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You may have noticed there's not much great new Taiji stuff being thrown up on this blog or the site recently. That's cause I'm drilling through the final stages of the book, to be released in June.

Synchronhissity

I was teaching Tai Chi to some students here (Tokyo) in Yoyogi Park (equals NYC Central Park) and the topic of the day's work was to be the ZMQ37 posture 'Snake Creeps Down' to wit:

Just as I began to introduce and model it, we noticed in the bushes/rough area bordering our practice zone only 2 feet away, a huuuuge snake stretched full out, basking quietly there, his black eyes watching us fiercely.

I believe he was 'Snake / Tai-curious'...

Sticky Fingers

I injured myself doing yoga back in March. Very stupid, really just an apparel malfunction. It was at the Tokyo shala after a solid month of intensive advanced training at the mother lode, INDIA. But anyway, back in Tokyo I went as usual for morning Mysore here but was wearing a new pair of untested yoga shorts. Basically the whole thing stemmed from a kind of passive apparel malfunction...

I was getting into the Rooster pose (kukkutasana) which I've done like a million times with no problem. Here's me roostering in 2006 or so when I was a total Ashtanga newbie:

You see what it is, from Lotus (Padmasana) you just need to thread your arms through your folded legs. No biggie normally, especially as many people use a water mister to spray their legs and arms for added lubrication before attempting. On this occasion though, the mister was in use and I figured hell just go for it, never had any trouble before. I started to jam the first (right) arm through... hmm bit of resistance here, this fabric seems a little sticky oh well I'll just push a bit harder... RIP!

CLUE: that RIP was not the new yoga shorts giving way. It was some freaky tissue deep inside and integral to my KNEE that ripped like a zipper. You know those kinds of science-fiction-feeling injuries where you can practically FEEL HEAR SEE and TASTE your body giving way? It was one of those.

I wasn't sure I'd even walk outta the shala on my own two feet. And you have to be able to WALK in Tokyo, I never drive here. Well I made it out, but then languished all the rest of March into early April totally unable to do any Ashtanga asana that involved the right leg. Which is all of them. Getting weak, sickly, and pale, I thought my yoga career was OVER.

But then by chance I found the book EARTHING. This book tells how all you gotta do to heal anything is just walk barefoot on grass, sand, or plain earth for 30 minutes a day. Actually that's surprisingly difficult to do in our present day concrete jungle world, so I ordered their little electro-grounding pad thing. I plugged it into the grounding slot of a three prong outlet and wrapped it around my affected area (KNEE!) for 30 mins a day. 

I started doing that right before my trip to LA in late April / early May. I'd thought there's no way I could do any real Mysore sessions in a real Ashtanga shala down in LA cause I up til late April, before starting this treatment, I hadn't even been able to get through the standing poses.

But after THREE DAYS of this electro grounding thing, lo and behold, my knee felt absolutely fine, it was totally restored. Just amazing, particularly since my normal self healing stuff like G-Jo and Pranic etc. hadn't worked at all for this particularly nasty self-injury,

I got so totally recovered that I ended up doing FIVE STRAIGHT MORNING of pure 24K uncut hardcore Mysore with excellent Original Gangster (Jois authorized) teacher Noah Williams at his fine morning operation in Silver Lake. Learned a ton and the knee never so much as twinged me the entire week, nor even unto this day has it ever again.

So check that out.

 

Self-swallowing

Hey yoga people! Listen up! I found a description of the most contortionistic person of all time. This succulent chunk of freakishness comes from the weird, final, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, his posthmously published The Pale King:

In 1932 , a preadolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of Tamil mysticism as capable of inserting into her mouth and down her esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin, and the other leg to just above the patella, and as thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee at rates in excess of 300 rpm. This phenomenon of suiphagia (i.e., 'self-swallowing') has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica, in most cases caused by deficiencies in cadmium and/or zinc.

 

 

New ebook on the way

My new #TaiChi ebook will debut June 1st:

FORMULA NONE TAI CHI: The Missing Basic

Stay tuned link below:
zmq37.com/writings.html

Train

There are two ways to train boxing. The first is via structured class, which involves mostly conditioning work such as burpees, jumping jacks, pliometrics, medicine ball, intensive ab work such as crunches etc. etc. Maybe hitting some heavy bag.

The second way is self-structured. Though I've done the class thing above, I prefer the self structured approach. Most real fight gyms and clubs are formatted that way. 

My typical session includces:

- few rounds of jump rope

- few rounds of shadow (this is really really crucial work)

- few rounds on speed bag

- few rounds on heavy bag

- few rounds on double end bag

- few rounds mitt work if a trainer is around and up for it

- few rounds of sparring if anybody interesting is hanging around for it

May 9, 2012

New Tai Chi private lessons fee schedule posted on my site.

Feb

I spent a month in South India (Kerala and Tamil Nadu).

Mirror mirror

I am back in Tokyo area for a while. Interested Tai Chi people, and/or martial artists who want to work kuzushi, and/or usual people interested in internal martial arts, please shout me up if you want to do a local session.

* * *

Tai Chi students often get confused about emptiness, softness, and solidity. What's the interplay between these in practical terms of what you feel when you do kuzushi (unbalancing work, an interactive partner practice based on and derived from traditional Yang style Taijiquan push hands drills)? I'll talk here about what you'll feel when working with me in that mode and how to interpret it. This is in response to a number of recent students questions on the subject.

The conceptual background you need for this whole thing is the usual: water. The various powers and states of Taijiquan are best likened to water and have been so conceptualized many times both in explicit analysis such as the Taijiquan classic writings and also be extension and implication, e.g. in the common quotes from Lao Zi's Dao De Jing.

H2O has three states: solid, liquid, and gas or ice, water, and vapor. (These are analogous to what you'll feel as I work with you in push hands through the Four Elements concept that's covered in detail in my Ten Tenets of Taiji Training doc on my site www.zmq37.com. In that doc I go into greater detail on four rather than three modes of basic Taiji energy application, but the additional states are beyond the scope of this little blog post.)

The basic point is that I can manifest the Taiji energy in our push session as any of the three states: solid, liquid, and air at any time. Now here's the crucial point: I can manifest any of the three as either my own presentation of my own energy or as a reflection of yours. In other words, I can have you experience my energy as any of the three states, or else I can entrain your energy and manifest your own energy to yourself as one of the three. So that's six basic conditions you can be experiencing at any moment working with me on kuzushi. These states can be manifested as a continual linkage from any state to any other, or can be suddenly terminated at one particular discrete state, and in that case that's where the final physical manifestation can be observed.

For example, as you attempt to unbalance me (most experienced martial artists try to use lots of strength in that attempt) you may experience my energetic response as vapor initially, nothing there, then suddenly crystallizing into a kind of solid 'wall' that then may slam you back. This would be an example of you experiencing my energy state. The inverse condition, where I have you experience the change in your own energy state, might be where you attempt to touch me and suddenly you feel like a cement block, as though your body were momentarily tranformed to a chunky, clunky lunk of something that cannot respond in time to my simple unbalancing gesture and over you go. That would be the inverse case mentioned above, where I've got you experiencing a state change in your own energy. In choosing how to manifest my own energy and into what state to entrain yours, I'm usually following your lead (exception is the advanced 'fire' manifestion, which is beyond the scope of this post but thoroughly covered in the 'Ten Tenets' doc).

What I mean by 'following your lead' can be understood with reference to your experience of water. If you gently push your hand through the water you will experience it as softness. But if you slam or slap it you will experience it's solidity. If you body slam it by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge you will (briefly) experience its lethal ultimate hardness. But unless you put yourself in the path of a tsunami, your experience of the water - soothing, smoothing, or smacking depends entirely on your approach to it.

Now, since most of you will be carrying and delivering a huge payload of totally unconscious physical force in your attempted unbalancing of me, I generally focus on reflecting your own state back to you, as water does, rather than preemtively manifesting the state of my own choice. But even though I'm (generally) acting in strictly reflective mode, as 'water', your experience may be of solid, liquid, or vapor, depending on what you bring in.

The basic point remains that you can't make assumptions about how you'll experience the energy of our interaction, e.g. expecting cottony softness all the time just because its Taiji. Taiji is based on relaxation and energy, but with these two as the foundation, a skilled instructor such as myself (no I'm not a Taiji master, but I'm definitely a highly qualified Taiji instructor) can choose to manifest your energy to yourself in any way I want.

My teacher sometimes says: touch the wall. Does it feel hard and solid and strong to you? If so, why? Why does it feel hard and solid and strong to you? After all, before you touched that wall, you didn't really know what it was. It might have been a Hollywood sound set, just a curtain cunningly painted to look exactly like a brick or plaster wall. The sensation of hardness, solidity and strength you get from the wall is coming from yourself. If you had touched it softly enough, you would not have experienced it as hard at all.

When you work this drill under a skilled instructor you are just experiencing yourself, but in an unusual mode, from the outside. I'll be your mirror, get in touch.

My star break at last

Casting call: RAGING BULL II.

This is posted on the door of the Wild Card Boxing Club now. And though you may think it's a bit of a stretch for a scholarly and philosophical Tai Chi instructor on his 50's such as myself to land this young man's tough guy role, a "bare knuckle fighter" consumed by "inner pain", that's where you're totally WRONG.

I actually -AM- gonna get this role, because I'm the only guy in here with NO VISIBLE TATOOS.

AHAHAHA!