Monga

Monga is the latest blockbuster movie from Taiwan and it is playing twice on opening night of the Taiwan Film Days festival put on by the San Francisco Film Society.  This gangster movie by Niu Doze has several male heart throbs in the lead roles and tons of hand to hand group fight scenes--Thus making it a great date movie!  But maybe not a first-date because it is actually quite complex.

The fight scenes are a lot of fun.  The choreographic style is not classic kungfu, it is loose and even sloppy.  But that's a good thing because the characters doing the fighting are talented fighters, not skilled fighters.  The free-ness of the choreography tells us the protagonists are young, a bit crazy and that they clearly love fighting.

The plot basically follows the emotional development of a few young men-of-prowess, a band of brothers, as they deal with more and more confining choices and harsh fates.  The plot has some twists in it, some are fun, and some are brutal.

But what is really important about this film is that it attempts to deal with the historic role men-of-prowess played in maintaining a social order outside of government control. This is what makes the movie special.  The action is centered around a temple.  The temple itself is martial, and the lead characters are all devoted to a martial god.  The film beautifully illustrates the thesis of the scholarly work Bandits, Eunichs and the Son of Heaven:  In order to keep commerce safe enough to keep thriving in such a vast country, Chinese civilization has depended on complex sometimes haphazard alliances between men-of-prowess.  The central government was never strong enough to control banditry or rebellion on it's own.  Magistrates were spread thinly throughout the country but righteous heroes, often centered around a temple to a martial god, were easy to come by.  These rough independent men tended to walk a fine line between community service and community extortion.  (More posts on this idea are here, there, over here and here too.)

The film can also probably be viewed as an allegory for the conflicts between native Taiwanese and the Mainlanders who came with the Guomindang in 1949.  It can also probably be read as an allegory for the influence the current Mainland Chinese have on Taiwanese politics, specifically the conflicts over independence between the KMT and the DPP.  But honestly I probably missed most of the nuances of these allegories, you'd have to be steeped in Taiwanese politics to get them.  Hopefully one of my readers is steeped and will enlighten us in the comments below.

The film Monga (Taiwan, 2010) is showing a 6:15 PM and 9:40 PM this Friday, October 22nd, 2010. It's at the New People theater which is a fantastic new theater in Japan Town.  Check it out!

Monster Motor

I've been thinking about the difference between three types of movement:

Fine motor movements like typing, making a cup of coffee, or cleaning a gun.

Gross motor movements like throwing a baseball, carrying a bag of laundry, or swimming.

Monster motor movements are a third category that I have invented.

Last Thanksgiving I watched a two and a half year old defeat a three and a half year old in a no-holds-barred wrestling match.  She did it, not by superior weight or strength, but I believe by the use of superior access to monster motor movement.  The young man she defeated, when not wrestling, was particularly concerned with improving his fine motor skills.  He spent a lot of time playing with small Lego men and would get frustrated when he ran up against the limits of his dexterity.  Hopefully we will get to see a re-match this Thanksgiving and all future Thanksgivings so that I can continue my research.

Monster motor movement begins in the womb, with whole body shrinking, expanding and spiraling.  In Chinese medical terms-- open, close, pivot, in cosmological terms, heaven, earth and center.

Lately I have been teaching new Taijiquan students two basic daoyin animals, the cat and the dog.  They are somewhat opposite ways of moving, but in my current way of thinking they both embody monster motor movement.  They each begin from a pre-locomotor physicality and progress to two very different sorts of four legged walking.  I'm avoiding the word crawling because everyone already thinks they know what that means, and what I'm talking about is animal specific movement.    I then try to get students to use this information to animalize their Tai Chi.

More on all this later but it ties into something else I've been thinking about.

At the rock climbing gym I noticed that climbing routes with bigger hand holds are more tiring.  This is deeply counter-intuitive, particularly because the climbs which are ranked easier always have bigger hand holds.  But the fact is, climbing with my finger tips is more efficient than climbing with my whole hand.  Each joint is an additional source of leaverage.  I'm not sure exactly what is going on here but I think that engaging the finger tips for balance and locomotion improves access to monster motor movement.

The Importance of Sometimes Being Obscure

The process of discovery, like the process of returning to simplicity, requires some wandering and fumbling about.  Part of that involves being, saying, and doing what may appear to others to be obscure.

Ben Lo famously said that one of the most important aspects of Taijiquan is that we make our hands like the hands of a beautiful woman.  What?  You mean like Paris Hilton?  Or Emma Stone?

A Thought On The Beach

Ritual is a way to make the unconscious conscious.  Not because that is in and of itself a good, but because it opens the possibility that one might free himself of stale qi-- of ghosts, of inadvertent conditioning (gender/movement/fantasy), of conflicting emotions, or of lingering unresolved commitments.  To the extent that this ritual awareness of stale qi remains in a conscious -body bound- form, we can say a given ritual is a failure.

When we revel in simple rituals we are embracing the notion that all great achievements are built on a long chain of failures.

Power Generation

Since you axed me, I'm gonna essplain it to you.

--Rush Limbaugh

A small part of the Rory Miller workshop a few weeks ago was dedicated to power generation. The simple reason for this is that striking a violent threat without doing damage is a waste of time. If you are already receiving damage, your ability to fight is diminishing as time passes.
Rory is able to pass on some very useful material about power generation in a very short time.
Let me start out by saying I think he did a great job of getting people to think about the importance of power generation to self-defense, and how to improve ones power in a short period of time. Tasked with the same goals I would not have done things much differently. However, I’m dedicated to discovering the highest level of martial arts theory available, so we have some taking apart to do.

Here is what he taught.

The drop step is the most immediate way to generate power.
Press the back heel.
Twist suddenly at the hip (kua).
Keep the whole arm and back loose like throwing a baseball.

These all increase power. When put together they dramatically increase power.
I realized a long time ago that I have way more power than I actually need to fight, from a self-defense point of view what I have to say about power generation is trivial. I suppose the charge of esoteric is a fair description of my opinion.
Rory himself raised the issue of why each of these work. With a better understanding of theory we can improve our results. So here are my explanations.

The drop step is used extensively in African dance and many dance systems, it is also the main strategy taught for punching in Northern Shaolin. It works primarily because it adds the force of falling mass. Rolling an elbow forward on the opponent’s arm while doing a drop step puts at least 100 pounds of force, multiplied by a few inches of gravity, onto the opponent. If the opponent’s structure is compromised already, the movement will likely cause damage. It can also shake up a person who has good structure. The flaw of this technique (all techniques have flaws) is that it is vulnerable to a sweep (or a rotation) while in the air, and tends to be over committed at the moment when it lands, particularly if it misses its target.
The same technique can be done internally, without leaving the ground or committing to one foot, but it takes a long time to train.

Pressing the back heel is also a major part of Northern Shaolin training. It’s main value is that it backs up projections-- it is what most people do when they jab with a spear to stop from being thrown back by the forward motion of the wild thing they are jabbing. It is not actually a power generating technique. A foot pushing off the ground (whether with the heel or the toe) generates momentum; however, once the momentum is achieved the foot can leave the ground without any loss of force. Pressing the back heel can have another purpose, which is to uproot. In tai chi, we teach people to uproot off of either foot and generally it is the foot which is weighted over the toe which does the uprooting. So even if your back heel is down to root against the forward motion of your opponent, your front foot can still be used to uproot.
Perhaps the full extension of the back heel adds a little momentum (as compared to leaving it up), but that isn’t its main function. No doubt everyone who studies martial arts should learn this technique and build on it, but eventually it should be abandoned. Its flaw is that it combines with the drop step to create an on/off switch. The drop step entails a loss of stability, the pressing of the heel is an attempt to regain it. A superior theory of fighting seeks to eliminate the gap in power created by this transition between “on” and “off.” Some stability is gained in the front/back plane from pressing the heel, but it is lost in the other planes, making the striker vulnerable to rotational force or up/down force. A superior theory of fighting would never strike in a way that sacrifices the six dimensions of power: up/down, left/right, front/back (called liuhe in Chinese). It is preferable to keep the body moving like a rolling, spinning, expanding/shrinking ball which never comes out to a point. Lot’s of Tai Chi guys take this to mean don’t punch, but that isn’t correct, it just means that when you punch, the punch has to be part of a rolling ball.

“Keep the whole arm and back loose, like throwing a baseball” is correct and needs no amending. The more relaxed and empty the movement, the more whole body integration and weight are available for generating force. In class I actually interjected that some people may experience shoulder injuries if they lack protective shoulder muscle. The injury can happen when a person throws the arm with a lot of force while only relaxing halfway. It’s probably best to work this idea gradually. Eventually ones entire body weight can be added to the force through the sequence relax, empty, unify.

Rory actually told us he was uncertain why “Twist the hip suddenly” helps increase power. Here is my explanation. First, rotation in the hip, what in Chinese martial arts we call 'turning the kua,' adds some rotational force so it makes forward force more difficult to stop, deflect or neutralize. Second, the suddenness of the technique is akin to shaking. It loosens the ‘meat’ from the bones and automatically adds fluid weight to the strike. Third, it cuts the body at the waist. This is actually a flaw, but it works! It diminishes structural force from the feet to the hands, however, it increases the moving mass available for the punch. It basically sacrifices the structure of the legs for the weight of the torso. No doubt many people will think I’m crazy for suggesting that loss of structure is a good thing.
Structure can be broken or uprooted-- fluid, dynamic mass can not.

So to summarize: The drop step can be hidden. The heel press isn’t necessary for power but can help with rooting against an on coming force or uprooting a threat’s structure; however a superior fighter will use your structure against you so eventually heel pressing should be discarded. A loose arm increases power if it integrates with the relaxed emptiness of the whole body. The sudden twist of the hip is a flawed technique but has positive effects on power generation anyway.

The big problem with martial arts is that they work. Since most of us will never need to cause massive damage to another person, if we measure martial arts by “effectiveness” they are all a massive waste of time. Most martial arts training will effectively increase power generation as long as you don’t train yourself to pull punches with free sparing, or subordination to the teacher.
While power for power’s sake is a fools errand, the martial arts I teach should give the student more than enough power to overpower a much larger person, or multiple people. But hopefully that will never need to happen. For me, the never ending search for power is just like a dance-- it is simply a happy consequence of freedom-- it is a unique expression of real joy.

Yahoo Server Crashed

My site was down for a full 24 hours, it's still a little buggy.  Yahoo says a server crashed.  It took them a long time to fix.  When I was a kid we had to walk to school.

UPDATE: Yahoo claims the problem is fixed but 4 days later I'm still getting the occasional 410 notice, if you get one refreshing usually fixes it.  Not always.  I have no idea how Yahoo thinks this is a good enough response to the problem.  Yeah, I know, I only pay $12.95 a month.  It still feels a little like the wild-west.

UPDATE:  I'm getting the 410 error when I try to update, ha ha ha.

The Gray Lady Approves!

We are in the news, the New York Times to be exact.

Here too.  It sure seems like Tai Chi has a bright future.

Increase the Chaos

Rory Miller's workshop got me thinking about how Tai Chi push hands relates to ground fighting:

With your back to the ground you have a perfect root.
When you are on top, it is very easy to give all of your weight to your opponent.
If you can consistently have a solid root in fixed step push hands, and give all of your weight to your opponent to carry when you are just standing in front of him, then doing those to things on the ground is remarkably easy.
Push hands is great training for protecting the head through continuous attack. Great for learning how not to get locked up.
As you get better in push-hands if your opponent tries to get under you, you let them try to carry you in a position where they have no leverage. If he tries to get on top of you, you float him. (both just like ground fighting, but harder)
As you get better still, you practice moving a heavier opponent from the worst possible angle, that's why push hands needs to be practiced at a slow speed.
And when you have reached a level of skill where you can express power without having any root and completely melt your structure you can increase the chaos for your opponent until they simply defeat themselves.
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Wrestling the goal is one-on-one domination on a soft mat. In the case of a surprise attack by a heavier opponent or multiple opponents where you go down to the hard ground! --instead of trying to dominate and control the situation, you want to increase the chaos, and keep rolling  You want to keep as much momentum in the fight as possible--and keep up continuous striking the whole time.
Fixed step push-hands and roushou is one of the best types of training for this situation ever invented.

Rory gave a rule of thumb which he explained like this.  If I am fighting on the third floor balcony of a condo and I'm about to die in a choke hold, I jump off the balcony with the guy choking me.

Rory's rule of thumb:  When you are losing, increase the chaos.  When you are winning, gain control.

I have a corollary to that rule:  If your opponent is experiencing chaos and you are comfortable with it, that works too.

A lot of training in internal martial arts is about creating disorientation and relaxation at the same time-- Or perhaps I should say unusual orientations like spinning in bagua, or unfocusing the eyes.

Unconscious Power

I have been quite reluctant until now to use the term unconscious.  Expressions like "the thousand yard stare,"  "trance-possession," or "a completely melted body" have been less jarring to my ears.  When trying to translate the esoteric meaning of a Chinese phrase like 'the jingshen moves the body,' expressions like, "over-come by a presence outside of the body" --such as fear, or love at first sight-- have seemed less confusing than the term unconscious.

But martial arts expert George Xu has been throwing around the terms unconscious and subconscious for a couple of years.  I've tried to dissuade him from using them because they have so much psychological baggage.  The average person is going to have to drop his or her preconceptions about what unconscious and subconscious mean anyway, why not start with a word they don't know?

George asked me: "When you are watching a great movie and you forget your own body--is that unconscious or subconscious?"

Me:  "I don't know.  These two terms refer to aspects of the mind which cause us to either act in a way we didn't intend to; or to act in a way we did intend to but didn't know it--and still might not know it even after the act."

The Chinese term jingshen is most often used in the negative.  For example, when a student is spacing out in class the teacher will scold, "You've lost your jingshen!"  So in a sense jingshen means presence in, or awareness of, ones environment.

Can we move our body unconsciously?  If I am not conscious of a movement, how can I be its cause?  On the other hand, how do we know that so called conscious movement is really conscious?  Maybe conscious movement is actually unconscious movement observed and then a split second later justified?  Maybe conscious movement is actually unconscious movement which we just happen to have planned in advance?  Or put another way, maybe all movement is unconscious, but some movement has a kind of mental tension surrounding it, attempting to guide it and control it.

Is it possible then, that we could drop this mental tension we normally call "conscious," and replace it with a kind of active spacial awareness?  And there by gain some control over unconscious movement?  Can we move our bodies using only awareness of our environment?  Can actively changing only ones feeling of "presence" actually move the body?

Jo Riley, writing about Chinese Theater, has chosen to translate "qi" in English as "presence."  Turning for a moment to  the theater realm, all of this talk of unconscious seems more reasonable.  Some styles of acting for instance instruct the actor to find a single gesture or movement-idea which represents the character he or she is trying to portray or embody.  That gesture is then injected into all the actors stage actions, and from this the actor will unconsciously begin inventing a whole way of moving which looks authentic.

So after a long hard struggle, I might have to admit that the term unconscious is as good as it gets.

An infant baby moves unconsciously.  Right?  How about a tiger stalking its prey?  That one is a little more difficult to pin down.  What about a baby tiger?  Just kidding.

What about a mother protecting her young?  We've all heard the stories of mothers lifting up burning cars to save their children.  Is that unconscious power?

Is it possible that we have access to this unconscious power all the time?

(Sometimes I think the pharmaceutical industry would like us to believe that everything from love, to super human strength, to good acting, is just a chemical discovery away.  Hormone theory is very enticing, but until I can see in front of me something as complete as the Periodic Table for the whole endocrine system, I'm going to reason that there are other mechanisms involved.)

This is where I start getting excited.  I've begun seeing unconscious power in other people.  I can see it in people waiting for the bus.  This natural power is in my opinion available all the time when people are relaxed.  I see the unconscious power but I also see two forces inhibiting it.

The first inhibitor is conscious intentional movement.  It is as if people are trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on and the power steering shut off.  Their maneuverability is restricted and they appear to be, in George Xu's words, carrying their own weight.

The second inhibitor is segmentation.  This is when we cause individual parts of the body to work independently.  For instance, when we sit down to write we turn off most of the balancing movement functions in our body and activate only the fine motor hand and eye coordination.  The result of this process is stiffness, which tends to occur at the location of segmentation--in the case of writing, at the shoulders, upper back, neck and for some people the forearms and the backs of the eyes.  Any segmentation whatsoever, inhibits power.

Just as a side note here, my ability to see this unconscious power has developed in conjunction with my own ability to express unconscious power.  But I also believe that my own mental training was for a long time inhibiting my ability to see unconscious power in others.  The type of analytic anatomic physiological thinking which allows us to see individual body structures like muscles, may be replacing what is actually happening with a mental proxy.  And thus, by eventually dropping those complex ideas about what we are, suddenly something that was always there appears.

_______

How did we get here?  Are humans victims of our own success?

Unconscious power is unconscious for a reason.  Human society requires us to plan out our intentions so that we can build things large and small, manifest visions, and carry out tasks.  It also allows us to be delicate and careful so that we don't break the things we create.

Unconscious power is familiar to everyone.  I guess it is how we felt as small children.  To a normal adult, unconscious power feels disorienting, vulnerable, weak and clumsy.

Expand and Shrink

Recently on Rum Soaked Fist someone asked a question about the importance of kai-he, which loosely means ‘opening and closing.’  While this may  be a good translation of the Chinese, the metaphor is confusing because it is easily conflated with the process of emptying and filling which requires opening key gates in the body.  To properly do kai-he, all the gates must remain open, there is no closing action.  The correct metaphor for kai-he is expanding and shrinking the way most wild animals do when they are showing dominance or submission.

As is often the case, the subject of shrinking and expanding does not have an inherent order.  Like so much of martial arts it is actually a process of unlearning (apophatic).  In attempting to invent a curriculum, the goal should be to reveal an underlying order, a natural way of being.  That said, here is one possible curriculum order.

Level 1.  Individuate shrinking and expanding in different parts of the body.  (Kumar Frantzis created a long list of different body systems which can be expanded and condensed, beginning with individual joints, muscles, soft tissues, internal organs, glands, blood vessels, meridians, the nine palaces, and cerebrospinal fluid.)

Level 2.  Shrink and expand the entire body with the breath.

These first two levels do not take long to develop (a year or two at most) but in order to maintain a big range of movement they require regular practice.

Level 3.  Shrink and expand the whole body without the breath.  That is, de-link the movement from the breathing.  This will make the movement softer and will reveal jin, or natural structure. To do level 3 well, requires that the spacial mind relax and expand out beyond the body itself.

Level 4.  At level 4 the spacial mind does many complex operations including shrinking while the body is expanding and the reverse, expanding while the whole body is shrinking.  To do this level well the body must be completely empty of tension and all the gates must be open--then one's power will increase dramatically and one's root will disappear.

Level 5.  Only the spacial mind is actively moving, the body follows unconsciously.

Because we are dealing with an entirely natural process it is possible to skip directly to level five.  In the theater world, the principle of using shrinking or expanding to control space is sometimes called a change in status.  It is the basis of dominance and submission in all animals.  If you see two actors on a stage set as an office or a home you should be able to tell which actor owns the space by his or her movements and positions.  If it is my office I’ll move as if everything is part of my big body, a guest will move only a limited amount of space around his body, if he sits in my chair he will look stiff.  Imagine the physicality of a worker sneaking into the bosses office to smoke one of the bosses cigars when he thinks the boss is away for the week, and then imagine the changes in the physical use of space when the boss suddenly walks in.
Because this is all automatic in real life, it can be taught with games.  Actors can use tricks to get their behavior to seem real.  Unconsciously we are all masters of shrinking and expanding, but when the process becomes conscious it has a disorienting affect and it tends to look fake.  So the trick is to make it conscious and then put your mind on something else so that it becomes unconscious again.

My favorite game for teaching this is called “siblings”:

A lazy brother, who doesn’t work, sits in a chair in the middle of the room.
The hard working brother comes home from work and finds the lazy brother’s underwear hanging from the door nob.  The lazy brother is sitting in the same spot he was when the hard working brother left for work.
The scene begins with the hard working brother making an accusation.  The director tells the lazy brother (secretly before the scene begins) that he is to admit to every accusation and that  when the hard working brother moves toward him, he is to take up more space, he is to expand his body.  They improvise from there.

I first played this game with Keith Johnstone when I was 15.  While I was playing it with a partner I suddenly realized that I already knew the game, that I played it all the time unconsciously with my sister.  I was good at this game, by changing my body size and shape I felt like I could move my partner around the room at will.  That evening when I got home my sister, as she was in the habit of doing, accused me of something I didn’t do, “Did you take my notebook?”  “Yes,” I answered while simultaneously expanding.  “What? You took it!” Her eyes flared, but because I expanded she couldn’t come closer, she had to move away.  “Yes,” I said, “There is some pretty interesting stuff in there.”  I shrunk a little bit and she moved in to take a bite “YOU READ IT!” Casually expanding again, I said, “Juicy.”  She moved back.  I could control her with my movements.  Within a minute I had her rolling on the ground tearing out her hair.

This was, I suppose, an enlightenment moment for me.  I had a choice at that moment to become a sociopath or to dedicate my life to truth and justice.

The monkey dance of dominance and submission that Rory Miller talks about works in the same way. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been in a fight since I was 15.  Almost all fighting is monkey dance, almost all fighting is social and follows unconscious social rules, status transactions.  Asocial violence is a whole different cup of tea.  A desperate drug addict just wants to take your money and get away without being noticed, no need to assert dominance, it doesn’t matter to them whether you are still breathing or not.

This seems to be the source of a lot of confusion because shrinking and expanding is still the most efficient way to fight.  A tiger hunting still shrinks before it pounces.  It is crucial for dominance and submission, and it is also crucial for generating power while avoiding counter attack.  Some things are the same, some are different.  A dog challenging another dog will stare it in the eyes and make a low growl, a dog submitting will roll over belly-up and squeak. Dogs hunting a wild boar will attack the buttocks, and calves.  A policeman subduing a threat wants the threat face down on the ground because it’s easier to control him.  A wrestler wants his opponent pinned face up because it is more humiliating.

Great actors, great martial artists, and great dancers control space, they don’t do technique.  Many years ago I studied ballet.  I noticed that sometimes there were dancers who seem to have good technique but still weren’t dancing.  Ballet is a high status dance form.  The dancers are floating on clouds all the time.  The neck is always exposed, like the alpha wolf.  The legs are always turned out, the chest always lifted.  Sometimes a young dancer is introverted and yet is forced by the training to move like a high status princess.  The physical body can be open, expansive and exposed while the spacial mind, the spirit body, is sucked in close.  This disconnect is probably the source of a lot of compulsive behavior like chain smoking or not eating.

Over eating and muscle trucks among martial artists could be a similar phenomenon.

Extremes of status can be very entertaining.  Think midget wrestling, sumo, and the teachers in the cartoon South Park.

Being a good actor or dancer does not make someone a good fighter, even if they have the ability to manipulate space outside of their bodies.  Even if they have great unconscious shrinking and expanding abilities.  There is more to it than that.  And it is also true that someone can have good fighting skills without having mastered the shrinking and expanding of the spacial mind.  But put them together and they reveal enormous natural freedom.

The order in which one learns,  doesn’t matter.  The levels I described at the beginning of this post can be jumbled up any which way you want. In the end, however, there is an order, it is the order in which social behavior (conduct/qi), our physical body (jing), and our sense of place (shen) interact as one.