Just in case anyone’s wondering why it’s gone quiet here, I’m enjoying the warmth in Singapore. I’ll be here for another week before moving on to Bangkok for a few days. After that, I’m going on a 10-day vipassana retreat. Can’t wait…

As readers of his blog will know, Tabby Cat has been in Beijing lately. I had the pleasure of catching up with him yesterday, and found him to be as interesting and good to talk to as I had expected! Tabby, I’ll looking forward to catching up next time you’re in town; watch out for an email soon.

We had lunch and then took a stroll around Zhongshan Park, exploring parts of it that I haven’t been to before. I was fascinated to discover that this is one of the areas where parents gather to advertise the personal details of their children, who are too busy for dating, in the hope of finding them a spouse. I’d read about this, but hadn’t realized that it happens in the same park where I train Funny old place, China…

It was a fresher day today, thanks to a cold north wind that made my nose stream. Not much to report, really: it was just walk, walk, walk, first in a straight line, then in circles. Sometimes I did it ok, mostly I didn’t.

I was thinking further on the same lines as yesterday: that getting this right is fundamentally a mental problem, not a physical one. I’m speaking from a learner’s point of view of course. As I was trying to walk the way Kong Cheng was telling me to, I was trying to hold my attention simultaneously in my feet, my hips, my pelvis and lower back, my shoulders, and my hands. Of course, I couldn’t do it, that’s too much! I realised that I was searching for the right vizualisation.

I’ve been wary of vizualisation, which comes from my meditation training. Vipassana involves using the mind to feel what is happening in different parts of the body; the danger is that the practitioner vizualises the body part, in other words creates a mental illusion, rather than stilling mental activity and simply sensing what’s happening in reality.

For martial arts training, though, it hit me today how useful visualisation is. Rather than herding cats, as my mind was trying to do this morning, the correct visualisation of an action or movement presents the mind with an activity it’s already familiar with, so that it knows exactly what to do with the body and doesn’t have to worry about it any more. Of course, this is precisely why the Chinese martial arts have such poetic names for their postures and movements: they are precisely describing a movement, energy and/or attitude in terms that would make a great deal of sense to traditional practitioners. Of course, they lived in a more unspoiled and natural world, and so were far more familiar with the movements of wild animals etc, that we are today. Working on the basic tang ni bu, I’m having to create a new vizualisation: “Cross-country skier holds down balloon”, but there’s got to be something better….

It’s been much warmer this week, but there is a price to pay… The winds have died down, so there’s no wind chill – but it also means that there’s nothing to blow the pollution away. Going to Zhongshan Park this morning, there was an acrid mist that caught at the back of my throat. As I entered the park, I could hear a distant booming that lasted for ten minutes or so; I wonder if the weather bureau was firing shells into the clouds to bring some rain…?

Sorry if these photos are getting repetitive, but I want to keep a record of what the scene is like every time I go to train; over the months, it should track the progress of the seasons – and, hopefully, remind me of progress in martial arts!

I’ve been practicing, and my mud-stepping is improving – Kong Cheng only had to kick my heels a few times. I did a few circuits under the eaves of a park office (where a thick-set Chinese gentleman of senior years was also practicing some qigong; we politely ignored each other). After that, it was circle-walking for two hours, winding up again with a bit of push-hands.

Such a simple description of the lesson but, internally, quite a lot happened. Kong Cheng had to remind me repeatedly about posture: leaning forward or to one side; wiggling my hips a bit too much; letting one arm (usually the outer) collapse in a bit too much… It’s all good; I think these are superficial issues that will vanish as I develop the internal work.

What do I mean by that? Well, as my stepping becomes less of an issue, my mind is able to move more freely around the body as a whole, identifying tensions. In particular, my shoulders, upper arms and upper back have a clear tendency to tense up, and only relax when I send my mind to them.Of course, once I do that, the lower back is free to sink in and under, the kua can move more freely, and the stepping gets more fluid and correct. So: it’s all in the mind – and, in keeping the mind present, calm, and aware of the body. Once the mind wandered (for example, ahem, composing a first draft of this post…) then everything tensed up again…

This awareness of tension is something I just wasn’t able to do before beginning yiquan, and the standing pole practice of zhan zhuang. As I mentioned before, that explains why my bagua before was so lousy – I simply couldn’t do it before because of the tension in the areas I just mentioned, so I guess I just compensated by go fast, relying on momentum and sloppy technique…. Kong Cheng mentioned that martial arts masters say “It’s easier to learn than to fix”, but there we are: I have to fix by bad habits before I can progress. Madam Ge Chun Yan often used to say that my root was weak, and I see clearly now why she said that.

If the zhan zhuang took me quite a long time to get into, the xing zhuang of circle-walking is tougher yet – maintaining mindfulness while walking is not easy! By the end of the session I was perspiring freely, and my ankles were aching from the unaccustomed strain; I lost a lot of weight when I first trained in bagua in 2004 – with luck, the same will happen again! It’s this kind of train of thought that makes me think that finally I am on the track for learning proper neijiaquan; above all, it’s the awareness that’s important, not the form. I didn’t have that when I was training in Singapore, or indeed when I first came to Beijing. Again, it’s only since I started the yiquan with Master Yao Cheng Rong that the penny finally dropped.

So, on the whole, I’m feeling quite positive about it all at the moment.

Here are a few clips that have entertained me or provoked thought lately.

I think of this one as A Dream of the Red Junks. I linked recently to a post of John Robb’s, in which he advocates the development of your own tribe; a train of thought that he followed up here and here. I see this being an important train of thought since, by the time I’m 70 or so, I expect that the world to be very different indeed from what we know now, and support networks will be essential. That being the case, and looking at the skill sets that I either possess or am trying to acquire, the Red Junks look like a reasonable role model – people will always need entertainment…

So, that brings us to “The World’s Most Talented Man”, found via the Emptyflower forums:

What an entertainer!

Here’s a video of that Systema seminar in Kuala Lumpur that I mentioned in my last post:

Systema instructors all seem to understand the value of showmanship…

For fun, here’s a bit of parkour in Beijing:

And to get you thinking… How is it that all these urbanites get fed?

Oh, and by the way, rising temperatures have pushed major Antarctic glaciers past their tipping point, which is not good if you live in a low-lying coastal area… This particular source isn’t one that I would regard as academically reputable but this post does tie together a number of issues that have flashed up on my radar over the past few months: Will 2010 Be The Year The World Runs Out Of Food? “Don’t say you didn’t see it coming“.

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