North Star Martial Arts
In depth discussions of internal martial arts, theatricality, and Daoist ritual emptiness. Original martial arts ideas and Daoist education with a sense of humor and intelligence.
Books: TAI CHI, BAGUAZHANG AND THE GOLDEN ELIXIR, Internal Martial Arts Before the Boxer Uprising. By Scott Park Phillips. Paper ($30.00), Digital ($9.99)
Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater and Religion, (2016) By Scott Park Phillips. Paper ($18.95), Digital ($9.99)
Watch Video: A Cultural History of Tai Chi
New Eastover Workshop, in Eastern Massachusetts, Italy, and France are in the works.
Daodejing Online - Learn Daoist Meditation through studying Daoism’s most sacred text Laozi’s Daodejing. You can join from anywhere in the world, $50. Email me if you are interesting in joining!
This is sad:
The links in the article are praticularly dark. Like this one. The new Anti-Semitism is a sign that the Chinese government is headed toward colapse.
This one is upbeat:
The Cosmopolitan Condiment, An exploration of ketchup’s Chinese origins.
It's a fun little article but the author schmootz's it at the end by dissing the addition of sugar as an American thing, so read this page out of Sugar And Society in China to re-balance the flavor.
Here is the pod cast of my talk at Soja martial arts. It's 2.5 hours long. I used a format where I had everyone get up and try the stuff I was talking about every 20 minutes or so. It was lots of fun. Thank you Soja for hosting it!
We need to learn how to edit these pod casts very soon, but until then, if you are listening to it on your computer the dial that spins around the cinch button allows you to move around in the talk, fastforword and rewind we use to call it.
Some big news is about to break and if I tell you what it is now, you will think I'm crazy, but if I talk about it after it breaks everyone will be like: dude, of course, that's old news. Being a Cassandra is a lose/lose situation. But perhaps some historian a hundred years hence will notice this blog post and make it all worth while.
The news is that exercise isn't good for your health.
I always feared this would happen. Talk to anyone with a degree in marketing and they will tell you ad nauseam, "Emphasize the benefits!" They are like, "Don't talk about what you do, avoid telling us what it is like, and never explain the process...tell them exactly what they are going to get--in glorious abstract platitudes!"
Forced against my better judgement to conform to this convention I end up with things like: Practice Internal Martial Arts and:
Obviously you can all see where I'm going here. When my Mom wants to sound authoritative she tells me, "It's true! I read it on the Mayo Clinic website!" Heaven forbid she discovers the CDC website...also known as "Side-effects-R-Us" Never mind. Okay, mind. But what is this obsession with benefits?
Here are the reasons the Mayo Clinc gives for Exercising:
Now before you fall out of your chairs, remember this is supposed to be the premier center of the world for medical expertise totally fact checked and backed up by the latest science!
So I told my advanced Tai Chi class the other day that I don't believe in exercise anymore and one of my students just about lost it, "Have you even seen the people walking around out side today! The obesity! The lethargy! The video game addictions!" We have a lot of fun in my classes, I showed him pictures of baby goats to calm him down.
Let's debunk the 7 Reasons For Exercising.
#1. It controls weight. Nope, it doesn't. A clearly false statement. Here is the counter argument to the counter argument: Yes, It Does. That argument is so pathetically weak it relies on a study that showed after 30 weeks of continuous aerobic exercise "over-weight" men lost 3 kilos. 3 kilos is 6.6 pounds. I gain and loose 3 pounds everyday, 6 pounds is nothing. 30 weeks is 8 months! Case closed.
#2. It combats health conditions and diseases. This statement is so general it doesn't even deserve a response, what conditions? what diseases? what type of exercise? for whom does the exercise bell toll? Oh, if you read the explanation they are talking about heart disease. Fail again, the heart association changed it's definition of good cholesterol 6 times this year alone! Coffee good, coffee bad...ignore, information does not compute. Exercise is good for arthritis. Eyes pop out. Moving on.
#3. It improves mood. And doing the dishes is likely to send me into a spiral of darkness? My guess is they wanted to say exercise helps you poo more regularly but worried about upsetting the delicate balance of authoritative elan.
#4. It boosts energy. Bored now. I thought sciency people didn't talk about "energy." Anyway, I think it does give people a "boost" if they haven't been exercising regularly. But this is circular logic. Doing exercise is itself a boost of energy. And if you do it regularly then you don't get a boost any more. Poor us.
#5. It promotes better sleep. Okay, I'll stop joking for a minute. Yes, that is a real possibility. But it can also make it worse. And for many people it simply doesn't help at all. The truth is, sleep is a huge mystery. I highly recommend the book Insomniac.
#6. It puts a spark back in your sex life. Folks, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that entirely depends on why you're not "sparking." As John, Paul, George, and Ringo put it: "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone any how." Take it away boys...
#7. And last but not least: Exercise can be fun! So can farting. I rest my case.
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Don't click here unless you want to feel pitty for me.
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Here is a quick rant on the health subject which I scribbled in my notebook the last time I was stuck on public transportation. Wait, before my quick rant, I have another quick rant. The arguments for public transportation are well known and very convincing--it is efficient, cheap, and saves time. Spock would love public transportation. In the USA, however, in practice it has completely and consistently failed to live up to its claims. Can we just stop doing it now? We should just focus on improving individual transportation systems. It's like we keep smaking into the same glass door because it's so clean we think it isn't there. Ouch.
Okay rant time: I freaking give up. Is sleep good for health? Does sleep cure cancer? Tai Chi properly understood is like sleep. It is a flexible routine part of life that nourishes and balances essential primary human appetites. There is a word for nourishing and balancing in Chinese: Zheng 正 (often translated correct, upright or rectification). So don't ask, "Is it good for this? is it good for that? The answer is YES! And if it isn't, well, then YOU are practicing wrong, or your teacher is TEACHING you wrong. And for those of you who find this to be a circular argument and unverifiable; I have this to say: YES, it is a circular argument! It circles down to the same issue every time: You are responsible for managing your own appetites. "Oh, really?" You say, "But we can test sleeping, and we can see health deteriorate daily when people go without sleep. Most people don't do any tai chi and some of them even have good health." Well if you say that, you obviously don't have any experience with circular argument! If they are healthy, then they are practicing tai chi already! They just don't know it. Even a man sitting on a sagging couch watching TV may be effortlessly and unconsciously using tai chi skills to place popcorn in his mouth.
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Now back to the original point, exercise isn't good for your health. I'm not sure we will ever get to the bottom of it. I look around at what people are calling exercise and I see a lot of pain and injuries. I also see people having a lot of fun and feeling good. I don't know, I guess it just bothers me when I hear people talk about exercising because they have too. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm happy to work with people who are motivated to improve their health, however they define it. I just don't see a link between exercise and health. I do see a link between health and hanging out with friends, belonging to supportive, inspiring, or stimulating groups, playing around, improvising, visiting parks and wild spaces, milking goats, chasing chickens, driving a $100,000 car, having sex with movie stars, wiggling your toes in the sand, grass, snow, mud, grapes, peanut butter, fairy dust, and swimming away from sharks. Unfortunately all these things don't help me because I'm left handed and we are fated to die ten years earlier than everyone else.
What does the term Double Weighted mean? This term became a problem because one of the five Tai Chi Classics boldly states something to the effect of--if you've practiced for a long time and you still suck at push-hands, it's probably because of 'double weighting.' I am going to settle the question of what Double Weighting means once and for all, definitively smashing all ambiguity asunder.
Allow me to first try and preempt any possible death threats by explaining that there are indeed two important and useful skills which others have tried to label "double weighting" but which are a terrible match for the term.
The first is a skill any good stand up wrestler can often acquire quite quickly simply by practicing a lot with a partner. If Bob and Joe are locked in a stand up struggle and Joe transmits all of Bob's force through his body to just one of his feet, he makes himself very vulnerable. However, if Joe knows this he can align himself such that he can suddenly change the transmission of Bob's force from one foot to the other. This creates an opening for Joe to attack if Bob tries to chase the force transmission going in-between Joe's feet. Maybe it doesn't sound that simple but anytime you see two Greco-Roman Wrestlers locked in a standup battle, that's what is happening. In Tai Chi push-hands practice because the spine stays vertical, this particular skill is counter intuitive, but it is still an effective beginning strategy. So it is often taught that--if one fails to shift his partner's force from one foot or the other, he is double weighted. One can see how if Bob's force and Joe's weight are both going to one foot it might be called double weighting. But that's a mistake this skill should really be called something like a 'clinch set up,' or a 'weight/force transfer reversal.'
The second fallacious usage of the term double weighting refers to the failure to conform to a basic matrix of push-hands skill. This can get quite complex but I'll try to make it simple. In upright push-hands if Bob and Joe are attached or connected in such a way that their mass can function momentarily as a single unit then it is possible for one of them to execute a throw using rotational force. However, a rotating mass can have only a single axis! Imagine the impossibility of trying to spin a globe which has two vertical axises. It just won't spin. To create a single axis for this type of finesse, Bob must spin his and Joe's weight entirely around a single vertical line going from one foot through his spine and head. The reason failure at this particular skill is wrongly referred to as double weighting is that people sometimes try to finesse it with their weight on both feet, and of course it fails. But why call this failure double weighting? It should be described in the affirmative as rotational throwing off of a single leg or around a singe axis! Why would failing at it need a separate name? Especially when there are actually a whole bunch of other ways this particular skill can fail.
So what does Double Weighted really mean? It means that you are carrying the weight of two people. Let me give some examples. Bob and Joe are now grappling on the ground. Bob tries to get as much of his weight on top of Joe as possible because Joe will find it harder to move if he is carrying Bob's weight in addition to his own. This is a very basic tactic of all systems of ground fighting. Make your opponent double weighted and they will find it difficult to move and will shortly run out of energy trying.
Here is another example:
The Football player in yellow is being forced to carry the weight of the player in white, thus, he is double weighted.
Now Tai Chi push-hands is a practice which generally has very little obvious momentum, so the use of mass and weight is a counter intuitive advanced skill. If Bob and Joe are pushing hands and are in contact and standing vertically and Joe feels Bob's weight on him, Joe is double weighted. The skill of giving the entirety of your weight to a push-hands opponent is a big advantage because when your opponent tries to move, he will be carrying you. In order to carry you he will have to expose the entirety of his structure. If you make the mistake of being double weighted in push-hands you are toast.
The main reasons most push-hands practitioners never learn the art of making someone else double weighted are listed here for your convenience: Loss of frame, folding in the kua, lack of awareness of the head, leaning, and the inability to create whole body unity via melting into emptiness.
It is important to remember that in the deadly spontaneity of defending oneself against a threat, having someone give you all of their weight is not the end of the world, it can be turned into an advantage-- it's a really bad situation, but we train for bad.
I picked up this book at the library last year and forgot to review it. Such a great title: Martial Arts and Philosophy Beating and Nothingness, Edited by Graham Priest and Damon Young, Vol. 53 in the Popular Culture and Philosophy® series.
The sad truth is, I rarely find philosophy compelling. I very much like live discussions where (my) ideas become the center of attention, so when philosophy is a voice in the mix it's fun. Nothing in this book struck me as novel or stimulating until yesterday when a student of mine graciously sent me a link to an article from the book. In the context of a student taking an interest in the specific arguments of Gillian Russell I suddenly had a reason to reflect more deeply on them.
And here is my response:
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As a footnote I would like to add that I often encounter martial artists that believe what they have been taught was the method itself; that a given method is the correct way to stand or move or execute a technique. There are only three methods I'm aware of in which the method is the same as the fruition. They are wildness, stillness, and emptiness. Everything else is preliminary or apophatic. Everything else is wrong.
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Also as a footnote, because I mentioned philosophy, I have to say how disgusted I am by a show on NPR called "Philosophy Talk." Their bad tasting tag line is, "We question everything except your intelligence." Really? Well it doesn't pan out because the hosts are so narrow minded and limited in their experience of both the real world and ideas that even when there is an interesting guest or topic they seem to squash it with their own pontificating. Yesterday they were talking about the recent Citizen's United Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. They were completely oblivious to the pro-commerce arguments which obviously informed the majority of the court.
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OK, since I seem to be in a confrontational mood, perhaps bought on by the large amount of time I've been spending around baby goats these last few weeks, please send me any and all links to books or articles about philosophy which you think might stimulate my horns to grow. Thanks for listening.
I have been saying now for a few years that 'self-defense' is a relatively new idea. The basis of moral self-defense is a consequence of lower status people claiming parity against a majority. Chinese actors (a degraded caste) must have found it very difficult to claim justifiable homicide or self-defense in the courts against a commoner--because actors were required to step into the gutter when a commoner passed them in the street.
The same is certainly true of Jews in both Europe and the Middle East.
For women, the possibility of independence from the protection and authority of a man was closely related to a woman's ability to earn independent income. Along with income, and the right to vote, the notion of self-defense began to take shape.
I'm very excited to see other people are taking an interest in the history of the idea of self-defense. Here is a must read article:
One of the western world's first female martial arts instructors, Garrud, who died in 1971 aged 99, is thought to have learned jujutsu in the late 19th century. She began working with suffragettes between 1908 and 1911, eventually at her own women-only training hall, a room at the Palladium Academy dance school in Argyll Street
....."Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves men are not worthy of that exalted title, and it is her duty to learn how to defend herself," [Edith Garrud].
Click the image to buy on Amazon!
This is a difficult subject for me to take on, but I've had an opinion for so long I might as well put it in print.
Modesty is a form of education which inhibits movement to ensure specific cultural role conformity. That's the definition I'm choosing to work from, and for the sake of this post I'm ignoring two other behaviors which are often conflated with modesty. Namely; avoidance rooted in feelings of vulnerability, and choosing not to reveal oneself for strategic, experimental, or dispassionate reasons.
This education is intense, for example a women recently told me her mother was always asking her sarcastically, "Why do you always sit like a truck driver?" I don't think I need to go into the 'how it's done' or 'why it happens' discussions. Everyone with a pulse and a conscience has already thought about this.
Boys and girls in America do a lot of the same physical activities and get a lot of the same training. Yeah, there are more boys playing baseball, and more girls doing ballet, but for the most part both genders get a lot of opportunities to practice complex coordination with running and jumping.
And then puberty hits and young women's hips grow a lot wider. In order to maintain running and jumping skills young women have to go through a process of re-learning how to run, jump and even walk. Most don't dedicate the time and effort to make these changes, and because of this, they develop with their knees and ankles aligning not below their hips but more narrowly in-between their hips. In fact, this alignment is often thought of as normal. When men pretend to be women they often imitate this poor alignment.
One of the results of this narrower alignment is knee injuries, specifically torn ACL's (Anterior Cruciate Ligament). Girl's soccer is one giant busted knee. It doesn't have to be like this.
For martial artists the issue is very serious because body structure, integrity, force transfer, force absorption, frame and mobility are all dependent on good alignment of the legs. Unfortunately it's hard to teach because modesty education and role conformity get in the way. It can also take a long time. Even more unfortunately, many teachers just decide to ignore the problem because it's a potential emotional landmine.
I should probably make a video about this because I don't even know how to describe the slight dislocation of the hip joint that happens during complete weight shifts with momentum and it's force repercussion for the knees, ankles, and feet--or how to describe the power lost. Men, by the way, often have the same problem to a lesser degree, but I've never noticed it tied into emotional content other than humility at having to re-learn something. And let me make it clear, some women don't have this problem at all. I have good things to say about the nation's gymnastics and dance teachers! They get it. And some women figure it out for themselves, perhaps driven by athletic or artistic passions.
That's pretty much all I have to say. Now you know what is going on if your teacher tries to get you to walk like a cowboy all the time or some such thing. I sincerely hope that we can begin to talk about this openly. The barefoot running movement has been wonderful for clearing up a lot of confusion about what a human being is, but without addressing the hip-modesty-alignment issue the lessons of barefoot running will slowly get lost.
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For those of you who were wondering if I'm going to talk about boobs, the answer is no. It is my hope that a female blogger will take up this tissue (oops, I meant issue), as it is in serious need of attention. This post by Rowan Johnson is a good start, and the third comment is intriguing.
I spent an hour looking for good images to demonstrate what I'm saying. Check out Zoe Bell (A+) next to Uma Thurman (C+).
Uma Thurman
Zoe Bell
I wouldn't be a martial artist at all if I didn't love the "doi!" moments where I hit my self-on the forehead because I've just realized how wrongly I've been practicing for x number of years. That's because those moments are transitions to new freedoms.
Yinyang theory is among the most basic aspects of North Asian cosmology so I'm not going t go into it here because most of my readers already know it.
What got me excited is that I suddenly came to understand the yin and yang meridians in a way I never had before. Or rather, I put together a bunch of discrete experiences into a coherent whole. So I'll just make a list.
Zhang Xuexin taught that qi rises up the meridians on the insides and back of the legs, then moves to the yang meridians coming up the the back over the head and out along the tan side of the arms, and then comes from the palms inward along the yin meridians of the arms and down the face and then down the front of the body and then, moves down the yang meridians of legs which are on the outside edges and along the front. Kumar Frantzis taught the same thing. And generally this is part of any heaven-earth qigong series.
Liu Ming expained that meridian flow, like the flow of qi in meditation, happens by itself, of its own accord, effort only inhibits it.
Markus Brinkman, on his roof in Taiwan, explained and demonstrated channel theory as it applies to martial arts using a finger counting system. He was astonished at how fast I picked it up. I puzzled on it for awhile and did a bunch of experiments. The idea is that force is generated, defused/transformed and transmitted along specific groups of meridians in sequence. The theory is in this book: Applied Channel Theory in Chinese Medicine Wang Ju-Yi's Lectures on Channel Therapeutics
I figured out through my own experiments that the yang meridians are better for defense and yin meridians are better for attacking. In the language of tai chi, pengjin takes force on the yang meridians, jijin issues force via the yin meridians. A corollary for this is that yin is gathered when our structure is organized towards the inside edge of the feet, yang is gathered when our structure is organized towards the outside edge of the feet.
In an attempt to reduce all structural power (jin/jing) in my body I figured out that I could put my foot down during baguazhang walking as if it were a vacuum cleaner, allowing qi to draw inward as my foot takes weight.
George Xu said to me sometime in the last year, "The yin and yang meridians have different jobs."
Anyway, all this fit together for me recently. All these things have to happen at once --simultaneously and continuously. Without this piece, we can not achieve an 'I know you, you don't know me,' situation. Without the crystal clear differentiation of the roles of the yin and yang meridians, the dantian can not do its job of meeting our opponent before our mass does.
It wasn't that hard to say, and no doubt, I believed many times over the years that I understood it intellectually and physically. But until it was happening in my body under the pressure of testing and resistance, it was just words.
There are so many ways to be wrong, it feels good to get a few more of them out of the way.
• For more background read this article on making a sandwich. Or for tai chi structure theory read this. For the concept and rationale of reducing jing/jin read here.
Here is the Talk I gave!
A place to train and learn about traditional Chinese martial arts, which are a form of religious theater combined with martial skills.
