Structure Vs. Momentum

Two posts back I was discussing the perfect curriculum.  Part of that discussion, which got a lot of comments on Facebook (can we fix the code so they show up here too?), is about the pros and cons of breaking an enormous corpus of ever receding revelations into bite sized ideas.  While the pros and cons are still being weighed, I have a little something to say about Structure vs. Momentum.

Structure training has many facets and side trajectories.  The most significant in no particular order are, center-line awareness and control, power investigation and development, and  creating potent default stances you can fight your way to when you are loosing in a self-defense situation.

But all that aside, the main purpose of structure training is to learn how to give up control of a fight in exchange for taking a dominant position. This is more or less what I was getting at when I named this blog "weakness with a twist." If you can reposition yourself with a structural advantage, having control over the fight isn't that important.  You can effectively let your opponent buck and roll while you tap them on the shoulder from behind.  It isn't usually that easy to pull off, but it is that simple.

Structure training isn't the whole fight by a long shot, but it is a very important piece.

Electric Volcano

Contrast this with momentum training.  Learning good structure usually involves a substantial loss of power do to the loss of natural momentum.  For instance untrained people often throw their shoulder and head into a punch because they intuitively know that it will increase the momentum of their strike.  We martial artists often un-teach this inclination right at the beginning because throwing your shoulder and head into a strike will likely land you in a worse position, especially if the punch misses it's target.

Again, the order in which this unwieldy mass of teachings are learned is up in the air, but there is some logic to teaching Momentum after Structure is established.

If structure training is about giving up control to gain position, then momentum training is about giving up both control and position in exchange for adding chaos.  The more mass there is barreling through space along spiral trajectories, the more inherent danger.  The less momentum there is in a fight the safer it is.  If the person you are fighting is focused on defense, he is less focused on hurting you.  If your opponent is trying to control or dominate you, adding momentum will likely shift him into a defensive mode.  The more defensive he is, the more rigid and predictable he will become.  The more experienced you are with the chaos of added momentum, the more likely you are to prevail.

Momentum training increases the power of strikes dramatically, but that's a side benefit.  The main purpose of momentum training is to get you to drop the wasted effort of trying to dominate and control.   Tigers fighting other animals don't waste effort trying to dominate and control.  Those are social concerns.  Drop them and you will experience greater freedom of action.

The will to dominate and control arises from the fear of chaos (huntun).  That doesn't necessarily make it good or bad, it just limits our ability to see things as they actually are.

Is Ballet a Chinese Martial Art?

Is Ballet a Chinese Martial Art?

While such a question may strike some as the outer edge of reasonable scholarship;  the facts, when ordered properly and examined thoroughly, speak for themselves.

First of all let’s acknowledge that ballet is Europe’s only classical movement art.  India has at least six classical movement arts, Indonesia has more, China has over a hundred.
Ballet today is taught to millions of screaming little girls in pink tights.  But a couple of hundred years ago it was a man’s art.  When Euro-centric scholars have examined the origins of ballet they have looked principally at two sources, folk dance and fight training.

Folk dances are generally divided into the somewhat arbitrary categories of classic, pre-classic, festival, mating, and court dances.  There is no doubt that ballet choreography is deeply rooted in the movement patterns of for instance the pre-classic pavan, the court minuet, and that graceful mating dance, the waltz.  But none of these popular culture dances give us any clue as to why the serious study of technical and virtuosic skill characteristic of ballet developed.

Louis XIV in Lully's Ballet de la nuit (1653).

Scholars generally point to court dances as the origin of all this serious fuss because nearly all the kings and queens and their aristocratic entourages from Spain to England to Russia were getting together for diplomatic shin-digs and princess exchanges.  They knew each other and they knew the same dances.  So it has been argued that there was a need for a common language of entertainment, and perhaps a common language for male suitors to demonstrate their masculine prowess.

All this is quite possible, but let’s leave it aside for the moment and look at the origins of martial ballet technique.

The European gentry was obsessed with dueling.  I’ve written about this elsewhere but suffice it to say, knowing how to fence by the strict rules of chivalry was part of the definition of the aristocracy.  Fencing schools and tutors were all the rage.  The basic positions of ballet children learn today, first, second, third, forth, and fifth position, come from fencing, as does the general aesthetic of turned out legs.

Then there is the art of tripping.  The basic footwork of ballet has at least some origins in tripping skills.  Ballet students do endless demi-plies with the arm in forward, side or back position while the toe rotates around on the floor in a large arc with extraordinary force integrated with the fast kicking action of coup-de-pied.  Ballet dancers know how to trip.

Interior of the Royal Chinese Theatre in San Francisco during a performance in the 19th century. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Another argument about the movements of ballet goes that they have roots in the aristocracies endless formal presentation movements and bows.  Know doubt this is true, imagine a lord with his arms held open wide to the sides holding in each hand an eligible maiden trailing a long dress.  We’ve all scene this in the movies.  And it’s true, the nobles of Europe were obsessed with “presentations.”  In fact there is a form of martial presentation which is also given as an origin of ballet.  I speak of course of the horse pageant.  This parade of power and status spurred an industry of riding schools which taught people how to show off on a horse.  You can still watch this on youtube. Riders doing pirouettes standing up on the back of their horse.  It seems fun and silly today, but it was martial in those days.  Remember the war horse was both the tank and the fighter jet of the 1600’s.

Yes, OK, you say, ballet has some rambo-tough aristocratic roots, but where does China fit in?
To answer this question we have to consider how they were thinking about China back then.  Besides silverware, the two finest things you could own in the 1600’s were blue and white ceramics and silk clothing from China.  When you got together with other lords and ladies, what did you do? Why you showed off your China gear, that’s what.  These items were known as luxuries.  The word luxury has come to mean anything expensive, but in those days it referred to the exclusive possessions of the aristocracy.  If you were a wealthy merchant you were expected to wear course wool and rough linen.  If you wore silk it was a sin.  If you were a successful artisan and drank tea, another luxury, from a Chinese cup, that was a sin too.  As global trade increased the aristocracies all over Europe were trying to find ways to visually and viscerally demonstrate their exclusivity and superiority.  The more trade increased, the more prices fell, and the more prices fell the more opportunities there were for commoners to get rich.  Extortion, the main source of income for the aristocracy, just wasn’t enough to keep the aristocracy on top any more.  They became desperate for distinction.

Marco Polo’s account of China was like one of the only books.  I know this sounds outrageous but in 1500, before the enlightenment, there just wasn’t much to read.  Everyone knew about Marco Polo.  Then in 1500 when Jesuit priest Mateo Ricci went to China, followed shortly by a string of both Franciscan and Jesuit priests, interest in everything Chinese exploded.  They don’t teach it in schools but the enlightenment debate about the possibility that virtue existed outside of Christianity was started by translations of Confucius.  After all, if Confucius was talking persuasively about the importance of virtue before Jesus was, could he really have gone to hell?

I don’t know that anyone was taking dictation at parties back then, but imagine the questions you would be asked by members of the aristocracy if you were a priest or a trader returning from a recent trip to China.  “So what do the Chinese upper classes do for fun?”  “What distinguishes an Chinese gentleman from the common rabble?”  You would have, of course, told them about the Ming Dynasty “Scholar’s Cities,” that is, the theater districts just outside city walls that scholars young and old flocked too.  “And what sorts of spectacles did they see?”  “They saw actors and singers all of whom were trained from childhood in an extraordinary form of physical dance theater.  A form of physical dance theater, you add, that demonstrated incredible feats of martial prowess.    These ‘dancers’ were cast in history plays where they played great lords and ladies of the past, as well as warlords and youthful heros!  Sometimes the fight scenes of these plays were the main attraction!”
“Chinese scholars were obsessed with these arts, in their spare time they were amateur actors and dancers.  They would spend long hours singing snippets of their favorite history plays into the night with close friends and bowls of wine.  Although a Chinese gentleman would never take money for a performance, it was quite common for them to formally employ a famous actor to tutor them in the arts of singing and martial arts.”

The lords and ladies of Europe invented ballet training as another much needed way to distiguish themselves from commoners.  They modeled it on accounts of Chinese martial arts.

I’m not suggesting that there are any direct physical links between ballet training and Chinese martial arts, but it seems quite likely that the idea of Chinese martial arts was in fact the impetus that got ballet off the ground.

---I originally intended this as a parody.  I wanted to make fun of the irrational fear many martial artists have of the entertainment roots of their arts.  But it says something unnerving about how deep I am in my own well of ideas that I think I just convinced myself of the likelihood of my own conjecture.

I welcome all challenges, serious and otherwise.

The Perfect Martial Arts Curriculum

Recently, several of my students have been giving me a hard time.  They say I'm under playing the importance of structure training.  Perhaps they are right.

In the traditions of India, Japan and China, it is common to teach using an ideal model.  Copy the model and practice like crazy and eventually you will understand how the model was created, both what makes it tick and what raw materials went into it.  "Reverse engineering" is the name techies give for this type of teaching.  It works well in flexible one-on-one learning situations where, if for some reason, a particular model isn't coming together, the master teacher can just change to a different model.

This way of transmitting cultural knowledge tends to be quite effective at creating continuity.  It's weakness lays in it's tendency to "worshiping" the model itself.  If the teacher believes a particular model is so great it should never be changed he will tend to blame the student (or the society as a whole) for artistic decline.  It's also possible that the teacher got an imperfect transmission of the model and ends up transmitting superficial knowledge.

Western Civilization gives priority in learning to cognitive understanding, not models.  Even when faced with an art which is visceral and corporeal, the tendency is to teach with a curriculum utilizing progressive stages of conceptualization.

This type of teaching tends to make efficient use of time and facilitates group learning.  It's very adaptable.  If the students aren't getting it, the teacher will try to develop a new lesson based on the notion that all knowledge is built on previous knowledge.  By working with the pieces, eventually the whole picture will come into view.

Working against this approach is the problem that acquired knowledge based on conceptual notions or utilitarian routines can sometimes inhibit artistic realms of awareness. (That's what the film the Black Swan is about, by the way.)   Artistic skills and ability are not always based on previous knowledge.  Realms of awareness which open up possibilities of spontaneous action can not really be taught, they must be discovered.  In fact, one type of knowledge can inhibit learning in another realm, like hitting the brake and the gas at the same time.

Too often the role of teacher as facilitator is undervalued and the role of teacher as "spoon feeder" is idealized.  My own learning experience in the martial arts benefited enormously from the "just copy this ideal model" and practice like crazy way of doing things.  Getting autonomous students to willingly submit to that form of learning usually requires a huge head fake.  A sort of matador's cape that I've never been particularly good at wielding.  Meanwhile our society exerts an enormous amount of pressure on teachers to create a progressive curriculum.

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All of that was just a conceptual prelude to me presenting the problem in the following practical terms.

If you want to understand the value of strength, do some really hard physical labor for an extended period of time.  Try working 20 hour days commercial fishing in Alaska, carrying around 80 pounds of gear all day above 10,000 feet, or tossing bales of hay in Iowa.  (Perhaps people can mimic some of these effects in the gym, but I'm skeptical.)  Once you have this kind of strength you will appreciate flexibility as a total revelation.  Without first developing this kind of strength, flexibility just seems like a convenience.  But build up some serious strength and flexibility will seem like a treasure.

Once you have strength and flexibility, structure is a revelation.  Good or correct structure will allow you to transfer force through your bones, dramatically reducing the need for muscular strength, allowing you to conserve enormous amounts of energy.

Once you have structure you can develop it so that any movement at any angle or curve has integrity.  And then looseness will be revelation.  With looseness you will have the ability to have structure only when you want it.  You can disappear and re-appear at will.

Once you have looseness, momentum is a revelation.  Looseness will give you the speed and adaptability to take advantage of both your own and an opponent's momentum.   It's a whole different way of fighting. (Yes, I'm talking about fighting again, but it's only a frame for the larger philosophical discovery.)

Once you understand momentum, you will feel the value of increasing the unified integrity of your entire liquid mass as a revelation.  Unity comes about through reducing all effort.  Eventually you will experience turning off all specific muscular control as a revelation.

Once you have discarded effort, emptiness becomes a revelation.  Emptiness connects the effortless body to spacial awareness.

No doubt there are revelations to come.

Laozi says that the more focused, differentiated, specific and clear an idea becomes, the more likely it is to begin to stagnate and decay or harden and break.  Shouldn't this be the first lesson?

Defeat All Dirty Power!

Below is the text of the flyer for George Xu's latest public offerings in San Francisco.  It's poetry, of a sort.  The first time I met George was around 1990.  My first teacher, Bing Gong was making a formal introduction on my behalf.  George was briefly delighted and then went into a wild rant about how everyone was doing Tofu Tai Chi.  He proceeded to define and contrast Tofu Tai Chi with the other cosmological possibilities and then began demonstrating maximum spring shaking power as the antidote to all this squishy food practice.  I was hooked.

In case you are wondering, "dirty power" is anything generated from a body which does not conform to the principle of "Dead physical body"  --Also known as XU, which was the topic of my last post.


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2011 Seminar with Master George Xu

Seminar 1: Master George Xu will teach Chen Style Tai Ji , secret of max gravity, 3rd level of internal power, pure and large internal power, form and Tai Ji push hand principles, and Wu Tang Qi Kung. Unit empty pure force will defeat all dirty power force and weak force.

Seminar 2: Master George Xu will teach Xing-Yi Six Harmony - Ten Animals, Xing-Yi 10 principles, 10 different circles, Seventh Harmony to the enemy and Eighth Harmony to the universe, 3 level of 10 Dan Tian training (small internal, large internal, space spiritual Dan Tian), and Qi Kung training.

Seminar 3: Master George Xu will teach Ba Gua basics and dragon eagle form, Ba Gua snake, dragon, tornado, three different power, Ba Gua principles and usage. Dead physical body follow intelligence internal power and pure internal power follow space spiritual power.

Seminar 4: Master George Xu will teach new secret from Europe, Tai Chi form and principles, two men training, test your internal power perfection, intelligence and purity. Tai Ho of Tai Chi, Natural style secrets. Teach you to be as powerful and wild as tiger, fast as lighting, large like ocean, spiral as tornado, heavy as mountain, light as feather at the same time.

Fee:  $120 one day, $180 both days

Please register in advance.

When:

1. Feb. 12-13 Sat & Sun 9-5pm

2. March 5-6 Sat & Sun 9-5pm

3. March 26-27 Sat & Sun 9-5pm

4. April 30 - May 1 Sat & Sun 9-5pm

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Also: Rory Miller will be in the San Francisco Bay Area again Feb. 18th-20th.  Check it out!



Me & friends at Rory's workshop in last September

Xu - Fake - False

The term xu is a key concept which ties together daoyin, the ritual body, trance, and all types of martial arts.  The first definition my dictionary gives of xu is “empty” or “hollow” but this is misleading as the term kong is generally used to describe emptiness in martial arts, meditation or ritual.

The second definition in my dictionary is more helpful, “fake;” interestingly, the fourth definition is “virtual.”

The radical for the character xu, is hu (tiger).  When a tiger stalks, he forgets his body, he thinks only of the prey.  Xu is the character used by Chinese Medicine in the expression shenxu (kidney depletion). When we go without food or sleep our bodies often become deficient and depleted, we lose fine motor control, the ability to focus, and concern for the flesh.

In the context of internal martial arts, xu is the fruition of the whole body moving as a single liquid unit.  Xu is a description of the physicality of an “I can sense what you are doing, you can not sense what I am doing” situation.  A body which is xu is unstoppable because it doesn’t apparently respond to resistance.

I know what you are thinking, zombies are xu. That’s right, if zombies could talk they would be like, “Yo, I don’t care if you chop off my arm, I’ll still eat you.  Shoot off my leg, no problem, I’m still coming...” I hesitate to say that xu is a form of disassociation because it is not necessarily a psychological problem.  However, the first time I bang my body or my leg against the ground teaching daoyin, people wince.  They think, “Are you crazy?”

Xu is external martial conditioning.  Xu is the result of pounding and slapping the outside of ones body as a way to be comfortable with heavy contact.

It is also what allows self-mortifiers to pierce and pummel themselves.  There is a long history in China of using a ritual trance initiation to induce xu.  Often it involves a ritual emptying, as in nuo theatrical exorcism where the hun and pö spirits are removed from the performer’s body and placed in jars using talisman and mantras.  But it is also a quick way of training troops.  During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) each boxer went through an initiation process which made him immune to pain and of course (he believed) bullets.

In trance the mind is totally preoccupied.  The boxers would invoke their personal deity and they would become, for instance, the Monkey King.  By preoccupying the mind with all the attributes of the Monkey King the individual boxer must have been able to disassociate from any injury to his own body.  He may also have been hungry and been entranced by the idea that he was purifying the country of evil Christians.

Other examples of training troops quickly involve group chanting.  Qawwali music from Pakistan, for instance, is all about invoking love.  It is the idea that while you are butchering your enemy you feel intense love for them, as you send them to god, you also make them one with god.  Because you are so focused on love, you disassociate from your own body.  Intense anger, revenge, and envy work too.  As Laozi says, “When we are possessed by desire, we experience only the yearned for manifest.”

Many spiritual traditions think of xu as a form of transcendence.  Putting on my rational 20th Century hat, I’d say that xu is the result of two forces; hormones (probably adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, epinephrine) and mental focus.

(While mentally focusing on an idea, a goal, or an object outside the body can create an experience of xu, "focus" is a really bad word choice because the more spatially expansive (capacious) ones awareness is, the more xu the body can become.)

For those who practice internal martial arts xu comes about simply through relaxation.  In fact I would tentatively say xu is relaxation. When every sand sized particle that makes up your entire body is relaxed it is xu.  (Xu is used in the Chinese character for atom.) A body which is xu does not intentionally respond to resistance.  It is heavy, liquid and unified.  Actually it does respond to resistance, but it does so in an unconditioned, unconscious, uncontrolled automatic way.

Everywhere I look these days people are abusing the poor word “embodied.” Everything needs to be “embodied” these days, if you want to sell it--it better be embodied with some awesomeness.  Exercise, politics, education, shampoo, coffee, even the truth is supposed to be embodied.  But I’m telling you people, if you take this ride to the top of the hill, it ends with a totally disembodied experience.  But words are misleading, truly internal martial xu should be both embodied and disembodied at the same time.  When all the controlling, micro-structural, 'I own this body,' 'this is me,' 'this is me-ness,' voices get turned off what is left is xu.  Xu and emptiness (kong), of course.

I’m not exactly describing an ego-free experience here.  The ego just becomes bigger, it lifts off of the body and becomes spacial.  One experiences a lively, dynamic form of perceptual-motor spacial awareness.

Everyone is at least a little bit xu all the time.  And everyone is capable of getting really xu in short order.  Most of the drugs you can name off of the top of your head increase ones experience of xu.

What inhibits the experience of xu? Only one thing: Feeling in possession of your own body--believing that what defines you is limited to this empty bag of flesh.

Happy Year of the Rabbit

(hat tip: Language Log/Victor Mair)

Jack LaLanne

Today we mourn the passing of Jack LaLanne, age 96.  LaLanne defined the notion of American fitness.  In the early part of the 20th Century, everywhere we found modernity, we also found the idea of National Fitness.  The idea was that the vigor and discipline of the individual body was a reflection of the power of the state that body belonged to.  Even Foucault and Nietzsche weighed in on this notion.  There is plenty of room for absurdity here--think of the iconic image of Ben Gurion doing a headstand on the beach in Tel Aviv--and I think no form of theater exploited that absurdity better than Japanese post-apocalyptic Butoh, but as movements go, National Fitness has had a profound effect.  (I've written about it's influence on China here.)

Before LaLanne opened his Oakland Fitness Gym lifting weights just to "look" fit was a cultural marker of homosexuality.  I suppose it still is, in some ways, but the idea that fitness itself had a long list of positive things going for it opened abstract exercise routines like weights or jumping jacks to everyone.  Before that change in mindset, athletes and jocks were just supposed to have been born that way.  If you didn't get big, fast, and powerful just by playing the game, too bad, get a desk job!

It's hard to imagine what the world was like back then, just like it's hard to imagine what it was like when everyone thought the world was flat.  Today, "training" is a prerequisite for sports.  Before LaLanne, training was a form of cheating!  Really!

There is an obvious parallel here with the mentality of dueling.  Back in the old days when gentlemen fought duels to maintain their honor, to train in fencing was un-gentlemanly.  It was a form of cheating.  When guns were used for dueling, it was considered un-gentlemanly to practice target shooting for the same reason, it was cheating.  In fact, for over 100 years, the definition of dueling pistols was that they had no rifling!  Rifling is the spiraling etched into the inside of a gun barrel that makes the bullet go straight.

So it's worth considering that the idea of fitness is really tied to the end of class in America.  Many commentators have already noted that fitness has been tied to the rise of the middle class.  It's also worth considering that if "working class" is now just a style of fashion, dressing like a superhero is truly a pardim shift.

I use to love watching Jack LaLanne on TV when I was a kid, he seem to me to be a kind of real-life superman.  But where as Superman was imaginary and made his living disguised as a newspaper reporter, LaLanne was real and made his living actually dressed as Superman!

As a tribute to this great man, now join me in doing 50 Jumping Jacks.

Still News After 111 Years

Here is an excellent article about the Boxer's (Yihequan) in the Economist.

National Living Treasures

I really don't know what to do.  Paulie Zink has another video up on Youtube.  His Daoyin is the link between Daoist hermit rituals, Shaolin, the martial theater tradition, and internal martial arts.  I don't know of anyone else that has even come close to receiving the complete transmission of this knowledge.  Paulie Zink has it, yet hardly anyone appreciates that fact, even worse, I don't think he appreciates it!  For crying out loud, why call it Yin Yoga?  You're killing me.

For those who have missed this story, here are some of the details.  Paulie Zink learned Daoyin and Monkey Kungfu in Los Angels in the late '70's early 80's from a guy, Cho Chat Ling who learned it from his father and taught no one else.  The Monkey Kungfu is made up of 5 different Monkey forms and qualities all of which Paulie then taught to his close friend Michael Matsuda.  I interviewed Michael last year in Santa Clarita and he told me that he never learned any of the Daoyin and that Monkey Kungfu and Daoyin were completely different systems.  It's my opinion that Monkey is one of about 20 Daoyin animal movements, but it happens to be by far the most developed of the animals because Monkey was such a popular stage role in every part of China.  Michael dismissed this notion by saying that it was purely a martial arts system.  He backed up this statement by telling me that a group of Paulie Zink's teacher's father's Kungfu cousin's  disciples (got that?) came to visit Los Angels from Hong Kong twice in the 1980's to compete in tournaments and Michael got to travel with them.  He said they were superb fighters, unlike Paulie Zink who never had an interest in fighting.  But Michael also said that none of the visiting group knew Daoyin, and none of them knew all 5 monkey forms either.  That means Michael is also a National Living Treasure and more people need to get down there and study with him.  I took his class-- that's some serious gongfu!  (Buy a video!) (There is more of Michael's argument here, but the idea that there was some wall of separation between fighting skill and performing skill does not stand up to historical scrutiny.)

The purpose of Daoyin is very simply to reveal the freedom of our true nature.  That's the purpose, or I could say the fruition.  One of the reasons this thing has gotten so screwed up is that people are always confusing the method with the fruition.  They think that physical looseness and flexibility is the fruition, when in fact it is only the method, and only a small part of the method at that.

The method of Daoyin is very simply to distill what is inside from what is outside so that we might become aware of this other thing, call it emptiness, call it freedom, call it original qi, call immortality, call it whatever you want.  The world outside of us is always pushing or pulling, and the world inside of us is always pushing or pulling.  The premise of Daoyin is that there is a place in between inside and outside which is always pure and always free.

Thinking back to how Daoyin was created, there were two ways in.  One way was to cultivate extraordinarily plain stillness and emptiness, and from that experience begin moving.  The other way was to tap into the spontaneity of the animal mind, to move, think and feel like a wild animal.  In order to have the complete Daoyin 'experience' you would have to go in one way and find your way out the other!  So in a sense, Daoyin can't really be taught, it has to be found.

One of the many differences between Yoga and Daoyin is that Daoyin has what we call in the martial arts world, "external conditioning."  Somewhere in the middle (1:26) you see Paulie putting his legs together and flopping them side to side, whacking them on the ground.  His torso becomes like water and his legs like someone else's legs.  Who cares?  Just throw them around.  This is one of the doorways in.

Later, when he does the pig, he is banging his knees on the ground in a rapid fire vibration.  Then near the end he does the caterpillar (changing into a butterfly) which looks totally smooth, but I've taught it to kids a lot and I always have to explain that "gongfu teachers like me are the model of toughness and dispassion!" and "I don't care if you get little purple bruises--the cure is more practice!"

In the video he starts with the frog, then the stump, the tree, then the crab, the transition to lotus sitting, then the pig (at 1:59, I've never seen that before!), then the caterpillar into the butterfly.

The music is barely survivable.  It should really be done on a hard, unforgiving surface.  The production quality is even lower than the stuff I do.  I'm pretty sure that most people will look at this video and say, it doesn't measure up to this or that standard--but that's partly because people don't know what they are looking at.

He is doing only a tiny fraction of each animal. Viewers should know that all the animals have meditation postures, and they all come totally to life, like the pig did for about one second (1:59).  The pig is particularly interesting because like the dog, it was the lowest status role there was in the Chinese theater tradition.  Think about it, to be an actor was lower status than a prostitute or a thief!  Playing the role of a dog or a pig was really low.  The animal role specialists would draw straws to see who the unlucky guy was who would have to play the pig!

Given that Paulie's teacher probably inherited a really low social status, it isn't all that surprising that he would want to abandon it himself and go into the import-export business (no one actually knows where he is now), but he obviously valued it enough to believe that it should be passed on to someone in it's complete form.  I can even understand wanting to free it from it's original Daoist/Theater context, even if I think that was short sited and highly problematic given that Paulie does not seem to understand what a treasure he is or has.

New Classes

I'm in the thick of it again.

Tai Chi and Qigong starts up again this Wednesday Jan 5th, 2011, at 5841 Geary Street, 6 to 8 PM.

Bagua Zhang and Qigong start up Thursday morning Jan 6th, 2011, Douglass Playground 6 to 8:30 AM.

All in San Francisco of course.  But I'm available for private lessons in Marin too since I live near the bridge.  I take phone calls if you have questions...415-752-1984.

This week I'm beginning 10 new children's classes in Northern Shaolin as a Performing Art in schools, that's in addition to the 2 I'm already teaching.

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I had a great vaccation, did a ton of reading and practice, I didn't check my email or phone for 14 days.  Yeah me.

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I have a new theory I'm excited about. I'll just share it with y'all briefly because I'm headed to bed early these days.

Here are some interconnected notions.

1.)  The frontal cortex of the brain is the part we usually associate with "thinking."  The frontal cortex counter-intuitively has a largely inhibitory function.  We don't usually think of  "thought" as a form of inhibition but it turns out that if I think about jumping out the window my brain does most of the things it would do if I actually did get up and jump out the window.  But in addition to all those things my frontal cortex inhibits my movement. That's why you can improve a skill just by thinking about doing it.

2.)  The various nerves which send messages from the body to the brain operate at different speeds.  Some of them are lighting fast, like the nerves sending information from the eyes, the ears, and those involved with spacial awareness.  But the nerves which send messages from inside the body to the brain are much slower.  Naturally, as martial artists we should instantly recognize that any information received from the slow nerves inside the body would be useless in a self-defense situation.  As Rory Miller puts it, "Time is damage."

Thus; the reason we practice internal martial arts slowly is to first make sure that we are not inhibiting any movement on the inside.  Inhibitory movement includes many things like stabilizing or rotating individual joints or holding strength in the abdomen.  Once all that inhibitory tension is gone then we can move (spread?) our mind to the outside of the body, to the fast nerves, to the instantaneous awareness of plastic and dynamic space.

As I have been saying now for about a year now-- body inside the mind, not mind inside the body.

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Also check out Rory Millers new workshop in SoCal, he is hinting at another one in San Francisco soon too.

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Happy New Year!