Category — Taiji

There are approximately ten thousand posts backed up in my brain right now, but I've no idea when I'll get a chance to write them, so instead you get one of the (many!) good bits from the Tao Te Ching:

In dwelling, be close to the land.

In meditation, go deep in the heart.

In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.

In speech, be true.

In ruling, be just.

In business, be competent.

In action, watch the timing.

No fight: No blame.

-Chapter Eight

I had one of those tiny physical moments yesterday that explodes into a psychological OH YEAH DUH … that was a moment, literally an otherwise meaningless moment in the shower, of refocusing.

Life is powerfully, powerfully distracting, especially as you slam into full adulthood and all the filters that kept out various influences are removed.  This isn't oops-too-much-RSS-browsing distraction; this is full-on fight-or-flight-level hardcore psychological distraction.

Some examples:

• Faced with the insecurities of providing for yourself and others, of economic wibbly-wobbliness and the suddenly finite number of years before retirement, you throw yourself into working and saving money (easily 80h/wk, all told)
• Faced with the heady freedom of being allowed to do anything you can legally get away with, you wind up "trying on" hobby after hobby, filling your free-time and emptying your wallet on lessons, equipment, outings, and materials, all for things you'll probably hardly ever do again;
• Faced with the daunting task of raising a child "correctly", you throw yourself into planning activities, events, and lessons into every possible moment, as well as into cooking and cleaning things into an acceptably perfect childhood environment;
• Faced with the sudden relative lessening importance of social activities (what? I'm old enough to party all I want and now partying doesn't mean much anymore??) as well as, for some people, the sudden ease of actually pulling it off (wait, I used to find this scary? ha!), you grab any opportunity to go to a gathering, eating up your evenings and killing your attempts to wake up early and do stuff;
• Overwhelmed by the 80-hour work weeks, the pile of clamoring social engagements, the kids, the house, the classes and outings, you retreat into television for hours or days at a time, often finding yourself too exhausted to even get dressed if you don't absolutely have to.

…And welcome to adulthood.  ;) 

When I was young I thought, of course I'll be a writer, writing comes easy to me and I love it.  But then…was I going to write instead of working and saving money?  Hmm, no.  Write instead of parenting?  No way.  Write instead of going out and doing stuff?  Well, that one was easy when I was a bored and scaredy kid, but this weekend I can literally go to three parties and a SolidWorks design class and free-diving in the ocean if I want — all with people I like. 

When I found taiji I thought, oh, THIS is the thing; this is the perfect physical component to my philosophic life, the mental components of which are of course reading and writing.  I love taiji like I've loved few other things; I often think that if I had nothing else but a life of constant taiji, space to write about it, and some pretty trees to look at, that'd be great.

But when to practice?  At home, with the kid bouncing around and things begging to be cleaned?  At work, in the five minutes between meetings?  Making the time to get to class once a week is epic difficult, though I do it, doggedly, but far too often without having practiced at all in the in-between.

And when to write?  I get up around 4:30am, but the writing, it turns out, takes more than just getting up. 
More often than not I surf blearily, drinking coffee and trying to gather my thoughts and the day's plans, until it's time to head out for work.

I never wanted to admit that I couldn't do everything, that I was going to have to say no even if something sounded awesome, involved a really cool person, or I'd never done it before.  But you just can't have everything all at once; if you want that nice retirement plan and health insurance, it's going to cost you big-time, as is the perfect kids' lesson-plan and the clean house and oh yeah, the novel and the black-belt.  There are sacrifices, and some of them really suck.  Welcome to adulthood.

But the important thing is to make these decisions as consciously as possible, I think.

So this weekend, that's what I'm doing — I'm refocusing things.  I'm putting some recurring plans in place, for writing and practice, that will get absolute priority…even from work, and cleaning, and parenting.  (To clarify regarding a common misconception:  no, more parenting is not always better; kids need time and activities to themselves too.  It's just up to the parents to schedule that so that it gives us time as well — and that's no mean feat.)   

This weekend I re-remember what's most important, and I state clearly to myself what I'm willing to bend for (work emergencies?  Sudden opportunities?) and what I'm not.  This weekend I re-invent my Super Picky Schedule to be super picky about the things I want out of life too, not just the things I feel responsible for. 

And there's another element to Refocusing:  The Present.  By acting intentionally rather than responding to pressures (i.e. all the "faced with"s from the list above), you bring your focus into the moment more.  …Make no mistake, this is probably why a lot of people don't do it.  Swimming naked in the Now can be a lot less comfortable than a nice ride in a pre-built boat that just goes where the waves push it.

But this is life.  It's not about being comfortable.  We all get to sleep sooner or later…  ;)

Boy, they weren't kidding when they said the answers are in you.  I'm learning so much philosophically from studying the mechanics of my own body, it isn't even funny; and it isn't funny how angry it's making me that there aren't classes in this in the academic world, either.

Here's something I learned from trying to perfect a Qi-driven punch.  (By the way, I capitalize Qi the way I'd imagine we'd capitalize Ocean if there was only one; and I italicize it to note that it's a transliteration of a foreign term and should be pronounced "chi".)

Intentional living is a lot, lot more about letting go at the right time than it is about reaching for anything.  Reaching, wanting, desiring things is pushing your energy out into a void, because the thing you're aiming for isn't there yet.  It's also, by necessity, neglecting to put that energy into doing the best you can with what you're already holding. 

Everything you hold, you will need to let go of.  Other things will be placed in front of you and you'll need to let go of some things in order to take new things; sometimes you'll also need to let go because it's just time for those things to enter non-existence (or time for you to).  Fearing or obsessing about what that's going to be like is both pointless (you simply can't know what it'll be like) and, again, wasting energy that you could be using to do the best job holding them that you can.

So you throw* a perfect punch* by using your energy correctly:  You focus on what you're holding; you be ready to let it go when it's time — not too soon, and not too late.  If you're ignoring it to reach for other things, or to fear letting it go when the time comes, you're letting go too soon.  By releasing (any energy: physical, emotional, etc) at just the right time, you gain incredible power.

In other terminology, perfect yang is surrounded by perfect yin.  Since we move in time, and the yang is a split instant whereas the yin is all the time that leads up to and follows it, the yin is much more accessible to our control. 

In other, other terminology, you can make a perfect action by getting all the stillness on either side of it just right.

*insert any verb & noun here

First, they’re cool.  And if you know a physical art that you like, then by necessity you’ve made yourself cooler in your own estimation.  Woot for self-esteem.

(Oh, and by “physical art” I mean the set of physical skills that would include–to different degrees–kungfu, playing an instrument, skateboarding, calligraphy, and dance.)

Secondly, the experience of going from poorly or fairly physically fit to being physically fit is one of the most amazing things this world offers.  To notice new strength, pulsing new energy, new physical *and* mental abilities on a regular basis is…superherolike, even!

Thirdly, they do fantastic things to your vocabulary.  Often you get to learn all these archaic and/or foreign terms, and moreover you really learn them, complete with the somatic (moving, living) meanings.  Or if the art is more humble, maybe you still get to learn what’s really meant by “fakey pop shove-it”, which is also pretty darn cool.

[That "cool" (for your chosen hypothetical definitions thereof) is an inherent good is a given, by the way.  It must be, due to its being a direct descendant of Fun, and the inviolate Eighties Movie Theory of the Inarguable Superiority of Fun.  ...I'm only partially kidding.  In a sense the EM Theory is simply pointing out how we know in our guts that fun and cool -- interesting and enjoyable -- things are good, and how we lose touch with this intuition as we age.  When I'm up on one foot like Jet Li I know what it is to feel cool, and I know it's a wonderful thing.]

The fourth awesome thing about a physical art is that it makes you really aware of how much you could lose if you were injured.  This in turn makes you more careful about dumb shit (like wearing seatbelts), and also more grateful for how you’re able to enjoy your body now.

And that’s the fifth thing, in a sense:  You get to enjoy your body.  This is a particularly profound thing for a lot of women, I think.  For many women the body is a burden in one or more ways — whether or not it’s popularly perceived as “nice”.  But regardless of gender, I’m beginning to realize how little many people — even healthy people in generally good shape who have decent sex lives — really get to enjoy being in their bodies and using them really well. The experience of feeling like you’ve attained some mastery with your body is…well, it’s just as awesome as it looks in the movies, I think.

So there you have it!  Five darn good reasons to get into a physical art.  Here’s how:

1. Pick one you think is cool — seriously, that’s how I chose mine (in fact it’s how a lot of the high-up students in our Temple did), and I couldn’t have chosen better.
2. Then grab hold of your Art and don’t let it go.
3. Profit!  ;)

Because I needed a new project, you know.  …I wonder if neophile.com is taken?  (Poop, yes it is.)  But still.  I had to take a moment there and revel in my own ridiculousness.

So, for the last week and a half I’ve been working through section 1 (of five) in the “Shaolin Workout” (see giant pic below).

This book has an interesting gimmick:  It was written by perhaps the most famous living Shaolin monk, Sifu Shi Yan Ming.  (Note: In Hanan province Mandarin, “Shi” is pronounced “Shir”.  I think it sounds funny; I smile every time I say it. Which is kinda cool in its own way. ;) …You can learn about him anywhere (and should, if you find that kind of thing interesting), but for “consumer purposes” probably what counts is that this is the Sifu who teaches a) the Wu-Tang Clan, b) Bjork, and c) a hundred thousand (at least) kungfu wannabes who’d be at his school in a red second if we could afford it.

To be honest, I kinda thought the introduction, which has a nice history of the Shaolin Temple as well as a detailed accounting of Sifu’s fascinating life-story, and the beautiful photography of an astonishingly cool-looking person, was worth the price of the book on its own.  So take my recommendation to buy it as either a Definite Yes, or an As Yet Uncollapsed Waveform, depending on whether you care if the workout actually works or not.

“Does it work?” is the question I’ll be answering sometime in the near-ish future.

Shaolin Workout, The - Cover

So far, I can say these things about Section One (under the Mercy Cut):

[Read more →]

John over at Tai-Blog posted this cool Tao Te Ching quote:

“The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself; The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete. “
Lao Tzu

In other words, for “the sage” (which is literally “the enlightened person” in the language of old Chinese texts), life is not a zero-sum game.

The sage doesn’t have to choose, as many of us believe we do, between taking more for ourselves and giving less to others.  Instead, giving to others is how the sage gets more for hirself.

This also reminds me of a Native American saying I was lucky enough to learn:  The best place to store your extra food is in your neighbor’s belly.

Most modern people approach life as though it is a zero-sum game:  To get something, you must take it from someone else.  To find happiness, you must contribute in some way to someone else’s misery.  In order for you to have an abundant life, someone else must suffer scarcity.

And while the truth is more subtle, it isn’t that subtle, if you can let go of the fear that makes running in and taking as much as you can carry sound like the only reasonable option.

It’s called give-and-take, and there’s a reason the “give” comes first.  When you give, you free up something else for the taking.  If you need something specific, you have to figure out what to give so that you can get that thing.  As long as you give, then take, the balance is preserved.

Nature used this principle to build a huge abundance of life in nearly every crack of this planet (and human beings using zero-sum thinking are killing it off at breathtaking speeds).  It’s not new science, and it’s not far-out hippie mumbo-jumbo either.  It’s just the same old “there is no spoon” angle: Rather than reaching out and forcing the world to bend to your will, you bend first, and if you do it right the world moves exactly how you wanted with no effort on your part.  This is also the essence of the classical Taiji wisdom “Yield to overcome“.

Give, and ye shall receive — makes a lot more sense than “ask, and ye shall receive”, doesn’t it?  When I was a kid, I was always so frustrated by that saying — ask who?  Ask God?  Well, I asked God for a pony and I didn’t get it, so I must be asking wrong…how do you ask so that you actually get results?

The answer, I think, is by giving.

China has been an area of intense study for me recently, so I thought I should share some of my discoveries and realizations.

One is that some of the coolest blogs ever deal with China.  Maybe it’s because it’s such a country of secrets, with a simultaneously ancient and powerful, yet almost completely buried and lost, traditional culture.  Maybe it’s because of the mind-boggling dichotomies that one runs up against continually in talking about it:  the startling beauty and rampant neglect, the highly advanced art and severely retarded politics, the graceful, intelligent mysticism and clunky, often clueless social mores.

But for whatever reason, I think I could read myself sick on China-related blogs and still want more (shut up, that wasn’t meant to be a Chinese-food joke!  ;)  …Here are a few I’m liking now:

Manyul Im’s Chinese Philosophy — May not fascinate you as much as me, since it’s a philosophy prof’s blog, but I love reading his reports on how academia is discovering, and in many ways catching up to, ancient Chinese philosophy.

The Useless Tree — Also a philosopher’s blog, but this one’s much less academically-oriented and more about comparing Eastern and Western wisdom and teachings.  Very cool.

The China Beat — Full of history, politics, essays, book recommendations, and all kinds of mind-boggling stuff.  I always find myself wanting an extra day in my life just to follow their links!

Meiguozi — talk about creative; the author of this one is designing new Chinese characters for modern concepts.  This was the first one I saw, and it dropped my jaw:

It’s a character to represent Sierpinski Triangle.  IS THAT NOT FREAKING AMAZING.  I think I want a tattoo of it!  ;)

Besides blogs, there’ve been some great books — most notably The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices, which is an obsessively-compelling and truly heartbreaking look at what life was like for Chinese women, in all different walks of life, in the ancient and far-away years of the 1990′s. The combination of the content and the publication date ought to be enough to give a feminist a heart-attack at half a mile; and any human being worth their salt, at a hundred paces.  But it’s amazing stuff, stuff you never hear about even today, and which will totally change your view of the world — and not necessarily for the worse.  It’s a very compassionate, sympathetic detailing of what are often shocking inequalities and injustices, and how they arise, not usually from malice, but from ignorance, long-embedded teachings, political manipulation and simple fear.

I’ve also been poking at the language a lot, wishing I could learn it, but pretty sure I can’t do it on my own.  I’m not terrible with languages, but self-teaching oneself Mandarin is pretty damn tall order!  Gah, it’d be worth it, though, just to be able to translate some of the poetry with even a few of the proper connotations intact.  I’ve bought a few books — an old-old volume on Chinese Calligraphy that I’m supplementing my clumsy attempts-from-cheap-how-to-books with, and a cute kid’s book called The Pet Dragon, which is a really cute introduction to the basic letters, and which my daughter absorbed completely in less than a week.   (Did I also mention she can count to ten in Chinese?  That’s my girl.  ;)

Also, as often happens to people who start reading about China, I got sucked into reading more about Pingfang and Unit 731. Which you really can’t avoid, any more than you can avoid reading about the Holocaust if you study Israel.  Unlike the Holocaust, though, this crime against humanity (also of nearly unbelievable scope and cruelty) was never admitted to or apologized for by the country that committed it, and America has been actively complicit in its cover-up.  Moreover, due to the nature of Chinese citizens, especially rural and recently-rural ones, many people have allowed themselves to be convinced that it’s best just to let it go and pretend it didn’t happen.  o.O

DUH WARNING:  Follow links to info about Unit 731 at your own risk and preferably not right before bedtime.

What a paradox is China!

I love it, but I don’t think I want to go there.  (At least, not without insider help.)

I adore reading about it, but it gives me nightmares regularly.

I’m horrified by the politics of cruelty, bald-faced lies and corruption, yet every time I look hard, I see the same things at work in my own backyard.

(Want an example?  The American government put together a series of meetings about health care reform that included a) people who want to keep the Insurance Industry in power, and b) people who want it to share power with the government.  When a Doctor’s group and others went to a meeting and protested the lack of even a single advocate to speak for the idea of a Universal, single-payer, non-Industry system, they were jailed and silenced. The government never addressed their concern except with thinly-disguised pro-Industry propaganda.)

Oh, also, funny fact?  I’m actually related to someone who’s a noted Sinologist, specializing in the subject of women in China.  Needless to say, I’m trying hard to re-establish contact with him — I’ve never even read his book!

Alright all you thinkers and schemers and reluctant believers, have some fun with this video, because I know I did:

Is this proof of, or evidence for, the existence of Qi energy?

Lately I’ve been fascinated with air.

In Taiji, air is one of the main sources of available energy.  We gather energy and use it to enlighten ourselves through focused attention and action; or to act upon the physical world (martial applications).  Energy is everywhere, of course — once you’re talking about it that broadly, you hit Einstein square in the EMC and anything that’s not mass is de facto energy — but the lessons I’m being taught seem based on the idea that it’s the energy in the air that’s the easiest to gather and make use of.  We pull it in through focused breathing, and scoop it up when we move our limbs, or our swords, through it; our movements prefer big arcs when possible, to contact more air and gather more energy.

(Interesting cross-contamination of symbols:  In the tarot, the suit of “Swords” represents the element air.)

Air.  Breath.  Psuke is one word for it in (ancient) Greek; the word also means “soul” or “animating force” — because, I suspect, the Greeks were smart enough to realize that circulating air was the one sure thing that was missing from a dead person, but present in a live one.  (Dead bodies can, under the right circumstances, move, bleed, grow, defecate, etc.; but they don’t inhale.)

Air enters and leaves our bodies, not shallowly like things we put on our skin, or slowly and via great chemical machinery like things we put in our stomach, but purely and quickly; a constant flush.  We can go without food for weeks, water for days, but air?  Four minutes, roughly, before we’re so damaged there’s not much point in charging the defibrillator.

I’ve always, always felt more invigorated by a stiff wind than anything, anywhere, ever.  Put a fresh wind on my face and it’s like sucking on a battery.  For the same reason, I can’t sleep with even a small fan on.  ;)

What is a “fresh” wind?  Is it a smell, or the amount of energy in it?

Air is also the Great Hidden, the thing that can’t be seen but which trumps most of the things that can be seen in importance and power.  It’s so light and refined that it can, when still, be completely invisible.  It can also move with a softness that makes warm water, dandelion fuzz and sleeping kittens seem rough and clumsy — and of course, if it wants to it can throw a house, pin a straw through a tree-trunk, or lift a lake completely out of its bed in minutes, dropping it wherever it pleases.  What could be more ninja, more zen, more perfected in its balance of extremes than air?

Air can penetrate nearly anything, knock over nearly anything, and holds the keys of life and death for most everything.

Does air hold energy, in the sense of force or power?

Does it transmit this energy to us, and if so, can we control how much by skill and practice?

(P.S. for usefulness:  One of the things that definitely improves air, whether you agree it’s by energy or not, is plants.  A list of the ones that are great for air-purification can be found here.)

I’m forever in the debt of people who drag me kicking and screaming through explanations of things I’d rather not explain…this one comes from my trusty pain-in-the-ass penpal Sabbath, who’s been taking the opportunity to bug me about my “faith” that Chi energy is a real thing.  (I did indeed have it coming, if you were wondering.)

Keep in mind that the definitions of some of the terms I’m using here are established elsewhere in the conversation.  I’ll babble more about them if you like, but if you just take words to mean broadly what you think they should, then this should work…

***

I’ve never taken it on faith that there IS a spiritual realm, because I’ve had glimpses of it my whole life, and every time I despair that I’ll never find it again, I get another glimpse.  And I’m not willing to take any of the facts about the spiritual realm on faith, because if it’s there, I should be able to find out for myself.  Of course, when you’re a kid you figure this ought to be easy; it took me a while to realize what kind of awareness was necessary and how much work it would take to develop it.  Most of what people (usually people selling books) propose as methods for accessing spiritual awareness is complete B.S.; I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by how much of it is, but I was.  All meditation, for example, is not equal; and simply “visualizing” things or issuing “affirmations” to oneself (or “prayers” to imaginary other beings, if you ask me) does exactly squat.  The spiritual lives in the Now, which the realm of thought and words is outside of, so to experience it requires doing one of the hardest things any human being can learn to do:  Quieting the mind.

The meditations and exercises I’m learning now actually work, though not quickly.  (Then again, gods know I need to be doing them more.)  Learning to feel one’s internal energy pulls awareness away from thinking, and by putting thoughtless attention in the body, the mind can be shut up long enough for me to sense that layer, call it a depth, of the moment that’s usually missing when life is whirring by from past to future with nary a gap in-between.  As soon as I sense this, all the “symptoms” of spiritual awareness as it’s commonly understood descend upon me:  Calm, peace, wisdom I didn’t know I had, love and charity I didn’t know I felt, access to intuitive knowledge (**), and a surprisingly complete freedom from fear and worry.  I have found many false truths in my life, and many true truths that were useful but still worldly, but never one that could cause all those things in me; I consider them the rock-solid evidence that what I’m experiencing is truly spiritual.

***

…There’s a lot you can argue with there, if you’re in an arguin’ mood; but if you’re not, think on this:  Is there anything you consider “rock solid” evidence of the existence of a spiritual realm, or of your contact with it?  How far off do you think I am in what I’m willing to accept as that evidence?