Paulie Zink Workshop in Marin
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Here is the info on a Paulie Zink workshop April 17th and 18th in Marin County, California. This is a bit difficult to write about because he is calling it Yin-Flow Yoga instead of calling it by it's actual name Daoyin. It's a weird problem, he wants to be able to teach his material and it nearly fits within the yoga class context, but if you read the text of the link you won't understand why this guy's stuff is so special. And because of that participant's expectations are going to be for yoga not Daoyin.For those of you not familiar with Paulie Zink, he is the preeminent practitioner of Monkey Kungfu, he dominated the tournaments and exhibitions in the 1980's and I've yet to see a better performer of Monkey Kungfu. There are better acrobats out there and there are better contortionists, and there are possibly people who act a little more like monkeys than he does--but there is no one else I've seen who puts it all together the way he does. It's too bad he never had a whole troop to perform with. He does have a disciple now, so I'm hopeful that his lineage will get passed down.
He credits his ability to years of train in the Daoyin system which he learned along with the Monkey Kungfu. This system is a combination of meditation techniques, some of them very old and shamanic like spending 4 hours balancing on only your knees and elbows staring at a flame, along with balancing, stretching, folding, rolling, exploding, pounding and scrapping. It is made up of animal imitation. Each animal has a whole series of meditations, postures, and forms of locomotion. It is the forms of locomotion that really sets it apart from a yoga class, but around half of the postures are quite similar to yoga postures. The difference is, his frog eats flies and hops, his bunny wiggles it's tail, and his downward-dog, scampers around the room and tries to lick people.I think of Daoyin primarily at a hermit practice done in conjunction with long periods of meditation. It is a capacity increasing tradition and is likely one of the roots of Chinese medicine. In his lineage it seems to have merged with a circus tradition. How did this happen? The answer is pretty simple but not widely understood, in fact I don't think Paulie Zink agrees with me on it. But any way here it is:
Paulie ZinkThe most common and widespread form of religious experience in China was public Physical Ritual Theater (often called opera in English). There were quasi elite performing families which were part of a designated caste. These families were hated outsiders. It seems likely that Zink's teacher was from one of these families and taught a single outsider (an American) because he wanted to free the art from the tradition. In the South of China, where his tradition comes from, Daoist priests performed public rituals which included theater and theatrical components. So it's not hard to imaging that Daoists were working with performing troops and may have even apprenticed there sons and daughters to each other occasionally.
Anyway, if you've got the time, check out the workshop!
What is going on here? Could this unity harmony thingy explain why Google was able to find the compromise of moving it's operations to Hong Kong?
And of course the Taiji symbol itself is the most ubiquitous image of harmony. It graphically dipicts simultaneous individuation--two distinct things working together inside of each other. But that just starts to sound weird, so lets have an example.
The shell of the egg is the boundary of our perception. When we practice internal gongfu the shell is the sky and the horizon--as we see, feel, hear, smell and imagine it. We call this shen (spirit) in martial arts. It contains the yolk and the egg white. In basic training we develop the yolk (the body) so that it is smooth, round, and able to shift and change like a thick liquid which can expand and condense in all directions. Then the yolk itself becomes so quiet that we forget it! We forget it like we would forget our own body in the presence of a beauty beyond words. We move only the egg white, shifting and swirling within an enormous shell, and the body follows without effort or inhibition. That's harmony.
Beijing Opera (Jingju) has as its most basic physical training something called "da" literally hitting or striking. The warm ups I learned as a kid studying Northern Shaolin are the very same ones used in Beijing Opera. The stage roles are divided into either martial or civil categories (wu and wen). Extensive weapons training is given to everyone because much of the traditional repertoire involves depicting historic conflicts and battles. Probably the best piece of evidence is the most famous Chinese Opera star of the 20th Century, the female impersonating dan 
"Mean people" were used for everything from entertaining visiting dignitaries, to weddings, to the most sacred rituals of a region. "Opera Families" were profane outsiders who lived in separate districts or separate villages and yet were paid to entertain and purify--to bring order and expel evil.
Which brings us back to martial arts. Martial arts were used extensively in these rituals. It seems almost too obvious that the basic physical training for popular and rarefied physical theater in China was in fact martial arts training. Each region had it's own style of gongfu (kung fu) and it's own style of theater (ci). But the basic training was the same. It could be refined for either fighting, performing, or both.
How do laws effect the way we train our bodies? Drugs, hormones, and steroids can dramatically change the way we train. We've all seen the pictures. Pain is one of the big factors that stops people from training yet some painkillers are totally legal and some are not. The whole steroid issue is confusing because one of the main reasons people take them is to train past the point at which pain would normally stop a person form training, so why are painkillers OK and steroids aren't? Oh yeah side effects, like painkillers don't have those. Many people are now aware that Ma Huang, an important herb in the Chinese Medical Pharmacopeia, is now illegal in the US because it was being used as a steroid, and one person gave themselves a heart attack. Please give us our Ma Huang back!
There are tons of exercise inventions, toys and apparatus that are illegal because someone hurt themselves and sued. I suspect we are missing out on some brilliant training equipment and other fun stuff because no manufacturer was will to take the risk.
There are two parts to it. The first is basic physical education. If a weighted knee rolls inward and the foot turns outward simultaneously, the Anterior Cruciate Ligament is in danger of breaking. Everyone needs to know this. Just telling people to keep their knee over their toe is not enough information. Students need to understand what they are training to avoid. But a knee really can move in a complete circle around the foot as long as forces are not putting that ligament at risk. In fact it is a good idea to train this way because it teaches the student to keep their whole foot on the ground, there-by avoiding rolling over on the ankle and ma
ny other possible strains.
With the knee forward of the toe and the Achilles tendon fully extended the heel can even come off the ground. This is used in Bagua Zhang's so called "lower basin" training, and in Daoyin dragon walk. These two are advanced techniques and need to be introduced over time, but they are safe.
Some of the old masters were brutal. And it is probably true that people got badly hurt every once in a while. I'm happy to leave that in the past. But there is also a kind of rough confidence about the body which comes from tens of thousands of hours of practice. To the untrained eye that confidence may look dangerous or risky when in fact it is a gift and a treasure.