping the ground with all those bells would rival the terror inducing sounds of a line of M1 tanks.  Besides, they function as armor for the lower leg and weight training.  Oh, and every movement from the warrior dances of Arjuna to the blood lusts of the Goddess Kali, to the dragon-tail pulling antics of Baby Krishna, to the flower picking of Princess Rada --can all be done with martial power and embodiment.  In fact, the stances and silk-reeling of Chen Style Taijiquan feel like kissing cousin’s to the Indian tradition I learned.

I’ve had a taste of several different styles of African and African Diaspora Dances but my actual training was in Congolese and African-Haitian Dance.  My Congolese Dance teacher, Malonga Casquelourd, learned to dance from soldiers on army bases.  Malonga’s father was a high ranking soldier in the Congolese Army and the family followed his deployments around the country.  Malonga had a fighter’s body and spirit.  Both Congolese and Haitian styles of dance have specific war/fighting training in them, but even the dances for funerals (sometimes confrontational), dances for dating/mating (also prone to challenges), and dances for work--all can be seen through my martial artist lens. The embedded fighting techniques are hidden everywhere in plain sight, they only need to be practiced as fighting, with a partner, to become functional.

Without the Redneck contribution to American tolerance, we would, as a culture, be cut off from understanding what it is to be a man who dances.  World-wide, a significant part of what it is for a man to express himself through dance is a demonstration of his ability to fight, a show of martial prowess.  (And I dare say, the same is often true for women.)

Big Muscles

As someone whose job it is to translate ideas from one culture to another, the pressure to use more familiar language is always floating around in the background.

Many people would like me to describe the fine details of Chinese Internal Martial Arts using vocabulary from sports or physical therapy.  This is always problematic for two reasons.  First, one can only go so far describing kinesthetic experiences before one starts  sacrificing subtlety--language is an imperfect tool.  Second, by discarding Chinese concepts, one loses the primary organizing metaphors of Chinese culture, and what might be simple suddenly becomes complex.

Still, sometimes we give in to the pressure.  Today is one of those days.

There are three big muscles on our backs which are extremely powerful and efficient. Unfortunately, the problem with humans is; we don’t use these big muscles very well.  Our arms are just too smart. We habitually use our many smaller arm muscles to do complex and repetitive tasks.  This is the cause of a lot of stress and tends to shorten our lives.  For this reason advanced internal martial artists have developed ways to make use of the three big muscles.

We evolved these three big muscles as four legged creatures with our torsos parallel to the ground.  This is important because on a horizontal torso the three big muscles hang  in a relaxed way towards the front of the body (originally the underside).

• The diamond shaped Trapezius muscle hangs from the spine wrapping the ribcage towards the arms.


• The Latissimus dorsi muscle hangs from the spine around towards the belly and reaches around to the inside of the arms.


• The Gluteal Fascial muscle complex hangs off of the lower spine and pelvis onto the outsides of the legs.

If you naturally move from just these three muscles, you are probably a very strong and efficient cave man--because this is not how humans normally move.

To activate these three muscles is a fairly complex process.  Normal sports training doesn't do it.

First we have to get them to hang loosely.  Most of the time when we are moving around or working, the three big muscles are being used for stabilizing.  They stabilize the pelvis, the spine and the arms.  (This is an important function in the event that we get hit by a car or a buffalo, but it isn't necessary to walk around all the time using these muscles as stabilizers.)

Basic structure training in Internal Martial Arts gets us to stop using these three big muscles for stabilization by getting us to put our weight directly on our bones.  The other 400 or so smaller muscles in our bodies are then used to focus force along our bones through twisting, spiraling and wrapping.  In that sense, the early years of internal martial arts training teaches us to use our muscles like ligaments; or put another way, the primary function of the smaller muscles becomes ligament support.  (To develop this capacity in ones legs requires many years of training.)

Once the three big muscles are relaxed and loose and the rest of the muscles are being used for ligament support, a transition begins.

The transition is difficult because it requires turning off the active quality of the smaller muscles. The main function of the smaller muscles then becomes simply to transfer force or weight from outside the body (like from an opponent or gravity) to the three big muscles of the back.  The smaller muscles also have a minor secondary function of changing the direction of force coming out of the three big muscles.

This minor secondary function is not to be confused with active control.  To make this transition means practicing doing nothing with your arms for hours everyday and connecting the unengaged emptiness of your arms to an equivalent lack of active muscle engagement in your legs.  (In practice, this usually looks like loose flailing or slow spongy movement.)

The three big muscles are already so big they don’t need to be strengthened but they do need to be enlivened.  All three muscles should be like tiger skin or octopi, able to expand and condense and move in any direction.  They then can take over control of the four limbs in such a way that movement becomes effortless--even against a strongly resistant partner. If you accomplish this all of your smaller muscles will be doing the task of transferring force to the three big muscles---preventing an opponent from being able to effect your body through your limbs.  Yet whenever your limbs make contact with your opponent, he will be vulnerable to the force of your three big muscles.

In the Taijiquan Classics they call this, "I know my opponent, but my opponent does not know me!"

(Note: weightlifting/surgical ideas about anatomy are so dominant that the gluteal muscle fascial complex doesn't actually exist as a picture on the internet.)

Monkey Doesn't Want To Go To School

Rebecca Yaker

Of all the martial arts principles in the world, Monkey Doesn't Want to go to School is the one I most easily identify with.

It also expresses how I've been feeling about sitting in front of the computer and goes a little way towards explaining why I haven't been posting a lot lately, despite a list of awesome blog ideas in my notebook.

When you try to get a monkey to go to school you can, for instance, grab him by the wrist and start pulling him up and in the direction of the door.  Monkey thinks this is funny.  Monkey melts his muscles and gives you his weight.  Every ounce.  His relaxed arm naturally integrates with the large muscles on his back, making it easy for him to unbalance you.  He lengthens his spine and his tailbone down and away, as he sits into the crease at the top of his leg (his kua).  He yawns....

Essentially, the same thing happens if he is in the tree when you are trying to get him to go to school.  Monkey lets you grab his lower leg, while he flops his elbows and chin over a branch.  When you pull his relaxed leg you help him integrate it with the big muscles on his back, and you find yourself trying to pull the whole tree.

It is a basic principle of all internal martial arts that you want to create a Monkey Doesn't Want To Go To School situation.  Human being's biggest problem is that they use their arms, hand and fingers too much (OK, some of us perhaps use our mouths too much also).  But it is this over reliance on the intelligence of our arms which causes a catastrophic collapse of whole body power.  In order to effectively use all of one's weight, momentum, and large muscle groups, the arms have to become as stupid as the rest of our body.  This is why we cultivate the principle of monkey doesn't want to go to school.

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

A while back I wrote a post called, why sit-ups make you fat.  Now from Time Magazine there is a nice article called Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin. It's written in a meandering first-person "why me" kind of voice-- like so many articles about health these days-- (ok, even I do that sometimes) still it's one of the best popular articles I've seen in a while.  Make sure you read the whole thing because this was from page 4:

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control "muscle" as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.

The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

The article makes it clear that exercise is linked to appetite, and it even suggests that exercise is linked to rest.  It doesn't explain that exercise is linked to sleep or our appetite for stillness.  Chinese Martial Arts, Health, Daoism 101 tells us that exercise, food, rest and sleep function as four interacting appetites.  Change one, and you change the others.  The quickest, most effective way to stimulate hunger is to exercise.  So yeah, intense vigorous exercise is likely to make you want to eat more.  It's also likely to make you crave stillness and help you sleep. These four regulate each other!

The article talks about people forcing themselves to run or do short bursts of burn and sweat at the gym.  In my book, that's a sure sign of a problem.  Exercise should be something you have an appetite for.  If you're healthy, your body will tell you how much exercise you need and how vigorous it should be.  I pop out of bed in the morning with an appetite to stand still for an hour in the dark cool air, followed by a couple hours of qigong and baguazhang.  If that's not enough my body will tell me by giving me ants-in-my-pants later in the day.

Burning-out your muscles three or four days a week at the gym will de-regulate your appetites!  Similarly, if you stay up late and drinking beer, the next morning you'll want to move less.  I don't mean to make it sound simple or easy.  We humans have social appetites too!  And competitive appetites, and most of us have an occasional craving for the taste of risk and danger.  How we manage all of this stuff together, as a single subject, is the field of study.  Chinese Martial Arts is social, and sometimes dangerous.  It helps us find our natural appitite for stillness and it gives us a context for cultivating it.  It enlivens our sensitivity to how different foods make us feel, move, and sleep.

How intense should a workout be?  It's a tough question to answer because it has to match up with everything else you are doing.  From age 18 to 30 I worked out 8 hours a day:  Kungfu, dance and bicycle riding in between.  I did that much because I wanted to, because it felt like the right amount of movement.  But would it have been possible to focus all that energy into something more conventional like working the floor of the Stock Market?  Maybe.

The beauty of Internal Martial Arts is that as we get older, we can still get the intensity of circulation and whole body stimulation without sweating.  That's right, I try not to sweat three month out of the year.  Traditionally, Spring time is the only season internal martial artists break a sweat.  The muscles and sinews can all be moved around and animated without having to scrunch up your face with exertion, strain or pain.

I like that the author of the Time article mentions her tendency toward "Puritan fury."  We ignore our ideas about what we think we are at our own peril.  If you have an appetite for self-torture, for instance, it's a lot healthier to get that out of the way in a poorly aligned horse stance between 6 and 7 AM than it is to bring it with you to your job, or take it home to your kids.

Taoism in the News

Here is an article from the NYT about Daoist music at Carnege Hall.

Here is an article from Taiwan News titled Daoism in Taiwan Undergoes Transformation.   I personally found the article frustrating.  It starts off saying Daoism is the hot new thing, then tells us it was hot a long time ago, then it says it's always been kind'a hot under the radar, then is says it's gotten too hot is some ways.  All true I guess but each point is only interesting if investigated in depth.

This one is also from the Taiwan News about a Palanquin builder and carver who is competing with cheaper mass produced palanquins.  This Summer I really enjoyed walking around the neighborhood they describe in the article.  There were tons of people carving deities and the work was exquisite.  (I got some of it on video too.) These articles about how a traditional skill is being lost are not that convincing.  First of all, if it made it into the 21st Century, it's doing pretty good for itself.  Seems like there is still a market.  Second of all, if a mass produced one will do, then a mass produced one will do.  What's the big deal?  Take that incredible skill and carve something else that people want to buy and treasure.

It's funny too.  One of the key metaphors in the Daodejing is that of the Uncarved Block of Wood.  Hey, leave that block of wood in a potential state, at least until you need it.  It was recognized 2500 years ago that the process of carving wood expands the part of your mind dedicated to your arms, fingers and shoulders.  Carving causes stress.  It forces things into being.  What would happen if we just left the gods inside the blocks of wood?  Would we still be human?

Steamy Woman, Watery Woman, Icy Woman

The practice of Taijqiquan push-hands is a feminine art.  Even when practiced by men, it unleashes feminine qualities.  For the fun of it, we could compare it to ballet.  Even though most people are familiar with a few famous male ballet dancers like Nijinsky, Nureyev, and Baryshnikov, everyone thinks of ballet as a feminine art.

The first level of practice is called "Icy Woman."  At this level we develop a root so that when pushed the opponent's force is directed through our body down to the ground.  As the Icy Woman's structure improves she is able to keep this rooted quality continuously during dynamic movement.  If played as a game, both people will try to keep even pressure on their opponent's root.  The moment the pressure is broken either partner can move to sever their opponent's root. The game can also be won root-to-root.  In this case each person uses a blend of twisting, wrapping, expanding and condensing to improve the integration of their root.  Root against root, the better root will win.

There are two side tracks many teachers take with the Icy Woman.  The first side track is technique.  90% of the push-hands on youtube is a demonstration of this.  Techniques include tricks, grappling, striking, pushing, plucking martial applications and so on.  The other side track is trying to develop sensitivity.  This confusion arises when an Icy Woman has a broken or ineffective structure or an inferior root, and yet still wants desperately to win.  Sensitivity does not need to be developed.  Sensitivity is innate, we are born with it, no assembly required.  The only way to reduce sensitivity is with aggression.  The Daodejing makes this point on the first page, (the concept is called wuwei).

In innocence we can feel the subtle essences.

When possessed of desire we can feel only the yearned-for manifest.

The second level of practice is called "Watery Woman."  At this level it is necessary to become weak.  If played as a game, the goal is to try and find some ice in your opponent.  Ice is either structure or rootedness.  The Watery Woman does not attempt to compete structure-against-structure nor does she try to uproot her opponent.  She gives up rootedness and structure for fluid movement and weight.  The Watery Woman sloshes her weight in and around her opponent, she only wins when her opponent makes a mistake--the mistake of becoming icy.

The Watery Woman is not hard to achieve, because it is also an innate human quality.  Many people get stuck with the Watery Woman because they try to fall back on Icy Woman skills and techniques when they are losing.  A heavier Water Woman has a huge advantage over a waifish one.  A half-frozen Icy Woman can beat a half-dried Watery Woman.  Being an Watery Woman is not an advantage in and of itself.  One can get stuck at this level by developing very effective mixed ice and water techniques, including vibrating, bouncing, or shaking oneself.  If it only moves fast, it isn't water.

When the Watery Woman becomes comfortable, lively and uninhibited-- the pleasure of the experience  becomes steamy.

The third level of practice is called "Steamy Woman."  At this level her body becomes cloud-like.  Empty and full at the same time.  When the Steamy Woman meets ice or water in her opponents she simply floats them out of the way.  Her mind is not on her body at all, but all around it at play with the elements of volume, momentum, and density.  Inside a steam-like feeling moves around freely without regard to purpose or concept.  Like a cloud, it has no agenda.  Outside the game is played by the shifts and swirls of presence.

For those of you who have been following my discussions for sometime, you will probably see the three Daoist "views" permeating the practice of push-hands:  Wuwei (effortless, natural, return), Transcendence (perfection, enlightenment), and Shamanism (contracts with, or sacrifices to, powerful allies,--in this case female super hero allies.)  Push-hands is a method which can be practiced using any of these views, but each view will produce a unique type fruition.

No doubt, some of my readers are thinking, "Where did you get this Woman thing from."  Here, I must admit that the Chinese term I'm referring to is ren, or "human," and it has no gender.  However, when George Xu, for instance, explains these three types of people, he makes the opposite mistake and calls them Ice Men, Water Men, and Steam Men.  I chose to use the female pronoun because it's consistent with Daoist thinking and practice.  Another key idea of the Daodejing is the centrality of our feminine nature. (Chapter 6)

The Valley Spirit is Deathless it is called the Dark Feminine.

The door of the Dark Feminine, is called the root of Heaven and Earth.

Subtle, it seems only tenuously to exist, and yet drawn upon it is inexhaustible.

I have been told there is a Fourth level, the "Void-like Woman."  It is effortless, and innate, it happens automatically with a completely resolved death.  Perhaps it is possible to reach this level while one is still breathing?

OK a little off topic, but pretty Icy!