HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

Push Hands is the most effective way to get in touch with the inner workings of your body, to learn to perceive and use internal energy, to perceive the dynamics of consciousness itself and to unite mind and body into a powerful and efficient system.  The original type of Push Hands exercise was a type of two person chi-gung. I list below some of the Push Hands principles for those who want to use their practice to develop internally.  These points will be especially meaningful to those who already practice Push Hands.  For those who have not yet learned this wonderful exercise, this will give you some insight into its flavor.

The exercise begins with the two partners facing each other with one foot forward.  Their forward feet are right next to each other.  Their arms are connected and the goal is to push each other over.

1. Aligning Heaven and Earth.  The earth is solid.  Heaven is gaseous.  Align the body in such a way that all of your weight sinks into the earth.  The legs are heavy with weight and the top of the body is very light.  The hips are in-between so they feel rubbery.  The hips connect the lightness on top to the heaviness on bottom.  There is a tendency, when force is applied to you, to tense up on top, bringing your weight upwards.  Think of yourself as a pyramid.  You have a wide base on bottom.  Your head is like the point of the pyramid.  When someone pushes you on top, your chest for example, they feel that there is nothing there; that most of you is underneath their push.

2. Connective Tissue.  Absorb their push into your connective tissue (ligaments and tendons and fascia).  Think of yourself as the bowstring of a bow.  The bow itself is between you and your partner.  When your partner pushes, he is pushing back the bowstring.  You then release that stored force from your center (your tan-tien) as the bowstring releases, (adding your own internal energy and the force from your legs and hips).  This is just like an arrow shooting out from the center of the bow.  Remember that the bow itself (the structure of your body) must remain firm.  The bowstring (your connective tissue, ligaments and tendons) is all that bends.  It is also important that all of the connective tissue of your whole body bends equally, just as the bowstring bends equally throughout its length.  As to how to direct the partner’s force to just these tissues of the body, a competent teacher is necessary to help you learn this principle.

3. No Telegraphing. When you are about to push, don’t telegraph your intentions.  This means that you don’t raise up your force to your upper body as if to say, “I am about to push you.”  There is a psychological impulse to prepare for the push.  You must remain in an aligned position throughout the Push Hands so that you can push at any moment from where you are.  Needing to prepare for the push means that you are not aligned at that moment.

4. Notice Telegraphing.  Watch for this telegraphing activity in your partner.  As soon as he prepares to push, push him at the moment of preparation.  His force will be top heavy at that moment and he will be easy to push.

5. Don’t Resist.  Don’t tighten up if you feel your partner is about to successfully push you.  It is better to get pushed than to tighten.  The whole point of this exercise is to learn to remain relaxed, to neutralize the opponent’s force through relaxation and to issue your own force with a relaxed mind and body.  You are only cheating yourself if you tense up to avoid getting pushed because you will never learn real Push Hands.

6. All Force is Your Force.  Don’t think of the force of your partner as “his force” pushing against you.  Accept all force as part of your own energetic system and realign your body to distribute that force equally throughout your body.  If you remain even in this way at every moment, his force will have no effect.  You are like the ringmaster of a circus.  You are coordinating all the acts so the show runs smoothly.  Similarly, coordinate all the forces you feel (gravity, momentum, the partner’s force etc.) so that nothing gets jammed up.  Don’t think of the partner’s force as an attack but just as force that needs to be aligned and balanced within your energy system.

When you do any chi-gung exercise it is important to balance the chi, not only within your body but with the chi of your environment as well.  It is dangerous to hold chi just within your body and isolate it from the environment.  Push Hands teaches you the importance of balancing your internal forces with outside forces. 

7. Use of the Joints.  Receive your partner’s force within all your joints as well.  Don’t deal with his force as one attack but absorb the force into all of the joints of your body.  In this way each joint will be dealing with only a tiny fraction of the original whole force.  That will be much easier to deal with.  When your joints and the connective tissue, ligaments and tendons are all dealing with his force, what seemed like a powerful push now seems like a bunch of tiny pushes that are easy to neutralize.

8. The Floor is Under You.  When you push, there is a tendency to freeze part of your body (usually your back) to serve as a solid floor from which to push.  Your back should remain relaxed and flexible.  Use the real floor itself as your ground.  Position yourself as a wedge between your partner and the floor with no frozen part of the body in between.  There is also a tendency to freeze your attention in order to push.  This is a difficult issue to learn about on your own and requires a competent teacher.  Buddhists call this “the round of birth and death” (of the attention).  It is similar to the issue of “telegraphing” (#3 above).  You feel you must solidify your attention in order to act.  Push Hands teaches you to maintain the fluidity of your body and of your attention at all times and to use the solidity of the ground beneath you.

9. Remain Stable.  Don’t lean on the partner.  If you try to thrust your weight into the partner, he will just turn to the side and you will fall down.  Always remain stable within yourself.  The applications to everyday life are obvious.  Force issues from the ground up with the sequential expansion of each joint.  In this way the force moves in an upward and forward direction, uprooting the partner.

10. The Tan-tien is the Top of Your Force.  As the force issues from the ground upward, it moves into the Tan-tien (just below the navel in the center of the body) then out to your pushing elbow and into the partner.  You force should never rise above elbow level.

11.  Yin and Yang.  The Yang part of the body is the back and the outside of the legs and arms.  The Yin part is the front and the inside of the legs and arms.  Yang force can only move through the Yin parts of the body.  Imagine a ceramic water pipe.  The ceramic is the Yang part, the structure of the pipe.  The empty space inside is the Yin part.  Water can only flow through the empty space, not the ceramic.  Your pushing force should only move through the front of the body and the inside of the arms and legs. 

12.  Breathing.  It is common to breathe out when pushing.  I teach that you should breathe in.  Imagine that you are a balloon.  When you breathe in the balloon expands, pushing the partner.  Try sitting down in a chair and then standing up.  When you sit and relax, you tend to breathe out.  When you stand and are ready for activity you tend to breathe in.  Breathing in is active and breathing out is passive. 

It is important to breathe into the lower abdomen only and not into the upper chest.  Breathing into the upper chest will bring your force upward and it should rather go forward and outward.  Breathe equally into the belly and the lower back so that the whole center of the body expands.  Remember that a balloon expands spherically.  In this way you will not need to tense your back.  The breath will provide the solidity.  This is why breath is called “the soft bones”.  Breath provides solidity so that the body can remain relaxed.

13.  Maintain Your Connection.  Make sure that the connection with your partner through your arms and hands remains steady.  Keep that pressure constant even though the pressure should only be “four ounces”.  You may have a partner who is extremely tense.  In that case the pressure should be four ounces lighter or heavier than his, depending on whether you want to lead him into you or away from you. 

14.  Control from Your Center.  Lead your partner into your center.  From there you can make slight adjustments in the angle of your hips to lead him off balance.  If his force is connected to your center then you are controlling the action from the center of your body.  Imagine you are picking up a heavy metal pipe.  If you pick it up from one end, it seems heavy.  Pick it up from the center and it seems light because it is balanced. 

When you connect the partner’s force to your center and work from there, you need much less effort and movement. 

15.  Eyes in the Belly.  There is a tendency to “view” the interaction from the head because that is where the eyes are.  I teach that Push Hands should be done with closed eyes so that you are concentrating on the feel rather than the sight of the interaction.  This also allows you to center your attention in your belly rather than keeping it in the head.  Once your attention is centered, the whole body will become centered.

These are some principles you can bring into your Push Hands practice to make it a form of chi-gung rather than a pushing and shoving contest.  When it is done properly, Push Hands can easily take care of the “pushers and shovers”. More importantly, it can be a great tool for healing and learning to live your life more effectively.  (See our “Push Hands – the Heart of Tai-chi Training” dvd).

The animal importing company was like my second home.  After school and on weekends I took care of monkeys, parrots, anteaters, hedgehogs, pythons, dragon lizards, tarantulas and dozens of other species.  The animals were my family.  Many had been there for so long that they were now fully grown.

These animals were imported from areas that were being destroyed.  They were sold to people or organizations that were studying how to breed them in captivity. 

At the same time, I went to New York City as often as possible to study a form of chi-gung based on animal behavior – a system I now call “Zookinesis”.  The reason I was chosen to receive this teaching is that my mind and spirit had already been formed to a large extent by the animals I worked with.  I spent more time with them than with people.

In this chi-gung system you learn to copy the patterns and qualities of internal energy (chi) of various animals.  By experiencing the large variety of patterns of chi you learn to appreciate the dynamics of chi.  You can then use these dynamics in healing. 

I soon began my own animal importing company and decided to live in the animal compound.  There were always problems and you had to be right there if an animal got loose or was sick.  I soon saw fewer and fewer people and more and more animals.

When I began learning Tai-chi I could relate the movements and qualities to many of the animals I worked with.  When I learned Push Hands and the self defense sparring of Tai-chi I practiced what I had learned in class with the animals.  They enjoyed it and I learned a lot from their response. 

It was important for me to learn Tai-chi sparring.  When I would unpack a shipment of new animals I never knew what to expect. The shippers often included unexpected animals or ones that were larger than what I ordered.  Opening the orders meant getting attacked by many animals that were in a bad mood.  I had to get them into their cages, protect myself and make sure not to hurt them.  I often got the worst of it. 

But as I learned the behavior patterns of each species I could use Tai-chi and Zookinesis principles to control them and calm them down. 

At a certain point I realized that I lived in a different kind of world than most people.  The very make-up of my mind and spirit was the sum of all the animals I worked with as well as the effects of my training.  This made me feel isolated.  So I searched for traditional teachers of other cultures that understood this relationship between the human spirit and the spirit of animals, cultures such as Native American, Celtic and others. 

Through readings I found that the idea of learning from the spirit of animals was widespread in the ancient world.  Ancient people felt they were an intricate part of nature.

Yet I found that in modern forms of chi-gung and Tai-chi, the practice of learning from animals is missing.  The only remnants are in the animal forms or such chi-gung practices as “The Animal Frolics” which are stylized imitations of animal movements.  But this is no substitute for working directly with animals.

There were five other large animal importers at that time in the New York City area.  Most Saturdays I visited one or two of them to see what new species they brought in.  The owners of these animal compounds would discuss their new animals with me.  If I found the animal especially interesting I would get a few in to work with them.  I spent three summers in Central America, canoeing through the rivers to see animals in the wild and visit the remote people who lived deep in the jungle. 

At the end of each trip I felt that I wanted to stay there permanently but my teachers were up in New York and I still had a lot to learn.

After graduating from college I worked as a travelling teacher of ecology around New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, bringing some of my collection of animals to each school and discussing the importance of protecting the environment.  I saw how excited the students were, how their eyes lit up at each new animal and how much they wanted to touch and hold them.  There was an innate need to be connected to nature and I provided that to the students of each school at least for one day.  After 20 years, I had presented the programs, called “The Animal Man” to over one and a half million students and teachers.

The yearning of children to connect with animals is the same yearning for each of us to be connected to our own bodies.  We have become strangers to our own bodies.  The body seems to us like some big, awkward thing down there that carries our head around.  With Tai-chi and Zookinesis we learn to feel each part of our bodies and to understand how to use the body properly.  Through these exercises each part of the body feels alive and awake.  You can feel healing taking place as the body becomes more conscious. 

In the sense of the consciousness of the body, we are not as smart as other animals.  It is only our thinking ability that is superior.  But we have sacrificed the consciousness of the body for the thinking process.

Zookinesis teaches you how to balance both forms of consciousness so that they work together.  The “Body-Mind” and the thinking mind are no longer at war. 

My Zookinesis teachers emphasized that, just as there are many forms of consciousness among different kinds of animals, there are many different perspectives in the cultures and thoughts of people.  We need to respect the different ideas and attitudes among people just as we need to respect the consciousness and the very right to live of animals.  If we have the attitude that only our own thoughts are correct then we may become disrespectful and even violent towards other people.  If we feel that we are superior to animals then we may feel justified in destroying their habitats and even entire species.

They emphasized that one reason it is important to spend time with animals is to appreciate that each species is a perfect part of the web of life of nature, that violence to bodies or to consciousness destroys all of nature. 

If we can repair the damage to our own bodies and to our own consciousness, we are actually helping to repair all of nature. 

I knew that it would be impossible to teach Zookinesis if I required my students to spend long months in the wild with animals which is how it was originally taught.  And so I combined Zookinesis training with Tai-chi to create a training system that incorporated all of my experiences into a simple, cohesive training system. 

The way my students most commonly describe their experience of this process is that they realize they have hips or they have a back or some other part of their bodies.  What they mean is that they now actually feel the aliveness of those parts of the body.  They are connected to their own bodies.  Their minds and bodies blend together so that both work at maximum efficiency.  Their behavior is no longer controlled by awkward behavior patterns, by fears, by excess movements or by the racing of the mind.  They are no longer blind to what is going on inside of them. 

When they catch themselves at ridiculous behaviors, they laugh at themselves.  We call that “The Dragon Whips its Tail”.  There is an animal mythology that goes along with Zookinesis that makes it easier to understand.  In this case the laughter helps you to whip away the ridiculous behavior as if you were flicking away a fly.  You realize that you are filled with self destructive behaviors and the laughter keeps you from getting angry or depressed about it.

For example, when we get stressed, we often tense up our shoulders.  Of course this behavior doesn’t help you deal with the stressful behavior.  It only makes you feel worse.  Through Zookinesis, Tai-chi and Tai-chi massage, all these harmful behaviors are exposed and we can more easily let them go. 

Finally our bodies and minds feel free and clear, like a natural animal.  We no longer feel caged by our own tensions and fears.  The vibrancy of nature is felt in every cell of our bodies and we feel how we are connected to the rest of life.

Tai-chi is considered to be a “spiritual” practice and many people wonder how a physical exercise can be called spiritual.  While most people begin their Tai-chi practice to improve their health and to reduce stress, they soon learn that there is much more to this ancient exercise.  As a child, you may have opened the back of a watch (when they were made with gears and mainsprings) and were amazed at what you saw.  You gradually came to understand how the watch worked and may have even embarked on a career as a mechanic or engineer.

When you understand the mechanisms that control how you behave as a person you can be more creative with yourself and improve those mechanisms.  We gain our basic skills in working with the body until every joint and muscle becomes relaxed, alive and conscious.  You feel alive like you never felt alive before. 

When you practice a Tai-chi form, you feel that each part of the body has a will of its own and wants to do the form.  As in a music band, one member may play part of the song a little differently and the other band members, hearing this change, go along with it and support it.  In the same way, part of your body may want to move differently and the other parts are consciously aware of this and support that creative change.

The result is a consciousness or feeling of self, which is evenly distributed throughout the body and not just located in the head. In some disciplines you are taught to eliminate the ego or feeling of self.  In the Tai-chi approach you just share this feeling of self with every cell, organ, muscle and bone in the body.  You become a cooperative community of living individuals who all feel they are part of the same “tribe” (which is you as a whole person).

How would this world be if all people felt they were part of the same tribe?  In Taoist theory, how all the parts of yourself relate to each other determines how you as a whole, relate to other people.  If a whole culture is taught to believe that we live in our heads and in our thoughts and our bodies are just a dumb machine, then that affects how that culture relates to other cultures.  If the head just orders the rest of the body around and doesn’t care how the body feels, that affects your relationships with other people.

When we practice the Push Hands exercise (described in detail in several other articles below), we quickly learn that if we forcefully try to push the other person over, this locks us up and actually allows the other person to push us more easily. 

If you use force, you have the attitude of force in your mind and your opponent can use that attitude to defeat you.  In a similar way, if you are the type of person who is always trying to get away with something, to take more than you give, then you are actually more susceptible to get scammed.  The internet spam emails only work if you think you are getting something for nothing.

That is why, in our practice, we always try to have even exchanges with people, to not cheat them and to not be cheated by them.  In Push Hands, where the other person comes in to push, we yield.  But we move into the part of their body which is inactive.  The balance of yin and yang is maintained but the result is that we always feel empty to the other person and we can always move into them to push.

The other person learns that if he is tense and has an aggressive attitude, then his body is really dead.  It is dead to awareness.  It is locked.  The attitude of balance always leads to maximum awareness.  The attitude of maximum aggressiveness leads to a deadening of awareness.

In this way we learn about the mechanisms behind our behavior.  We learn about balance of aggression and passivity.  We learn what deadens our consciousness and what enhances it.  We learn that the relationships with other people or with how we deal with situations, mirror the relationships among the different parts of ourselves.  If our minds are aggressive towards our bodies, we will probably be aggressive to other people.

If we think of our bodies as lowly, we will probably think of other people as less worthy than ourselves. 

Spirituality is about relationships.  It is the recognition that all life is connected and you are not more part of life than another person, another animal or plant.  Tai-chi allows you to feel that.  It speaks of the experience of “chi” (internal energy or biological energy) that connects all life. 

Some of the practices of chi cultivation require that you move your chi around in various ways, which are supposedly better than the way it is moving now.  My teachers taught me that the secret of chi cultivation is quite different and it is an important lesson in spirituality.

The body, they say, knows how to move chi.  All you can do is to interfere with chi.  By making you practice moving chi along certain pathways, you remain within an aggressive frame of reference with regards to the body.  You are whipping it into shape.

My teachers taught very differently.  Through the Zookinesis and Tai-chi exercises they taught me how my frame of reference interfered with accomplishing the task.  If I tensed up to push them I was just locking myself up and becoming ineffective.  Yet to me, pushing meant tensing the body as much as you can.  They taught me to send a pulse of energy through the body from the feet up, like a whip which remains loose as it strikes.  That required a completely different frame of reference. 

The typical student who learns this method will start with a pulse at the feet and then when the thought comes into his mind, “Push Now!” he tenses up, blocking the pulse and deadening his body.  Instead he has to release the pulse into the other person, not push his tension into the other person.  He should really say “Release Now!” and relax. 

This is the same approach in learning a Tai-chi form.  It takes a long time to really learn the movements but at some point you must release the form to the body and let the body do the form.  Your usual sense of self just sits back and watches.  You don’t eliminate the sense of self.  That sense of self becomes the audience that can appreciate the creativity of the body.

Gradually the body, mind, emotions and all other parts of yourself become equal partners in your life.  There are no bullies within you.  Then chi flows naturally all by itself and “you” sit back in wonder.  You understand your connection to the rest of life.  You understand how all the parts of your body communicate with each other so that your actions in life become effortless and effective.

When you encounter a situation your first thought is of balance – active balance.  All parts of you are alert but relaxed.  You see the situation and the people in that situation clearly.  Just as you can now see inside yourself you can see inside them.  You understand something of their internal relationship which is reflected externally and you know how to use the principles of Tai-chi to your advantage, without taking advantage of them. 

While Tai-chi is not a religion, there is a morality – the morality of balance.  There is an empathy of understanding for the torture many people live with because you yourself extricated yourself from that internal torture.  In this way, you see that there is a spiritual path in life. 

It is not the path of maximum power of one part of you over another or of one person over another.  It is not about thinking this as opposed to that.  It is the path of discovering, understanding and then releasing useless behaviors and allowing the body, mind and emotions to function naturally and in harmony with each other and with the community of life.

The key is to let go.  If your attention is now mainly caught up in your thoughts and emotions, let your attention move into the body as water moves into a dry paper towel.  If you feel your attention ready to combat another person, first let it flow into that person and learn how that feels.  You may think that if you connect with another person in this way you are being too “new agey”.  People say, “We must be tough to live in this world.”

Remember that Tai-chi is also a martial art.  The full name is Tai-chi-Chuan (The Grand Ultimate Martial Art).  One of the most important parts of the skills of Tai-chi fighting is for your attention to remain connected to the “opponent” and to flow with him.  Flow away from his strikes and into his open areas.  If your attention disconnects from his body you are in trouble.

When your chi and your attention are connected to the situations and people around you and you remain relaxed, you are in a powerful position.  You know how to respond at each moment.  Spiritual doesn’t mean weak.

Chi is the biological communications system of all life.  When you become aware of that system you have acquired a new sense.  You can understand the mechanisms behind your behavior and the behavior of others.  At that point it is easy to let go of useless behavior patterns because you just get bored by them. 

The spiritual path of Tai-chi eliminates self destructive and ineffective behaviors as light eliminates darkness.  You don’t beat yourself up about your problems or force yourself to change.  You just see how silly the ineffective behaviors are and you can laugh at them.  There is a lot of laughter along this path.

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.

I recently had the opportunity to spar with my original instructor, Tom, in Grandmaster William C. C. Chen’s school in New York City.  It was like the old days again and reminded me why Tai-chi-Chuan sparring is so different from other styles.  We flowed in between each other’s strikes, slipping each other’s strikes to the sides. 

I also sparred with a young man who was practicing for the tournaments.  He seemed hesitant to strike me with full force.  I had to just stand there and ask him to keep hitting me as hard as he could to convince him I would not break.  When you are used to sparring with full force, the little taps that some people give you can be annoying.  You need to know that the partner is at least trying to hit you with full force so you are sure that if you felt just a tap it was because you successfully neutralized his strike. 

One of the main features of Tai-chi-Chuan sparring is that your full focus of attention is inside the partner’s body.  His strikes are just brushed aside.  You don’t focus on them because you don’t block them.  Rather, you are fully aware of the spaces between you and him and slip your body into those spaces to evade the strikes.  From there you can deliver your own strikes.  Whoever is the master of the spaces controls the sparring.

The strikes emanate explosively, exponentially increasing in force as they move outward, like a cannonball being shot out of the cannon.  As quickly as they shoot out, they bounce back into place setting up the next punch.  Each strike has the full force of the body behind it and the power comes from the legs and hips.

Any strike has to have a solid base to shoot out from.  In Tai-chi-Chuan that base is the floor.  In most styles of martial arts the base is the body’s tension.  In those styles strikes emanate from the tense back and shoulders.  The strikes are not bouncy and explosive but are used like battering rams.  The body cannot slip into empty spaces because it is needed to serve as a “floor”, a base for the strikes. 

By using the real floor as the base you free up the entire body.  You can stay within the striking distance of the partner but remain “invisible” because you “exist” only within the spaces.  Once you leave the spaces, to block for example, you are exposed. 

The orientation of your sparring strategy is  tied to the partner’s tensions and force if you block, rather than to the empty spaces which allow you to move, and to the body of the partner, which you strike as is the case in Tai-chi-Chuan.

Another strategy of some styles is to hold the arms in front of the body and face at all times for protection.  In Tai-chi-Chuan we allow the arms to flow and be functional.  Although they remain close to the body and face, they are allowed to creatively interact with the partner.  If the arms are held rigidly, then you can just punch his hands into his own face.  You can also strike the sides or the top of his head.  I can tell you from much personal experience that full strikes to the sides and top of the head are very effective.  The striker must use a loose fist when striking the skull so he doesn’t hurt his fingers.  Since the strike is explosive, the force is not just felt at the surface but penetrates the head and body. 

If your partner holds his arms in front of his body you can feel free to strike his arms.  The arms can only take so much before tiring from the beating.  You can certainly add grappling and just pull the arms away so you can punch or kick.  Pulling the arms also destabilizes him so that you can more easily deliver a strike to the legs.  (We usually kick mostly to the legs and a bit to the midsection.  Kicks higher than that make the kicker too vulnerable). 

It is important to notice where the partner is focusing his attention.  If he if focused only on your torso, for example, you can punch his legs so that he will no longer be sure that your strikes will only be coming to his upper body.  The legs can only take so much striking.  Usually when you spar with kicking, the partner cannot focus only on the torso and head because his legs are constantly being kicked. 

Yet many styles kick mostly to the torso and head so the partner doesn’t need to divide his attention.  He can disregard the lower part of the body.  Tai-chi-Chuan uses this vulnerability by striking the legs, torso, head and arms so the partner must keep his attention on all these areas.  We train to develop our attention, as described in many of the other articles in this section, so we are comfortable with an expanded and sustained attention.

As we are aware of the pattern of the partner’s attention, we focus our strikes to areas of his weakest attention at that moment.  This requires us to develop the sense of attention so that we can perceive how strong his attention is at any point in the sparring area.  We keep our bodies in the areas of his weakest attention so it is difficult for him to hit us.  

My wife Jean also had the opportunity to spar with Tom and she enjoyed it.  We vowed to practice sparring more with each other.  We each have not sparred for many years.  This is because fewer and fewer people are interested in traditional training anymore and we ended our sparring classes. 

When they find out that they must first learn a Tai-chi form, the Zookinesis chi-gung exercises and push hands before sparring, prospective students lose interest.  They can go to a martial arts school down the block and start sparring after only a few months.  These schools also offer colored belts, while Tai-chi-Chuan, and my own fighting system, Phantom Kung-fu, do not offer any belts. 

The internal systems at my school require that you let go of tensions, inefficient behavior patterns and bad attitudes before beginning sparring.  Most people get involved in martial arts to reinforce their behavior patterns and attitudes, not to go through a transformation.

After the class, Tom and I talked about the “old days”, when there was much more excitement in the martial arts and when people were willing to experiment with alternative approaches and ideas.  The traditional schools used to be filled with students. 

Part of me is waiting for those days to return but I know that you can’t just wait for the times to be right because life will be over too soon.  And wasn’t the lesson of those more creative times that we each need to create our own lives no matter what is going on around us?  The “eternal flame” of the traditional training is fed by continued practice.  Jean and I continue to visit Grandmaster Chen’s classes whenever we can to remind us of that.

The concept of a spirit world, common to almost all pre-industrialized cultures, lies at the heart of developing and learning to use internal energy (“chi”).  Zookinesis explains this concept very simply.  We humans have senses that we do not use anymore.  The way we have been trained to use our attention no longer allows those senses to function. 

If we were to fully develop our attention, all of our senses would work again.  We would then see the world very differently – more fully.  The world we would see once our senses were restored is called “the spirit world”. 

Two of those senses are the sense of internal energy (biological energy) and the sense of the dynamics of attention (how consciousness flows through the body).  The difference between an “internal” martial art and an “external” martial art is the ability to perceive and use these senses. 

Each part of the body becomes more functional, alive, active and yet relaxed.  You can move one small part of your body out of the way of a strike, for example, without moving the entire body.  When you are grappling you can absorb the force of the partner through your body either into the ground or around back into the partner.  Your body is able to absorb, use and transform energy instantaneously. 

In Taoist terms this would be called, “Taoist alchemy”.  To many people Taoist alchemy is known as training to increase longevity or to increase sexual energy.  But its benefits go far beyond these things.

Taoist alchemy restores our biological consciousness which every animal has, while allowing us to retain that special human consciousness we cherish so much.  Early humans developed a way of developing the thinking mind.  “The elements” were a way of categorizing the world they experienced into five distinct groups.  I have written about this in other “weekly lesson” articles.  Our civilization rests on this particular development of the human mind.  And so we divide our world into matter, space, energy, time and consciousness.  We divide our personal lives into our bodies, minds, personal drive or energy (“will”), emotions and again, consciousness.

But in modern times our educational system has concentrated so much on this categorization or thinking process that it has ignored developing other aspects of our human nature or what I would call our “animal nature”.  We pride ourselves in being superior to animals.

But I think we can all agree that something in our civilization is missing.  There is an inner awareness and a deep inner satisfaction with life that seems to have gotten lost.  In my many years of teaching I have found what I feel is the basis of this lost “animal awareness” or animal nature.  It is the fear that if we perceive fully, if we can see the spirit world and function within it, then our thinking abilities will weaken.  There is a deep-seated illusion that full awareness competes with full ability to think clearly.

The root of that illusion is our weak attention.  This is the root of all the problems.  Our attention is just not strong enough to think and to have our bodies function well at the same time.  If we do not maintain an animal awareness in which attention is distributed evenly throughout the body, then attention actually weakens.  When the attention is so concentrated on thinking as it is today, then the rest of you suffers. 

Attention (or consciousness) is experienced (by Tai-chi students) as an energy which flows through each living thing and therefore is connected to all other living things.  By concentrating it in the thinking process you cut attention off from the rest of your body and the rest of nature.  It becomes like a lake, usually fed by a stream that suddenly is cut off from the stream.  It then turns into a smelly swamp.

Attention that is not connected to the rest of nature decays.  Just see what happens when our political leaders think they know so much that they don’t listen to people who disagree with them.  They don’t consider all views and facts.  The result is poor leadership.

On a biological level all our cells and organs need attention flowing through them.  For most people the body is just a big thing below our brains that carries our brains around.  Tai-chi and Zookinesis teaches the harmonious relationship between the thinking process we have developed and the animal consciousness.  The two don’t have to be competing.  They can re-enforce each other.

In the internal martial arts, for example, you need to fill your opponent with your attention so that you feel every action and intention of each of his muscles and joints even before they emanate as a strike.  You flow with the opponent, allowing him to control the movements but you control the relationship between you.  That relationship is that you move away from his incoming force and into his open, unprotected areas.

Internal martial arts training requires that you can perceive the spirit world before you even start to learn the actual martial arts techniques.  If you can’t see inside your own body and that of your opponent, then you have no business even beginning to learn the fighting.

In modern martial arts schools the students want to fight right away and not have to go through any internal changes at all.  “Just show me the techniques”.  Modern martial arts schools (with some exceptions) are all about the techniques and not about the heart of the martial arts. 

Martial arts is a personal path, much like a religion or a philosophy.  The fact that you are learning to punch and kick people is just the method of teaching the path.  You are actually learning about your own desire to be violent, about its roots and about how to resolve those issues.  You are also learning how to see inside the opponent and understand him on an internal level.  While effectively defending yourself you can still remain calm and not have the violent emotions of the opponent duplicate themselves inside of you.  If the opponent has transferred his pattern of violence inside of you then you lose, even if you have won that particular fight.

And that’s how it is in everyday life.  There are many angry people walking around.  Many of my students are doctors.  One told me that many doctors nowadays are “practicing angry”.  This means that patients are angry at doctors and ready to sue them.  Medical insurance companies look for every excuse not to pay the doctor because perhaps, the patient’s name was misspelled on one of the papers.  This makes the doctors angry.

Our culture is a reflection of our nature as individuals.  We put all of our attention into our calculating minds and fear allowing that energy to connect with the rest of our body and the rest of nature.  Then our culture is composed of closed individuals who fear their connections to other people.  We fear being connected, letting our attention, our feelings merge.  Relationships are strained. 

I remember as a child watching situation comedies on television.  They seemed to all be based on the same premise.  The husband and wives conspire against each other to get what they want.  I wondered, “Is this what a relationship should really be about?” 

Have we become a culture of fearful people conspiring against each other to get what we want?  I guess it’s silly to even ask the question.  But is this what you want for yourself?

The martial arts seem to be so much about fearful people conspiring to hit each other to “win over” each other.  Yet, whether an internal or external martial art, this training is supposed to be about self awareness and the ability to live in harmony with other people.  It is really about spiritual development as defined by becoming a fully developed human being.  Your thinking mind must be involved in learning the martial arts but when you spar you use the animal attention. 

When animal attention combines harmoniously with the thinking mind you are in the spirit world and you are fully human.  You can then perceive the energies behind the physical manifestations.  As an example you can feel the dynamics of attention and internal energy that leads to a person’s behavior.  You feel less fearful because you can perceive the origins of a person’s behavior before they manifest physically and you can be ready.  You don’t get taken by surprise.

In Push Hands practice, you begin to neutralize the partner’s incoming force at the exact same time as the force begins to come in to you.  You saw the origins of that force in the preparation of the partner and know what to expect.  Push Hands then takes place in real time.  Yet as a beginner you didn’t realize the force was coming in until it was right on top of you and then it was too late to neutralize it. 

Imagine if you could see things coming at you much earlier and prepare for them.  Many people can do this economically.  They study the economic trends and know that a recession or that good times are around the corner.  They can then prepare for the future.  They use their thinking minds to see into the future.  We can do this with our animal attention as well.

Just for a moment, think of the trends of how the behaviors of people are changing.  Then look into the future.  Are you happy with what you see?  All we can do as individuals is to develop ourselves.  Our nature as individuals can then affect those around us.  Each interaction with another person is a chance to decide the future of our culture.

I always ask myself, “Am I in the spirit world right now?”  Have I let the angers and conflicts of the world around me program my own behavior or do I have some say over my behavior?  The concept of the spirit world helps me to maintain my direction in 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.

Kung-fu systems such as Tai-chi-Chuan and Phantom Kung-fu are based on the way animals defend themselves.  The student learns to copy the body mechanics and skills of several species in his sparring. 

In the 1960’s and 1970’s I owned an animal importing company to provide wild animals to organizations and individuals that were studying how to breed them in captivity and develop captive breeding populations.  Every few years, I traveled through the jungles of Central America to study the animals and for adventure.

Up until the 1990’s, I kept a collection of over 150 reptiles, many of which were part of breeding populations and some were used for educational programs.  My sparring students were required to work with these animals to get a feeling for their power and body mechanics. 

It was exciting to introduce new students to the animals.  They had never seen these species before in person.  The black, rough necked monitor lizard sat in its own huge cage.  At six feet long, thirty inches tall (when straightening out its legs) and about two feet wide (when puffed up), it was an impressive animal, especially when hissing and whipping its tail.  Its long neck, covered with large spiked scales and long, narrow head and nose gave it a bizarre appearance.  It was as black as Darth Vader. 

The students had to enter the cage and, while the dragon lizard hissed and whipped its tail, the student had to pet it to calm it down.  Soon the lizard’s hiss changed to what was obviously a hiss of ecstasy.  The ability to walk right over to what seemed like a live, angry dragon, changed the perspective of the student.  It allowed him to overcome his fears and spar better. 

I found that each encounter served to alter the state of consciousness of the student, gradually bringing him or her to be able to connect better with the animals, and with each other.  It allowed the student to be able to perceive the consciousness of the animal and understand how he could control his own behavior to control the behavior of the animal so it would calm down.   This is an essential skill in sparring.

The pine and bull snakes were great teachers.  Their hiss was so loud it seemed like you were standing right next to a steam locomotive.  You would walk near the cage and the incredible hiss would suddenly be upon you.  It was very hard not to jump into the air with fright even though you knew it was just a harmless snake.  The student would pick it up and the snake dug the tip of its tail (which was fairly sharp) into his arm as it stared at him.  It looked like it was saying, “Now take that!” 

The students soon realized that as frightening as the animals seemed at first, they were very gentle when handled correctly.  I once bought a thirteen foot reticulated python from someone because it was too vicious for them to handle.  I thought this would make a great animal for my students to handle.  But when I brought it into the Tai-chi studio the snake became very tame.  We couldn’t get it to misbehave if we wanted to.  I had played up this snake as being very tough to handle.  I guess it sensed the peaceful atmosphere and felt safe. 

I used to have a very large African python.  This species is very active and very intelligent.  As you hold it, the snake brings its face right next to yours to see you (snakes’ eyesight isn’t very good).  Its movements are sudden.  It will quickly turn around, come right up to your face and then just stare at you without moving (just sticking out its tongue).  I have found that there are some people who don’t like that (though I can’t imagine why. It seems endearing to me) If you can get used to the African python, you can get used to the intensity of sparring. 

I used to bring in many species of monkeys and to keep them from getting bored, we would play fight with each other.  I got into the cages and just started mixing it up.  The monkeys loved it so much that each time I stopped fighting they would complain loudly to keep playing.  So many hours were spent fighting with the monkeys that it was easy for me to spar in their “style”.  The same was true of snakes and lizards of course.  But I worked with many strange animals as well.  The best fighters were the tayras and grisons which are related to the weasels but much larger.  Each species loved to play fight and they had more strength and endurance than I had.  Raccoon-like animals like the coati mundi were also a lot of fun.  I probably spent two hours a day fighting with various animals to keep them amused. 

Sparring with people then became easy.  No person was as quick or had as much endurance as the animals.  The animals were my real sparring partners.  It would be impossible to duplicate the training you get when working directly with animals.  Yet few people have this opportunity.  These days I have too much work to maintain a large collection of animals and so my students don’t receive that kind of training anymore.  I hope one day to create a training center where people can learn directly from animals as well as from human teachers, as I did many years ago.  Wouldn’t it be a great experience to learn martial arts and healing exercises from both a human and from animal teachers? 

My students and I used to have long talks about what we learned from our experiences with animals and how to apply them to sparring or to healing.  I could tell which animal the student had been working with from how he sparred that day. 

You always have to respect the animal’s power, though.  I remember working in the Bronx Zoo one summer.  I worked with the small mammals, the monkeys and the apes.  I opened the shift case for a gorilla.  This allows the gorilla to move to this separate cage so you can clean its main cage.  After he entered the shift cage, he sat down.  I then began to close the large iron door.  It weighed five hundred pounds and was closed by pushing an iron bar.  It took all my might to gradually push it closed but about one inch before closing, the gorilla placed his finger on the door and flung it back.  The door came crashing open.    I believe the gorilla gave me a little smirk.

When I spent two months in Nicaragua we had to catch our own food.  The townspeople were going on a caiman hunt (caiman are a type of alligator) and I was invited.  At night you can only see their eyes reflecting back from your flashlight.  The head caiman wrangler used a forked stick to catch the caiman’s neck and he and another man flung it into the canoe.  He turned to me and said, “Grab its head and close its mouth”.  Now, this 10 foot caiman was snapping its jaws and thrashing its tail.  I wasn’t prepared to move towards the snapping jaws let alone to grab them.  But the alternative was for us all to just stand there with a snapping caiman in the canoe.  So I jumped on top of its head and bear hugged its jaws.  The head wrangler then tied the mouth with a rope.  We ate well that night.

If you can jump towards the snapping jaws of a Central American alligator, you won’t fear sparring or for that matter, doing anything else in life.

The animal forms of Kung-fu give you a taste of fighting like wild animals.  I believe that a teacher of animal styles should have extensive experience with the animals of those styles.  Otherwise you are just doing “empty” movements with no real experience of what is behind the movements.  When the student spars with the teacher, the student should really feel that he is sparring with an animal because the animal spirit is indeed, in the teacher.

As our civilization moves further away from nature, the Kung-fu forms can help us keep a feeling for the wild so that at least, our bodies can remain natural.