I met Kong Cheng again yesterday at Zhongshan Park; it was cold again, but at least there wasn’t any wind. (Also: hooray for thermal underwear!).

Basically, I spent most of two hours still working on tang ni bu. I confirmed that there is a significant difference in stepping techniques between Sun Zhijun’s style (which is what I’ve practiced before) and Liu Jing Ru’s style. The former allows the heel of the rear foot to rise while stepping forward; the latter does not – the foot must be kept parallel to the ground, with the heel flat.

I asked a friend of mine, who’s a student of Sun Zhijun about this afterwards; they said that the heel-raise is part of the bagua qigong. Apparently, allowing the heel to rise stimulates the Bubbling Well Point, generating yin energy, and stimulating the kidney meridian.

However, Liu Jing Ru’s style, which I’m now learning, doesn’t do this; since Kong Cheng is a TCM doctor, I’ll have to ask him about this next time we meet. The fact remains, though, that I find it very difficult! Kong Cheng was kicking at my heel whenever it rose, trying to make the foot slip or twist, and I suppose from that I can see a combat application (though that’s just a guess). I have to say that it got very annoying – though the annoyance was with myself for not getting it right, not with Kong Cheng for kicking!

(I also have a feeling that there’s a difference in the way the two styles approach kou bu and bai bu, but I’ll leave that question for another time).

I found that I had to focus on two points. First, the Achilles tendon, allowing it to relax and lengthen; secondly, the muscles at the front of the ankle, using them to keep the foot raised. Essentially, that means that I was trying to keep my mind intent on a ring around the ankle. I’m still not sure that I’ve got this right. Well, since I can’t do it consistently, I obviously haven’t, but Kong Cheng does say that I’m improving. I’m going to make sure I can do it properly before I move on to any forms. Once that happens, though, I think I should progress fairly rapidly, since those are the forms I studied with Sun Ru Xian Lao Shi when I first came to Beijing.

I find that I have to concentrate on my feet so much that I’m not able to focus much on the rest of the body. Even so, I could feel that my posture is improving as I walk, and I was able to relax back, shoulders and tailbone more than in the previous lesson. Plus, my ankles are much more stable, and don’t wobble so much – this is definitely a result of the last year’s zhan zhuang, since before I started yiquan my ankles were very tense and rigid, which meant that they didn’t like carrying any kind of load. That, in turn, I think made my knees bear my weight, which wasn’t good.

We finished up with some more bagua tui shou, which is where I finally felt able to apply some of the insights from yiquan, specifically with regard to generating strength from the core back muscles, rather than the arms or shoulders. My right wrist hurt a lot during this, so Kong Cheng used some tui na massage on it, which helped.

By the end of the class, my thighs and hams really felt that they’d had a solid workout, and were tingling a lot!

I popped over to Wangfujing to do various tasks, and then headed back to Xinjiekou for the afternoon’s yiquan lesson. That went well, mostly practicing postures that I’ve done before but do need to work on much more. I was the only foreigner there, which hasn’t happened for a while. This class also finisihed up with tui shou, for about half an hour. This is the first time that I’ve done any serious yiquan tui shou since my accident, and I was comprehensively demolished by my partner – I couldn’t read his movements at all, or escape from any of the traps he applied to my arms. Ho hum, back to the beginning (again!).

In the evening S. and I went to the cinema at Oriental Plaza and caught the 3D version of Avatar. The 3D affect is brilliant, and the computer-generated world is stunning. The storyline is a bit hackneyed, and I’m too much of a cynic to enjoy the ‘happy’ ending, since you just know that the ‘Sky People’ will return in greater force, but hey, it’s a nice movie to watch with someone whose company you enjoy

I mentioned that a chat with Carlos had got me thinking about yiquan… So, I did a bit of googling, and discovered that I’m not the only one with yiquan on my mind. That in turn led me to realise that Tabbycat is blogging again, which I hadn’t been aware of. More than that, he was in Beijng! So, I dropped him an email… but a bit too late; he’d just left for the States again. Well, I’ll be here for a while… Anyway, as I’ve often mentioned over the last couple of years, I have a real problem with being stiff, particularly in the shoulders. I’m very tempted to sign up later in the year for one of the Yiquan Academy‘s 30-day intensive beginners’ courses; I really think that intense sessions of zhan zhuang might do the trick as far as relaxing and opening the joints goes, not to mention posture…. Well, we’ll see.

I’ve caught up again with Will, who was the senior student at the Beijing Milun School back when I was here before in 2004/5; he’s too busy running his restaurant these days to do much martials arts beyond a bit of Chen taiji. The food is very good, though!

I called Master Sun Zhujin, to talk about meeting him for classes. If I understood him correctly, he’s free to teach on weekends. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand where he lives! It got a bit frustrating; I’ll have to call him back again when I’ve enlisted a Chinese-speaker to help me….

As I’ve mentioned, Master Liu Jingru lives way down in the south of Beijing; I’m way up in the north, and it’s just not practical for me to get down there. However, I’d been in touch with his main student, Kong Cheng, who was so helpful to me last June (it was Kong Cheng who took me to Dong Hai Chuan’s grave). Kong Cheng happened to be in Wudaokou this morning, so we met up. He was in a real hurry; he’s flying Italy tonight, and will be there until June, teaching acupuncture and bagua in a series of cities. We met at Lush, where I was having breakfast.

As we chatted, I mentioned the difficulty I was having, ie that all the bagua teachers are very far from the University district. “Oh, but there’s one very close!”, he said, “Do you want to meet him?”. A couple of minutes later, we were in a taxi, on our way to meet Master Sun Ru Xian, who lives just north of Tsinghua University, near the Yuanmingyuan ruins. He’s studied a lot of internal martial arts, and is first and foremost a xingyi man. I spent a few hours talking to him; he’s really nice and down to earth, as is his wife. He has a few very friendly dogs as well! My luck continued to hold good; one of his students was there, a Chinese guy who had taken his MBA in Singapore (U of Chicago), and speaks excellent English.

Master Sun asked whether I wanted to learn for health, performance or application; I said application, which was clearly the right answer. He spent a lot of the time throwing me around (his apartment fortunately has big, soft sofas), and it looks like I might start training with him next week. He’s a heavyset guy in his 50s, very strong. He’s a student of Liu Jing Ru amongst many others. We also chatted about Yiquan, which he learned from Wang XiangZhai; he pointed out quite rightly that it’s only something to study if I have a lot of spare time.

Well, funny how things turn out…