Balance is Key

If someone gives me a surprise shove I will likely do a quick jump or stumble and quickly recover my balance on two feet.  The same is true for most people, it’s not a special skill.  No other animal can stand on two feet and take a shove with out falling down, even bears have a high falling down rate.  When we learn to walk as toddlers we naturally train our dantian’s to do this complex job.  The recovery of balance is lightning fast.  If I contemplate the physics of it, there must be an internal counterbalance functioning unconsciously.  Somehow my mass absorbs all the momentum of the push and moves my center of mass very quickly back and forth, up and down and left and right until it is directly above my feet again.  Again, it is too fast to perceive.  What I am aware of is the space around me, perhaps sharp objects, the surface of the ground, a wall or a tree.  My guess is that if I misperceived a slanted wall as vertical, or a sloping ground as level, I might actually fall down or stumble for a bit longer.  But a functioning spatial mind can make corrections very quickly.  In fact, it might actually function better at high speeds.  How else could we explain the ability to run through a forest down a steep hill.  The spatial mind controls the dantian, as a counterweight, unconsciously and instantaneously, bringing us back to balance.  

This basic function of the dantian can be transferred to higher order skills like skiing, carrying a long ladder through an obstacle course, rock climbing or gymnastics.  Of course, all animals have a similar skill which they use on four feet or in the air if they are birds.  

Normal humans however, only use the dantian for this one type of task.  When we throw a ball, or pick up a pen to write our name, we are using our brains in a very different way.  Or, like when we are rock climbing, we use the same set of balance and vertical orientation skills simply applied in a different context.  

Pure Internal Martial Arts are unique because they use the dantian to respond to forces other than gravity.  To paraphrase George Xu, “When you touch any part of my body, you are touching the dantian.”  The best video demonstration of this I know of is this one by Ma Yue Liang:

Not everyone can learn internal martial arts (that would be communism), but proof that nearly everyone has a functioning dantian is apparent in our natural ability to recover our balance.  

Shout Out

Just wanted to give a shout out to another student of George Xu's, Derek Croley:

Basic Theory

Mike Sigman has a new blog, check it out.

His basic theory is quite good.  When you read it note that "san waihe" (three external harmonies) is a description of the way the body should be organized not how it should move or be motivated.  The external body he describes needs to be empty (xu) of intent and effort.  The movement of the external body can then become unconscious.  

The internal body (what he calls "san neihe" and will hopefully deal with in future posts) needs to do a different job than the external body.  As I have said many times, the internal body is moved by changes of the spatial mind.  The external body must be completely within the spatial mind and unconscious, any spatial mind inside the body will break the system.  If the internal body does the same movement as the external body it is still possible to have some internal strength, but it is so much cooler if the internal body goes a different direction and moves in a totally different way.  The internal body should attack the opponent directly, not through the external body, not through the limbs.

You can download a video of Mike doing some basic movement here. 

He embedded this video of Chen Bing doing simple stuff.

Chen Bing Reeling Silk from John Prince on Vimeo.

At around 3 minutes he uses the term "tong bu" which is translated as "synchronized." There is another tong 通 (first tone instead of second tone) which refers to emptiness passing through the gates.  I don't think he is making a translation error here, I just don't think "synchronized" is helpful because the dantain is not doing the same job in the same direction, it's doing something quite different.  Tong 通 is implied in his statement that the hand must remain "alive" (ling).  When you have the feeling that the hand is inside the dantian it is much easier to keep the gates (at the shoulders) open.  

I know all this stuff I just said is probably hard to follow, perhaps impossible.  That's why I appreciate Mike's blog post, it is fairly easy to follow, it is a clear beginning.  He suggests that forms should come later, after learning these basics and he has a good argument to back it up.  That's not traditional but it might work better.

The other thing I like is how clear he is about the central importance of up/down power.  He calls it gravity and power from the ground.  Most people, most trained martial artists, can not fully use up/down power because they are in a trance.  They try to replace gravity with strength & control thereby losing whole body mass, they end up carrying themselves instead of making their opponent carry them.  They also loose upward power by arcing it forward through their limbs as vectors into their opponent.  Ahhh, in praise of simple up and down.  

A Revisionist History of Footbinding

Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, by Dorothy Ko.

I don’t know if my readers have much interest in the history of footbinding, but this is certainly a great book to read if you are interested.  I must admit that I didn’t know much about footbinding myself before I read this, it’s been out for about 7 years and I hadn’t gotten around to reading it because I picked up a feminist vibe from the cover the first few times I saw it.

Ko’s premise is that all the histories written to date are actually histories of anti-footbinding.  For the benefit of my readers I will focus on ideas in this book which are important to the hidden history of martial arts.  The first is that she decided to write the history backwards.  Although I had never thought of it, that made a lot of sense to me.  Footbinding like martial arts has so many potential beginnings, reasons for existing, influences from different parts of society and meanings over a thousand years that there is no convincing beginning!  Better to start from the present and work back along the various strands of time.  

Christians have been in China since the Tang Dynasty, but they were minor players fading in and out along the borders.  The Jesuits and Franciscans who spent time in China during the Ming and early Ching Dynasties were minor influences, but the ideas they brought back to Europe changed the rest of the world.  After the Second Opium War Christians including Protestants, started to make large inroads into the Chinese heartland.  These missionaries brought education, medicine, and all the elements of modernity including new ideas, technologies and international commerce.  

Besides medicine and modernity the accommodations of the Second Opium War gave foreign Christian leaders a way to circumvent the old Magistrate Bureaucracy.  Parish leaders could appeal directly to the Imperial Court via their embassies, effectively giving significant advantages to Chinese Christians.  

The period between 1890 and 1910 was intense.  Christian converts stopped attending theater and stopped paying for it too.  Why?  Because as regular readers may already know, the martial arts theater movement tradition known in the west as ‘opera’ was clearly understood as a religious institution.  The local communities that put on these “opera” performances used them to raise money for education, repairing roads, building bridges and stuff like that.  In other words, putting on these religious performances was the context in which local taxes were collected!  This created a lot of resentment and is certainly one of the causes of the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900), which was a roving mob, dressed as characters from opera like the Monkey King and General Guangong, responsible for killing thousands of Chinese Christians and burning their communities.  

Christian missionaries really disliked footbinding and used it at the center of their critic of Chinese cultural barbarity and backwardness.  However, it was in this twenty year period that Chinese voices against footbinding grew and in a very short time succeeded in ending what had been an extremely widespread practice.  Not that it was a single practice, that is one of the main points of the book, there was a lot of variation in the techniques.  For instance some women may have had good enough mobility to practice martial arts.  One of the origins of footbinding hundreds of years ago was not all that different from the wrapping that ballet dancers do for point shoes.  It also appears that footbinding done early enough (at age 3 or 4) was not painful and probably allowed women to have some ability to run.  Certainly one of the reasons for footbinding was the beauty of the movement it could create.  And obviously, the arguments against footbinding were overwhelmingly convincing.

The dominant metaphor offered by Chinese voices for the elimination of footbinding was that it decreased circulation and that what Chinese needed more than anything was more circulation!  Circulation in women’s feet was paralleled with circulation of modern ideas, commerce and technology around the world.  It sounds funny to our ears today because we think of China as the home of Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine and Fengshui, all of which center around the metaphor of circulation.  But it is likely that this argument was really China’s way of claiming modernity for itself!  “Modernity with Chinese characteristics!” The project of ‘nationalizing’ modernity absurdly included attempts to claim Chinese origins of the Anti-footbinding movement.  

Think about it, this is the same twenty years in which Tai Chi, Bagua and Xingyi “came out” as public arts to be recognized by the entire population.  Tai Chi eventually became a way to claim ‘generic’ Chinese-ness as opposed to ‘ethnic-minority-Chinese-ness’. 

Unbinding ones feet was a bit of a nightmare.  If you were past the age of puberty there was little chance your feet would be normal.  It took months of slow, careful and painful adjustments to “let out” the feet. Tai Chi may have gotten it’s original reputation as a health practice because it was recommended that women letting their feet out practice Tai Chi as they were learning how to move on their feet in various stages of unboundedness.  It must have been a profound moment in gender integration too.  

The rural regions around Suzhou for some reason did not bind their feet.  Many non-Han ethnic groups did not bind either, the Hakka for instance did not.  However, in most regions, even poor families were likely to bind at least the oldest girl child, the younger daughters being more likely to be sold into servitude were likely to need big feet.  That’s a pretty dark thought all around.  Of course I’m trying to imagine this kind of world and the difficulty I have causes me to have doubts.  

Footbinding started as a status symbol of the elite.  It may have spread inadvertently as an act of rebellion because the Manchu ethnic rulers of the Ching Dynasty made ineffective but widespread attempts to ban it.  Having come across this theory rebelious agency some time ago, along with a poem I came across about the potency of women with bound feet, led me to a thesis about bound feet representing potential power just as relaxed tai chi feet gather potential power by not pushing out the balls of the feet or the heels.  (You can read more of my theory here.)  The book doesn’t offer any direct support for my theory except that it promotes the notion that footbinding has multiple origins, reasons, and methods.

Another sidenote of particular interest is that up until the later part of the Tang Dynasty Chinese were barefoot in formal situations, especially at court.  In less formal situations they wore socks.  Shoes and such were for the outdoors, the way Japan was up until the 1980’s.  During the late Tang Dynasty (around 900 CE) the practice of wearing boots became formal, perhaps because it was the custom of some ethnic generals attending court.  Gradually socks and even small shoes became hidden underwear and bare feet became hidden in darkness.  Ko points out that foot binding is unlikely to have happened until the Song Dynasty when people were sitting in chairs which could display their feet.  

 This change in footwear and thus in peoples relationship to the ground, must have been a necessary step in changing the well documented “seated” Daoyin internal body transformation methods into stand-up Shaolin and the various internal martial arts.  

And finally we have a question.  To what extent did women performers have bound feet?  From what I’ve been able to gather about performers in general, both men and women, where in a moral category which made them available for sex.  I gather that prostitution was understood as a type of entertainment usually coupled with singing and or dancing.  So female prostitutes most likely were able to dance and had bound feet.  As we have learned from other texts women sometimes performed in male troops (for an extra fee) but generally theater troupes were either all male or all female.  In both cases women warrior roles were very popular.  According to Ko’s sources, in Beijing and Shanxi men playing warrior women wore tiny stilts to make it appear that their feet were bound.  Did women who specialized in male martial roles have unbound feet?  Or did they wear fake foot enlargers to play those roles?  In any event we know what we know about this because there were laws written around 1900 in Shanxi banning actors from wearing these tiny stilts. It was thought that they were setting a bad example within the changing standards of femininity.  Warrior femininity that is.  

Here is a dissertation that deals with the same issues: Women in Tianjin, 1898-1911

Christian Missionaries in China, 1891  

Working Backwards

One of my problems as a teacher lately is that I’m having trouble finding the beginning.  I can start a child where I started with Northern Shaolin, that is simple enough, but even with a child I’m doing all kinds of adaptation depending on aptitude and interest.  We can go in a more acrobatic direction, or a more dance-theater way, or we can move toward a kinesthetic-emotional conversation about, identity, change and ethics.  

With adults it is profoundly more challenging.  20 years ago I knew exactly what to teach and how to teach it.  Now there are so many potential jumping off places, each one feels like a beginning.  Choosing a beginning implies choosing a path, a curriculum.  Choosing a beginning is made 10,000 times more difficult because the end result, the fruition of practice, is in contention.  

What will you get out of it?  What will you be at the end?  Is there really an end?  How will you know when you get there?  How could you know?  

If the subject were, “speaking French fluently” we have a pretty good idea what that might mean. You’d be able to talk to people, to get ideas across and understand complexity, perhaps get a job where you speak and write to people in French.  But understanding a language doesn’t guarantee you’ll find anyone worth talking to, or that you’ll be able hear, or think clearly.  It certainly doesn’t mean that you will be comfortable drinking wine and smoking cigarettes while discussing philosophy in the wee hours of the night!  Especially if you hate wine.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the lost beginning.

So let’s talk about some possible endings.  

I recently read Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift of Fear. I highly recommend it. It has lot’s of good lists to contemplate.  It has a couple  of dark sections and I suspect that is why they put the word fear in the title.  But it is a truly optimistic book about intuition.  It could easily have been titled: ‘Intuition, Your Best Friend.’   

Intuition is an amazingly powerful and instantaneous.  Through intuition we know things before we know how we know them.  Could intuition be the fruition of practice?

The active aspect of intuition is qi, we don’t know where it comes from.  It just happens!  Qi has no pattern or memory.  There is an inactive aspect of intuition too, it is our body's natural ability to heal and reproduce itself, called "jing" in tradtional Chinese terms.  Jing is that unconscious aspect of our body which stores all patterns of growth, healing, injury and change.  Rational actions and rationales are mixed, that is, they mix qi with jing.  By mixing qi with jing, we create a way of storing qi in the body as tension.  All fantasy requires this mixing of jing and qi.  When jing and qi distill, as the result of internal arts practices, memory and fantasy have nothing to cling to, rational thought likewise has noting to build on.

So the “end” of learning internal martial arts is not even a state of consciousness or a trance, it’s movement without body memory which has no intent, no conditioning, and no restraint.  Think about that.  If a movement is unconditioned why would you remember it?  If a movement has no resistance and no restriction, how could it be stored in the body?  

This doesn’t preclude that we might have certain spontaneous creative, destructive or survival oriented ‘drives.’  It also doesn’t preclude perception or awareness.  Our intuition about where the wall is behind us, how many people are in the room, and what can fit inside of a box, are all operative without having to remember them.

Even while fighting you’d have no sense of ‘acting’ or forcing.  That’s the meaning of the Daoist term wuwei.  

So what kind of beginning does this suggest?  What kind of path?  What kind of practice?  Yikes, I’m lost!   

Wait, I have an idea.  Oops, I lost it.  Oh no, there it is again.  

Practice is finding what your body remembers and unraveling it, emptying it, cleaning it.  The more one trains along this path the more etherial our movement memories become.

Discuss!

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. 

Update on 2012-10-02 21:57 by Scott Park Phillips

Oh well, no comments?  I guess that's settled then!

Martial Arts Lifestyle

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.

Throw Away Comments

I recently read The Yoga of the Yogi: The Legacy of T. Krishnamacharya, by Kausthub Kesikachar.  It's not my intention to review it here, I'm not qualified to comment on his organization of Yogic theory and philosophy.  I picked it up to learn more about the founder of modern yoga, who he was, his education, and his training.  It does cover that material in a terse way, but as an American reader of history, I would have benefited from a lot more inclusion of historical context and clues about how his relationships to specific people influenced his decisions to pursue knowledge.  Anyway please don't take my opinion as a review of the book.

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, by Phillip B. Zarrilli.  I believe I wrote a review of this book some time ago and decided not to publish it.  The two things that interested me about Zarrilli's work, the theater connection and the China connection, don't get worked out in this text.  Too bad.  One thing I loved about the book was that he put everything he had to say about "Paradigms and Discourses" in the first chapter and outright tells the readers to skip that chapter unless they are a disembodied head stuck inside an academic box! Yes.

 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?  

Muscle and Fat are Two Sides of the Same Coin

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.  

Cooling Gloves

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)