PLB

sinansencer, Respect is bound up in hierarchies and assignations of class but it is also a humble appreciation of admirable skill and worthy actions. We can love unconditionally when we notice when people do things that require a lot from them.

The Tao

I have been doing the ding shi at least once a week for a while now. I don't have time for that as a daily practice. I find that keeping a focus on the intent to open and close makes the transitions take the same time as the completed postures so I end up just doing the form very very slow. Not a constant speed though. The rythym thing becomes more elusive. This is just a personal observation. I should make it clear that this comes from experimentation. My teacher hasn't shown me ding shi. But I don't think ding shi is the same sort of standing practice as taking a posture like single whip and hanging out there as long as one can support it by the principles. That is good too.

The Five Animal Play I have learned from my teacher comes from (or it would be better to say conforms closely) to Jiao Guorui's Qigong Essentials For Health Promotion. It doesn't look much like these videos because they don't have the whole breathing introduction that precedes the forms in the book. There are very defined beginning forms done in a certain sequence of the quality you may be objecting to but the book talks about doing it without a net as the real practice; By real I mean letting go and being the animal for a bit of time. The closest I have come to this free play is with Deer. One morning a couple of years ago, I saw a man do monkey in a fashion that was astonishing. He was doing it from the inside out, shaman style. It wasn't anything like these videos.

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Vmarco, With all the comparisons you provide, placed side by side with your declarations of what you prefer, I have no idea what you think is true. Get down in the mud and say what you think is happening. Why talk about it otherwise?

I remember my first week of standing excercises as the introduction to a country I had lived next to all my life and had no idea existed. This whole new place to be.

Mal, I appreciate what I do learn from my teacher even if I cast about for more information than he provides by himself. It would be great to spend more time with people I have encountered who could surely help me find things more quickly. But I balance my practice with a demanding work life so I won't be rearranging my life to gain access to them. That choice makes me more determined to keep doing it as much as I can and less concerned about progressing quickly. Without the practice, everything else is just thoughts bouncing against other thoughts in an imagined space that I have not been invited to. So, in matters like Meredith's book, I look at it as a clue to be worked more than as a thesis to be proven or disproven. I have only been doing the form for three years so I am a newbie. I would like to hear what people who are far more advanced than I am think of his book. Not because their view would tell me whether to bother with it or not but to get further clues about what there is to be done and experienced. What one person finds useless sometimes helps another. As for Yang Chengfu's book, I don't think it is as big as what he transmitted. I read it with interest and the pictures of the complete postures are achingly beautiful. But one very interesting element to Fu Zhongwen's book is that he was trying to address what was missing in that book. And I guess another new book will need to address what is missing from Fu Zhongwen's book..... The form I practice is from the Dong tradition so there are differences from what Fu Zhongwen specifies. Close but interestingly different. A cousin thing.

I have read the book and am experimenting with his method of intention/attention (his version of the macrocosmic orbit, if you will). What he says about the niwan as the intersection of the third eye and the zhong ding has been helpful to me (Meredith cites this element as a teaching from Cheng Man-Ching). His discussion of "suspending" the crown reminds me of discussions about that in the last few months here. His references to Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan by Fu Zhongwen encouraged me to look at that book more closely. So, I am glad I read Meredith's book. On the other hand, the book is annoying when approaching the question of how much emphasis on "form" is necessary. Perhaps this is only my personal problem but without the form and the alignments I constantly seek to refine and multiply, I would be totally screwed when it comes to learning the art. I want to feel the "juice" Meredith speaks of more deeply than I do now but it ain't going to happen without groping further down the path I am already following. And to that end, the lessons I get from my teachers about rooting and separting jings is more subtle and to the point than what Meredith advises.

This place is great. So many different points of view; So much depth in the archives of what has already been said. There is the unusual quality that appears when people who really want something are involved with each other. I guess it is the latter quality that I most deeply appreciate. I am practicing something and everyone else here is too. I don't have to apologize to anybody about what I want.

That sentence has been a piece of my mental furniture for decades. I like the way it depicts an explanation for being tripped up in an orthoganal relationship to the experience of successfully negoitiating the tightrope. I think Zhuangzi would have enjoyed Kafka.

"The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just off the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon." Franz Kafka

I tried these excercises and was surprised at how immediate the connection was between the movement and the channels. I find it works even if the circles are very small. I have been doing it on my subway ride to and from work and have avoided being arrested so far. Not like that time when a perfectly well intended snake creeps down was taken the wrong way...

Ideology is an idea that always includes a witness. If it is included as a prerequisite, it probobly doesn't need me to activate it. That doesn't make it false, it just makes the idea of things being self evident a matter of careful discrimination. There is a peculiar lack of experience discussed in most forms of empiricism. Insight is like waiting before a door that only opens for reasons that are probably perfectly reasonable but the reasonability or not has nothing to do with whether one is ready when the door opens. That is why it is important to operate by principles. Otherwise, there would be no waiting, no experience. Just aimless questions one has already decided not to pursue.

In my experience, some things are the same whether doing dynamic or still practices. The intention element seems to have the same connection to what is happening (or not). And new elements slide through suddenly in moments of fleeting awareness in both cases. Nonetheless, I guess I stay still for the sake of learning how to move more than the other way around. It is easier for me to separate things when I am moving.

On some level, you are reacting if it bothers you that you are not reacting. Not sure why you call it a "kundani syndrome". It sounds to me like a lot of routines you got used to pumping you up have petered out. That doesn't mean you have stopped feeling. What do you feel when you think about what you have done and not done in the past? Have you ever betrayed trust? Do you wish someone loved you when you know they never will? Don't get me started.

How much one needs a sense of urgency to perform is the pivotal question. I have a high pressure job in regards to what I am expected to accomplish. If I said "f*ck it" to the whole enterprise, I would have to quit because the job is nothing other than the acceptance of those expectations and then making things happen. Within the context of that acceptance, however, I have learned over the years that much of my anxiety and distress that I immersed myself in as a means to "get ready" was/is completely unecessary and actually counterproductive. The principle in Tajiquan that a person only expend as much energy as necessary to perform an action applies to everything undertaken in life. The principle is not just about conserving one's strength; Embodying the principle creates new degrees of freedom.

Like any skill, fighting requires a lot of fighting to get better at it. But fighting is different than other arts because it can get you killed or severely injured when you fail where failure in other disciplines usually is less fatal. Training to fight is itself an acceptance of one's own death on many levels. Sparring can be good training for fighting but any set of constraints that turns war into sport makes any discussion of what is more deadly moot. I have pushed with some guys who I could beat up in a boxing ring, no problem. They would end me in thirty seconds in a real fight. There is only one way to prove that kind of statement. I am good with just sort of being really sure about it. When I was much younger, I sparred with a lot of people and got hurt on a regular basis. No problem, nothing permanent. I was lucky. Then I sparred with someone who gently touched my ribs with Lady's Hand. I collapsed and had difficulty breathing for several minutes. My adversary apoligized and said he meant to only give me a small taste of the stuff. I realized at that moment how far away I was from whatever it was that hit me. I became less interested in fighting and more interested in that stuff.

The matter of models and their relationship to what they would mirror or reveal is a central theme in Daoist literature. I am not sure anyone could "update" this observation made by Zhuangzi in 400 BC: So these Daoist were some very interesting cats. They underlined the limits of what could be talked about and then proceeded to talk about it anyway.

ChiDragon, When you ask: " Do you think Kung Fu is not an isometric exercise to get the body in shape....???", two thoughts come to my mind: Standing practice is for cultivating awareness, calm, and the discovery of one's energetic body. Your description seems to give little credence to the idea that standing is a part of an "internal" art. The notion that it is primarily a body building exercise goes against every thing my training and teachers have led me to understand and practice. Low stances certainly develop incredible leg strength and I enjoy going as low as I can go without hurting my knees. But the "isometric" element in those stances and movements are increased by obeying the rule about keeping the knees from going beyond the toes rather than letting the knees take up more of the load. Consider the kung fu of He steps out into very low stances and never moves his knees beyond his toes on his weighted leg. I am pretty sure Yu Gua Shun could satisfy any measure of physical conditioning you have in mind. When everything is relaxed and I am able to keep my focus very clear, I can do the Yang 108 in the low frame. I need the internal element to do it without hurting myself, not the other way around.

You may have already heard your teacher say the following but what the heck, I hear my teacher say it over and over so repitition must be the name of the game. He says: "Let your eyes guide and guard the movement." "Keep the shoulders and hips aligned. This will make your waist begin to turn in a way that stretches the kwa". "If the hips are too tight to square up at the end of a movement, don't force the knees to make up the difference. Accept that you have a tight ass and move on." "The knees and the elbows are the smaller circles of yin and yang in the tai chi symbol. So the elbows are heavy compared to the arms and shoulders and the knees are light compared to the legs and feet." "Never reveal the above secrets to the public." (Hah! Just kidding.)

It is very difficult to make out what other people are doing. It is very difficult to talk about what oneself is doing. Words offer a bridge and a barrier to the same. The advantage of traditional sources is that nobody owns them. They are there like a wall, a path, or a lake. The advantage of talking about what is happening now is that it doesn't even exist yet, the speaker searches for clues in the crime scene of life, hoping to establish a narrative for what just happened. That is why people try to have philosophy; not to explain everything but to make room for words.

Snowmonki, Thank you for the thoughtful reply. In Tangora's discussion of Bend the Bow, shoot the Arrow, he begins with the same insistence upon caution and the need for a competent instructor that you so elequently expressed. I guess that is another part of the "Advanced" element you pointed to; there are matters being discussed in the book well beyond the fundamentals he also talks about. The way he brings those different levels together is unusual and worthwhile for an 'underguided' student like myself but I take your point that it can be risky and harmful if taken the wrong way or seen as some kind of shortcut. Your comment: "It would simply wash with me better if there was at least a note to say work through exercises A-G in this book first, for example. But it doesn't." is interesting on many levels and I am going to take some time to think about. Among those who have written about these matters who do you see as exemplary in this regard? The book to the side, I welcome any call to be really freaking careful with the spine. If you know any neigong teachers in NYC who won't break my back, I would appreciate the word. sincerely, PLB

Snowmonki, I have been working at the excercises in Tangora's book since I read it several months ago. The book has helped me a lot. I never thought of it as a complete explanation of a practice; more of a clarifying discussion of how one element is built from experience with another. But your comment suggests that what is missing could be harmful to a player. I would be interested to hear what you have to say about that.

Interesting thread, a lot to think about. One thing that was mentioned tangentially but is worth saying directly is that the "Western" tradition has no shortage of philosophers/theologiists/psychologists who have called for the abnegation of self and ego. I am leary of lumping all the examples of such negation as part of one idea or view of the world. For instance, when reading St. John of the Divine and Pascal side by side; one might notice they are sharing a language of personal psychology while also talking about completely different problems.