Tai Chi and Healing

 I recently got this question as an email:

Greetings- I really like your blog...innovative, challenging and quirk! It's a great read and always thought provoking..

 

I came across an interesting entry recently: /blog1/2012/6/15/yin-yang.html .  It struck me that for some reason, no one seems to deal much with how exactly tai chi - say Yang form- actually helps your health...What I mean by this is, do we have an actual 'index' or list of how each movement affects the meridians in a health enhancing way...eg if Single Whip works on Stomach/Spleen (not saying it does!) then why is this?

 

Also, you mention in that post a hefty tome on Acu-Channels and Lectures which you praise highly- is it worth your average interested tai chi/ ba gua teaher investing in or is it very much for the specialist?

 

Many thanks- J. K.

Hi J. K.,

The first thing that ought to be said is no one really knows what Tai Chi was before the Yang and Chen families started teaching it in Beijing.  Looking at the Chen style with an ear to history, dance, and anthropology, it is pretty hard to discern what it was.  There are elements of ritual/exorcism, there are concepts from Daoist cosmology and Daoyin, there are elements of mime and theater, there are many different types of fighting skills suggesting the integration of complex contexts over a long period of time.  

Daoyin is perhaps the largest category of yangsheng (nourishing life) practices.  But it doesn't fit well into any modern notion of "health" or "medicine."  

Whatever tai chi was, seems lost to us now, too many generations have passed without asking the necessary questions.  

But we do know that between 1900 (the Boxer Rebellion) and the 1936 Olympics a great deal of effort went into humiliating and degrading martial artists as superstitious and anti-reason.  In order to defend themselves against this ideological (quasi-fascist) assault martial artists claimed to have completely rid their arts of any semblance of theater or religion.  Sometimes they claimed that hand-to-hand combat had some military basic training value, but mostly they argued that building a strong body with "Chinese Characteristics" was good for the unity and vitality of the nation.  They would even say the "health" of the nation, because China had "earned" the title, 'the sick man of Asia.'  

So when they claimed martial arts were good for health, they were initially just echoing claims that gymnastics, tennis, and basketball were good for health.  While all this is going on Methodist medical colleges were popping up to teach a new generation of doctors, herbs and acupuncture were also ridiculed.  Tai Chi found a unique road to survival as a nationalist art which was more for health than for fighting or show, and which allied itself with people trying to argue for the rational value of native medical traditions. It's fighting reputation didn't evaporate, it floated into the realm of subtle and amazing skills.  

All of this however cut it off from the possibility of explaining 'tai chi healing' in terms of daily ritual, or a talisman for upright conduct, or daoist alchemy (jindan)--healing via returning to simplicity or our original nature--or as a theater skill set that would allow one to perform for hours on end day after day without becoming worn out, or even as a set of skills for emotional healing from traumatic events, starvation, or war.  All of those theories have come out of the west.  Not that they are 'western' just that it was westerners who have made the public claims associating tai chi with these other ways of thinking about healing.

Thus there have been attempts to explain the healing power of tai chi using meridian theory such as this book by Erle Montaigue.  I don't know if Montaigue made this stuff up or he learned it from a particular teacher but it is very detailed about how such and such a posture/movement is good for the gallbladder and thus for healing such and such diseases--- but it is too contrived to be plausible.  I was taught the same sorts of things for Bagua but I've never been able to make any sense of it as treatment.   

The post you reference above is about a simplified notion of meridians.  The 12 meridians are too specific to illness to be of use for movement, instead we have only two meridians-- yin and yang.  These two must always work together.  In most fine motor control actions the yin and yang work against each other, as they do in most athletics--not totally, but enough to reduce power and focus energy on the task at hand.

 

Anyway, healing can be viewed from a lot of different perspectives.  I have a very clear idea about how healing happens but it is idiosyncratic, highly specific and experimental.  I don't present myself as a healer because my methods require people to participate in their own healing, to change their conduct and environment--and that requires a change in the way they see and value human nature.  

I do not recommend you get a bunch of Chinese medicine books and try to milk them for info on marital arts.  At the same time, I would hardly want to discourage you from going really deep in your own way.  The Expressiveness of the Body is a good place to start!  

http://www.amazon.com/Expressiveness-Divergence-Greek-Chinese-Medicine/dp/0942299884

Best Regards,

Scott

Energy vs Power vs Barefoot

Two years ago I wrote a blog post laying down the differences in the way dogs and cats walk.  I haven't changed my thinking on this much but if you don't remember it I recommend a re-read.

The issue of energy efficiency verses power efficiency has been coming up a lot in class lately.  I blame two popularizations of internal arts, the barefoot movement and the standing up desk movement.  The link is not direct but these two movements are allowing people to see and hear things they simply could not see or hear before.  You can hit people over the head with truth or surreptitiously replace their morning coffee with it, and unless something has disrupted their mental force field, nothing will get through.

But when someone tries to stand up at a desk for 5 or 6 hours they start to notice that there are a lot of different ways to stand, each having different consequences for every other function of the body.  

One of the funny things about the barefoot movement is that the minimalist shoes popping up on peoples feet are still enough of a barrier that they limit the unraveling process that true barefoot can bring about.  For one, most of these minimalist shoes squeeze the toes together--a completely ridiculous idea unless you are using them for vertical rock climbing.  Secondly, if you have a barrier to sharp objects you will happily push down the center of your heel and the ball of the big toe, things you would never do on rough uneven ground if you were truly barefoot.  Thirdly, our bodies have superb mechanisms for warming and cooling the feet which are only triggered by the actual changes in shape that happen when our feet are interacting with actual ground in an unmediated-instantaneous way.

I suppose I should disclose at this moment that I just spent 10 days alone at a mountain lake above 9000 feet, barefoot, without books, doing standing, sitting and movement practices.  After a few days my appetite for food got very small, and then I stopped sleeping because I didn't have any thoughts to help me drift off.  But then again I wasn't tired so I didn't need sleep.  This single experience leads me to speculate that the need to sleep is mostly a self-sedation response to social stress, conventionality, and self-restraint.

Anyway, back to the main point.  Humans have developed, evolved, or invented ways of walking and running which are extremely energy efficient.  With each stride, our momentum carries forward with very little whole-body effort or resistance.  This allows us to 1) carry stuff, 2) out-run or out-last animals we are tracking, 3) have the energy to work, labor, and think.  We effect this energy efficiency by using our legs like sticks with bendable joints.  Our torsos continuously re-balance on these hard structures while in motion.  Shoes allow us to use our legs in an even stiffer, more energy efficient way.  When done standing relatively still, internal martial artists call this the flaw of "being on the table."  The implication is that we are using our legs in a rigid way, like table legs.  

Naturally, I am not presenting a good verses bad dichotomy here, just attempting to present things as they actually are.

Contrast all this with power efficiency.  A confusion arises because energy efficiency allows us to be more aggressive about getting where we are going, it allows us to exert lots of effort.  Power efficiency, in contrast, uses a lot more energy which ironically is a disincentive to the exertion of effort.  A fruition of practicing power efficient internal arts is that we discover effortlessness.  Walking barefoot is power efficient.  Standing meditation is power efficient.  People who try to do standing meditation for one hour using energy efficient structures usually give up; often complaining of pain--which of course goes away the second they start moving--or boredom.  Power efficiency is not static, even in stillness it is wildly active.  

If you are in the daily habit of taking a half hour walk with shoes on, when you try to walk barefoot you'll find that not only does it take a lot longer to walk the same distance, but a half hour of barefoot walking will get you really tired--at least until you spontaneously rediscover the whole body effortlessness that babies have.

Energy efficiency is a big part of what makes us human.  When we are young, energy efficient ways of moving are supported by bounciness in the hip joints and lower back, springiness in all the ligaments, and elasticity in all the muscles and fascia.  With age and time those pieces of the puzzle start to fray.  These physiological "systems" start to fall apart.  That's why switching to whole-body power efficient ways of moving, like we use in the internal martial arts, have an apparent ability to heal.

These natural revelations come from Daoism, a relgious tradition which continuously rediscovers and re-establishes itself by returning to simplicity.

How Cheap is Life?

Alexander Hamilton came from a place where life was cheap.  In the West Indies of his time the majority of people were enslaved, didn't wear clothes and had an average working life expectancy of four years.  He didn't know his father and his mother died when he was ten.  Death was all around him, yet somehow he learned accounting and how to read and write in English, French, and Hebrew.  At the age of 15 a devastating hurricane destroyed much of his surroundings and he wrote a vivid description of it which was published in newspapers all along the East Coast of the future US.  Someone in New York was so impressed by his writing that they took up a collection to send him to Princeton!  When he got there, talk of revolution was in the air and he convinced his dorm mates to practice marching drills with him from a book.  When war came he marched his friends down to the armory and because he had already taken command they made him an officer on the spot.  Shortly after the first battle he met George Washington who recognized his merits and made him Aide-de camp, responsible for all correspondence of the general.  

And the rest is history.  As far as supplying ideas and doing the intellectual leg work he is the single most important American founding Father.  When a person's life has been that cheap-- and he gets through it-- he must see challenges differently than the rest of us.  Not just challenges, but risks and ideas too.

Clarence Thomas has a lot of critics, enemies really.  He was born in a Gullah community.  The name Gullah is probably a distortion of Angola.  The Gullah were isolated to some degree in language and culture because they used African fighting traditions to free bonded people and make war.  After the American Civil War, a group of Gullah that were fighting on the Mexican Border were invited to join the US Calvary; later made famous by Bob Marley's song "The Buffalo Soldiers."

Clarence Thomas grew up in extreme poverty and hardship, abandoned by both parents he delivered coal as child, probably the dirtiest work there is.  Yet he managed to attend school, always graduating at the top of his class and receiving one scholarship after another.  To this day he is subjected to constant racist attacks that he is stupid and unworthy, that he only ever got anywhere in life because of other peoples pity, guilt and charity.  Yet he knows how cheap life can be.  His eloquent and unfettered opinion on the right to keep and bear arms is a necessary addition to our understanding of the history of the United States.  Like Hamilton, Thomas knows that the pen is mightier than the sword.  People who know how cheap life can be, fear the pen more than the sword, or in this case, the gun.

I've been watching a lot of Italian knife fighting lately.  Its spontaneity and musicality are informing my jian (double edged sword) work.  This art clearly comes from a place and time when life was cheap.

The Chinese arts I study are at least 500 years old, that's a lot of time to keep a tradition going.  That means the arts survived many eras when life was cheap as well as eras when life was not so cheap.  Classical artists try to consolidate and pass on as much of the essence of their art as they can.  Yet, we often fail to understand the lessons of the previous generations.   Without the actual experiences, accumulated knowledge is often just a shadow; shadows on top of shadows.  I'm very lucky to have studied so much with George Xu because he lived through a time when life was very cheap.  He has been able to bring many of those shadows to life!  Perhaps it has been harder to learn from him those parts of the arts that flurished when times were not so cheap, thank goodness for my other teachers, but the beauty of these arts is that these shadows on top shadows take tangible forms if you nurture them.  And George Xu certainly has taught me a kind of openness which can only come from choosing life!

There are several chapters of the Daodejing which are about living through times when life is cheap.  I leave you with this one: 

Exiting at birth, entering at death,

3 in 10 choose life,

3 in 10 choose death,

3 in 10, 'though they choose life, make decisions that bring about premature death.

Why? because they regard life as precious.

And then there are those who are good at nourishing life!

When entering a wilderness, they don't avoid tigers or rhinos,

When entering a battle, they don't put on armor or take up weapons.

The rhino finds no place to jab his horn,

The tiger finds no place to dig its claws,

The weapon finds nothing to catch its blade,

 Why? because there is no death point on them.

--Daodejing, Chapter 50

Italian Dancing

There are cultures where being a man is defined by the ability to fight with a knife.  It is just a basic characteristic of manhood.  This blog post by a Sicilian guy named Rob is a fantastic description of knife culture.  It is also pretty dang effortlessly funny, he has clearly mastered the Dao of bravado.  I ended up on that blog after a wonderful talk with Maija the other day in which she told me about the Italian tradition of hiding knife fighting skills inside of local dances.  

The Earth Doesn't Suck

Einstein proposed that spacetime is curved by matter, and that free-falling objects are moving along locally straight paths in curved spacetime. These straight paths are called geodesics. Like Newton's first law of motion, Einstein's theory states that if a force is applied on an object, it would deviate from a geodesic. For instance, we are no longer following geodesics while standing because the mechanical resistance of the Earth exerts an upward force on us, and we are non-inertial on the ground as a result. This explains why moving along the geodesics in spacetime is considered inertial. (wiki)

Over the last three years I've been getting further away from a systematic curriculum.  My own practice has changed so profoundly and is so exciting that I have been unable to contain myself.  The illusion that the earth is pulling us down causes us to seek power and to use structure and effort.  Cause is hard to assess, the "cause" of illusion may simply be desire followed by aggression, followed by deficiency...that would be the daoist take in a nutshell.  But see through the illusion which creates the need for structure and profound changes start to happen.  

Try this active spacial mind thought experiment:  You have a 8"x4" inch by 7' foot long plank on your shoulders, you are moving in a crowd and you don't want to bonk anyone.  Reduce the force in your feet to zero.

An alternate version of this experiment is: Imagine each of your 10 fingers are touching someone's closed eyes and you don't want to hurt them.  Zero out your feet.

Jewish Strong Man

This is an entertaining pod cast about a Joseph Greenstein, "The Might Atom."  

Here is some more about him.  He studied Jujitsu back in the day.  He also believed that most people stop themselves from being naturally powerful.  Here are some more stories.  There is a book too but it's $70 on Amazon so I'm going to wait until Hannukkah.  

Podiatry vs. Astrology

Now before anyone gets offended, let me say that I have gotten some really good advice from astrologers who didn't even know me.

With the revelations of barefoot running, it is hard to take the study and practice of Podiatry seriously.  Of course, every field of medicine starts out butchering people or selling magic potions and slowly, over time, through trial, error, and good intentions--and eventually, hopefully, some science--they get around to simple straight forward solutions.  That is why I am happy to report that the solution to foot problems in the summer is to wear 4 inch high heels around the house.

Plantar fasciitis is really common these days.  Here is the definition from PubMed.  When I look at the list of causes and the list of treatments I can't help thinking, "Do these people think babies are delivered by storks?"  According to the site:

You are more likely to get plantar fasciitis if you have:

• Foot arch problems (both flat feet and high arches)

• Long-distance running, especially running downhill or on uneven surfaces

• Sudden weight gain or obesity

• Tight Achilles tendon (the tendon connecting the calf muscles to the heel)

• Shoes with poor arch support or soft soles

So both flat feet and high arches?  Poor support or soft soles?  Oh, so perfect arches or very good arch support will save you?  Clearly running up hill is the way to go because it will give you a long Achilles tendon, right?  Unfortunately that just isn't true.  

The "treatments" are just as all over the place.  And it is sad, because it is painful and it can take a really long time to heal.  

But if I were to go out on a limb and assign cause, first up would be the erroneous, yet widely held, notion that the feet play a role in stability.  It just ain't so, it just ain't physically possible.  I could nail your foot to the ground and still push you over with one finger.  All of our mass has to be continuously balanced from the center of mass or by compensatory movements at the periphery.  Unless your foot is in the air wiggling around, it is not a factor in balance.  You can learn balance on any shape at all from marbles to stilts to skis.

Second on the list would be cushioned heels.  It was never a good idea to encourage people to walk or run by slamming their heel into the ground. A large part of the field of podiatry has developed to deal with the problems created by the shoes earlier podiatrists thought were a good idea.  And since the list above has running on "uneven" surfaces as a cause, allow me to point out that all this heel slamming ain't too good for the lower back.  One of the best things a person can do for lower back pain is spend 20 minutes a day walking on truly uneven surfaces like tree roots and piles of rocks.  

Third on the list is really a religious issue.  People don't trust their legs.  Perhaps because our legs take us places where we do bad things and engage in naughtiness.  I don't know.  But because people don't trust their legs they convince themselves that strength and effort serve some function.  Penance, perhaps.  Pain as a mechanism for moral self-correction.  I can see that.  But the actual functioning of the legs is completely effortless.  Effortlessness should be the mantra of any training method.  As George Xu put it:  No power, no effort, and no bones.

Here is a good article on the barefoot vs. shoes running issue.

I was about to publish this blog post when I had to run out and teach a lesson.  While I was out, I just happened to meet a podiatrist!  He was open minded, generous, reflective and he really loves feet.  Feet are so beautiful.  Strangely, a big part of my job is reading peoples fate by looking at their feet.  I guess we share that.

Two Different Visions of China

This is sad:

Foreigners Under Fire

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.

Exploring Theatricality in Chinese Martial Arts

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.

Health and Fate

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:

• You'll be more honest with yourself about how weak, clumsy, and stressed out you are.
• When you look at random other people you'll think, "Wow, I bet that hurts!" 
• You'll be able to cut off a person's head, effortlessly.
• You won't like the elastic in bras and underwear anymore.
• You'll discover the unlimited freedom of matching your appetites to your fate.
• You'll be more mature and responsible...or is it.... spontaneous and childlike.
• You'll become unconditioned, like an uncarved block of wood.
• Empty, like a carton of Ice cream that we just bought yesterday (can you believe it's all gone?).
• Like water, always seeking the lowly and the dark.

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: 

1. Exercise controls weight
2. Exercise combats health conditions and diseases
3. Exercise improves mood
4. Exercise boosts energy
5. Exercise promotes better sleep
6. Exercise puts a spark back in your sex life
7. Exercise can be fun

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.