HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

When a student first begins learning Tai-chi and Zookinesis, the first thing that impresses him is how much his body has degenerated. The student is asked to use the body correctly and he can barely feel his body let alone make connections to it.

You might hear the teacher give instructions but how do you translate that into action? Your attention must be fine and energized enough to affect one nerve to move a small part of one muscle while the adjacent nerve remains still. You must be able to breathe into one small part of the lung so that the lung presses against one vertebra while the rest of the lung remains still. While it seems like it would take a lifetime to achieve these feats, you learn that they are actually very simple. They are really at a beginner’s level of achievement.

So you, as a student, wonder, “If this is simple, what hope do I possibly have of getting very far in this practice”. Add to this that as you begin to feel your body internally, the first thing that you feel is how tense, misaligned and dead the body is. No one wants to feel this. We usually are very happy to be dead so we don’t have to feel how out of shape we are. Yet what choice is there? Will you remain dead until you die or will you begin to become alive?

Every lesson and every minute of practice brings you a little closer to becoming alive. Don’t concentrate on how far there is to go. A Zen student told me that he went to a Zen monastery and the teacher had him help build a stone wall. After two hours of this he told the teacher that he was very discouraged. He worked very hard yet made little progress. The teacher told him that he looked at the situation the wrong way. “What is the right way”, he asked. The teacher told him, “Pick up one rock and put it onto the wall. Then pick up the next rock and put it on the wall.” The teacher then left. The student couldn’t understand what the teacher meant.

If you worry about accomplishing a huge task, then each effort will seem small. If you concentrate on what you are actually doing, then each effort will fill your attention. Find the joy in each little inch of becoming alive. Your body, your mind and your spirit can come to life. The mind and spirit also have muscles and bones. They have a structure – an anatomy and a mechanics – a physiology. Like the body, they can be tense, fragile and basically, non-functioning.

Tai-chi and Zookinesis teaches this anatomy and physiology of the body, mind and spirit and gives you the skills of using these parts of you. Zookinesis was originally called, “Spirit Breathing” because of the importance of the use of the breath in training. As an example, when you move in an exercise or Tai-chi form, the parts of your body create momentum. This momentum pulls on each muscle, joint, tendon and ligament of the body, aligning each part in the direction of the momentum. So each part of the body is stretched by the momentum.

As you are expanding, you breathe in. You direct that breath into each joint at the same time that the joint is being pulled by the momentum. (If you don’t understand this at this time, don’t worry. It takes training to appreciate this dynamic. I’m just using this as an example of the use of breath.) As each joint expands in pace with the breath expansion, it is also being pulled in a particular direction by the momentum. The momentum continues to pull on the joint, yet, once the joint is “filled with breath”, the breath then passes through the joint. The result is that the joint is first stretched open by the breath as it is being pulled by the momentum and then, when the breath passes through, the momentum then continues to stretch the joint. The joint is stretched from within and from without.

This is obviously a more advanced training, requiring at least that you understand these ideas in the first place. The point I’m making is that even when a student is at this stage of development, he still is amazed at how dead is his body and attention (even though it is a great deal more alive than when he started). His expectations of what he can accomplish are now so great that the above exercise seems to him as simple as moving one finger at a time may seem to the average person.

You realize that the potential of our minds, bodies and spirits is so great that it really remains hidden and unknown to most people. You begin to feel that you are living in a different world than everyone else and so seek other practitioners to have a community of people you can relate to.

Do you remember ever walking on the earth with bare feet? How did it feel when you then walked on cement? When the students have a community to relate to, how do you think it feels when they then have to deal with the culture at large? No wonder the Taoist monks retreated to the mountains in monasteries! Yet the greater achievement is to be able to function in our culture and still retain your aliveness. How else can others know what aliveness is?

A student of any “internal” system of exercise begins his or her practice in a “catch 22” situation. He learns a series of techniques that should lead him to develop a connection of his mind and body. This connection allows him to become aware that there is an internal system of intelligence that can then take over his instruction. In other words, at some point, the awareness of his own body should itself, instruct him as to how to move and exercise. The catch 22 is that the more he focuses on the techniques he is being taught, the less he trusts his own body and the more he depends on those techniques.

The techniques, in Tai-chi and Zookinesis are considered as the “Zen raft”, that is, a raft that brings you from one side of a river to the other. Once you get to the other side, you abandon the raft and begin your journey on the other side of the river. The techniques of body awareness lead you to a living internal blueprint of the dynamics of the mind and body, of the emotions, will, memories, senses and all the other aspects of being human. You become aware of that internal intelligence and how it lies behind all aspects of your life. The techniques of Tai-chi and Zookinesis are still practiced and perfected but you become aware of how they are leading you to a greater awareness of how flesh and consciousness interact.

In our culture, we believe that everything starts with the physical world and that all other phenomena are a by-product of the interaction of atoms and subatomic particles. In most ancient cultures, the physical world was considered equal to all other human experiences. Each was considered to be an “element” of being human, so that the mind, emotions and consciousness itself were on an equal level with the physical world. The “balancing of the elements”, the main purpose of internal training, was to develop a balanced person who doesn’t obsess with any one element.

As an example, in Zookinesis, the sense of sight is considered to be one half of a paired sense. Sight gives us information about the exterior of objects – their color, shape, size, texture etc. It shows us how each thing is separate from each other thing. The sense of “chi” (internal energy) gives us information about the interior of things and about how everything is connected to everything else with energy. In our culture, the sense of chi is not recognized, so that we don’t feel it. Yet as we learn any internal system of exercise, we need to regain this sense so that we can become more balanced.

Practitioners of the internal martial arts are well versed with chi and use it to strengthen their health, to increase the power of their strikes in sparring and to be able to withstand strikes from an opponent. A student of mine once asked me if I could stop using chi to protect myself from strikes. I explained that I am so used to protecting myself with chi that it was hard for me to stop doing it. But I figured out a way to “turn off” the chi. He then punched me and it really hurt! I told him I would never do that again. He reminded me that since he had not yet developed this protective ability, I should take it easy on him. He made his point.

Often as people practice “Push Hands” (a two person exercise in which each tries to throw the other off balance), or sparring, they will come up with a very creative technique they had never learned before. This will surprise them because it is as if another person inside of them made them do this new technique. As they get used to these new techniques arising spontaneously out of them, they realize that they arise out of their own creativity. Then they come to “know” their creativity as a living energy within them. It is this body intelligence I mentioned above. This awareness will make them feel uncomfortable at first because they realize they are more than they thought they were. There is a power inside of them which seems stronger or perhaps just “smarter” than the students themselves. How can their “weak” little personalities stand up to this powerful ancient intelligence?

An artificial competition begins to try to keep the “genie in the bottle”. It takes time for the student to develop a harmonious relationship with his own inner intelligence. Push Hands is great training for this because it deals with the relationship between two people on a physical level. You can’t use force and tension in Push Hands or you yourself will get pushed over. You really have to merge with the Push Hands partner, uniting your energies until you find a weak point in his alignment or attention and then you can push.

In the case of the internal intelligence you learn to blend and connect your personality with that ancient body intelligence to form a greater self. In those old cultures there was a name for people who successfully accomplished that merging. It was called being “an elder”. We don’t have many elders in our culture and that concept isn’t admired as it used to be. We now feel that each generation knows more than the previous one. We feel that the ancient cultures were ignorant just as we feel that our parents are dumb compared to ourselves. Yet it is not the accumulation of material knowledge that developed an elder, but the type of knowledge that is always at our fingertips.  I find that my best students begin their practice just to improve their health, or to get better muscle definition or to learn self-defense. Yet as they learn there is much more depth to this training, they become even more interested. They realize there is a whole other world out there – the world of internal awareness.

The student is led to this awareness by continuing to practice the techniques until he realizes that simply doing the techniques faster or stronger is not getting him anywhere. He comes to a plateau in his training. It is only when he lets that internal intelligence (the “Body-Mind”) take over that he can continue to progress. At that point, he feels that the person he thought he was, can just sit back and let this new being take over. His exercise becomes effortless and much more rewarding. The old cultures called Body-Mind “the ancient one”. They might ask the confused student, “Let me see the ancient one”, meaning that they wanted to see the student let the internal intelligence take over his exercises. So the point of this week’s lesson is not to let the techniques become the whole of what you learn. Realize that they are leading you to an internal awareness and continue to watch out for hints of the ancient one. When he (or she) comes you will be rewarded.