HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In most martial arts styles, technique is pitted against technique and one body is pitted against another body. In the Phantom Kung-fu system you divide the opponent’s attack into its smallest components. You analyze the structure and movement of the body and the dynamics of the opponent’s attention, second to second, tenth of a second to tenth of a second.

This requires an extreme familiarity with proper body mechanics and alignment. It requires being able to sense the dynamics of the opponent’s attention and how each of his body parts would be able to respond to any action on your part. It requires that your sense of time is expanded so that one second seems like a long time to you and you can move and adjust easily within one second or even a small fraction of a second. It requires that your own attention is not just pulled by the opponent’s actions but is independent.

Phantom Kung-fu requires three years of preliminary training, including learning Tai-chi forms and Push Hands as well as the Zookinesis exercises, so that your mind and body can be conditioned to function in this way. Since most potential martial arts students want to fight from the very beginning, this eliminates those students from participating. They are welcome to join the classes but usually choose not to or drop out quickly when they learn they will not be fighting for at least three years.

The divide and conquer strategy means that you view the opponent, not as one big person, but as a combination of many body parts and behaviors. You can perceive which part or which behavior is central to any particular movement and strike the root of that movement. In Tai-chi it is called, “Striking the root”. The root of a punch may be the shoulder or it may be a hip. You strike whatever destabilizes the opponent the most, both physically and mentally. In other words, you go right to the root of the problem and don’t focus on the end result (the fist or foot).

As a strike comes in, we often slap the top of the incoming wrist because that tends to break the strike and we don’t need to move much to get out of the way. A tiny slap to the top of the wrist allows us to strike the opponent at the same time as we are defending. Both actions take place at once. In fact we use the least motion possible to cause the desired effect. Striking the root requires less movement than blocking the end result.

If our actions are small enough, people watching won’t notice any movement on our part. This is because the opponent’s movements are usually so extreme that ours seem non-existent in comparison. The opponent seems to be magically defeated with no apparent effort on our part.

Yet there is a lot of effort in terms of concentration. Our attention must be very active to assess every little action and behavior of the opponent and to be aware of every little part of our own body so that each part is ready to respond. The more internal activity in terms of the dynamics of attention, the less physical movement is needed.

This is true in life in general. The more we are aware of what is going on around us, the sooner we can respond to situations. We deal with a situation at its root. We don’t let things drag on and hope they will go away. This creates a very powerful way of life. It is not aggressive in a negative sense. We just deal with each situation as it comes up. The sooner we deal with it, the more choices we have and the nicer we can be about it.

When we observe the details about a situation, we can avoid another problem. There is a tendency to label the situation. When we call it a name then we respond to it in a programmed way – a way we are used to and comfortable with. When we examine it more closely and learn about its component parts, we find each situation is different and we can be and need to be more creative in how to respond it.

In Phantom Kung-fu we create our techniques each moment anew. We do not use a pre-set series of responses. Every moment is different. We cannot let ourselves get caught up into a pre-conceived idea of what is going on or we will miss what is really going on. Let go of your pre-conceived ideas and just observe. Observe the opponent and observe your own behavior. Look for programmed behaviors in both. Take advantage of those in the opponent and drop those inside you like a “hot potato”. If you are observant and creative each moment then you won’t miss anything. Your responses will be more appropriate to what is really going on and therefore will be more effective.

Some people focus in on their problems and others on their self-image. There is often a central focus in our lives that everything else revolves around. It is the central reference point for our lives. Yet we rarely examine it. In Zookinesis, the central focus is attention and creativity. Attention and creativity don’t have any fixed form. We humans tend to want a fixed structure as our central focus and therefore we ourselves become fixed. Those first three years of training are designed to soften that fixed state of the body and mind. This allows you to see life itself as kaleidoscope of interacting forces and to respond to it in that way. It allows you to perceive the fullness of your life and to allow creativity to flow through you. This is a joyful way to be. In this way, Phantom Kung-fu not only teaches you to protect yourself but to experience life more fully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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