My friend Vajra is teaching a workshop in Boulder worth checking out. He has unique experience with violence, he was the lead inspector for San Francisco's Entertainment Commission which which put him in daily contact with social violence and gang violence hot-spots. He co-founded the 4 Rings Collective with Robert Lee in 2014.

Why am I so anti-fajin?

Fajin is defined here as shoving, but it is using magic tricks to shove, so we might call it competitive-deceptive shoving, or technically-superior shoving.

If you do it entirely without uprooting it is just a tackle, it's physics, mass times velocity squared (MV2). Nothing wrong with that.

If you shove someone from behind by surprise, most people will stumble a few feet and recover. This is an amazing phenomena. Why is this? Why are humans so incredibly good at instantly regaining balance?

Jing is such a key concept in Chinese martial arts, theater, meditation and religion. I just thought, for fun, I'd post Google Translates instant correlations. 

32 Translations of jing 精

adjective

• fine 精细, 细, 精, 优良, 精美, 良好
• refined 精制, 精, 优雅, 文雅, 优美, 彬
• precise 精确, 准确, 确切, 精, 过份周到的, 过份注意的

Applications Rant.

I teach applications. Applications are all about capturing a feeling. A feeling of moving through space, of getting a hold, of clearing, catching, spinning, or tipping. The point of an application is to get a feeling, and then find that feeling again spontaneously in some kind of rough-housing game. 

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Over the last few years I have been harping on about how rooting is a mistake in martial arts. A mistake I might add that dancers never make. Which is why dance is such a great way to learn about power in the martial arts. This is one of the benefits of thinking about martial arts as performing arts. 

In the Chinese theater tradition, the internal martial arts have been on the stage for at least six hundred years. This martial prowess of enlightenment is called jindan, or neidan, or liandan. In the theater sometimes it comes from taking a pill. But just as often it comes from retreat into a mountain or a cave for years of meditation. It is like a montage in an action movie when they have to train-up the hero quickly. 

Most martial arts at some point get deep into the idea of increasing power. The problem with that is most martial artists delude themselves because they do not have an adrenalized high-risk-of-injury place to test out their practice. When I've worked with people who had an opportunity to test their power four nights a week breaking down doors, they only used the amount of force necessary and it is usually less than a martial artist who is only imagining the usage. Even great martial arts, who perfectly understand how power works, tend to over-power.  

That is just a prelude to a misunderstood metaphor which is very common in Chinese martial arts circles. The metaphor is that of a bow shooting an arrow.

Paul Katz wrote one of the most informed and thoughtful reviews of Meir Shahar's book, Shaolin Monastery. I'm posting it here because I think it should be read more widely.

Review: Shaolin Monastery, by Meir Shahar --Paul Katz.

My simple contribution to it was that I had a 15 minute conversation about the book with Paul in his office before he wrote it. Paul has written so much since that conversation, I haven't kept up, but he is one of the most broad thinkers in the realm of Chinese religious studies. As you can see by the diversity of topics in his list of publications.

Many people have asked me for my predictions of the coming Chinese New Year.  Probably more than usual because my teacher Liu Ming died about a year ago and he had been giving predictions for the new year to packed houses in the San Francisco Bay Area for about the last ten years.  

As my regular readers know, I’m more of a strategist than I am a prognosticator, but I’ll try to split the difference.

This is a wild theory. I was debating calling this post, "Why the long face?"

Please read this blog post from The Paleo Periodical and/or watch the video below. I know it sounds crazy but I think they are probably correct.

Here is my contribution.