Recently, I’ve been putting my tui na skills to use, treating a relative for sciatica and chronic lumbago. Of course, after only a couple of sessions it’s too soon to see lasting results. Even so, when someone who enters the room bent double in pain, holding on to chairs and tables for support, walks away upright with only a bit of a limp… well, then I really feel I’ve achieved something.
And boy, do I also feel that I’ve been working… It’s physical work, this tui na, and I soon find the perspiration running freely. I’m too stiff as I work; I do need to get into the practice of taiji and qigong again, as I’m using the muscles of my arm too much. Sometimes I get it right, though, and I transfer pressure to the patient without effort, using body weight and core energy.
This comes on top of reading Matthew Crawford’s book, The Case for Working With Your Hands, which I bought a couple of weeks ago. I find it hard to disagree with his thesis that there’s a satisfaction to be gained from using craft skills that is increasingly hard to obtain from the white-collar conceptual mind-work that I was always encouraged to pursue. Certainly, a lot of my work in the higher education sector no longer has the status it once had. Increasingly, the basic teaching of core concepts can frankly be done just as well, or even better, online; the offshoring and/or virtualisation of education provision over the internet can achieve results just as well as a lecture to 350 students. There is another side to education; the widening of horizons, the cultivation of human potential, the development of self-confidence. That’s the aspect that attracted me into the field, not being or wishing to be, a research academic. It’s getting harder and harder to do that though; the changing nature of the industry is bringing bigger and bigger classes, where it’s hard to make individual connections, while fewer and fewer students seem to want anything more than an easy path to a qualification that will help their career. I’m seeing complaints now that it’s unfair to expect the whole curriculum to be revised before exams, or to give them case studies without accompanying answers. Certainly, there isn’t the satisfaction to be had equivalent to taking someone’s pain away because you gave them treatment based on skills you’ve learned the hard way.
I was given a copy of 9000 Needles for Christmas, and I’ve watched it a couple of times now. In brief, it’s a documentary about an American body builder who is paralysed after a stroke. When his insurance runs out, he’s packed off home; his family decide to take him to China, after learning about an acupuncture treatment specifically designed for stroke victims. The documentary was made by the patient’s brother, who naturally enough doesn’t know anything about acupuncture; as a result, it’s a little frustrating that we never learn anything about the principles of the treatment itself. It’s fascinating, though, to see the huge improvements in his condition over a short period of time; it’s also very interesting to see the inner workings of a Chinese TCM hospital (the same one, as I’ve mentioned before, that runs a one-year, English-medium, acupuncture diploma course).
I have a few aches and pains of my own at the moment: a big black bruise on my thigh, and a sore hip. Yes, I went to my first systema class for almost a year last week, and had a great time. This was at Celtic Systema, the school run by Mark Winkler, who’s not long back from six months of training with Vladimir Vasiliev. We worked on breathing, ‘old man walking’, some falling and ground work (hence the sore hip: no mats), and breaking tension chains (hence the bruise on my thigh). All good fun: I’m looking forward to the next class. It was a small group, only four students plus Mark. What was interesting was that Mark and one of the other students speak Welsh, so the three of us spent a lot of the class yn siarad Cymraeg – truly, Celtic Systema!
On the old New Year’s Eve (ie, following the Julian calendar), I went out with the local Mari Lwyd, and not for the first time by any means. It was filmed, so here’s what I mean:
I arrived shortly after this, so I don’t appear in the clip. It’s important to keep traditions alive – and truly alive. It’s a danger that they lose their vitality, become relics that are paraded around reverently, no longer inhabiting their true role in our psyche. The thing is, the Mari Lwyd, traditionally, is a force of chaos, an element of Saturnalia when all roles are turned upside down. Read the folklore, and the Mari runs around, chasing women and making children scream in delighted terror, respecting nobody. Know this, and that mare’s skull is full of a potent personality, waiting for the right bearer through whom it can come alive. Keith Johnstone, in his book Impro, has a lot to say about masks and trance, and the ability of a mask to ‘possess’ its wearer (I’ve put my copy somewhere I can’t find it, else I would quote). Anyway, what I’ve getting to is that I wore the Mari to the next pub we visited and, as someone said to me with a raised eyebrow the next day, I was “in character”. Someone else told me that they laughed until they cried, and the manager gave me a free pint, that’s all I can say…
Right now, I’m working through Bella Merlin’s Stanislavsky Toolkit; there’s an awful lot in there about breathing and movement that can very easily be related to systema, a link I’ve made before…
Phew: I made it to the meditation group at work today. This is actually the first time I’ve been since… blimey… June? I always meant to go during the summer and autumn, but I was always just too damn tired. It was great: even after such a long break, I got back into it. I could feel myself getting warmer, and a bit sticky as my body started to detox – always a sign that the meditation is working. For a brief time, I got really deep in to it; the world vanished, thoughts were absent, and there was just the breath… Man, did I feel better afterwards!
Also back into the zhan zhuang these last few days. There’s always something new. One of my fellow-students on the tui na course had commented on part of my right foot being really stiff – and it was too, I just hadn’t noticed, and was unconsciously compensating with my posture. So, I’m working on that and, slowly, painfully, it’s stretching and opening up. The standing is generally going well, though the creaking of ligaments and popping of tendons (or is the other way round?) remind me of the ground I’ve lost. Not to worry, I’ll soon be back to where I was, and then onwards…
Might be an opportunity coming up to get back into acting; that’ll be good, I was really missing the creative flow of those improv workshops in Beijing. Couple of other things in the pipeline, too, but I won’t mention them in case I jinx them. Systema classes starting soon; that’ll be cool.
Wow, it’s like a logjam, isn’t it, sometimes? You need dynamite to clear the blockages but then discover there’s a lot of cool stuff waiting to flow down to you….
JEB CORLISS: Well, you wanna know what I think is crazy? I think waking up at 6:00am, eating breakfast and getting in a car and sitting in traffic for 1.5 hours on your way to a job where you then sit in a box for eight hours, get a 30 minute break to eat some lunch get back in that car and sit in traffic for another 1.5 hours on your way home where you eat dinner and watch the TV then go to sleep. Repeat that until you’re about 60, you retire, and then you die! I think that is absolutely insane!
Phew. Well. That was a tough summer. After the fun of North Wales…. dunno. I fell into a ‘slough of despond’ led there by a combination of things but in particular, I guess, by the… smallness? of life in the UK? The lack of interest and vision? The acceptance of the lifestyle Corliss talks about above, and the assumption that it’s both right and normal? While all the time, events loom large and the storm gathers on the horizon that might sweep it all away… Meh. Took me a while to remember that I’m bigger than this. Getting back on top of things now.
That said, there have been a lot of positives as well. Still with the girl I met on the CELTA course; her and her little boy. It teaches you a lot about yourself, accepting the trust of a child. Dealing with an indefatigable 5-year-old when he’s playing up? That teaches you a lot about yourself as well. I got the qualification, by the way; can’t remember if I mentioned it, but I’m a qualified teacher of English now.
After a last-minute effort, I also submitted the paperwork and assignments for the meditation course. This was the follow-up for the training weekend I took back in June, so I’m now also qualified to run meditation sessions (which I could do anyway, but now I’m able to join an industry organisation and get insurance, which is so important these days).
For the last few weekends, I’ve been travelling up to London for the training course in tui na at the Asanté Academy. I’m really enjoying it, and my course-mates are a really sound bunch of people; some are working acupuncturists, some are martial artists, some are just interested. A good mix of people, all of them interesting. The gf has been accompanying me, so no time yet to catch up with other London-based friends (readers of this blog included) but that’ll come.
A lot of the theory we’ve been covering has been discussed in terms of acupuncture rather than tui na, and I’m finding that really interesting; it’s definitely getting me more curious about that course in Tianjin. Not sure how I would pay for it (the year’s living as a student, rather than the fees as such), but I’m looking into it now as a serious option.
My martial arts training has been largely on hold, what with everything, apart from zhan zhuang and some xingyi, but as I’m getting back into a more focused state of mind I’ll be trying to ramp that up again…
Interesting times, and all that…
Oh, and a software update broke the blog theme, thus taking the site offline for a while, and leading to yet another new look and feel!
As I was standing in the garden yesterday morning, a flight of wild geese flew over the treeline, not all that far above my head. There were about twenty of them, honking to each other in a leisurely conversation, on their way somewhere…
As it turned out, I was in the garden quite a lot. Two sessions of zhan zhuang: one early afternoon, with the sun warm (for once!) on my face, the other approaching midnight, with a full-ish moon and the stars clear and bright. I also spent a while planting herbs on the bank of the garden; once they’ve taken, I should be able to do my meditations and standing practice with their scent in the fresh air… I remember vividly what it was like to stand in zhan zhuang when I visited Qingbiankou in Hebei Province, with the herb-scented breeze flowing down from the hills… Quite an experience… Finally, I lifted the first of my potatoes… A rather disappointing crop so far, but I bet they’ll taste nice this evening…
Not what you’re expecting from a martial arts blog, perhaps… But wait…
There was a car boot sale behind the town hall yesterday morning, and I strolled down to take a look. I ended up buying a bunch of books, and four chili pepper plants. I’m not sure what type they are, but the peppers look as if they’ll be rather small, which suggests they’ll be hot! (Oh, and I ordered some sichuan pepper bushes from an online garden supplier; give it a year or two, and I’ll be able to prepare my own ma la mix with entirely home-grown ingredients!). Anyway, as I walked down, I found myself being greeted by shopkeepers standing in their doorways and passersby… People I went to school with, or I regularly shop with, or who drink in the same local pub as me, or even just are faces I see regularly… It was a good feeling.
What’s this got to do with anything, you may be asking. Well, it’s been a crazy week, world-wide, hasn’t it? The US downgraded; even so, things will get worse there, because there’s no money left. As I’ve mentioned several times before, in the US, government at every level is broke, and will have to stop its operations. In Euroland, there’s no respite as governments try to find a solution to sovereign debt – but they won’t, because there is no good solution. And, in London, the cracks started to show, as the streets burned, and the police barely held the line. It’s all quiet again now, but the problems are not going away.
Behind all this lies resource scarcity. Oil, food, water, minerals, whatever. It’s all costing more than it did, and that’s only going to get worse. In London, Minnesota, the Middle East, Africa, China… those who have nothing are finding it hard to cope as the costs of living rise… Those who have something will become ever more desperate to hang on to it…
So, it’s a good time to go back to examine basics. The targets I set myself, and described on this blog, a year or so back are proving to be sound ones. I’m re-establishing myself in a strong community, where people know and look out for each other. I’m getting familiar with how the garden works; reading my books to learn about the medicinal values of herbs and spices, so that I can decide which to plant… And working on the martial arts and meditation, to build mental and physical resilience…
At the top, the photo is of London Sikhs, who gathered to protect their gurdwara from the mob; standing on the steps with swords, axes, and sticks. Perhaps that kind of thing will become more common.
Well, I’ve just finished my intensive, 4-week CELTA course. When you apply for a place, you are warned that it’s intense; I was told that it would be best if I had someone else to do my cooking and washing for me, and that I could expect to routinely work into the small hours on assignments. As it happens, I don’t have anyone to do my housework for me, and I have commitments that sharply limit the hours I could commit… so it was a very hard slog indeed! I was routinely falling asleep at the keyboard, and basically only just scraped through. Still, a pass is a pass, and the qualification should be very useful indeed. I have plans… I also met a rather special woman…
So, where am I at? I managed to get a few training sessions in with the spear. I’ve now got that xingyi spear set down, on a broad-brush level. I need to spend a bit of time now working on the fine detail, to make sure I’ve got that right. After that, I’ll move on to a bagua spear set. The Sun Zhi Jun spear form that I’ve been discussing with Kim here is pretty complex; the more I work with the spear, the more I realize how tricky that set is. So, I think that as an intermediate step I’ll work on this form:
I’m still really enjoying working with the spear; it’s been a revelation to me. So much so, I had to acquire a Hanwei Yari. Apparently there’s been a fire at the Hanwei factory and all their inventory was lost, so all of the UK retailers are out of stock, and I had to get it from Kult of Athena (who were great, by the way: HIGHLY recommended). It took a while but it’s arrived, and I’m really pleased with it. It’s not as flexible as a waxwood Chinese spear, but hey… On that note, two more clips:
Jet Li vs Donnie Yen in Hero:
Yari vs Chinese spear:
My zhan zhuang went completely out of the window during the last month; I was far too tired and pushed for time. I’ve started again as of today and will be very regular, if only because I have to complete a 6-week diary of twice-daily meditation sessions. This is part of the ongoing requirements I need to fulfill in order to obtain the qualification as a teacher of meditation; you may recall that I went to Brighton in early June for the initial weekend training. At that time, I hadn’t even thought of doing the CELTA course, which was very much a last minute decision… Anyhow, the plan is, zhan zhuang standing meditation in the morning, sitting meditation in the evening. I also have to do two book reviews, which I’ll probably post here as well. That’ll take me to mid-September, at which point I’ll be off to Switzerland to visit the aforementioned young lady… After that, in October, I plan to start that course in tui na – weekends in London for so months or so…
Re-reading (once again) Robert W Smith’s account of his time in Taiwan, Chinese Boxing, I note this passage in the chapter about the policeman Paul Kuo:
Kuo told me also of Wang Hsiang-Chai, famed but not liked in Hopei. Wang loved to fight and lost only to Shang Yun-hsiang. His method consisted entirely of circles; every block was an attack.
Heh. Wang Xianghai keeps on cropping up in books that I’ve had for ages, but I’d never noticed before…
I’ve just got back from a couple of days in Brighton, where I was taking a foundation course in leading mindfulness and meditation training. As I’ve mentioned before, once I’ve completed this qualification, I will be able to register for professional insurance, and to run training sessions for the public, as well as for patients referred by GPs (though at this point this latter isn’t something I plan to do).
It was a small group: myself, another bloke, and four women. We were a pretty mixed bag, from very different backgrounds, and with varied reasons for doing the course. We all got on very well, though, and I think that some of us got very involved with the experience.
It was certainly interesting, and definitely challenging. Although I’ve had a fair bit of experience in meditation since 2004, it has always been a personal thing; apart from here on the blog – which has a certain feeling of detachment and distance, since I’ve met so few of you in person – I rarely talk about it in real life. In Singapore and China, meditation was well understood, and even close to the mainstream; and abiding memory is New Year’s Eve, 2007, when I attended the 108 Bells ceremony at the Bright Hill monastery – where there were hundreds of people. Here in Wales… it’s not the same; I tend to not talk about it, since meditation falls into that extremely broad category of ‘weird’, as far as most folk are concerned…
Still, I was very surprised at how difficult it was to stand up and act as a leader in the practice, even when the ‘students’ were also course participants. Talking about the benefits of meditation in front of a group of strangers was surprisingly tough. However, I got into it fairly quickly, though all weekend I found it tough to control my voice in the way I’m used to doing as a lecturer. There you are, the mind-body connection in action…
We went through a fair bit of training as a group, learning how to explain the benefits of meditation for both mental and physical health, and ran through a number of “3-minute convincers” – exercises designed to demonstrate rapidly the mind-body link to people who might be sceptical. We also went through a number of group meditation sessions. There were also, of course, sessions where we had to lead people through a meditation exercise and into deep relaxation. The first two were 1-1 with another student; the second was to lead the whole group. For the first, I used a qigong visualisation that I learned in Singapore; while I was talking the other student through it, I felt that it just wasn’t working, but when we’d finished, she said that it had been really effective. For the second 1-1, I used a basic yiquan visualisation exercise tied to zhan zhuang. It wasn’t a great success, since I hadn’t checked for contra-indications. Fortunately, that session was only for a couple of minutes, and she was straight up about telling me she couldn’t do it. For the final session, with the whole group, I had ten minutes, and took care to point out the options for hand and arm positions; I then went through the ‘standing in the water’ visualisation for the holding the ball exercise. Again, I felt as I was doing it, that it really wasn’t working – but, when I finished, it got really good feedback. Even the course instructor mentioned that it anchored her in the body in a way that no other exercise she knew was able to do. Just goes to show: yiquan rocks
Another exercise was where the instructor, using her experience of working with patients referred by doctors, gave us an example of what it’s like to work with non-cooperative participants. In my case, she play-acted an agoraphobic woman, who hid her face under her jumper, and wouldn’t look at me or even talk. Blimey. That was hard. It showed me how complex it is it work with the genuinely ill, rather than simply those who have disposable income and are looking for help with relaxation…
It was a pretty stressful weekend overall. I was staying in London on Thursday and Friday nights; on Friday I got back to the hostel at 20:15ish, to discover that they had made a mistake on the computer, deleted my booking, and given my room to someone else… And no, they didn’t have another… I can now tell you with absolute certainty, that trying to find a room with no booking, late on a Friday night in London, really is not what you need if you were looking forward to a night out, or even for a quiet, relaxing evening….
There were other issues too… but nothing to do with the course itself. Very glad I did it; I learned a great deal and met some wonderful people. It isn’t over yet; I need to keep a daily meditation diary for a few weeks, write some book reviews, and record myself running a meditation session with ‘real’ people before I get the qualification. I may post the book reviews here.
It was a great confidence-booster, though; I start to believe that yes, I can teach this stuff – not just blog about it….
And so my plans make progress… Big job losses are happening in communities in my area… It looks like a wave of redundancies are coming in the organization where I work… Catching up today on the last few days’ news, it’s clear that changes are happening more and more rapidly, and none of them are good. Got to be ready…
I was practising zhan zhuang in the garden yesterday morning. Heavy but broken black clouds were low in the sky, allowing golden moments of sunlight to break through and illuminate the tops of the saplings I planted last month. As I stood, the blackbirds landed close by my feet, scraping caterpillars against the path to rub the hairs off. A robin came to investigate me, lost interest, and went to the next garden. A squirrel ran along the top of the fence at the end of the garden, paused for a short while to survey the territory, and then leisurely went back the way he came.
It occurred to me that this was the experience of those Daoists who developed the neijia styles. In their silent, stationary, meditations, they would have observed the life around them, just as I do; having stilled their minds, they project no emotion, no intentions, that would alert the beasts and birds around them. Thus, in the mountains, they would have seen the bears and the tigers, the storks and the snakes, going out their business with no fear of the observer.
That led me back to something I’ve mentioned before, the naming of taiji movements. In the West, names such as ‘Parting Wild Horse’s Mane’, ‘Fair Lady Works Shuttles’, ‘Stork spreads wings’ are regarded with amusement. How flowery! How poetic! But silly, after all; shouldn’t we give them names that explain how they’re used? What’s the, you know, practical application there, man? Of course, the answer is no, the names are perfect. They come from a close observation of nature, a clear understanding of the energies, the principles, the flow involved in that movement. It’s only our dysfunctional society, where children think milk is produced in factories, that is so alienated from the world of nature, that doesn’t get this.
Moreover, the ability to observe that nature, and the ability to express these energies in one’s own body… that comes first and foremost from control of one’s mind. To achieve that stillness. To know the body from inside. To understand how that flow of energy moves the human body to achieve that end… It’s the mind. All in the mind.
For me, I got that through yiquan, though of course I had a background in taijiquan before I got to it and, of course, I had completed several meditation retreats. For me, yiquan and taijiquan complement one another; the exact same principles, but expressed with yang energy in yiquan, and yin energy in taijiquan.
Thus, I agree with an awful lot that Tabby Cat writes about on this topic. I don’t agree that CMC-37 is the best, though of course I do also practise that form. He’s lucky, in that he found a teacher who led him to this insight. Not everyone gets that luck, and for them that form is not better than yiquan is for Tabby. For myself, it was with yiquan that I had the breakthrough. Horses. Courses.
But he’s right, though: it’s all about the energy. It’s all about the mind.
Not too much to report at present. Sometimes when wake up at night, my fingers hurt from being tensed during zhan zhuang. I’ve started using the steel rings on my wrists in some postures.
The pair of blackbirds nesting nearby are getting pretty used to me now, especially the female. She darts around my feet while I’m practising the ba mu zhang (slowly, of course). She’s even coming within a few inches of me while I dig up the lawn to become a vegetable plot, hopping here and there in search of fresh, juicy worms. The male is more cautious, and won’t come near. This evening, the female landed right in front of me, and pulled a large worm halfway out of a large clod of earth, held it for a while, and then hopped off. She was looking at the male, perched nearby on the ridge of the greenhouse, as if to say “Look, it’s OK! It’s safe, and there’s good eating!”. I think she’s mentally classified me as strange but useful type of livestock; good at churning up earth, but not dangerous. A pig, perhaps.
There are times when I’m standing in zhan zhuang, maybe in the morning with all different kinds of birds flying about, and the sun just creeping into the corner of the garden, or in the evening with the mud from the garden drying on my fingers, when I simply don’t want to do anything else. I think of the hermits that Red Pine met in China, and I think to myself, this is how they live. Meditation, martial arts, growing their own food, close to nature and in harmony with the wildlife. Could anything be better?
Well, that isn’t an option for me at this time, but I’ll tell you what: these sessions of practice, morning and evening – nothing else comes close…
I also met a rather special woman…
