A MORE POWERFUL LIFE
In an internal martial arts system, the smaller your movement, the more powerful it is. The goal is to send your energy into the other person. If you can do that without using up that force in your own movements or in tensing up your body, you can send almost all of your force out. In external martial arts systems, the body tenses up to provide solidity. There can be no small subtle movements within the body and so the body moves in a stick-like fashion resulting in large movements.
In an internal system such as Tai-chi-Chuan and Phantom Kung-fu each muscle is under your control and is kept relaxed. You can move several muscles and joints just a tiny bit each to result in the strike so that the overall movement of the whole body is very little.
Power comes out in a spiral pattern from the ground up through each joint. This spiral pattern magnifies the force. At the moment of impact the body tenses just enough to prevent the arm from collapsing and to allow the force to flow through the arm. The internal martial artist is aware enough not to tense up even the slightest bit more than is necessary.
It is the degree of his or her awareness, to be able to make such subtle adjustments in just a fraction of a second that results in power. If the martial arts student can make his concentration fine enough to make these tiny adjustments, he can be powerful. And so there is a general saying that the smaller you can make your attention, the more powerful you are.
As an example, if you think that a punch is the thrusting of the arm forward or turning the whole body to thrust the arm forward, then you are only aware of the arm as a whole or only the movement of the whole body. If you think of a strike as a quarter turn of the spine and a slight upward quarter turn of the hip, your movement will be much faster, more connected to the body and to the ground and more powerful. As far as your attention is concerned, you will be striking from the ground up and from the inside of the body out, which is the proper mechanics for sparring. External stylists generally keep their attention on the outside of the body, keeping their bodies rigid.
When you can bring your attention to a point you become very powerful. When you can work with many of these points at once then you can really start to learn. Internal stylists also learn to bring their attention into the joints and muscles of the sparring partner so that he feels completely connected to the partner. In this way he can feel what the partner is going to do before he actually does it.
The martial arts practices have their greatest benefit in everyday life. If you can take this training into dealing with other people, with business strategies, with goals in life and with your health then your life can become powerful. A few examples will explain. It is very easy to get caught up in the emotional patterns of other people. This is because most people cannot bring their attention into the subtle changes of feeling inside their bodies. If your attention were everywhere inside of your body and at the same time was inside of the other person, you could tell how the other person’s emotional patterns were affecting you. You could see the mechanism of how your own feelings and reactions change due to the other person. You could then take control of that mechanism so that you do not copy their emotional patterns or even react blindly against those patterns. You can remain centered and examine how you can be most effective.
In the martial arts, each partner tries to control the behavior of the other, confusing them or freezing their attention. In everyday life, most peoples’ emotional and mental patterns are so chaotic that they constantly damage the people around them. It is important to be so aware that you are immune to that damage.
On the other hand, your own behavior patterns from the past, may have taken control of your present behavior. When you react to a situation it may not be in the most effective way or even the least bit logical. If your attention is so pinpointed that you can feel how your own patterns are affecting you, then you can get beyond them. They only have control if you can’t see them, if you feel you ARE them.
That is the most powerful effect of developing the fineness of attention. We have come to believe that our identity is the patterns of behavior and reactions that have programmed us. Most people have really lost the awareness of themselves. When you reach your original creative, connected self there is great calm and joy. But most people are trying to follow the “breadcrumbs” home, meandering through the thick forest in search of themselves.
The finer your attention, the more you can see the mechanisms that control your behavior, the more you can see what is not you and the quicker you can discover the source of your creativity, of what makes you a unique individual.
At that point you can see that while we are all unique individuals, we are also completely connected to each other and to nature. At that point we can finally love fully and let go of anger and resentment that may have been seething inside us for many years – about issues long since gone.
I have also found that in business, you are able to get to the heart of any negotiation and better understand the issues that bother the other person. Very often in business negotiations the other person is not saying exactly what they want. They’re trying to be coy. It is important to sort out the issues so that you immediately understand where the other person stands. This makes for more effective negotiations for both sides. If your attention is strong and can follow many lines of discussion at the same time, it is easier to sort out the underlying themes and get to the heart of the issue.
Training the attention in this way is not easy. The Tai-chi forms and Push Hands exercises and the Zookinesis exercises teach the attention to seep into every crevice of the body, to follow many patterns of energy and movement at the same time and to constantly re-adjust the body and mind to changing external conditions. It is said that it takes five years of Push Hands training to be able to consider yourself to be a beginner. This is because the condition of our attention in modern times is so poor. Our attention can be considered to be in critical condition – almost dead. To bring it back to even normal health takes a lot of work. But the result of that work is not only a more effective life but great health and joy.
There are two reactions to practicing Push Hands among my students. The first is laughter. They laugh at how dead their attention is compared to how healthy they know it can become. The second is shaking their heads and saying that they can’t believe how stupid their bodies are. They know what they should be doing, but the attention is so rigid and so programmed with useless patterns that it is a great struggle to free the attention. It is as if their attention is entangled in a net.
And yet, as a teacher, I see that they are making great progress in every lesson. It is just such a long journey back home!
You can go through the rest of your life knowing and being yourself and enjoying the thrill of living or trying to follow the breadcrumbs through the forest as if you are lost.
