HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

The way the martial art of Tai-chi approaches grappling is very applicable to daily life.  The pressures we face on a psychological, emotional and spiritual level are the way life grapples with us.  When common sense is applied to grappling we can easily deal with the strongest opponent.  Rather than fight back against the pressures we examine the nature of those pressures and neutralize them. 

In one technique we can imagine the pressure as a line drawn through the body.  The line starts at the opponent’s hand or arm, where he is applying the pressure and then continues in the direction of the pressure.  Each of his hands or arms is exerting a pressure and each has a line.  You imagine where those two lines will meet within your body and then relax that point.  You only need to relax about one inch of muscle. 

When the point at which the pressures meet relaxes, the opponent’s force is neutralized.  The skill is to relax just that exact point and to not relax more than about an inch of muscular area.  Once the opponent is neutralized, you can do what you want with him.

The meeting point of the pressures shows you how you resist the force of the opponent with your own tension.  You are then more easily able to let go of the resistance.  The opponent depends on your resistance to control you. 

Yet the remaining muscles of the body maintain their firmness to keep the body’s structure intact.  You do not simply collapse your body but strategically relax only the meeting point of the lines.

In our everyday lives we are faced with many pressures – financial, emotional, etc. The meeting point of those pressures show how we fight against the pressure.  If we imagine ourselves as victims in a world battling against us we will wear ourselves out.  We can just as easily ask ourselves, “What is this pressure telling me?  Why am I battling against the pressure?” 

I have found that the reason most people feel pressured in life is that they are unwilling to change as they go through life.  Perhaps they feel they are entitled to a certain high standard of life and resent having to control their spending.  “The other guy can buy these things so why shouldn’t I be entitled to do the same?”

Perhaps you demand certain patterns of behavior from other people.  After all, you are entitled to be treated in the manner to which you would like to become accustomed.   You want the world to conform to your expectations and it usually doesn’t. 

The Tai-chi solution is to make changes from the inside out.  Gain control over your lifestyle before trying to gain control over the rest of the world.  If you can improve your health and your knowledge, your relationship to the world will change.  If you become more aware of your body and end the isolation of the mind and body characteristic of our culture, you will become more powerful.  If you understand how the advertising industry affects your emotions and how other institutions of our society try to control your behavior, you will be freed from their pressures. 

When you notice your frustration, your anger, your sadness, you can then more easily see how these pressures control how you feel about yourself.  Anyone basing their feeling of self worth on the pressures of others who want to control them, is “building their house on sand” which we actually do here on Long Island.  That’s why the wealthy homes on Dune Road get washed into the sea every few years.  When those homeowners expect the taxpayer to rebuild their homes for them or to re-build Dune Road, they are not following the principles of Tai-chi.

There was a time when cultures were based on the warmth, closeness and sharing of small communities.   The world most of us live in seems cold and isolated.  We do seem like victims thrown into a world foreign to our basic natures. 

We could turn cold and accept that the rest of our lives will be a miserable battle.  Or we could build a small community of people – friends and family – and create the kind of culture we would like to live in.  We can do this by starting with ourselves and imagining our own selves as a community.  There is the emotional part of us, the mind, the body and all its individual parts, the will, the internal energy, our memories, our habits and other parts.  Each of these is energized and actively participates in our every action. 

Ancient cultures provided a teaching called “The Elements” which helped people to develop a harmony among all these parts.  We don’t have this teaching in our modern world.  By participating in training such as Tai-chi, Zookinesis and Yoga, which are based on the teaching of the elements, we can create this harmony within ourselves.  That can serve as the basis of a more harmonious attitude and pattern of behavior in our circle of friends and family. 

Whenever you feel a “point of pressure”, use that as an opportunity to shift and adjust something in your life so as to make that pressure irrelevant. 

Before we are about to attempt anything, the attention assesses the body, mind, will – all the “elements” – to see if you are prepared to accomplish the mission.  If your attention feels that you are not ready, it will cause you to hesitate or stop trying.  By building your inner strength you feel more prepared and are more willing to try new things.  You no longer consider a new challenge with fear.  Your attention assesses your elements and finds them strong and ready.  This creates an entirely new attitude which leads to success.

Even though we may be dealing with a mental or emotional challenge, the attention assesses the body’s physical condition to determine if you are ready to deal with the challenge. Is each part of our body flexible and strong and is it filled with our awareness?  Our intellectual way of interacting with each other in modern society is a more modern form of behavior.  Our biology still works on a physical “flight or fight response” mode.  So in order to feel confident to tackle a modern type of interaction, we still instinctually assess our physical readiness. 

When we are grappling, we also need to assess the partner’s readiness.  We need to use our attention to assess his body. His grappling behaviors will come from his own sense of physical readiness.  We need to be more aware of his readiness than he is of his own.  This is the skill that push hands provides to us. 

We can also block the ability of his attention to assess the readiness of his body.  This can easily be done by constantly shifting the meeting point of your two lines of force on his body.  His attention may be able to assess if he is ready to deal with any particular pattern of pressure but if that pattern shifts slightly and regularly, his attention will be worn out quickly.  You don’t want to shift it enough to throw your own body off – the smaller the shifts the better.  As you practice this you will begin to vividly feel how his attention panics and his body tenses when you shift the pressure and how his attention tries to re-assess the situation.  The grappling game is then played on the basis of attacking his attention rather than his body.

Another important principle in grappling is “Let Yang be Yang and Yin be Yin”.  This is an expression from Zookinesis training.  It means that the Yang energy, which is expansive and energizing, should be allowed to fully express itself.  The Yin energy, which is grounding, should be allowed to fully express itself.  Imagine walking a dog on a leash.  The dog pulls you forward and you tug back on the leash to control the dog.  If you let the leash go, the dog would run as fast as he could and feel very free and happy.  You would be able to relax.  Letting go of the leash is “letting Yang be Yang”.  Relaxing is “letting Yin be Yin”. 

Don’t pit yin against yang as when you are holding the dog back.  If you do that throughout your life, one day your Yang energy will give out and your Yin energy will implode within you causing death.  Rather, allow each energy its full expression and in that, seek balance.

Grappling is different than the dog on the leash situation because the grappler’s force presses inward.  In this case, seek balance by your yang force filling the yin areas of the opponent’s body.  This balance evens out the opponent’s superior physical strength.

Allow your Yin force to be grounded by his physical force, bringing him into your foundation.  This is “letting Yin be Yin”.  Allow your response to originate in your foundation to destabilize his alignment. 

His Yang energy is now in your foundation so you can upset his whole body from there.  Let him feel the pressure of the volcano in your foundation as Yang energy builds, and the endless depth and power of the magma about to erupt.  His force will be burned with only scattered cinders remaining and you will be in control.  Then allow your Yang energy to be Yang.  It will erupt by itself.  You don’t need to force it.

The mistake many grapplers make is to turn Yang energy into tension.  In this case your Yang energy jumps within your own body, hardening it.  Rather, allow your Yang energy only to jump within the opponent’s body, leaving your body as relaxed as possible while still maintaining its structure.  You will need very little physical movement.

Remember also that expanding Yang requires an in-breath into the lower part of the lungs.  You should not breathe out or bring the breath upward when Yang leaps out. 

All of this requires a great deal of training of course.  But the result is that when you are faced with everyday life you respond the way you are trained.  You don’t get rattled.  You simply assess your own balance of energy, the other person’s balance and make the most advantageous response which is usually the simplest.  You let the other person fill their bodies, minds and emotions with Yang energy while you remain balanced.  And you don’t wear yourself out by pitting Yin against Yang.  This keeps you young and energized.

The internal martial arts train the student to become more powerful in his everyday world, not just in fighting itself.  They were a way of encoding ancient secrets of keeping your body and mind young throughout your life and developing magnified vitality.

The first principle is the use of minimum movement.  While you duck away from a strike, you move only an inch away from the opponent’s fist.  When you strike, you tense your arm only as much as needed to prevent the arm from collapsing.  Your power comes from the sequential expansion of your joints and muscles from the ground up.  The power is a surge through the body and the body as a whole stays still. 

In everyday life you change your perspective from reacting to the negative qualities of other people to letting go of the “handle” that other people seem to have on you that allows them to affect you with their behavior.  Your mind and emotions become like a still lake.  The lake reflects the scene around it but is not disturbed by that scene.  In the same way, you are fully aware of all that is going on around you but you have dropped the internal mechanism that makes your “internal waters” choppy.

This does not result in losing your emotions.  It just means that your emotions don’t get churned up because of the behavior of other people.  You are still affected by the beauty around you and your connection to nature.  The result is that you can be the calm in the middle of the storm and clearly see how to be effective in any situation.  In our modern world the “storm” never seems to end.

In grappling, you can maneuver the part of the body the other person grabs while keeping the rest of the body calm.  Your whole body is not thrown by the force of the opponent.  If he grabs your arm, your arm joints, including the shoulder, move and rotate to deflect his force.  If he grabs you from behind, a small shift in the hip joint can break his connection to the ground (his “root”) and allow you to throw him. 

Your body becomes a collection of many parts and you have control over each part individually.  When confronted with force you don’t tense up the whole body.  Instead you direct his force through your body into your own root and use it to strengthen your foundation.  Once the opponent’s force has been drained in this way, you can throw him.

In our everyday lives we have many “parts”.  There is the physical part, the emotional part, the mental part, the spiritual part, etc.  The study of how to keep all those parts in balance is called, “The Elements”.  In this training we learn to be a “passive observer” (of our own behavior) as if we were an audience member watching a play.  We ask ourselves, “Does our behavior make any sense?”  Then we play the part of the director and adjust the script.

In this way we don’t have an investment in any particular pattern of behaviors.  We realize that we are not those behaviors – that we are so much more.  We are a beautiful, natural creature connected to the rest of nature.  So much of what wears us out in everyday life is our investment in a set of behaviors that hurt us.  Even though we know that our addictions and negative behaviors hurt us, we feel they are us and we don’t want to change who we are.

The key is to learn who we truly are – not a set of damaging behaviors but an incredible interaction of many parts, all of which are connected to every other part of nature.  We learn to become like an orchestra conductor harmonizing many instruments to play a beautiful piece of music, and that music is our lives.

When I listen to Public Broadcasting programs of the oldies groups, I am still amazed at the talent of those groups.  It used to be all about the music.  While there is still talent to be found now, it is more about the money now.  I don’t hear the kind of talent there used to be (or at least that kind of talent can’t seem to get commercially successful).  We use a lot of throw away products now that are cheaply made.  Is that what is happening to our lives? 

Even our religions, which are supposed to guide us, are more cheaply made.  If you are a member of this religion you will go to heaven.  If you are a member of any other, you won’t.  So religions are based more on the fear of going to hell than on spiritual development.  That to me is “cheap” religion.

The cheapening of lives wears us out.  When we yearn for value in our lives, to develop ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, we continue to grow and improve throughout life.  We become healthier, stronger, smarter and happier.  The quality of our lives reflects the quality of our products and our art. 

Martial arts are called an “art” because they really train you to improve your everyday life.  The internal martial arts teach you how to let go of unnecessary movements and behaviors, to stay calm in the midst of turmoil and to become intimately aware of the balance of your “parts” so that you stay in harmony within yourself.  They teach you that sparring is not a struggle but the art of remaining calm and centered and yet effective. 

You strive not to conquer the opponent, but to conquer your own ineffectiveness.  You learn that your power comes from your awareness of what is going on around you and your stillness – reacting only as much as is necessary.  In this way you don’t wear yourself out by living life as a great struggle. 

As the minutes and hours go by in your life ask yourself if you are enjoying those minutes and hours.  How much of the day is spent being aggravated and worried and how much enjoying life?  Isn’t it worth investing time to change that proportion?  Life goes by quickly and time can’t be recovered. 

While ancient knowledge can’t help us with modern technology it can help us change that proportion.  It can help us stay healthier and more active throughout our lives, enjoy each day and become more effective.  That is the kind of technology some of the ancient cultures were good at.  While Tai-chi and Zookinesis may seem just like physical exercises or a martial art, they really teach so much more.  They are a treasure of ancient knowledge.