Dark Rant Predicting My 45th Birthday

To Be Read Allowed While Banging On A Pot...

Since about the time humans mastered rope making, stick handling, and making stone points, life hasn’t been much of a struggle except the problems we make for each other and the occasional natural disaster.  

Think about that, we are born knowing how to swim, yet a few years later we can drowned from not knowing, ‘though to add irony to mischief, they say most drowning happen in water shallow enough to stand in.

So how best to maintain the cult of our unselfconscious, unstruggling ancestors?  By eating raw fish alla the Japanese?  By dueling and other staged fights for honor and entertainment?  By wild and dangerous sex?  By backpacking a couple of times a year?  Or is there some way to keep up the cult daily?  Shut the doors, close the windows, extinguish all flame?  I see the wonders of this retro primitive movement everywhere among my friends in Oakland.  There are people keeping bees, chickens, rabbits, and goats--I myself went berserk picking blackberries and plums for canning, juicing, liquors, and baking.  As my mother in-law put it, “putting up store!”

As if there were some purpose to these spontaneous rituals?  And I do mean rituals, because like the tatooing craze, none of it has any purpose, these are acts of pure meaning!  ritual acts of communication with our ancestors.  Tribal signals to the future, a Flintstones balance to our Jetsons lives.

I suppose this is what the politics of need is about: a Winchester mystery house of taxes, EBT, subsidies, credit swap leveraged educations, an app to count your footsteps?  

If we separated need from identity, would there be anything left?

As elaborate medical procedures pile on top of each other, drugs on top of drugs, surgeries on top of surgeries, implants inside of implants, new, artificial, gene-thearapized, no expense is too great!  Like Qinshi Huangdi creating an entire world for himself in death, under the earth in Xian.  

Can I just get an astrology reading already?

Did you try walking barefoot?  No, I don’t mean in your living room, I mean all day for a hundred days.  We seek out shamanic healing, alternatives both new and old.  Symbolic rituals of life created and re-created on top of other rituals.  Have you tried just letting go of your hips?  No I don’t mean in yoga class three times a week, I mean all the time, like a junior gangster riding the bus and taking up two seats.  Is that chip on your shoulder just some fundamental need to carry a spear with you everywhere you go?  

These walls, these unconscious limits, these un-seen commitments, can we transcend them or can we just see them and be okay with it?  

And all this just to begin the conversation about why someone might want to try and learn Tai Chi, Bagua, or Daoyin.

A symbolic, and yet physically real return to baby-hood.  To our original nature.  Can you give it all up?  To sit or stand still for just an hour a day?  Tempting fate, challenging life to present some kind of need or purpose outside of preference and constructed identity?  Students demand purpose and healing, exercise, power, strength, transparency, a regime, a curriculum, proof!  They attach meaning willy-nilly like children playing with dolls.  Who am I to interrupt these games?

The arrival of the Goatmilk Cappuccino is a sure sign of the Apocalypse.  (Capriccino?)

Arguing Against Ice

This blog has a great challenge to the whole idea of icing: Motilitywod.

Here is the video, it's long and the sound is a little low but it's good.

I did a bunch of thinking about this issue.  Most of my readers know that Chinese medicine has been against icing but there has been some concession to the idea that inflammation is a problem and improved circulation is part of the solution.  That is now in serious doubt.  

For the last 15 or so years Physical Therapy schools have been teaching that the purpose of icing is to reduce secondary injury from inflammation.  However, there isn't much proof that secondary injury exists in muscular skeletal injuries. It may be a fantasy justification.

The injury is supposed to be caused by hypoxia, lack of oxygen in the cells.  The logic developed such that icing caused blood vessels to constrict but that the warming right after icing caused them to get much fatter via the "hunter" effect, and thus circulation increased.  More circulation, more oxygen available to the cells, less hypoxia.

But things turn out to be a lot more complex.  For one, we don't have a definition of inflammation, this article explains that at the moment we know of 9 different mechanisms that fall under the general heading, inflammation.  I suspect that as this debate continues we will discover there are things ice is great for, burns perhaps, but at the moment it is being way over used.  

The video suggests using compression bands (like Voodoo Bands) or electrical stimulation for muscle skeletal trauma.  I'm a fan of both but I have a different explanation.  When you use electrical stimulation or compression bands with external manipulation, you are making your external body empty (xu) of intent (yi), yet active (ling)!  This frees the mind to go outside the body and also frees the internal body from the external body so that it can move around and make spontaneous adjustments to the whole system.  Qigong and Standing Meditation (Zhanzhuang) can also do the trick.  Lymphatic vessels, which clear out inflammation, do not require impulsive muscle tension to drain, they just require movement.  With practice a student can learn to open and move fluid through the lymphatic vessels very easily.  

Rethinking Empty Force Displays

If you do a Youtube search for Empty Force (or Ling Kong jing), you'll see all kinds of crazy looking stuff where people move without being touched.  I think the level of misunderstanding here is a couple of generations deep and I'm not going to dig all that up right now, except to say that what we call 'a magic trick' in the west is sometimes called 'qi' in the east.

A subset of these videos are showing something very real, which is easily misunderstood.  I bring this up now because of a conversation I had with Majia about display which she has turned into a very clear blog post.  If someone whips out a knife and people jump back, nobody says, "Hey, they just got blasted with qi!"  But people generally have an instant and intense sense of the distance they need to be from a razor sharp knife in the hands of a threat.  People will jump back in a lively way even when they are just playing with knives  (Jumping back, by the way, may put you in a worse position.)

Knowing what is really a threat and what isn't comes from training, practicing and playing with others.  Baiting, feinting and small but deadly shifts and changes are invisible to the uninitiated.  

The uninitiated can still be scared, but not by the same stuff as the expert.  This is much more obvious with a knife than with open hand because most of us are at least a little scared of a knife.  It also follows that people who play with knives are likely to be sensitive to the difference between subtle but deadly, and showy but impotent.  

But if you have a teacher whose punches hit with the force of a sledgehammer, and from playing and practice with that teacher you are aware of tiny subtle shifts that signal a real attack, you're going to get out of the way fast.  An outside observer is unlikely to know why you moved.  Then imagine that this powerful teacher uses this ability to get you to move, and then to get you to move again before you've finished moving, and then again!  One of the real possibilities is that the trained student will feel their only choice is to jump backwards and roll away.  And the illusion of "empty force" was born.

Display is obviously part of the "monkey dance" category of fighting that young men are so prone to be possessed by.  But it is also a very real part of self-defense.  There is a whole category of street-level predators who use display in various ways to test whether they can get close enough to make you into an easy victim.  

Refuge vs. Treasure

Religious Daoism makes a distinction between two experiences of practice.  These two come into existence because our unconscious or aggressive conduct creates a cleave between the way things actually are and the way we imagine them to be.  In the one case, practice is experienced as an absolute treasure because it is a perfect expression of our true nature (de 德) and it permeates everything we do.  In the other case, practice is experienced as an incredible nourishing and inspiring refuge from the stress, fear and passions of our daily lives.  

In the written literature of Daoism, this distinction has sometimes been couched as the reason Daoism is not for everyone.  Religions which encourage practice as a refuge appear to have a big advantage over Daoism.  Practice as a refuge may even be addictive or function as a tool for mental clarity or stress reduction.  A refuge is easy to sell.

When we treat practice as a treasure the results are inseparable from all experience.  A roller derby helmet becomes part of practice, a loose tooth, the smell of a skill-saw cutting plywood.  

We can and do sway back and forth between these two experiences of practice.  Some nights before bed, as we are brushing our teeth we think, “I can’t wait to get up in the morning and practice.”  That’s what treating practice as a refuge feels like.  

Practice as a treasure has no pluses in its camp.  Nothing that can be pointed to.  

This is the conversation I know about practice; the pull of one, the unbounded unnamable quality of the other. 

There really is no conversation I can have of any meaning or significance unless the student already has a practice as solid as stone.

So then I ask the question-- what is the way in?  What is the basis for teaching?  On what ground does it take root?  

In children it is quite obvious that they have potency and access to freedom of movement and openness to learning.  Children have a practice, it just has no form because it is still so open to not-knowing, and not-doing.  As long as they are not over scheduled they can discover practice.

In adults it is obvious too, in the way people can hold their faces in a mask, or accomplish tasks without thinking, or bring energy, skills and ideas forth to solve a problem. We are capable of these things because of our rituals of “practice,” whatever they may be. 

Still, the conversation can not happen until the practice is chosen and one has signed contracts with all their demons to that affect!  The ability to make commitments is the single most defining quality that makes us human.  

I suppose, I could wander here for a moment into the realm of explanation, though I suspect it will leave me dreaming of my refuge.  Practice is another way of saying self-conditioning.  It is making deep grooves in our nature and behavior patterns rather than shallow scratches.  So Daoist practice is un-self-conditioning.  The making of a groove-less groove.  

Beautiful music and delicious food, cause the traveler to stop.  

Words about the Dao are insipid and bland.  

-- Laozi

Learning

Confusion is the mind’s response to learning, to looking into the unknown and attempting to make sense of it.  It happens when we come to our own experience, our senses, with a pre-conception about the way something should look, sound, taste, smell, feel, or function.  Confusion is the first wave in the process of dropping a pre-conception, or resolving a conflict between multiple pre-conceptions.  

Frustration is the mind’s experience of a type of compressed breathing that arises from combining effort with learning.  It is also used socially to communicate that something yearned for is out of reach.

Enthusiasm is the mind’s response to the likelihood a core human appetite is going to be nourished.  

Among the greatest expressions of happiness in the Jewish tradition is,  “My son’s have surpassed me!”  It means:  I am wrong and you are right.  It expresses the pure delight in learning and changing ones mind by the influence of another.

When I was 14 I bought a plane ticket to Europe and a train pass for the Summer.  It must have been 1981.  I had worked a lot of different jobs by 14, but I made most of the money for the trip selling political t-shirts for a Communist surfer, dude.  I debated international law with the young, beautiful, and articulate while sleeping under beached small boats in the South of France.  I swam in warm Swedish lakes watching the sun come up and down while having mad sex on smooth granite.  I met Krishnamurti in a rural area outside of London.  I remember his light rolling walk.  I remember his talks, always referring to himself as “the speaker,” in a big white tent.  He went on for hours, I fell asleep, snoring.  I remember how he talked about the illusion of memory and the illusion of the senses.  

I suppose it is no surprise that when I came home, high school was beyond boring.  Hah, I’m not writing my memoir yet, but I would like to understand how my ideas about teaching and learning came to be.  I quickly discovered high risk activities and dangerous people, wilderness, and people who fought with baseball bats and dodged bullets.  I also learned how to convince adults to give me responsibility.  Pushing both boundaries at the same time.  I became entranced by improvisation and dance.  

I tried to welcome contradictions and irony.  I tried to be the student my teachers were ecstatic about teaching.  I tried to find pure learning, to transcend the crutches of punishment and reward, to eschew competition.  

I worry that I can’t keep a secret.  I realize that teaching is almost always a ‘head-fake,’ like in football when you look one way and throw the other.  But a little teaching can go a long way, less is more, right?  And yet, I get consumed my own enthusiasm.  A little showing off of my skills or smarts gives me pleasure.  When I sense a student is comprehending something new, I feel compelled to pile on sensory information and ideas.  I’m excited by the challenge of constantly re-defining, re-imagining and re-experiencing what internal martial arts are.  I have no desire to settle down.

Can I, and should I, learn to withhold teachings?  Can I learn to give students some small practice or idea to cling to, and just let them believe they understand for months on end without bursting their bubble?  In the name of “development?”  Can I be convinced to believe in curriculum?  in progress?  in step by step piling up knowledge and experience?  

I suppose the alternative is to get a giant sign to float over my head that says, “If you don’t love being wrong, you can’t learn.”

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.