HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

Tai-chi-Chuan teaches you how to avoid attack on the street and to make it difficult for a sparring partner to defeat you in class.  Even if you are not strong or are not used to fighting, there are ways you can thwart the attacker’s efforts.

A mugger is looking for an easy attack on someone who won’t or can’t fight back.  He mugs for a living and doesn’t want to get hurt “on the job”, just like anyone else.  The mugger must assess the physical abilities of his victim as well as the victim’s state of awareness. 

There are three qualities you can develop to lessen the chances of becoming a victim.  The first is the alignment of the body.  If your body is not aligned properly you are probably not involved in any physical activity that requires coordination.  The mugger can sense this.  Any training, such as Tai-chi, Zookinesis, Yoga or Pilates can teach you the proper alignment of the body.  Even the use of such physical therapy aids as the foam roller will improve your posture.  This will also improve your overall health.

The second quality is the fluidity of the body.  If your body is stiff and tight, you probably can’t move very well and certainly can’t run after the attacker.  A person who walks fluidly and is well connected to the ground may offer the mugger trouble.  If your body seems bouncy and alive you may have the energy to run after him.  The training methods mentioned above as well as such activities as trampoline work will bring that fluidity to the body.  Trampoline, Zookinesis and the animal forms of the martial arts are especially good at adding that bounciness to the body.

The third quality a mugger looks out for is awareness.  If you are aware of what is going on around you, you can prepare for an attack.  Strong awareness also shows that you have had some training, as the awareness of most people is very dead.   All of the above training helps with awareness, especially the Push Hands exercise of Tai-chi, sparring in general and the Zookinesis exercises.

In a classroom situation there are ways to thwart the sparring partner as well.  Most fighters concentrate on the opponent’s fists and feet and sometimes elbows and knees as well.  But they don’t concentrate on the space between the sparring partners.  Proper Tai-chi training teaches you to move into the open spaces so that the opponent is jammed.  You should be more interested in the spaces between you than in the strikes of the partner.  Let his strikes trigger you to move into the open spaces where you can easily deliver your own strikes. 

This requires that you don’t keep moving forward and back as with most styles of fighting.  You stay in and don’t allow the partner space to move or even time to relax and catch his breath.

Another way to quickly tire out the partner is to make his attention move rapidly.  Most people have very weak attentions.  While a properly trained martial artist has a “field of attention” so that he can deal with many things going on at a time, most fighters have a “single-pointed attention” which can only be in one place at one time.  That person’s attention has to jump from one place to another and it gets tired.  

So you should strike to different parts of the body.  You can punch the legs as well as the head and body.  You can integrate kicking with the punching rather than using punching for a while and then switching to kicking.  Add a little bit of grappling as well, just for a second or two, here and there and then go right back to punching and kicking.  If your partner cannot predict what you will do next, his attention is uncertain and wears out quickly.

Keep the body fluid.  Allow your hips, lower ribs and elbows to rotate in small circles and allow the head to reflect this movement.  This will allow you to respond quickly and will make it difficult for your partner to aim.  It will require his attention to follow your movements and most people cannot do that for long.

These are but a few simple ways that proper Tai-chi training can teach you to be uninviting to attackers and to make it difficult for an attacker to defeat you.

Tai-chi-Chuan uses a fundamentally different fighting strategy than any other martial art.  When this strategy is applied to everyday life and to conducting business, it provides a more powerful and effective approach.  This is just one example of that strategy.

“Yield to Yang/fill in Yin”.  The aggressor concentrates his force in a particular area.  If he strikes with his fist, he has a target in mind.  You learn to automatically retreat from his target and to find the most empty and unguarded spot on his body to move into and strike.  The retreat is not away from him but rather, towards his unguarded area.

In everyday life the defeats we constantly experience are like the strikes of an aggressor.  If we focus on the defeat, we are like the fighter who blocks the incoming strike, focusing on the aggressor’s power.  If we are thrown by the defeat, we are like the fighter who moves away from the strike.  If we contemplate the change in our life situation caused by the defeat and re-adjust our focus to take advantage of this change, then we are like the fighter who moves around the strike and delivers his own strike. 

As a fighter you know that the aggressor will not just stand there and take your punches and kicks.  Most of your efforts may never reach their target and some of his efforts will reach you.  If you thought of each of his strikes as your defeat, you could never psychologically muster the nerve to practice sparring.  Your own emotions would destroy you more than would the opponent.

Much of the impact of a defeat is not the effect of the situation itself.  It is more that it hurts your self image.  It is your self image which is being beaten, more than your body or your life.  Once you realize that your self image is not you, then you are on your way to victory. 

True humility is not acting as if you were a lowly human being.  It is the understanding that your self image is not you.  Your behavior no longer is controlled by needing to maintain that image. 

If, while sparring in class, someone strikes you, you can appreciate their skill and be happy for them, even though you got hit.  In life you can appreciate the challenges you need to overcome and the skills you gain as you turn each defeat into an opportunity. 

One of the high level achievements in Tai-chi sparring is to substitute your self image with the principles of Tai-chi, mainly yielding to Yang and filling Yin.  You can only be defeated if you don’t allow your self image to grow into a wider perspective. 

In business it is well known that you should not argue with a customer.  Instead of arguing that your product is indeed a good one, you ask the customer how you could improve your product.  You not only make him feel that you care, but you may actually get some good advice.  Customer complaints are the best source of good ideas.

If you are competing with other companies producing similar products, you could throw more money into advertising or spend more hours in the day promoting the product.  Or you could ask yourself, “What real needs of people are the competing products not meeting?  How can I adjust my product so that it will fill those needs?”  In other words you can compete in a “Yin” area, in a niche market that the other products are not reaching.  It would wear you out to meet head on with large companies with big advertising budgets. 

To be “nimble” in business in this way, the self image of the business has to be flexible.  You think of your business as providing a product to the customer.  Now you switch your viewpoint and think of your business as fulfilling a need of the customer.  It’s not the same and that switch changes the way you do business. 

When I began producing the “Zookinesis” exercise series of DVD’s, I approached the series as providing exercises to keep you strong, flexible and energized.  I noticed a great change in my older students through the years.  They looked, acted and felt much younger.  In fact, these exercises are supposed to keep you young, but I never explained that in my advertising.  Now I call Zookinesis “Age Reversal Exercises” and market them to seniors.  I knew all along that they are supposed to reverse aging but never thought to promote that aspect. 

Looking back, I realized that I thought that since most of my students were not seniors, I wanted to promote the fact that Zookinesis keeps you vigorous, athletic and toned.  I didn’t think age was an issue for non-seniors.  But it seems that no one wants to feel that they are getting older, whatever age they are at the moment, if by older it is meant that the body deteriorates. 

So at the beginning, I thought that I was teaching exercises just to keep you strong and flexible when the need of the students (at least in their own minds) was to stay young.  I didn’t change the exercises at all but just got better at explaining what they are in a way the students could appreciate. 

Perhaps there was yet another factor.  If I were teaching people to reverse the aging process, perhaps that means that I, myself, am getting old and that age reversal was an issue I needed to address myself.  Not wanting to think of myself as getting old, I avoided using “age reversal” as an advertising point for Zookinesis.  My vanity interfered with my business.  Yet I, of all people, knew that age is not a matter of years but of health and attitude.  This is an example of how issues of self image can interfere with business as it can interfere with everyday life.

When I first started to learn to spar with Grandmaster William C. C. Chen I couldn’t help but concentrate on his fists and feet.  Which one would hit me next?  After gaining some skill I found that I was more interested in the spaces between our body parts.  Which space could I use to deliver my own strikes?  I found that emptiness (space) was equally as important as form (the body, the strikes).  I needed to know where I could move into to avoid his strikes. 

I realized that sparring was not about maximizing hardness but rather maximizing balance. When you are not willing to change and when you invest all your hopes in one particular outcome, that is like hardness.  When you invest in developing your attention to follow and adjust to change, when you accept change as part of life and when you learn the strategies of change to always look for opportunity, then your life is based on balance.

You maximize hardness when you try to defeat hardness by blocking rather than ducking.  That brings up another related issue.

“If you think of winning and losing you are already defeated”.  In Tai-chi sparring, you concentrate on the details of the aggressor’s body mechanics and the pattern of his attention.  You are so connected to him that you feel that he is part of you.  Your ability to remain connected to him in this way is essential to how you spar.  You don’t think of defeating an “enemy” but of finding a weakness and striking that weakness.  It is the weakness you discover at any one moment, that you are sparring against, not the person.  The aggressor and you are one unit.  The weakness are the target. 

In everyday life there is a tendency to think of yourself as fighting against the world.  According to Tai-chi principles, the world you experience is, to a large extent, a reflection of the world you have created inside yourself.  Through the Tai-chi forms, push hands, chi-gung, Zookinesis and other practices you can examine that inner world and see exactly how the weakness there can distort your view of the world around you.  You are no longer battling the world but correcting that balancing mechanism that creates your outer life from your inner dynamics.  Sparring is actually the most effective practice to give you this insight and the skills to make the corrections inside of yourself. 

The world around you is no longer your “enemy”.  Defeats are just changes.  The only real defeat is when your attention becomes rigid and you can no longer adapt to changes.  You are defeated when you let yourself become old, no matter how many years you have lived.  When you are no longer able to adapt to change, you are old.  Flexible in body, flexible in mind – you stay young

The power in Tai-chi-Chuan sparring comes from relaxation with a minimum use of muscle tension. This contrasts with “hard” or “external” styles. The power of the punch, for example, originates in the foot as it presses into the ground. Each joint expands sequentially from there so the force emanates upward. The force moves through the leg and hips and then directly to the elbow and fist, bypassing the upper body. The upper body sits loosely on the lower body. To the extent that the upper body tenses, this detracts from the force that moves out into the opponent’s body and increases the amount of force that stays in the puncher’s body.

At the moment of impact, the body must not tense up any more than is minimally necessary to maintain the firmness of the body’s structure (including the punching arm). Any tension beyond that point decreases the amount of force moving into the opponent. Your fist is not completely tensed up as you strike.

In the fraction of a second it takes to impact, your body must perceive the balance and alignment of the opponent so that your body can re-align itself to take the opponent’s situation into consideration. Your body aligns itself to deliver the most effective punch according to the alignment of the opponent. Your muscles and joints must re-align, all at the same time, instantly. And of course, your body must have the knowledge of how to sense the opponent and re-adjust. If your body were stiff, you would sense nothing and not be able to re-adjust.

Your force must move out equally into the floor, through the foot, as into the opponent. In external styles. the tension of the body is used as the “floor”. You punch out from your own tension. In Tai-chi-Chuan, the actual floor is used as the floor. This releases the body to be flexible and responsive.

As the front part of your body expands to deliver the punch, your back must relax and sink into the floor. Your front cannot expand if your back doesn’t relax. And if you expand your back and front at the same time, you just lift yourself out of your root (your connection to the ground). There need to be an equal amount of you sinking as expanding.

In this way, your center remains still, and the stillness of the center is necessary for power. It is like jacking up a car to change a tire. If you place the base of the jack on marbles or on slippery mud, it will slip and the car will fall down. If your center moves about, the structure of the body cannot remain aligned to deliver the maximum power.

Even the arm itself remains relaxed until it makes contact. Only then does it tense and only enough to prevent the collapse of the arm. The arm does not create the power. The body creates the power. Any attempt to add more power by using the arm muscles to punch actually cuts off the body’s power.

So relaxation is a vital ingredient to developing power in sparring. And in life, relaxation allows the body to remain strong and not be worn out. Your training in sparring helps you to deal with life in a more realistic way. You no longer feel you are battling your way through life.

Tai-chi-Chuan teaches you how to avoid attack on the street and to make it difficult for a sparring partner to defeat you in class.  Even if you are not strong or are not used to fighting, there are ways you can thwart the attacker’s efforts.

A mugger is looking for an easy attack on someone who won’t or can’t fight back.  He mugs for a living and doesn’t want to get hurt “on the job”, just like anyone else.  The mugger must assess the physical abilities of his victim as well as the victim’s state of awareness. 

There are three qualities you can develop to lessen the chances of becoming a victim.  The first is the alignment of the body.  If your body is not aligned properly you are probably not involved in any physical activity that requires coordination.  The mugger can sense this.  Any training, such as Tai-chi, Zookinesis, Yoga or Pilates can teach you the proper alignment of the body.  Even the use of such physical therapy aids as the foam roller will improve your posture.  This will also improve your overall health.

The second quality is the fluidity of the body.  If your body is stiff and tight, you probably can’t move very well and certainly can’t run after the attacker.  A person who walks fluidly and is well connected to the ground may offer the mugger trouble.  If your body seems bouncy and alive you may have the energy to run after him.  The training methods mentioned above as well as such activities as trampoline work will bring that fluidity to the body.  Trampoline, Zookinesis and the animal forms of the martial arts are especially good at adding that bounciness to the body.

The third quality a mugger looks out for is awareness.  If you are aware of what is going on around you, you can prepare for an attack.  Strong awareness also shows that you have had some training, as the awareness of most people is very dead.   All of the above training helps with awareness, especially the Push Hands exercise of Tai-chi, sparring in general and the Zookinesis exercises.

In a classroom situation there are ways to thwart the sparring partner as well.  Most fighters concentrate on the opponent’s fists and feet and sometimes elbows and knees as well.  But they don’t concentrate on the space between the sparring partners.  Proper Tai-chi training teaches you to move into the open spaces so that the opponent is jammed.  You should be more interested in the spaces between you than in the strikes of the partner.  Let his strikes trigger you to move into the open spaces where you can easily deliver your own strikes. 

This requires that you don’t keep moving forward and back as with most styles of fighting.  You stay in and don’t allow the partner space to move or even time to relax and catch his breath.

Another way to quickly tire out the partner is to make his attention move rapidly.  Most people have very weak attentions.  While a properly trained martial artist has a “field of attention” so that he can deal with many things going on at a time, most have a “single-pointed attention” which can only be in one place at one time.  That person’s attention has to jump from one place to another and it gets tired.  

So you should strike to different parts of the body.  You can punch the legs as well as the head and body.  You can integrate kicking with the punching rather than using kicking for a while and then switching to kicking.  Add a little bit of grappling as well, just for a second or two, here and there and then go right back to punching and kicking.  If your partner cannot predict what you will do next, his attention is uncertain and wears out quickly.

Keep the body fluid.  Allow your hips, lower ribs and elbows to rotate in small circles and allow the head to reflect this movement.  This will allow you to respond quickly and will make it difficult for your partner to aim.  It will require his attention to follow your movements and most people cannot do that for long.

These are but a few simple ways that proper Tai-chi training can teach you to be uninviting to attackers and to make it difficult for an attacker to defeat you.