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!
Here is the link to the write-up of my meeting with Tabby Cat (featured in the videos above). I do hope he'll agree to another meeting with me one of these days! He has a new book out too:
Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics
Please discuss and report below.
Oh well, no comments? I guess that's settled then!
I often find myself, willingly I suppose, in conversations where the notion of martial arts is limited. I'm speaking here about the expectations of whom ever I'm conversing with. If someone where to randomly ask me, "Hey, what do you think martial arts are all about?" I'd be like, "I could easily give you a satisfying definition of all the elements of martial arts in a 22 hour lecture format." And after pointing loosely to the theatrical, the actual fighting skills, the religious, the healing, the asocial, the psycho-social, the sensory-somatic-developmental, the intuitive, the improvisational, the heroic, and of course the hermit-culture ways of thinking about the arts--I might elicit this response, "Oh, you mean, like, martial arts lifestyle! yeah, cool."
Self-defense Style
Wait a second. Is that what I mean? Not to be confused with self-defense lifestyle, I suppose. Or the tai chi lifestyle.
In any case, it seems really important to get the fashion correct. I wonder about the possible usefulness of leggings, explained here, there may be some health benefits, and I would think that wraps made out of leather, silk and chain might be the next big thing in urban armor. And I came across this umbrella page too, not really my thing but moving in the right direction.
China Beat, the blog, just gave up the scene. The final post was a bit unfocussed, something about Twitter and social networking having made blogging uncool. It hurts a bit. I mean, I don't where we are going! But the idea that I might be a representative of some kind of lifestyle is intriguing.
I keep hearing about people who don't have jobs right now, and I'm thinking, what is a job? Is there such a thing as job lifestyle? Back in June I moved to the Montclair part of Oakland, California. It is like a Daoist paradise up here. The gentle fog floats down in the valleys and all I see is a sea of spiralling mists with scattered trees poking up from the abyss. I can sit out on my luxurious deck and absorb the warm, fresh, quiet air. It's not that I'm consciously avoiding being busy in my languid effortlessly inspirational purple mist, it's just that the rest of the world is doing something important. (Even my wife is doing acupuncture and milking goats.)
The idea of "lifestyle," may trigger a bit of ironic caution in me but it is a potent force none-the-less. I remember living in San Francisco in the 1970's when you couldn't walk anywhere without stepping in dog poo. It was a constant struggle to survive. Perhaps we cursed the dogs, or the dog owners, but there was an inevitably about it. It wasn't until people with a gay lifestyle decided it was cool to pick up dog poo that the average person started to think, "Hey this is a whole group thing we're doing here, we can end this!" And now it's gone. A change in lifestyle, is a change in the social-mind fabric of spatial rightness and wrongness.
So that's what I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about the martial arts lifestyle, how can I make it happen? I'm not sure what the elements are yet, but I'll take a jab at it.
Fashion is big, fashion is communication. People who see us need to know we are living the martial arts lifestyle. A type of loose fitting but strong pants? A hat that can be manipulated for view obscuring, or to draw fire? A "business" knife? A think-twice-about-that pencil? Nearly barefoot shoes? A swagger? Clothing that rips easily? or perhaps indestructible tyvek? Short hair or long? a top knot? Stretchy and tight fitting clothes or loose and flowing? And what kind of bag is best? Is there a martial arts smell? Look, it is already obvious to me when a person has a bit of mojo, if we make it into a recognisable look, how far away could consciousness raising be?
Obviously it isn't just about fashion. It is about practice. And practice is about making time.
Ah time, we all knew it would come to this. Birth on one side, death on the other. I have stumbled into a career of sorts, teaching martial arts. My enthusiasm drives me even more than guilt. I'm like a kid in a candy shop, an archeologist in a tomb, a mountaineer on an ice waterfall! And yet, teaching ain't easy. The world changes around us. I started out as an artist, I did ceramics at the high school of the arts and then I moved into dance. I started thinking pretty early about how I could get the time to be an artist. How I could be free to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to do it. In the early 1990's before the Berlin Wall came down, there was a big fuss about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). People were getting government money to make a type of art that was pretty offensive to a large swath of the tax paying public. There was a lot of protest art being made, in general; I participated in a bunch of "no limits on what gets funded" performance projects. For instance I danced naked at the LA Arts Festival and the Berkeley Art Museum, did the mud-people thing crawling through the financial district, weird public sex rituals, I'll spare you the details. Fun stuff, inspired movement, iconic imagery, heck I don't know, whatever; but I came out of it thinking, "You know, I don't really see why people should pay for me to dance naked if they don't want to." See I'm all for self expression, and breaking boundaries, and cutting edge, and protest, and offending the freaking pants off of people, but it just doesn't follow that government should be leveraged to that effect. Some people argue that controversial protest art wouldn't get made if the government didn't fund it. (Cricket sounds.)
Leg WrapsSo to make a long story short, if you want to practice, and have a martial arts lifestyle, you've got to get your money-time-eat-sleep-love-matrix in order. Most people think they can show up to a martial arts class and just start learning martial arts. But it doesn't work that way. This is where I have to admit I have often failed my students. The students who figure out how to practice on their own, usually have had some experience overcoming a profound obstacle to draw on. The practice-every-day model that most music teachers try to instill is a good place to start, so is the meditate-for-an-hour-without-fail gig American Buddhists have going. One would think that all the discipline we encounter in the world of sports and athletics would translate to a practice, but unfortunately these people are often motivated by a team, and even when they are deeply self-motivated they are often so aggressively goal oriented that the idea of practicing without a goal is too much of a leap. The other problem with people who already have lots of movement training, dancers included, is that they are going to have to un-learn. Un-learning is identity destroying. To use George Xu's rather crude analogy, you have to un-pack your sausage. Sausage, in this case, being a metaphor for muscles and minds conditioned to move in a certain way.
In this Twitter-text(oid)-chillax moment, private lessons are all the rage. Once upon a time, private students would get a time slot in my week, but now spontaneous flex-time is the norm. Hey, I'm cool with it. I'm thinking of making everything a private lessons. In a way, I'm already doing it. I mean, if you are going to a class, no matter what they call it, it's external martial arts. Internal martial arts is taught one to one, period. Even if I'm teaching a group, the instruction moves around the room, from person to person. This, by the way, is another factor which disorients students who think they are doing exercise. Internal martial arts might make you sweat now and then, but it isn't exercise in the sense of follow me, and now do twenty of these. That's all a head fake. Internal martial arts is about spontaneity and spatial mind flow.
Okay, hold it right there! I'm admitting I'm near the bottom and I don't know where we are going. There are some very accomplished teachers out there who have fallen into traps. Some become bitter, badgering their students for not being smart, or aware, or disciplined enough. Some teachers of the internal martial arts claim enlightenment. Some say you must do it their way! Meaning that they try to make you feel guilty for going on a non-internal hike with your husband over the weekend, or a non-internal swim at the pool. Yikes, it seems like there is this fence we're walking on, to one side it's all head-fakes and curriculum and goals and on the other side it's exclusive fidelity to a teacher's systematic, precious, transcendent ideology.
Hey, at least I know where I'm not going! That's where I got the idea for Martial Arts Cafe! There are no rules yet. If you want to come to a meeting of the Martial Arts Cafe send me an email and I'll let you know when it's happening next. A space to fight, unlearn, drink coffee, and deliberately develop a martial arts lifestyle.
I recently read The Yoga of the Yogi: The Legacy of T. Krishnamacharya
The one thing that really caught my attention was that the author maintains a ritual practice of putting his guru's sandals on his head. He also tells us that the tradition dates all the way back to the time of the Ramayana. He frames this ritual practice around faith and devotion, but he also says that everything can be transmitted this way--meaning that because the practice is pure revelation, it transcends method.
What's that? I can learn Yoga from putting sandals on my head? But who even thinks about questions like this? They just throw these comments away. Even people who do the sandal practice just talk about faith and devotion. Only someone of the highest level would even think of suggesting such a practice.
It just occurred to me that if my students were to put my old shoes on their heads they might learn a lot faster. I have new found respect for Yoga. After 30 years of martial arts practice I understand why and how this works, however; 1) none of my students would do it, 2) if I explained it, none of them would understand it, 3) if by chance they did understand it, I would have to kill them.
Which brings me to another book which I am also not going to review: When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art
On page 45; "[In] playwright Bhasa's version of Karna's story, Karnabhara, which illustrates the divine gift of power (sakti) which requires no attainment from the practitioner. When a messenger gives Karna Indra's gift of an 'unfailing weapon whose sakti is named Vimala to slay one among the Pandavas', he asks, 'when shall I gain its power (sakti)?' The messenger responds, 'when you take it in [your] mind, you will [immediately] gain its power.'"
What? No hard work? No training? This is correct, this is the highest level. Do you really know what it means to put sandals on your head? Do you really know what it means to put a sword inside your mind?
It shouldn't be controversial to state that muscle and fat are two sides of the same coin, but people these days are so pro-muscle and so anti-fat that it may cause some cognitive dissonance.
Why? Because they are both forms of food storage. They both require a lot of food to produce. To say that they both result from over eating is obvious, but if you are going into a long Winter without much food, over eating is a very good idea. Likewise, if you are being sponsored by an Indian Raj to wrestle against other sponsored champions, by all means bulk up!
Muscle and fat are normal adaptive responses to eating too much food. In our topsy turvy world people sometimes over eat because they are over working at (stressful?) mental activity-- that tends to become fat. I suspect if those people got enough sleep, the excess fat would just burn off while they were asleep. After all, we can't eat and sleep at the same time! I've never really believed the "just laziness" argument, you have to be lazy and over eat and not get enough sleep. But it also seems that at some point the system can get so taxed it spirals out of control.
People also over eat and then "need" to exercise. Meaning they want to interrupt the efficient fat storing mechanism and replace it with the adaptation to stress response which makes food into muscle.
There is a whole conversation about the chemistry of the endocrine system I'm not going to have here, except to say that people like me tend to put on muscle very easily, it's genetic. But that muscle doesn't happen unless I over eat.
One of the reasons internal martial arts are "hard" to learn is that active people like me who have the discipline to practice also tend to put on muscle too easily. That muscle is conditioned strength which obstructs spontaneous whole body integration and whole body liquid unity thus reducing power efficiency and momentum mass transfer. (Yes, that sentence was a summary of the last 40 blog posts.)
Why are we over eating? There are a lot of good theories out there. Coming back from 10 quiet days in the mountains by myself, I was overwhelmed by how much intensely delicious food there was in my refrigerator! My mind has all sorts of automatic functions which are normally outside of my control. For instance, when I was living with goats earlier this Summer, I became an expert on what goats like to eat and what they don't like to eat. It was like I had a pre-loaded observation program in my head that had an intense desire to know and catalog what goats are eating! Weird right? My point is that there is a heck of a lot about human motivations we don't understand.
There is also the theory that food corporations have gotten so good at figuring out what we love to eat and selling it to us cheaply that we have become helpless automatons. No doubt, but we are also helpless against the urge to make fresh plum juice from the trees in my yard, or going out to see the latest Bat Man movie for that matter. Paradise sucks.
Well, as you can see by now, this post isn't going anywhere. But it wouldn't be complete unless I offered the theory that a significant part of the population may be over eating because they are exercising too much.
There is some new technology coming our way from Stanford. They claim it is better than steroids. The article is excellent, please read the whole thing. Temperature is the primary limitation on muscle performance and now they think they understand why and how to work around it. Strength training is about to enter a new era.
In a previous post I outlined my new theory which posits that there are two categories of movement, energy efficient and power efficient.
Power efficient movement doesn't make us sweat, it doesn't make us over heat, it doesn't give us sore muscles and it doesn't wear down the soft tissues of our bodies. It can make us very tired, but we'll just want to find a place to lay down and sleep. Like a cat.
Energy efficient movement allows us to walk or run for long periods of time. It also allows us to work with our hands, carry things, and multi-task. All these activities induce fatigue, pain, and stress. At the risk of over simplifying I will venture that when we build muscle we are almost always doing it within an energy efficient framework. Personal trainers have identified a long list of different types of muscle training and "conditioning" each requiring different regimes. But repetition is the key. We seem to be "made" for fatigue, pain, and stress because we adapt to it very easily. Not only that, but in concentrated bursts it seems to improve our mood, and plays a significant social role in mate acquisition and status displays.
The key to power efficient training, is to not trigger this adaptive response! We still use repetition, but our key purpose is to refine a specific feeling and then take that feeling into more lively dynamic movement. That "feeling" is a process of refining signals of awareness which allow us to glimpse or encircle that which has no feeling, true effortlessness.
So we march off into this brave new world with "no limits" on adaptive capacity and with "no limits" imposed by fatigue or heat. Where will this leave us? How soon will we bash up against the new limits? Because they are coming. I'm not an expert or anything but one of the rules of systems theory is that if you speed up or improve the efficiency of just one part of a complex system, you slow the whole system down.
I'm excited by the new possibilities, but I'm concerned that the kind of training I've been doing is drifting further away from the mainstream, not closer. So much for the meeting of East and West. Non-aggression, returning to stillness, and spontaneous naturalness won't disappear because we are the valley floor, but effort and aggression keep finding ways to climb higher.
(hat tip to Geoff)
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?)
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.
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.
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
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.”
A place to train and learn about traditional Chinese martial arts, which are a form of religious theater combined with martial skills.
