Entertainment Therapy

Could it really be this simple?  25 Million Type 2 Diabetes Cases Cured.  The drive to eat and store food we inherited from our ancestors is having trouble adapting to our perfect world, a world where commerce has given us unlimited food, as entertainment-therapy.

The way modernity has come to define exercise is largely based on eating.  A routine which stimulates appetite to grow muscle mass would have been immoral for most people for most of history--because it would have meant that the people around you wouldn't have had enough food.  'Over eating' as a form of 'fitness' would have been incomprehensible.

The traditional popular movement arts, the village arts, may be a mixed bag.  After all, if you only do a certain dance for one week out of the year, and that week just happens to come with a major feast, then perhaps its purpose was to stimulate appetite, and help resolve the constipation a sudden increase in food intake would likely create.  On the other hand, if the art was practiced year round it would in all likelihood have to be based on training efficient movement, not strength; training endurance, not surge.  Of course, wrestlers sponsored with copious amount of food by a king trained for surge, not endurance. But heck, it's all speculation.  Eating, dancing, fighting, the reasons are beyond reason.

In all humbleness, it seems that in this era most of us are looking for an ethic of conscious eating.  It's hap hazard out there.  Opinions abound.  Strategies multiply.  Knowledge mixes with whim and whimsy.  The simple answers get wind behind them and sally forth, for a while.  We seem intrinsically to know that the answers must be simple, but what seemed to work for a while now degenerates into folly, cant, or personal preference.

Taxis, hair cuts, moving furniture and hot food.  The four things we tip for.  (I tried to tip the new accounts guy at the Bank of America the other day, it didn't go over that well.)  There must be something about food, something so deeply irrational about how we view it, that we are all blind.  Like insects that keep flying into clear glass windows.

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In the interest of full disclosure, here is what I ate yesterday:

4 Barrel Coffee, Yogurt, Nuts, Banana.

Salad with both pickled and raw cabbage, pickled bamboo shoots, tomatoes, romaine lettuce, hard boiled egg, raw carrot, raw daikon (shredded), and left-over slow cooked soy sauce pork shoulder.  Miso, lemon, sesame oil dressing.

Lamb stock with slow simmered shiitake mushrooms (dried), celery, carrot, leek, shredded cabbage, parmesan cheese.

Slut Walks

There is a new movement afoot which is likely to change how we understand self-defense.  As I have stated before, self-defense is a new idea, it is not instinctive.  Self-defense is a notion which has emerged from a particular culture at a particular time and it is not yet fully formed.

The new development is something called a Slut Walk.  A Slut Walk is a street procession in which women wear whatever clothes they want and demand that the streets be safe enough for them to do so at anytime, under any conditions.

In a talk I had with Sgt. Rory Miller a few months back, he commented that as a community we get the crime we tolerate.

Here is the money quote from the article:

The protests began after a police officer told students at Toronto’s York University in January that if women want to avoid rape, they shouldn't dress like “sluts.” (If you thought the days of “she was asking for it” were long gone, guess again.)

Heather Jarvis, a student in Toronto and a co-founder of SlutWalk, explained that the officer’s comments struck her and her co-organizers as so preposterous and damaging that they demanded action. “We were fed up and pissed off, and we wanted to do something other than just be angry,” she said. Bucking the oft-repeated notion that young women are apathetic to feminism, they organized. What Jarvis hoped would be a march of at least 100 turned out to be a rally of more than 3,000 — some marchers with “slut” scrawled across their bodies, others with signs reading “My dress is not a yes” or “Slut pride.”

That all sounds great to me.  But I can't help thinking that the whole thing was started by a misunderstanding.  What the police officer probably intended, was to explain how to avoid being raped from the assumption that we live in a dangerous crime filled world.  Not the assumption that we should tolerate it.  What he most likely intended to convey was very basic advise like 'always pack your own parachute,' because it's your life on the line.  If you get stabbed, and the knife is just sticking out of your chest, leave it there because pulling it out may cause more damage.  I bet this officer also told them not to hitch-hike.

And I might leave it right there, except I've just been in Tokyo where a single woman can go out to a bar at night by herself and get so drunk that she gets lost walking home by herself--without it even occurring to anyone that she is doing something risky.  We get the crime we tolerate.

Slut Walks may actually represent the influence of Japanese society on America.  Then again maybe it is the internal dialog we have been having about women in the Islamic world being forced to wear Burkas and such.

All of this represents a difficult challenge for the theory of self-defense.  Self-defense is justified if a threat has:

1. Intent


2. Means


3. Opportunity and....


4. You can demonstrate "Preclusion," which means that you can explain why you did what you did and not something else--such that a reasonable person in a similar situation might believe that they would do the same thing.

If a jury believes that it isn't safe to go out in certain neighborhoods after 2am they are assuming that there are men cruising around with 'intent,' and 'means.'  The jury could ask, "Why didn't you take away these evil predators 'opportunity' by staying indoors?"  When women are accused of risky behavior (ie. dressing like a slut) it is a challenge to the 'preclusion' part of the self-defense equation.  The answer to the jury's question should be this, "I did take away those evil predators 'opportunity' to do evil, I shot them.  I had to shoot them because this community tolerates them."

Support your local Slut Walk!

(Mexico gets in the game)

Kazumi

Yo! People! Let's give it up for house wife monster dancer KAZUMI!



(hat tip: Japan Probe)

Stuff on my Mind

Here is a woman in Australia who, like me, understands that "core strength" is a big mistake:  Edgecliff Physiotherapy.

I learned about her from Josh Leeger who also turned me on to Exuberant Animal.

Also from Josh I got to Philip Beach's site describing Meridians as Emergent Lines of Shape Control.  Here is a pdf of a paper which explains the theory.  This made me think that meridians don't really "exist" they are trained reactions which disappear the better your internal practice gets.  Which explains why Medical Qigong is the lowest level of qigong, the meridians are most apparent in sick or dying people.  It also corresponds well with the Daoist notion that the meridians are lines of fate, lines (and points) which provide a window into either freedom, or robot-zombie-like predictability.

Speaking of fate, here is a rationalist approach to Astrological Horoscopes!  I think the author nails it in his own quirky way.  My own experience following a Daoist Auspices Calendar for several years taught me a whole bunch of unexpected lessons.  Like that their is a lot of freedom in letting an external force (in this case words on a page) decide for me whether to go out and party or to stay home and study.  When you're free, you can waste a lot of time and brain power trying to pick a day and time to get a hair cut, or buy new shoes, or work in the garden.  Just looking at the Daoist Calender externalized all that strategizing and weighing of options--which freed up a lot of time and energy.

I've been reading Gustavo Thomas' blog and watching his videos, great stuff!

Look at all the stuff canceled in Tokyo.  We have found lots of stuff to do here anyway and people are happy to see us.  I had very fresh raw pork liver the other night, with beer, yum.  I'm happy to report that Tokyo is still full of great deals on delicious food, especially lunch.  For example at a sushi boat restaurant, if I eat as much as I possibly can it only costs about 8 dollars US.

We went to a Kabuki show.  My main comment is that the actors have to practice a whole lot of stillness!  How anyone could miss the connection between stillness in the theater and stillness in martial arts I do not know.  Oh, and the costumes are amazing.

Check out Akira Hino, Jazz Drummer, martial arts teacher, dancer.  Here is his Video Channel.

Japan is so fashion conscious, it is impossible to be here and not think a lot about clothes and shoes.  I hope I can find some time to work on making my own because that seems like the only really satisfying way to stick my head down that well.

Daniel Mroz published a book on martial arts and theater, check it out!  Now I really have to work on getting mine in to print.

I got the book Impro to Rory Miller at Chiron and he loved it.  We are still awaiting a review.

Check out Tokyo Probe. Beer.

Aunkai Martial Arts in Japan

If you are a martial artist visiting Tokyo you will want to pay a visit to Akuzawa Minoru, he teaches an art he calls Aunkai which is a hybrid of Chinese and Japanese arts.
When I first found the studio, I looked in to see a bunch of guys in boxing gloves hitting boxing mitts.   My first thought was, oops wrong class.  But it was in fact the right class.  They use Sanda as a base for skills development and as a warm-up.

Akuzawa Sensei's website is worth reading, especially the Bujutsu section.  Towards the end of class he was kind enough to show his skills to me directly and let me test him in various ways.  He also partnered me with his senior student Miyakwa Kazuhisa for a significant portion of the three hour long class which gave me a good sense of what he has been able to transmit.

Although, I believe it is quite difficult for most students to grasp, Akuzawa Sensei is using an apophatic method,  "...[W]e aim to give our students the physical tools to forge a Bujutsu body able to bring its own imperfections to light, address them, and come to its own answers--all of this eventually leads the practitioner down their own path in the Martial Way."  While most people would read that statement in context as iconoclastic or individualist, to me it is simply explaining that the methods themselves primarily point to what you are NOT supposed to do.

Take for instance these two exercises:  Both have fixed foot positions.  The one top goes up and down.  The one on the bottom goes forward and backward.  They are both designed to take all arm and leg power out of the system as well as any size advantages or gravity/momentum/positioning advantages--  Thus leaving only "internal"  mind-energy changes of the torso for generating force.  What the practice reveals is all the possible things you could do that are wrong.  This is really important because all those "wrong things," like tension in the shoulders, might seem like they are giving an advantage in a more dynamic or volatile exercise.

No matter how much you simply copy the external shape, it is impossible to simply copy movement that happens internally. To add to this, the concept of bujutsu, unlike martial sports, does not adhere to rules, so you must be able to flip your perception and look at things in a completely different light.

Here I think he is suggesting that the mind limitations normally associated with social dominance also limit power and options.  To practice 'internal' arts is to fundamentally play a different game.

You must not get bogged down on the "shape" of things in practice. I also strongly believe that you should not create a method that is set in stone. Bujutsu itself is the ability to use the body in any situation, any environment, and as such is the embodiment of change. This means that training must be tailored to yourself by endless trial, error, experimentation, and adjustment if you want to understand the true essence behind movement.

Again he emphasizes the apophatic; make mistakes and learn from them.  Sure, there is a method here, but  the method is pointing to something.  When you figure out what it is pointing to, the method can be burned away.

Akuzawa Sensei is a warm, generous and open guy and his students were all welcoming.  The best test of his power I got was when he asked me to hold his arms down at his sides.  I was instructed to use any kind of force adjustments I wished to try and stopping him from lifting his arms up for the opening movement of Tai Chi.  I was ready, in position, holding his arms with all my creative effort, but he unconsciously decided to scratch his head!  His "head scratching" power was totally unstoppable, he took me with him.

He is clearly offering a method, it uses boxing gloves and some Shaolin and Xingyi type repeating lines, and a bunch of two person resistance/cooperation exercises that teach various things, and he advises students to do standing meditation practice on their own.  But he is also clearly saying, don't get stuck on the method, the method is all about limitations, the fruition is about freedom.

Weakness With a Twist in Japan: Sumo

I have been in a whirl wind of change.  I moved from San Francisco to the suburb of Lafayette, and then I got on a plane to Japan.  At the moment it is 7 am in Tokyo and I am sitting down in line to see an all day Sumo match.

If anyone has contacts in Japan that they would like to introduce me to, please send me an email.  If you are in Japan and you want to meet up, same.  If you happen to know of something particularly cool or weird to do, particularly in Tokyo or Kyoto, I’m all ears.

The report on radiation:  There is none in Tokyo,  we brought a Geiger counter from home and it shows no change.  Second, the abundance of cheap delicious food is overwhelming...in Japan there is no sales tax, and no tipping and my American Express card is not charging for currency conversion.  Sarah is at my side playing angry birds, we are in need of coffee and snacks but we must sit here for one more hour before the tickets are handed out.

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Update...the Sumo was awesome. Here are my quick observation which are certain to offend someone so let me preface them by saying they aren't meant to offend, just to provoke thinking:

1.  I would like to see what Sumo was like before the spread of Fascist movements in the early 1900's.  Was it more or less theatrical? comic?

2.  Are the Sumo guys meant to be Cosmic Babies?  I ask this because Tangki in Taiwan are often seen that way and the defining characteristics are sometimes said to be bare feet, bare chest, and bib (They wear two kinds of bibs in Sumo, a fighting one and a ceremonial one.)  When baby or child deities are made into icons or puppets or actors in China, they also have these characteristics.

3.  I was reminded of Indian Monkey wrestling several times.  The "dirt" that gets watered and swept at regular intervals on the Sumo stage has similarities to the 'dirt' that gets mixed with gee and nice smells and gets shoveled into even softness in the Indian wrestling temples between fights.  Also a Sumo guy did a bow (as in bow and arrow) dance at the end which looked a lot like a monkey king spinning a staff.

4.  Between each fight there a singer comes out and does a short dance with a fan, it looks closely related to the Shimai (Noh Dance/Drama interludes) I studied at Oomoto 23 years ago.  So does the officiated Shinto priest's vocalization and movement.

5.  The wood clappers are used at certain times, for theatrical effect?

6.  I believe there was a ritual in which each match was formally announce.  It seemed like the reading of imperial decrees.

7.  I have heard from several sources that the Japanese do not think Sumo and Mongolian wrestling are related.  I heard for instance, that the squat dance they do with their arms out to the sides, hands together than up then down, is to show that the wrestler has no weapons.  But it looks a lot like a version of the Mongolian eagle dance.  (check Youtube)  Also the side balance with one leg up in the air and then coming down with a heavy stop looks just like Mongolian wrestling.  As a demonstration of prowess it has a lot in common with the stamps in Chen Style Tai Chi too.  Maybe Mongolian wrestling came from Sumo?

8.  I really appreciated all the dancing and posturing and throwing salt and slapping and grunting.  It really gave me a chance to see who was likely to win and why!  Especially when looking at the early junior matches-- the (not)-eagle dance instantly let me know if they had good shoulder integration which is key to winning.  The squat let me see head integration and uprightness, and the four legged prone posture let me see if they had any spine problems.  Later in the show when they started reaching for and then throwing salt, they sometimes really looked like gorillas.

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We've got tickets to Kabuki...so I gotta run.

Mothering and Othering: Making an Immortal Baby

The most basic, primal, reduction of the notion of self-defense is the protection of a baby in the womb.  It totally trumps castle law and threats to life and limb.  If a pregnant woman rips out a man’s throat, or shoots or stabs him, all she has to claim is she was protecting her baby.  As long as she can plausibly make that claim, no jury in any civilized country would convict her.  Even a child would at least have to make the case that running away was a bad option, or that lethal force was justified, but a pregnant woman unaided and under attack can get away with almost anything.

Obviously pregnant women do everything possible to avoid having to fight, above and beyond the rest of us, which is probably why their case for justified self-defense seems so strong, so pure.

But that’s an aside, here is the main question.  What is the psyco-physical state a female uses to protect her fetus and, by extension, small children close at hand?  Pregnant women, in my limited experience are often happy and relaxed.  Compared to the average person they have virtually zero abdominal tension.  We understand this viscerally.  If we were carrying a baby inside our body we would be careful in all our movements to not transmit tension to the baby.  The way we walked, moved our arms and turned our head would all keep in mind treating the baby with loving care.  We would avoid shaking or bouncing unless the baby seemed to like that.  And when the baby was sleeping we’d probably be careful to move in a way that wouldn’t wake the baby.

A woman who is pregnant is doing this all the time.  So in the event that she needed to fight, it seems possible that she would maintain this attitude or at least be physically informed by it.  Think for a moment though, how such a fighting style would look.

First of all, it could not rely on structure or rooting because pregnant women tend to have poor structure and balance.  They have a lot of mass to wield, but the movements of the  arms would likely be used clear a large area around the belly while attacking in circles.  The mind, rather than focusing on death points to attack, would be using massive force to throw an attack back.  In other words, a pregnant woman might fight using the tai chi and bagua notion of a giant rolling ball.

The mind of the pregnant women, if she made the actual jump to fighting, would be fierce beyond reckoning.  A parallel with the concept of “xu” we have written about before is pertinent here.  “Xu” literally means fake, but in martial arts it refers to a body which is not giving off self-identity signals, a body which does not respond to pain, a body which has let go of all tension.  The pregnant woman who has made the jump to fighting is fighting for the baby, not herself.  The experience might be de-personalized, the baby has needs, the baby is the future, what happens to the outer body is secondary, the outer body can risk being destroyed as long as the baby is fully and totally protected.

This seems to invoke the image of two bodies, an inner one and and outer one completely differentiated-- a qi (potent energy) body, surrounded by a jing (relaxed mass) body.  To make this match up with the standard internal martial arts lingo is a small leap.  The inner body (the baby) is qi, it is potential energy, pure animation which is round in shape and when awake, can extend several feet beyond the outer flesh body of the ‘mother.’  The qi body (the baby’s needs and perhaps its will) seems to take over the mother;  however, the qi body is blind to what is happening outside, so it must be led by the mind.  The mind of the mother controls the space and defines the environment around herself.  The mind goes first, the dynamic energy of the baby (qi) follows the mind.  The mass of the mother’s body (jing) always puts the baby energy ahead of its own needs.  The shen (spacial mind) leads the qi (energy body) and the qi leads the jing (body mass).

This appears to be a very obvious, though over looked, explanation of why  Daoists have so often used the metaphor of making an immortal baby to describe the internal elixir practices of neidan, and jindan.

Try this practice: Imagine you have a baby in your lower dantian. Try to move without waking up the baby.  Do this over a period of months and gradually increase the range on motion in which you can move without waking up the baby.  Eventually your body mass will become very quiet.  This is called purifying jing.  This is, of course, also a description of doing a tai chi form, or so called ‘pre-heaven’ Baguazhang.

Once the jing is purified and the body is quiet in motion, then you can experiment with waking up the baby.   While the baby is sleeping there will be no power.  After the baby is awake, power will seem to come from emptiness.

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All this suggests a composite mind and a composite body.  At the moment we are dealing with massive generalizations and oversimplifications but let me sketch it out quickly.  The composite mind has several models.  One model is the lizard, mammal, frontal cortex (human)--a three part mind where the lizard is powerfully focussed on survival and aliviating pain, the mammal is obsessed with status, pleasure seeking, emotions and group bonding, and the frontal cortex is all about planning, imagining and rational thought.  There are other models too.
Models for the composite body come from evolutionary theory.  Our bones were once an exoskelatin, a shell which got covered in a wormy substance we call muscle.  Each part of our brain comes from a different type of body substance which at some point in our evolution was an independent animal.  We are composite forms which tend to organize all these ‘minds’ and ‘bodies’ in standard ways, however, extreme circumstances or carefully designed practices can alter the organizational order of this conscious/unconscious mass of kinetic life energy.  Just a thought.

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It seems to me that in utero, before we get the gender defining hormones, males and females both have a proto-womb.  Perhaps this is even true to some extent for pre-pubescent children.  I would like to propose what must seem obvious to many people, that this proto-womb is what martial arts, theater, meditation and ritual all refer to as the lower dantain.

The womb seems to have some independent connection to mind, as if it was an earlier life form in our evolution, which can re-assert itself when other aspects of our composite body-mind are quiet.

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When a mother fights, the ground belongs to her baby.  Dantian, literally means cinnabar field, red ground.  Everything which enters that field belongs to the baby.  Even the mother’s own body belongs to the baby.  The fighting mind of a pregnant woman has a very unique way of owning space, a unique way of possessing.

Contrast this with the social form of fighting that men do.  One man pees on a tree to mark his territory with his testicular scent.  Another man then does the same thing and they fight over ownership.  The peeing doesn’t actually have to take place, it can just be assumed.  This testicular marking style of fighting involves a sense of ownership too, but it is less absolute.  Subordinate yourself to the dominant male and the fight is off.  Fights for status are rarely lethal and are usually resolved with simple posturing.

The testicular scent fight is a battle of and for identity, “My body owns this! and belongs here! doing this!”  The womb fight is asocial, “Don’t even think about hurting this baby or you will die (after you’re dead I’ll make a decision about whether or not you are good food for my baby).”
When two men fight over testicular scent, they each extend their minds right up to, but not through, their social challenger.  Two testicular scenters engaged in hand to hand combat are usually very close together, but their minds do not extend much beyond their own bodies and thus the jing (body mass) and the (potential energy) remain mostly mixed up within the body.   Because the qijing and qi do not differentiate the power is very limited.
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Which brings us to othering.  Othering is the psyco-physical process of dehumanizing an individual or a group of people so that you can kill them without feeling social restraint or remorse.  Othering is shorthand for:  “Seeing someone as belonging to another species.”  Butchering animals may be totally natural on a farm, or while hunting, or it may need some training.  Certainly us urban people need to get past our squeamishness in order to butcher an animal.  After I caught, gilled, cleaned and iced 128 King Salmon in one day in Alaska I was haunted by fish eyes whenever I looked closely at anything shiny.  But other than that, I had successfully othered them.

If a person is raised to believe that another ethnic group or tribe is inferior, the process of othering is probably already complete.  When a criminal plans an assault, most likely he or she has already gone through a process of othering.  It is important to think about because in some cases you may be able to avert an assault by somehow getting the assailant to see you as a member of his tribe.  Othering is a justification process.

What does the psyco-physical experience of othering do to the mind and body?  To successfully other, is to shut off, like flipping a switch, all immediate social impulses.  So while it may be possible for a human predator to get close to someone by imitating social behavior, the behavior is not tied to a script, so when the range is right the knife simply goes in.  It is nearly always a surprise to the person being othered.  It’s also very quick and uses overwhelmingly superior force.  Although if simply threatening force is likely to allow the predator to achieve his or her goals then there may not be an actual assault.  It seems like the mind in these cases sees a victim as kinetic energy to be controlled or extinguished.  It’s not a contest for ownership, total ownership of the space is established before the assault.

Othering doesn’t require much physical training or energy work or relaxation techniques.   It only requires that the mind sees the immediate environment as inside its control.  In George Xu’s words, “The wolf thinks: ‘This territory is my refrigerator.’”  So in this case, the mind definitely leads the body mass (jing) but it doesn’t matter whether the jing and qi are mixed as long as the predator has enough skill to sneak up on the prey.  (In other words, predators in nature often need extraordinary skill to hunt, and thus they have perfect differentiation of jing and qi, but human predators can use weapons, so they don’t.)

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Mothering is the source of all compassion. Mothering is the psyco-physical process of extending ones mind to include someone or something within ones field of protection.  To mother is to project the sense of “my baby” out into space.  It is a very potent place to fight from.
Othering is nearly the direct opposite of mothering.  It is a process of extending ones mind to surround but totally exclude someone or something from the protection one affords himself.
And Testicular Scenting is just a cute term for "the monkey dance."

Tunnel Vision and the Perception of Density

Understanding the nature of perception is profoundly important for the study of any movement art.  The martial arts have been particularly vulnerable to the modern dictum that, "what you see is what you get."  But perception just ain't that simple.

Kinesiologists and their fellow travelers have uncovered a plethora of experimental evidence that motor development, perception, and imagination, are all intertwined and interdependent.  For instance check out this upcoming workshop blurb from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen:

The senses are our organs of receiving information from ourselves and from the outer world.
Perception is the psycho-physical process of interpreting sensory information. This process begins as potential and develops in response to experience. The dynamics of perception explores how we filter, modify, distort, accept, reject, and use sensory information to bond, defend and learn.

In order to perceive clearly, our attention, concentration, motivation or desire must actively focus us on what it is we are to perceive. This aspect of perceiving, pre-sensory motor focusing, patterns our interpretation of sensory information.  Without this active focusing our perception remains poorly organized.

Sensory information comes to us through multiple channels.  Touch and movement are the first of the senses to develop. They are registered throughout the whole body and establish the baseline for future perception through the sensory structures of the head: mouth, nose, ears and eyes.  Sensory information from these structures is transmitted via the nervous system through cranial and spinal nerves...

[This workshop will explore:]

• The perceptual-response cycle.


• The developmental sequence of the senses and perception.


• The mouth as the first extremity to grasp, release, measure, reach, and withdraw.  It sets the foundation for the movement of the extremities (head, tail, hands and feet).
  The mouth and nose as the first initiators of movement of the head and spine.
  The inner ear as it registers vibration, movement, auditory tone and body postural tone.


• The eyes as they are dependent upon all the previous senses and, the role of the eyes in helping to integrate the other senses into more complex patterns.
  Cranial and spinal nerves from a cellular and nervous system perspective.

The perception of space outside our bodies is thus built on a foundation of both movement and feeling.  So for instance if I look at a tree, or just for fun, a guy named Hulk, I'm going to be using my eyes to determine his size, shape, motion, and density.  90% of that is not what I actually see, it is happening in my imagination.  My imagination happens to be very accurate for this task.  Even though Hulk's back is not visible to me, I've incorporated it into my visual comprehension.  If one of Hulk's legs was obscured by a trash can my mind would still imagine the leg and would be quite surprised if suddenly the trash can was gone and there was no leg there.  A very large part of this imaginative process develops through touch.  Hulk's density is frankly not visible at all, our perception of density is built on our experience of touching, squeezing, biting, lifting, pushing, bouncing and poking similar objects.

Embodiment is the new catch word being used to sell everything.  The packaging on my toothpaste tells me that it will leave me feeling more embodied, so does the flier for 25 Hour Fitness, and the meditation class down the street.  All of this embodiment hoopla is just the perception of density from the surface of the skin inward. The opposite of "Embodiment" then is disassociation.  I don't really know what disassociation is, but I'm guessing it is a failure of imagination.  Many drugs, especially the illegal ones, cause some kind of dissociation which probably temporarily damages the basic functioning of the imagination.

In Chinese internal martial arts, Tai Chi, Xinyi, Bagua, we take a different route.  I suppose we could say, "We do Embodiment inside out!"  The higher levels of practice are all about the cultivation of emptiness which is the feeling of zero density from the skin inwards.

As we discussed above, density is perceived through various forms of touch.  Every inch of the body is capable of perceiving density.  The feeling of cultivating Qi is hard to pin down but at least part of what we call "feeling qi" is the perception of density from the surface of our bodies outward.

If you just do a quick glace around the room, you probably aren't thinking much about density.  But now find an object like a vase or a can of deodorant, ask yourself, "Can I feel the density of that object by just looking at it?  Can I feel its density from a distance with my belly?  How about with my elbows?"  Most peoples imagination can do this quite easily.  When a cat is stalking its prey in a forest, it keeps its eyes on the prey but it is testing the ground for density with each step.  If you walk into a darkened room your perception of density suddenly goes on high alert so that you won't ding your shin or otherwise smack into something solid and unexpected.  That perception seems to reach out into space.  This is what we are doing when we practice internal martial arts.

If you hit someone, basically you are trying to make them feel more embodied.  The more they feel the pain inside their body, the more effective your strike was.  The more their perceptive faculties are focused inwards, the less they have available to find a way to hit you back.  So the opposite is also true, the more my faculties are focused outwards, the better my opportunity to fight.  This is true for the entire surface of my body and also for my ability to imagine out into space.

Along the same line of thinking, stare into the center of this image.  After a while the lines on the edges will start to straighten out.

This happens because we basically have tunnel vision all the time, it just seems like the whole world is in focus because our imagination makes it so.  But if you are in a fight for your life with an adrenaline surge, part of your imagination shuts down and you get tunnel vision.  This Wikipedia article suggests that there are pharmacological reasons for this, in other words they don't call it a loss of imagination.  But in fact it is both.

Theater ritual and martial arts are closely intertwined.  Masks have been used since ancient times to create altered states of consciousness.  If you want to know what it is like to experience the tunnel vision associated with being attacked, just put on a mask with narrow eye slits.  Mask work done with tradition and sensitivity has the ability to profoundly change the way we move and see.  It can change the way we feel and perceive both space and time.  Most traditional Chinese martial theater and ritual was done with elaborate spacial perception altering costumes and either heavy mask like make-up or actual masks.

Kung Fu: The Hard Way

I just watch the first part of this 4 part video made by the BBC in 1983.  It's quite good, it's asks most of the right questions, sometimes it's answers are too brief and too general, but if we started from this very good basic explanation, how did we get side tracked?  The basics are here, Kung Fu was a devotional and exorcistic religious practice, a highly developed form of actual fighting skill, it played a roll in social cohesion, children's moral and physical education, triad organizations, rebellion, theater, dance, medicine, health and music.  The well established ties between Indian and Chinese civilization during the Han and Tang dynasties likely played some roll in it's development, especially in the realm of meditation and yogic action.

In answer to the above question I've come up with five reasons that the nascent field of Kung Fu studies has been so retarded.

1. When Qigong fever got out of mainland China it really confused the issues of Kung Fu's origins with a false narrative.


2. This particular BBC documentary focuses on Hong Kong, and manages to avoid getting caught up on the propaganda narrative of Chinese Nationalism dominant in both mainland China and Taiwan.


3. The Western ideas of mystical energy, self-defense, moralistic non-violence, and the belief that categories must be clear and distinct-- all have played a roll in inflating, diminishing or obscuring some aspect of the actual history of Kung Fu.


4. Buddhism exploded in the West, which amplified the 'Shaolin comes from Bodhidharma' narrative and tinted the glasses through which we look at everything Chinese.


5. The traditional Chinese distinction between Orthodox and Heterodox religion was so 'foreign' to Western notions of religion that it took over 100 years of scholarship and cultural exchange to become comprehensible.  (See here,... here,... here ... and here.)

Enjoy!

Shaolin Nike Shoes

My feet appear to be growing a bit as a result of small changes in my practice, so I'm considering leaving behind the Feiyue shoes I've been wearing and trying something new.  If someone at Nike is reading this and you have a pair of size 10.5's of the  "Wushu Shoe" (say that three times fast) please send them my way.  Until then, perhaps my readers can share a link in the comments section to their favorite workout shoes, or even a quick review.