HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

The dynamics of how the mind can heal the body is a vital part of all ancient healing systems.  But just what are those dynamics?  I have spent most of my life studying this subject, apprenticing with traditional healers of several cultures and reading ancient manuscripts of others.  As a writer, my job is to distill that information and to express it in a way that is appropriate and understandable to modern readers. 

Firstly, I need to explain the concept of “attention”.  It is important to understand that attention does not mean thinking.  Pure attention (called, “True Yin” in Taoist Alchemy) is the state of awareness when thinking stops.  You are perfectly capable of functioning, but your intentions come from a deeper part of you than thoughts. 

The best way of explaining this very important principle, comes from Christian history.  During the first three hundred years after Jesus’ death, there was a split in Christianity.  This was at a time when Emperor Constantine chose Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire.  In both versions of Christianity, the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) was used to express the basic principles of the religion.  In each version, the Father represented consciousness, the Son reason or thinking, and the Holy Ghost represented creativity (a piece of God within you). 

The “Gnostic” Christians believed that thinking was a process used by consciousness to communicate and to plan your activities, etc.  It must always be balanced with creativity so that the thinking process does not become rigid. 

This was expressed as “The Bridal Chamber”, in which the bride (creativity) and groom (thinking) were united and balanced within the larger space of the room (pure consciousness).  And so they explained that the Father “begets” the “Son” and is not the same as the “Son”. 

The “Apostolic” Christians believed that thinking is the same as consciousness – that there is no other state of consciousness than thinking.  Creativity is also thinking.  Everything is thinking.  They expressed this as the Son IS the Father or “Jesus is God”. 

Emperor Constantine called for a conference in the city of Nicaea in 323 AD to settle these differences.  The emperor set himself up as the moderator.  Now, using our thinking minds to good advantage, which version would an empire, needing to keep control over vast numbers of people of many different cultures, choose as the “correct” version of Christianity?  If thinking was the only version of consciousness considered legitimate, and the Roman Empire and the Apostolics provided a list of approved thoughts, then that inconvenient factor of creativity could be eliminated.

It is easier to control people whose minds all conform. To this day it is hard to convince people that there is another state of consciousness other than thinking.  The state of consciousness which is controlled by the thinking process is one dimensional.  Each thought follows the other, one by one. 

And yet, even while thinking, you must also at the same time, use the state of pure consciousness, even though you might not recognize it.  It is this larger state that keeps track of where the thoughts are going to wind up somewhere useful.  It is like the map that gives you the overall picture, while the thinking process is like the little dot on the map that shows you where you are at the moment.  If the “map” part of the mind weakens and you are left only with the dot (thinking), then you are lost.  And that is the state of many people today. 

And now the real secret of healing.  In modern times, we “think” of consciousness as the by-product of nerve activity in the brain.  When you get involved in any traditional healing system, you soon realize that every part of the body is conscious. 

In Tai-chi we say that the feet are the “gateway to consciousness”.  This means that how your feet are placed on the ground with each step, determines how the rest of your body has to adjust itself to the irregularities of the terrain.  Those irregularities are part of the geology and biology of that area.  In this way, each part of you becomes part of the geological and biological history of that area. 

Of course, in modern times, we pave over those nasty irregularities so that our feet don’t need to be conscious.  In many ways we create a culture which allows the consciousness of the body to die so that all of our energy can be focused on the thinking process.  And so the body is deprived of conscious energy and begins to decay and age. 

Many types of massage such as “Tai-chi Massage” are specifically used to “wake up” the consciousness of the body.  The Tai-chi “Forms”, “Chi-gung” and “Push Hands” are used for the same purpose.  When each part of the body is conscious, the body “knows” how to heal itself.  It knows without thinking. 

And so one important principle of Tai-chi (as well as other healing systems) is that “attention” should be evenly distributed throughout the body, so that you feel you are as much your feet as you are your head.  Many people feel they are just a big head, and the body’s function is just to carry the head around.  Small children in our society usually draw people as big heads with tiny arms and legs sticking out of the heads.  I wonder if they are just seeing the distribution of attention in a person, and drawing their pictures accurately from that perspective. 

In “internal” martial arts training, your attention needs to fill up the entire area around you so that you can feel your sparring partner with your attention.  The action is going by too fast to see everything.  One of the great benefits of martial arts training is that you learn to connect your attention to your surroundings, including to your sparring partner.  Gradually your attention can connect to all of your natural surroundings in a very spiritual way. 

And that “way” is as follows:  Consciousness is experienced as a natural force, permeating all things in nature.  The consciousness of each living thing is connected to all others.  In this way, the earth is a conscious being and the state of health of one part of it is vital to the state of health of all other parts.  An attack on one part of the earth is an attack on the whole.  The natural flow of consciousness through all living things is vital for the health of any one of them. 

We now live in a culture which fosters blocking ourselves off from that flow of consciousness and so, it fosters the deadening of the body.  We watch football rather than play football.  We text our friends rather than talk to our friends.  If anyone is interested in making a lot of money, I have a great idea.  Imagine a cell phone that you can talk into and it creates text, so that you don’t have to press on the letter keys.  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  Now imagine a cell phone that receives that text and translates it into voice, so you don’t have to look down at the phone (for example, when you’re driving).  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  But I think that technology may have already been invented.  It is called, “Calling someone on the phone”. 

Why do people prefer texting?  I think it is because they don’t have to actually talk to anyone.  Texting provides a separation between people, just as an addiction to thinking provides a separation from your own body. 

But thinking that emanates from the combined consciousness of the whole body and its connection to the entire world of life, is truly creative.  It is the balance of thinking and creativity that allows the body to constantly heal itself.  To heal is to be creative and to experience the creativity of others.  Art, in whatever form, is healing.  Comedy is healing.  Allow your attention to expand, relax and play, and you will stay younger and more vibrant.  Spend more time in nature and feel how you are connected to it.  This will help you to become more connected to yourself. 

Play ball and talk to people face to face, like in “the old days”.  Feel how watching the rising or setting sun can heal the body.  As the Tai-chi saying goes, “Relax (to allow attention to expand), smile (be playful) and breathe (feel your connection to nature)”.

Only a fraction of the human brain is used in modern times.  We have moved our focus of attention away from those parts that make us powerful and coordinated physically and which allow us to channel the biological forces of nature through our bodies.  This leads to lower vitality and premature old age. 

When we practice Tai-chi and Zookinesis, it is essential that we stimulate the entire brain, including what is called the “reptilian brain”, or “primitive brain”.  Rather than being primitive it is an essential part of the brain.  We gradually enliven all parts of the nervous system which, in turn, enlivens the entire body.  The result is that our very perception of the world around us is sharpened.  We can perceive deeper levels and finer details of our senses and bring back senses that have been allowed to become dormant.

The process of bringing power back to the brain is most vividly experienced in the Push Hands exercise (a two person exercise in which each person tries to throw the partner off balance.  (This has been described in detail in other “weekly lessons”).  But you can use the techniques of Push Hands in everyday life in ordinary situations. 

As we practice Push Hands we experiment with “seating” our attention in various parts of the brain.  As an example, we concentrate on the lower rear part of the brain which is the reptilian brain.  As you are about to push the partner you may notice that your attention jumps forward which causes your entire body to lunge forward.  This allows your partner to turn to the side and allow you to fall forward.

The dynamics of your attention can pull your own body off balance.  An important principle in Push Hands is to keep your attention centered.  You generate the force to push the partner through “internal” movements of your body.  This consists of moving individual joints and muscles in relationship to each other but not allowing the whole body to lunge back and forth.  The result is similar to break dancing moves in which the body undulates, sending waves of force through itself, but the body remains in a centered position. 

This can only be achieved when your attention is centered.  If your attention is concentrated in only certain parts of the brain, the frontal lobes for example, then it is already off center.  You are already off balance as far as your attention is concerned and then your body copies that pattern of poor balance.  The body reflects the pattern and quality of your attention.  If your attention jumps around a lot, then your body will exhibit excess movement. 

You can practice spreading your attention throughout your brain in the Push Hands exercise, your Tai-chi forms, Zookinesis exercises or any other activity.  This practice will enable you to keep your attention full and balanced in the brain in your everyday interactions with people.  I guarantee that you will amaze yourself with how calm and powerful you feel when you keep the reptilian part of your brain energized in interpersonal interactions.

Rather than paying attention to the reptilian brain from the frontal lobes, try having the reptilian brain as the seat of attention and looking out from it.  Make believe that right in front of the reptilian brain there is a window and you are looking out that window.  The window is in the middle of the brain (back to front) and at the bottom of the brain.  You may feel both your body and your breathing relaxing.  You will feel more connected to your surroundings and more secure. 

This exercise does not cut off your frontal lobes (the intellectual part of the brain) but includes them. Your attention will feel more centered within the entire nervous system.  The quality of your attention will be more relaxed, sharper and stronger.  Your body will be able to respond more accurately to the changing condition around you.  You can see that energizing the reptilian brain is essential for practicing Push Hands.  It is also essential for living a more powerful and effective life. 

You begin to look at the dynamics and qualities of attention in other people as if you were a healer diagnosing a patient.  Your understanding of these qualities in others gives you a deeper understanding of their resultant behavior which in turn, gives you more options of how to respond to them.  If they are off balance, then you own balanced state can help them to become balanced.  Their attention responds to the qualities of your attention as one tuning fork vibrates when another one next to it is sounded. 

On the other hand, you can avoid having your own attention thrown off balance by the unbalanced state of their attention.  You see the underlying mechanisms of the interaction and can avoid the pitfalls.

It’s amazing that simply by bring the focus of your attention to a different part of the brain and “looking out” from there, you can change the whole dynamic of your personal life.  It is so easy to try and the results are so obvious. 

This is the type of training you would receive in what is called a “mouth to ear” transmission of teaching, such as Zookinesis.  This means a tradition that is taught from teacher to student through long term, disciplined training, rather than from books or shallow training.  There is a whole world of such training methods.

Once you become comfortable with looking out from the reptilian brain, you then create other foci of attention.  Examples – a point on the palm between the third and fourth finger and one inch down, the point on the bottom of the foot at the rear of the ball of the foot and centered between the left and right side, the coccyx bone and the tan-tien (an area just below the navel in the center of the body).

You concentrate on these spots to either energize or relax them as you do Push Hands.  The patterns of energizing and relaxing in these areas create different alignments of the body and affect the flow of forces through the body.  This allows you to send force out into the partner while keeping the body still.  The result is that the partner is thrown back and it doesn’t seem as if you did anything.

If you could not access the reptilian brain then you simply could not create and coordinate these multiple foci of attention because your attention would not be centered.  This is part of what is known as “Taoist alchemy” which is the basis of Tai-chi and Zookinesis.  Taoist alchemy is the inner work to bring back your mind, body and spirit to full functioning.

From that inner point of view you can perceive sources of energy that are normally invisible to us.  You realize that our culture is not built on a foundation of “whole brain experience” or what I call “whole body attention”.  Anything outside of our modern cultural perspective is considered to not exist.  And so, while we may have perceptions and feelings of these sources of energy, we ignore them in order to feel emotionally secure.  We need to feel part of this culture.  It is like a child grabbing onto his parent’s leg, fearing to venture too many steps away.

The mouth to ear training allows you to take those steps and to understand the inner experiences which you have ignored up to now.  In this way a whole new world is revealed which allows your life to make much more sense.  Your culture, which previously caged your perceptions, now is seen in a wider context. 

You can begin this training by yourself simply by massaging the rear of your head several times a day to make it easier to pay attention to.  Remember that the goal is not to pay attention to the rear of the head from the front of the head.  The goal is to “seat” the attention in the rear of the head (as an exercise) and then to eventually fill the entire brain with attention so that the attention is balance. 

Paying attention to the rear of the head is only the first (but necessary) step.

I’m sure you will have many questions and comments about this type of training.  Feel free to use the “comments” section to the left of this article for your questions and comments.

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.