Breathe in and ignite the sun within your belly.
Breathe out to release its rays to join the sun in the sky and the earth below.
Center your breath and relax your body to the four directions.
Expect to receive energy from everything you see and feel.
Leave space inside of you for that energy to move.
Allow the energy to continue on in its journey.
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.
All of this training culminates in a single, powerful, all revealing realization that brings power and vibrant health back to your life. You understand the source of your power as a human being and how to channel that power in your life. I will describe this realization and how to use it. The basis is the relationship between consciousness and the physical body. Imagine a glass of water sitting on bone dry earth. Sitting on the earth is a little seed. The glass of water has two eyes painted on its side as if it were looking at the seed. This is the situation most of us are in.
In this situation it is obvious that if the seed ever were to grow into a plant, the water in the glass would have to be spilled so that the earth could absorb it. The desiccated earth is our bodies. The water is our attention (our consciousness). The seed is the aliveness and power inside of us.
We have objectified our attention. We think of it as our eyes looking at something. The whole approach of Zookinesis training (or any Taoist training) is to understand that attention is not the eyes. It is an energy just as gravity or electromagnetism is energy. Our bodies have evolved within the environment of many types of energies and are the result of these influences.
Our bodies are even pressurized with about fifteen pounds per square inch of pressure, to counter the tremendous air pressure around us. In every way, our bodies have evolved as a response to the energies around us. In the same way, our minds have evolved in this environment.
Consciousness (attention) is an energy in which we have evolved. Yet we think of it as our eyes looking at something. We objectify attention as if it were in one place looking at another place or thing.
We know that the water, in the example above, needs to be absorbed by the earth. The water sitting in a glass does not help the seed. The water must lend its very nature and substance to the earth to create life. In the same way attention must be absorbed by the body so that every part of the body can become “moist”. The attention “knows” how to be absorbed by the body. The body “knows” how to absorb the attention. To let the body absorb attention, you must let go of attention rather than holding it rigid. The rigidity of attention makes the body rigid. Rigidity separates attention from the body.
That is why we practice to relax the body and to relax the attention – so that the two can merge.
When attention and the flesh merge, tremendous power and awareness floods a person. At first this may feel threatening. “How could poor little me have such power?” The tendency is to “objectify” the power, to call it God or the Devil or a spirit channeling wisdom through you. We identify our own power as images we have learned just as we originally objectified attention itself by thinking of it as the eyes.
When attention is absorbed by the body you realize your connection to the source of attention. You can perceive the energy of attention in the world around you. While the world you perceive is the same old world, it seems very different, very alive. Your body feels very alive and you feel yourself beginning to heal. You feel each cell like a baby bird desperately calling out to its mother for food. Each cell of the body wants to receive the energy of attention and calls loudly for it. You begin to hear those calls or rather you feel the body trying to absorb attention.
People whose bodies are especially disconnected from their attention will try to absorb the attention of other people and can be very draining to those people. When you hear them talk, they sound like baby birds squawking.
We naturally know how to pull attention from people. This is important to strengthen the attention of babies. In Zookinesis it is called “Threading Attention” as if through the eye of a needle. Everybody tries to get the baby to look at him and respond to him. This strengthens the baby’s attention. The baby connects its attention to our own behavior patterns. We innately know how to do this. It feels good.
But if you are trying to absorb other peoples’ attention because you are internally disconnected, that doesn’t do you or the other person any good.
When people objectify their attention to an unusual degree and are unusually disconnected, their attention will be concentrated directly in front of their faces. They will have a “crazed” look. Some of those people make very good salesmen because the customer is accosted and overwhelmed by the salesman’s energy and they will buy anything to end the assault. This is really a form of violence.
I believe that violent people are very disconnected and their behavior results from a misdirected attempt to reconnect themselves. But since they objectify their feelings they will attempt to connect to other people, often in very inappropriate ways. They are desperate and don’t know how to heal their disconnection. If someone displays a quality they know is missing inside of themselves, they will act almost as if the other person stole this quality from them or they resent that the other person has what they don’t have. The violent person has become lost from himself and doesn’t know his way back.
Zookinesis training is the way back. The exercises are specifically designed to allow the absorption of your attention into your body. (“Spirit Breathing Workouts” DVDs. Catalog #’s HE-24D and HE-25D. “Zookinesis: The Laughing Dragon Exercise” HE-28D). The books, Movements of Magic and Movements of Power explain the whole process.
So the great realization mentioned at the beginning of this lesson is that attention is not located at a specific point such as the eyes. It is an energy that needs to permeate the entire body. When it does, this connects you to the same energy of attention which permeates the entire earth and all of its inhabitants.
How do you use this connection to make your life more powerful? To explain this, remember that when the attention is rigid, this makes the body rigid. Patterns of the attention affect the body. On the other hand, behavior patterns in the body, such as patterns of tension, affect the attention. When they are separate from each other, they are like two sets of patterns fighting against each other. Once they are connected, they are just moist earth – they are organic – and life can begin to grow.
When you are connected to the larger energy of life, then your patterns affect that energy. If your patterns are violent they will have a negative effect. But if you are healed, then you can use the patterns of attention as a rudder, to steer your life in a positive direction. As a simplified example, if you hold the image of what you want your life to be like, you will see your present situation in terms of how to achieve your goal. Your choices will steer your life in the desired direction.
On a deeper level, if you maintain a positive image of what you need in life, that image will resonate in other people and in general in the energy of attention around you. The ability to affect the larger energy of attention to help your life depends on how connected your attention is to your body. This is the great benefit of the Zookinesis exercises. Without that connection, you just struggle. You can’t beat the whole world into submission to accede to your demands. But you can connect with the energy of consciousness (attention) that permeates the world.
Each act of self healing will be magnified by that connection. When you try to heal others, your efforts will likewise be magnified by your connection. Life becomes easier and a lot more effective.
Some people make the mistake of just trying to use what is called, “The Law of Attraction”, that is, to send out those images of what you want, but without first connecting their attention to their bodies. This is utterly useless. It is only when the attention and body merge, when you stop objectifying attention, when you become fully connected to the larger energy of attention, that you can have any effect.
Some deserts only receive a few inches of water every ten years or so. But as soon as it rains and the ground becomes moist, a thick carpet of colorful flowers appear within days and the desert comes to life. It is like a miracle. The Zookinesis training is like this. Before this training, you are like a desert and then soon your life blooms with beautiful colors.
This practice is essential for progress in Tai-chi and Zookinesis. Each of us feels “we” are located somewhere in space. This location may be the head, the entire body, just the thoughts within our head, just our emotions or some combination of these things.
I would say that most people feel they are in their heads. This makes the rest of the body feel somewhat foreign. As I have written before, if I ask someone to pay attention to their feet, their attention will go from their head to their feet.
The passive observer training is very difficult to understand, but I will try to describe it simply. In Zookinesis it is called “living in the dragon’s cave”. The dragon’s cave is empty space. Yet within that cave lies the dragon which represents inner power and creativity. The dragon’s cave (or the “center of the world” as it is known in other cultures) is not located in space. It is the world beyond ordinary human experience. Your feeling of where you are located must be in the dragon’s cave.
To explain this better, realize that when you see the whole space around you, you are actually “seeing” two spots of light, one on each retina of the eye. The area of visual acuity is 1/8 of an inch in diameter. From these two tiny spots of light, you envision an entire scene. You compare the tiny bit of light with your memory of walking through such a “space”, you compare the light on one retina with that of the other for stereoscopic vision and do other calculations to come up with the scene.
Much (if not most) of the scene is your way of creating something out of very little information. Yet out of this tiny amount of data we get the immense world before us. In Zookinesis we have access to other perceptions – the sense of internal energy and the sense of the dynamics of attention. We can use the same inner gymnastics to put together a “scene” using these senses. This scene can give access to what is going on within our bodies.
The passive observer does not get caught up in these inner gymnastics. It watches the gymnastics to understand how we are constantly building our worlds out of our senses, our memories and our imaginations. It observes the mechanics behind the world that most of us see. The passive observer is powerful in its non-involvement with the gymnastics. Since it does not get caught up in “the action”, it can appreciate “the action”.
You, as the student, can be aware of the perspective of the passive observer and of the poor little student caught up in all the emotions and mental activities and body awkwardness. (You are both of these.) You can observe the constituent parts of your awkwardness (mental, emotional even spiritual as well as the tensions and improper use of the body).
You do not feel bad about your awkwardness because feeling bad is simply one of the constituent parts. The passive observer does not feel bad. It just observes the dynamics of feeling bad without comment. Some people feel that this practice may turn you into a cold, unfeeling person. Rather, it frees you from the prison of patterns of emotions and thinking and allows the emotions and thinking to flow from your creativity.
When you live in the dragon’s cave, this frees the dragon to emerge from its cave and live in the world. (Remember that the dragon is creativity). The greatest power of the dragon is that it can smack with its tail. When you feel bad (let’s say about not doing the Tai-chi form well), the dragon just laughs at your emotional gymnastics because they are so silly. Laughter is the dragon’s tail smacking you to wake up!
There is an extensive mythology based on animal behavior in the Zookinesis training such as the dragon described above. To put it simply, you can laugh at yourself when you can see yourself from another perspective. Comedians do this all the time. They take a situation we take for granted and describe it from another point of view that reveals the absurdity of the situation. The passive observer is that other point of view where we don’t just take things for granted. Developing the passive observer is built into every aspect of Zookinesis training and proper Tai-chi training.
