Gao Xingjian, Artist

Worth reading.
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012050261.html

Fixing the Public Schools

What's wrong with the public schools in the United States and what to do about it is an endless controversy.  The United States has so many well developed an conflicting ideas of what education should accomplish that I expect there will always be big disagreements.  It's fun do debate, and it's valuable to experiment, and I believe in finding both diverse and divergent solutions for making education better, today.

But this post is not about what education should accomplish.  It is about those forces who seek to sabotage the lives of children.  For over a year now I've been hearing about corrupt accounting practices happening at the San Francisco School District.  You'd think that just the hint that someone could be stealing from children would cause a stampede of angry parents and students on the school board, but this stuff happens so often that there is a whole bureaucracy which has built up over the years to stop nefarious practices from being discovered or revealed.

This particular scam was discovered by whistle blowers and reported to officials at the highest levels of the district 5 years ago.  The scam went on.  More people and organizations that came into contact with the scam noticed something fishy and reported it, and still the scam went on and on.  For all we know the scam could have been going on for years before it was discovered.  That's the way these things usually work.  It appears that in June an "official" investigation was launched and they found a small sample of the stolen money.  The numbers are not clear but at least 5 people were stealing.  Since they found a few $100,000 we can be pretty sure the theft was in the millions.  The criminals will have Union protection I suspect, as they have for the last five years.  Since they were stealing, their salaries, overtime, and pensions should automatically be forfeited.  But I bet that isn't what will happen.  Here is my guess.  One of them will have covered her tracks well enough that she won't even lose her job.  Another two will lose their jobs but get to keep their pensions.  And two more will plead guilty to a misdemeanor, pay a fine and get probation, one will lose her pensions and 3 of the five will have to pay some token amount of money back to the School District.  Most of the money is already hidden.  I hope I'm wrong, but....

Crime pays.

If any of this bothers you, you are still human.  Here is an organization which is going to change things for the better.  The link is a great article about the struggle to fix DC Schools.  Again, this post is not about what education should accomplish, it is about those forces who seek to sabotage the lives of children and what you can do about it.  Join Michelle Rhee's organization Studentsfirst.

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The Laundry Warrior

The Laundry Warrior is the correct and original name of a new movie which just came out under the bland title Warrior's Way.  This is a ground breaking film and I loved it.

Had I known it's original title I might not have been so astounded by the detail and beauty of the fabric and clothing in the opening scenes.  This is a film about beauty.  The sets and props are incredible.  Really! The film is also about fashion, the deepest subject there is.

Toward the end of the film it occurred to me that everything can be viewed as a rough allegory of the relationship between North Korea, South Korea, and America.  The role of America is played by a cowboy-circus group, they are very happy but regularly traumatized by gangs of other cowboys who are criminally evil.  The split between North and South Korea is twisted and complex, an inter-family feud among assassins over a baby.  The screams of the dead are trapped in the hero's sword, but the audience never sees or hears them.

Watch the clips here:  http://www.filmofilia.com/2010/11/18/4-new-the-warriors-way-clips/

The fight choreography is good and the love interest part of the story is as good as it gets.  Did I mention that the clothes are amazing?  Oh yeah, the fights are mostly with swords, a little old-school Zatoichi technique and a little slow motion computer animation like the movie 300.  The Koreans can all jump really high, especially out of water, it is almost like flying but they seem to come down hard.  This style of fantasy fighting is cool and can really work but they really should consult me on the nature of momentum.  The best fighters in the world, cats, do fight in the air!  But cats must spiral and twist.   Cats use rotational momentum combined with maximum internal power to fight.  The films fighters rely too much on force generated from turning around a vertical center-line.  Folks, if you are going to spend millions of dollars on an international project that employs people from Korea, Japan, the US, New Zealand, India and Australia--then I demand perfection!

Now to the important stuff.  Every little kid knows that the outfit, the kung fu or karate uniform, is a key component of the art.  I often hear parents tell me, "My son really wanted to do kungfu and begged me for a long time, but when I finally signed him up and he started taking classes I realized what he really wanted was the outfit not the hard work!"  Kids get shamed about this pretty early.  They are told that the uniform is just a vain symbol and that what really matters is doing forms.  Later they shame you about that and tell you that it's not the forms it's the applications and techniques that matter.  And if you make it that far you are likely to get shamed about those too, sparring and competitions are what really matter!  And if you make it through all that it's all about philosophy and health.  It took me many years to realize that the observations of little kids were correct all along. The power is in the outfit!

I resisted teaching with a uniform for at least ten years.  When I finally got one it made a huge difference.  Wearing a uniform helps get the teacher's charisma out of the way.  With out a uniform some kids may admire me right away and want to learn from me because they want to be like me.  But with a uniform it isn't about me any more, it is about the art, and everyone can relate to that.  Duh.

Adults think they are more savvy.  They are less likely to be 'fooled' by an ethnic costume.  But growing a beard doubled my credibility teaching at the college level.  Imagine what a couple of inches in eyebrow length could do?  What you wear and how you wear it has a profound effect on teaching.  Clothing conveys ones degree of seriousness, whimsy, toughness, or irony better than anything which can be said or written on a white board.

Readers may be thinking, dude, what about skills?  What about the movie you were reviewing?  At the higher levels of internal martial arts techniques and applications barely matter because whatever you do is unstoppable.  And eventually you realize that for self-defense in a surprise attack situation you can not expect to see, hear, feel, or know which way is up.  The five senses are likely to be seriously distorted.  That's why the old masters said, "Just do the form."  That's what you can count on, and if it is a well designed  form it will work for attacks from any direction, it will work in the air and it will work on the ground.  At the higher levels of internal martial arts structure, mass and even fluid, the inanimate aspects of the body, just don't matter anymore.  The body becomes like an empty suit moved by the spirit.  The spacial mind turns off all the controlling impulses of the gross and fine motor movement, and the whole body become like someone else's body.  Like a suit of chain-mail armor, or like a burlap sack (with arms and legs) filled with rice.  In the end the body becomes like clothing.

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Check out these cats fighting in the air with rotational momentum and internal power!

Body Mapping

Lately I’ve had a few students who are professional musicians and one of them handed me an article about a new method called Body Mapping.

Here is a description by David Vining of what they think they are doing:

The body map is one’s self-representation in one’s own brain.  The breakthrough of body mapping is the realization that we move based on how we think we are put together rather than how we are actually constructed.  If the body map is accurate, movement is good; an inaccurate body map causes inefficient or injury-producing movement.  In body mapping, one uses self-observation and self-inquiry to gain access to the body map.  By carefully examining what one believes to be true about his or her body and comparing it to accurate information, one can recognize fallacies in the body map and correct and refine this representation to become more efficient.  During this process, accurate information may be provided by kinesthetic experience, mirrors, books, pictures, medical models of body parts and teachers.  Through body mapping, one can recognize the source of inefficient and harmful movement and replace it with movement that is well-organized and cooperates with the reality of how we are actually built.

Let me start by saying it is wonderful to find a system that recognizes the importance of mind in movement training.  And it is a rare treat to find someone I fundamentally disagree with expressing themselves so clearly and precisely.  The statement “we move the way we think we are put together”  is mistaken.  We actually move by a process of changing spacial imagination.  If you are imagining your anatomical body moving in space, it will seem like “we are moving the way we are put together,” but that is just one of an unlimited number of options.

An Alternative Body Map!

The therapeutic application of Body Mapping is a big improvement over what I usually see recommended by Physical or Occupational Therapists (but those fields are changing fast and allow for a fair amount of experimentation so it’s possible to find a PT with 30 years of Tai Chi under her belt.)

I believe Body Mapping as a method works!  In practice I would expect it to relieve many of the stress injuries musicians get from practicing all the time.  In many cases musicians are practicing with an image of their body which has become a distinct and repeating shape. In the martial arts world we call this “stale qi,” in the Body Mapping community they think of it as a “false map.”  This “stale qi” is usually a small concentrated shape (less than five inches in diameter) and either inside the body or near the surface.  Getting the musician to acknowledge the shape (it is usually unconscious) and to dissolve it while playing their instrument will relieve the stress.  I’m not saying this is easy, people can be stubborn about their routine uses of the mind, and it can disappear one day and snap back into place the next.  Just feeling the ‘false map’ and dissolving it into vast emptiness is what internal martial artists do.  If Body Mapping did just this, it would be enough.

But the Body Mapping advocates then seek to replace the “false map” with a “true” or “truer” map.  This is an unnecessary step. However, it is likely to be helpful in the short term because movement based on an analysis of anatomical structure tends to be efficient movement.  But eventually that too can fail from over use (again, stale qi).  It is also impossible to get a truly accurate map. Our mind is just too good a creating short cuts and simplifications.  Who has the patience to visualize every single anatomical soft-tissue structure, much less every molecular interaction!  Still, some knowledge of muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, and fascia can be very useful as a teaching tool, especially for beginning students.

If I say, “Don’t think of a carrot,” did you think of it? You probably did because that’s just what our minds do.  It happens really fast.  It happens at mind speed, the only speed which really counts in a fight to the death or a virtuoso solo on a musical instrument.  Now, imagine you are a carrot and turn the carrot!  I am not a carrot, but there is no reason to believe that imagining that I am one will make my movement less efficient, or cause injury.

When you play a musical instrument you want your imagination to be free.  We want you to have an excited and totally active spacial mind.  There is certainly a place for “concentration” in the learning process, but I want my musicians' minds playing with the currents of air on the edge of the grand canyon, or the darkness at the bottom of the ocean--not stuck in their instrument or their anatomy.

What the Body Mapping advocates are saying is that if you are playing a trombone and you unconsciously think one of your arms is actually coming out of your neck, over time you will develop inefficient movement which will eventually become debilitating.  They are correct about that.

They go on to say that if you replace that “false image” with an “accurate” structural kinesthetic experience of your arm and neck, you will move more efficiently.
They are correct about that too.

Structure may be a sensible way to teach efficient movement to musicians, but I suspect that at least at the higher levels, music teachers have very strict rules about how structure, alignment, and especially “fingering” should be. I would be warry of messing with that. If I was teaching martial arts and music to a teenager I would consider Body Mapping all his finger movement to the spine so that his movement is always structurally strong and efficient.  Such a practice would most likely have to be done separately from the practice of music and then applied to it because most instruments use each hand differently.  I also wouldn’t want to leave students at that level, having only taught them structure with out freedom! Especially if they plan to be professionals--it is important to reach the heart-mind emptiness levels of performance.

To summarize this article for regular readers:
The body must be inside the mind. Do not put the mind inside the body!

(Also see Zhuangzi chapter 3, On Nourishing Life....)

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One of the consequences of the false contextualization of martial arts as “for fighting only” is the obscuration of the obvious fact that professional musicians and theater artists were both part of the same families and performed together.  Since theater in all of China was “physical theater,” and its training was in fact the movement tradition we know today as “martial arts,” it is almost inconceivable that there were any top quality professional musicians who didn’t have at least some martial arts training embedded in their art.
In fact, I could go further and say that powerful operatic singing is one of the important sources of Chinese internal martial arts.  How could a person sing for 4 hours to a huge outdoor audience without being “internal?”  Italian operatic singing technique may be the closest thing to Tai Chi in all of Western Civilization.

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I sincerely hope that in the future martial arts will be taught with music and theater, and that professional musicians will see martial arts as a resource for how to dance with their instrument.

There is lots of material about Body Mapping on the web.  The Berklee School of Music in Boston is promoting it here.  I see this as a positive trend moving in my direction.  In the article the author makes the point that performing music is a movement  art.
And here is a book about Body Mapping that looks pretty interesting, I just ordered it.

The Cleanest Race

I almost always avoid politics on my blog, most of what we call politics is simply too shallow to warrant any overlap with the general topic of this blog.  I also do my best to avoid seeming rude, rudeness in other people often turns me off, why would I subject my readers to that?  But I'm going to make a small exception for a big issue.  (Exceptions prove the rule, right?)

After a week of listening and reading commentators on the issue of North Korea I am absolutely sick and disgusted with the incompetence of what passes for 'expert' these days.  If you fancy yourself an 'expert' and you haven't read and formed an opinion on B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, stop writing and giving interviews, and go get a copy and read it.

I had the chance to meet Myers this year at a talk and slide show he gave at UC Berkeley.  To paraphrase what he said (he used kinder language of course), the US State Department is clueless and stuck in the mud, unwilling to experiment with a novel practice called "thinking."  We can only pray that a few military leaders have read his book by now.

Anyway, I've lost my patience.  If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up!

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Here is an hour long lecture with questions and slides he gave.  And here is a Youtube snibit I haven't had a chance to watch because I'm sitting in a cafe without earphones, but it looks like a piece of the same lecture.

The Primeval Tongue

It is a staple of Chinese movement and religious studies that the tongue should be on the roof of the mouth.  In Daoist ritual and ritual meditation the tip of the tongue is sometimes used to draw talisman on the roof of the mouth.  But in Zouwang (sitting and forgetting) the basic emptiness meditation practice, which is very much like Zen, part of the posture instructions for stillness include putting the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth behind the teeth.  I’ve also heard people say to put the tongue on the soft pallet.  The identical instruction is standard in Tai Chi and other internal martial arts and qigong classes.

There are two explanation commonly given.
The first is that keeping the tongue in that position allows the throat to open so that saliva can travel downward without stimulating the gag reflex or the need to swallow.
The second explanation is that it somehow connects the meridians which travel in a circle up the back, over the head, and down the front-- popularly called the “micro-cosmic orbit” of the du and ren acupuncture channels.

A while back I wrote about Michael Jordan’s amazing tongue.  In an interview he said he learned to do tongue lap-rolls from his father who always rolled his tongue when he was chopping wood.  I’ve been experimenting with this for a long time.  How does movement of the tongue help the movement of wood chopping?  I think I have the answer.

The sucking reflex babies are born with is a whole body movement which comes up from the belly and presses the tongue to the roof of the mouth.  Not the tip of the tongue!  A spot about a centimeter back from the tip of the tongue presses upward into the roof of the mouth. This creates a rolling effect pushing the tip of the tongue downward and out (to surround the nipple).

If you don’t have a baby handy to play with, find a cat and interrupt her while she is licking herself.  She’ll probably stop with her tongue just slightly out of her mouth on a downward arc and give you this Jewish grandmother look like, “What? You want something? No, what makes you think I’m busy?”

If you put your own tongue in this position and try to talk it will sound like, “blublah.”  I find that practicing with my tongue in this position is very similar to having “baby feet” (see previous post).  It is an even better position for getting saliva to flow down the throat without stimulating the gag reflex.  It also seems to interrupt my tendency to think in words.  Why did it take me 20 years to figure this out?

This is a very relaxed position of the tongue, it is not held with pressure.  Any movement of the dantian (the abdominal region of the mind) will be felt as a subtle change in the shape or fullness of the tongue if it is relaxed.  If the tip of the tongue is curved upwards this feedback loop will be broken.

Perhaps this experience is what was originally meant by “connecting the du and ren meridians” but if that is the case, the method and purpose really got mangled in the translation, or the transition to modernity.

(please, no “baby talk” in the comments)

Here is a video of an infant sucking:

Baby Feet

Much of learning in traditional Chinese martial arts involves re-imagining.  A subset of learning involves re-naming.  The purpose of re-naming is to re-imagine a process or practice you are already familiar with.  We could speculate that the imagination has a built in deterioration and mutation mechanism for anything which has become fixed.  The imagination requires regular refreshing to function properly.

Among the latest re-naming I’m excited about is the expression “Baby Feet.”  This expression refers to both the method and the fruition of practice.  It is a method because I say things like, “Make sure you have baby feet when you are punching each other.”  It is a form of fruition because it really isn't something you do, it is the result of completely emptying the legs of all impulses to “stay balanced” or “generate structural power.”  Of course if you do that it doesn’t feel like much because you probably aren’t moving much.  Only when the dantian (abdominal region of the mind) is relaxed enough to expand all the way to the ground and there is a free hydraulic flow between the two legs and that flow is controlled by movement of the dantian, not the legs, only then can you get the sensation of “baby feet.”  Once you have that sensation it can function temporarily as a signal to let you know all the other stuff is active and operative.

I use to describe this sensation as “putting your foot down like pouring pancake batter on a griddle.”  But that got stale when I quit eating wheat!  Also the sensation started to become bigger, faster and lighter;  Now it’s more like dripping food coloring in water.

Anyway, it is more obviously a Daoist teaching with this new improved naming because walking on “baby feet” is something we all already know.  It has simply been obscured by artifice, coordination, and intelligence.  Yet it is apparently an experience available to everyone all the time.  The Dao of Wuwei is not an achievement or a skill, it is simply our true nature revealed.

Dress Like a Master

I'm really getting into fashion lately.  I'm particularly interested in things with rough texture.

First off, I've been wearing Swedish Military Issue undershirts.  They are crazy, tight, and made out of a net like heavy twine designed to create maximum dead air space.

For a while now I've been wearing Feiyue shoes (I wrote about them, I'm certain but I can't find the post, could it really be lost? Quick history: Made first in France, copied by Communist Party, bought by Tiger Claw, USA).  They are flat so that I can feel the ground, they are dirt cheap ($14 a pair), and light weight.  I don't worry about wearing out the bottoms the way I would on expensive shoes, and I keep four pairs in rotation.  They also look good.  The problem is that they don't absorb moisture well, so my feet tend to get wet on the bottom.  That's a real problem when it gets cold.  In addition, during an hour of standing meditation on a cold morning at 5:30 AM, even my feet start to freeze.  Ice man I am not.  But I've solved both problems.  I ordered wool inserts for my Feiyues.  Warm and fuzzy, good grip and not squishy.

Finally I bought this thick, rough, heavy cotton shirt from St. James. 

The Greatest Self Defense System Ever - Northern Shaolin

The first movements in the Northern Shaolin I teach are superbly designed for responding to the way actual bad guys attack, especially considering that Northern Shaolin is traditionally taught to children.  In fact I would say it is the greatest self-defense system ever invented.  I know that sounds pompous or something but I was surprised, I mean, I didn't show up to Rory Miller's workshop on real world violence thinking or believing that.  My teachers were all too modest to ever say anything like that either.  I have only come too realize this through testing and reflecting on the forms that I teach after having taken Rory's workshop.

Frankly this is totally counter intuitive because the style of Northern Shaolin I teach begins in a very theatrical way, with a stamp and a quick parting of the curtains followed immediately by a special run where the feet kick backwards, which is followed by the 'monk clears his sleaves' movement which ends in a stamp balanced on one foot with the other knee up at chest level and with a fist high in the air.

I have long been an advocate for teaching Chinese martial arts as a performing art.  I have also argued extensively that historically these arts were understood as performing arts with real life applications.  You could really fight with these arts, you could also put them on a stage or in a parade.  In many parts of the world you can find some type of amateur theater, or folk dance, which has very real and important therapeutic and social purposes.  In traditional Chinese culture, martial arts were woven into everything.  Depending on who you talk to this is either extreme heresy or so obvious it doesn't need to be said.

I've been teaching these opening Shaolin movements as self-defense for twenty years.  I've always taken the martial component seriously, meaning I've always been frank and open about what I know and don't know and given students an opportunity to practice these movements with a partner who attacks them in a whole bunch of different ways at different speeds from different angles.  But because self-defense was of limited interest to me my perspective was limited.

One of Rory Miller's big challenges is to analyze martial arts by asking questions like, "How do bad guys really attack?"  And "Would this work against a really bad guy."  Rory obviously has a lot of material in this area that he didn't have time to cover in the workshop, but a couple of things really got me thinking.

According to Tony Bauer, it is important to choose a single action which your body can go to in a surprise attack.  It should be a position from which you can fight which defends your head and neck and is itself a return attack.  This wasn't hard for me to do, I have at least 20 of these and picking a favorite was easy. (Watch a Tony Bauer video)

We practiced this by doing the same movement while three people took turns (spontaneously) attacking us from the front and the left and right.  (This made it obvious how important it is to train side power, but more on that another day.)  Everyone's movement involved putting their hands up in one way or another.

After this Rory took the women aside (I decide to pretend I was a woman) and told us that there are two common ways women and children are attacked which require a different type of response.  The first is being grabbed from behind by the neck and pulled backwards.  The necessary response to this attack is an elbow strike backwards and it should be practiced.  The second is a bear hug from behind which traps your arms and lifts you off of the ground so that you can be carried away and thrown in a car or something.  Most self-defense classes teach that at the moment you are being grabbed you should suddenly sink your weight straight down.  This could potentially work if the person attacking was just grabbing you.  But as Rory pointed out, they don't do that, they grab you as they are running.

This Summer George Xu was showing us how effectively he can sink making himself impossible to lift.  A strong healthy student offered to help with his demonstration and promptly came up behind and lifted George into the air.  To his great credit George immediately admitted that his method had completely failed and we went on to analyze why.  It turned out that his attacker was charging forward before lifting.  When George added turning to defuse the forward motion and sinking at the same time, it worked, he couldn't be lifted.  But heavens, if it didn't work for George Xu the first time, do you think it will work for you?

So that's what Rory said too.  If you are still on the ground being bear hugged you can try the sinking thing, but if you are already in the air you need a different strategy.  He suggested using your hands to trap you attackers hands and leaning forward.  If the attacker is moving they will likely stumble forward and as you have their hands they are very likely to fall forward and to the side, shattering their collar bone on the ground.  Great stuff.  (He cautioned  that practicing this, even on a mat, has a high probability of leaving the attacker with broken bones.)

The Northern Shaolin opening movements follows this exact logic and take it a step further.  Rather than try to get this all in a writing, here is a video I just made!

Women's Self-Defense

In the 680 or so posts on this blog I have not had all that much to say about self-defense in general.  (It's not even on my "Category" list in the side bar.) Of all the things which interest me about martial arts, self-defense has rarely risen to the top.  But lately I have found myself thinking, reading, and teaching about it more and more.  Most people think of martial arts and self-defense as synonyms.  That leads to a lot of confusion.

Devi Protective Offense is a site dedicated to clearing up the confusions.  It is specifically designed by women, for women.  Teja is selling a product and a service which looks great.

You can watch a few of her videos for free, and she has this overview (click to enlarge).



She isn't dealing with historical development however, which in my opinion means she is too quick to discard traditional methods and forms.   In the video below she says that men have created unrealistic strategies for self-defense because they have trouble comprehending what it is like to be small and weak.  She is correct, but to me that is an argument for preserving traditional arts not discarding them.  Women were involved in the creation of many traditional martial arts particularly those related to performance and hospitality.  But even more importantly, I was a kid once.  I know exactly what it is like to fight someone three times my size.  Northern Shaolin was designed specifically for kids and it is extraordinarily well designed for kid's self-defense.  The internal arts take a long time to learn and require adoption levels of intimacy, but all the techniques I teach do assume that you are fighting a much stronger opponent (weakness with a twist is my motto).  Everything else she says is spot on. (hat tip: Chiron)