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Week 1 roundup

The calendar in my old Nokia, the one I lost, showed which week it was in the calendar; I find that none of my remaining calendars (Google calendar, Windows, Mac, or ancient backup Nokia) have this function. So, I won’t be using the number of the week much in post headings, at least until I buy a new phone! Anyway, I know for sure that this has been the first week of 2008…

On New Year’s eve, I had an invitation to go to a barbeque. I was a bit dubious at first, as it was at the home of a friend-of-a-friend, and I wasn’t sure I felt up to being polite to strangers; I felt more like being contemplative. Plus, there was a taijigong class that evening. In the end, I decided to skip class and go to the barbie, since I was getting a bit too antisocial.  As it turned out, it was a really good evening, with quite a lot of people I knew or kind-of-knew, and we had a really good time with lots of friendly piss-taking and banter.

Round about 11, I said my farewells and headed up to the temple at Bright Hill. I went to their countdown last year, which wasn’t really to my taste, but I wanted to see in the New Year again to the sound of the 108 chimes of the bell. I got there at just the right time; I went to stand next  to the bell and, while I was debating where to stand, found that the crowd had sort of formed up around me. Next thing I knew, the monks had arrived, and I wound up pretty much facing the abbot as he rang the bell. What I didn’t know last year was that the crowd was largely composed of people who had spent the previous week on retreat at the temple, and this was the culmination of that.

I didn’t stay too long afterwards, and got a cab home. On New Year’s Day, Madam Ge had arranged a farewell meal for Sun Zhi Jun and Mi Jun Pei. We went to a fish restaurant on Marine Parade, and had a nice few hours. Most people had a buffet; as the sole veggie, I was brought a plate of vegetable noodles. There were lots of speeches of appreciation from various students (I was “persuaded” to make one as well, and almost died of embarrassment!), and gifts of tokens of esteem to all of our teachers. The evening finished off with karaoke. I have an deep dislike of karaoke  – I don’t like to sing, and I never know the words or, often, the tune – so I didn’t sing. Five years in Asia, and I’ve never yet sung in karaoke – and I don’t plan on breaking that precedent!

On Wednesday, I went for solo practice, and then to drink tea with Chin Woo friends. I’m trying to cut down on the beer for the new year… Thursday to taijigong class at the Nam Wah Association.

On Friday, Master Zhou took me through a lot of exercises designed to work on loosening up the shoulders, and developing explosive power. My power is currently more of a damp fizzle; more work needed. A good place to start is on getting my posture right; I almost gave myself whiplash at one point as trying to project force forwards from the shoulders shook my neck and head back and forth…

Last night, for the first time in over a year, there was no more baguazhang with Madam Ge. Instead, I headed down to Lavender for my first class in Zen Meditation at the Kwan Yin Chan Lin centre. It was a big class, with around forty students, though I don’t know how many were first-timers; quite a few were return students. There were quite a few foreigners.  It was a very calming session, as Ven. Chi Boon began to outline what Zen is about.

One thing that I found very interesting was when he asked us what Zen is. When some students tried to answer, he pointed out that by using words, we depart from the true nature of zen. How could we answer without using words? As we mulled this over, trying to discover some abstract way to achieve this, intellectualising the problem, an assistant standing behind us suddenly rapped the floor loudly with a stick. The surprise of the noise jerked us back into the moment. That was the answer all along… I found it interesting because I’ve read about this before, just as you are reading it now, and thought I understood – but there was an almost physical sensation as the mind returned, and I hadn’t expected that.

We began to practise seated meditation; I’m nowhere near flexible enough to sit in full lotus position, or even half-lotus. My ankles are very stiff. I suddenly realised that they used to be much looser; after the first meditation retreat I attended in Thailand, I was meditating regularly, and that really stretched my ankles. It was during that period that I first went to Beijing, and began to study baguazhang – I wonder if stopping regular meditation is why I seem to find mud-stepping harder these days? Stiffer ankles…?  Hmmm. The style of meditation we were using is all about breathing from the dantian, which is very good for me – I’ve been finding that difficult recently.
We also spent ten minutes last night in slow walking meditation, where practice in bagua stepping proved useful.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the course! I have a feeling that it will tie in much more closely than I expected with my work on taijigong and bagua…

More zen meditation in Singapore

I’m noticing a lot of visitors coming to my post Zen Meditation in Singapore, which is a year old now. If you’ve come here looking for information on classes in zen, the Kwan Yin Chan Lin centre will be running a six-week course starting on January 5th 2008. Details here (PDF file).

Life at Shaolin

Photo: Justin Guariglia

Photo: Justin Guariglia

Pern Yiau of the Nam Wah Taijigong Association gave me a call the other day; he’d read something in the Chinese-language paper about an exhibition of pictures about the life of the monks in the Shaolin Temple, and – correctly – thought I might be interested. The exhibition was apparently at the Page One bookshop in one of the malls near where I live, and was only on for a few days. So, the gf and I headed on down to take a look.

It turned out that it wasn’t really an exhibition as such; it was a display to promote a new coffee-table book, Shaolin: Temple of Zen. The display pictures were prints of the promotional pictures you can see on the book’s page on Amazon; I’ve ripped two of them above. The book itself is very nicely done, and the photographs are beautiful. At S$63, it’s perhaps for the Shaolin completist, but it does convey the skill, dedication, and tranquility that is the monks’ ideal.

The book is very nice indeed, taken simply on its own terms. It’s more interesting when taken as a part of the Temple’s campaign to take control once more of its own image, in order to re-establish Shaolin as a true seat of Buddhist thought and meditation – rather than as a place where funny chaps in orange robes shout at each other loudly and hit harder.

I referred to this once before, when I had just noticed Matthew Polly‘s book American Shaolin. I subsequently bought that book and really enjoyed it; I also learned what I hadn’t known when I wrote that post, that Polly is actually a formal disciple of the Shaolin Abbot, Shi Yong Xin. I’m not sure if this significant: the Abbot writes an introduction to Shaolin: Temple of Zen, while Polly writes an accompanying essay. I’m not sure if this is the result of their relationship, or whether the publisher simply decided that Polly was the natural choice to write some content.

In any case, it’s a very good-looking book, with some beautiful photographs. I still prefer the small book I bought in Beijing, Monks in Shaolin by Chinese photographer Hei Ming. That book shows only individual monks against a white background, removing them from their environment to focus on their characters, which I like. This new book keeps them in their context, which may suit other people’s taste better.

Things change, and we move on

Life has got in the way of blogging lately, as it’s wont to do! I think this is a moment of big shifts – things from now on are not going to be the way they have for the last year  or so. Here’s a quick roundup:

• Events, lectures, meetings and wotnot have prevented me from meeting Master Zhou for the last three weeks. It’s a big pity, but unavoidable. On the other hand, I’ve been practicing his form on my own, and it’s taking root – I think, and at last! I’m looking forward to class next week…
• I’ve been attending the qigong classes  at the Nam Wah Association regularly, and feeling more and more benefits every time. My posture is noticeably improving (to me, at any rate).
• Big changes with my Saturday night bagua: we are now moving into a purely revision mode. I’ve already mentioned that I’m re-doing the sword form for revision. The empty palm class is now stopping new work, though. Any class will naturally suffer attrition, and there are very few of us left from the group that started together in August last year. Some have joined from other classes, and that’s kept our numbers up. However, a few are coming less and less regularly, and with me due to leave next year, I think Madam Ge has decided that the class numbers have dropped below critical mass. So, we’re moving to a revision program until February, by which time a class that started after us will have caught up to where we’ve reached, and the two groups can merge and move on together. I, of course, won’t be here then.
• I may not do much more even of the revision schedule, though. I’ve just noticed that the Korean Zen school down at Lavender, which I’ve visited a few times, will be running a new course on Zen Meditation (link to PDF file) from early January. These don’t happen all that often; I’ve wanted to take part before, but always decided to stick with the bagua classes instead. I’d like to take this one though – I don’t know when I’ll get another chance!
• My Drunken Broadsword teacher is still not well, so classes haven’t resumed. I’ve never been very good at this, and i suspect that once he’s better I would be starting from scratch again. I think that I may not start again – at least until after I get back from Beijing next year… Partly it’s that I have so much to do in preparation and partly…
• … I’m getting more and more keen on a certain lady, and weekends are pretty much the only time we get to meet…

So, much is about to change. Where it goes from here, I’ll have to wait and see…

Mind and body

I’ve been thinking more about my ankles. I’m finding in my taiji practice that it’s very difficult to really relax them, and thus sink my weight properly. That has a lot of knock-on consequences, as the weight is then taken by my knees and lower back – which of course, aren’t meant to be load-bearing. I’ve been doing this for a long time without realizing it! This has led my thoughts along a very interesting route.

Now, the question is, why are my ankles so stiff, and reluctant to take my weight? I’ve come up with three answers to this.

The first, which only came to me this week, is that this is the consequence of hiking. I’ve really only taken up the internal martial arts as my main non-work activity in the last few years, since I moved to Asia. All the way through my twenties and early thirties, my main hobby was hill-walking in north and west Wales. That meant for most of every weekend day during those years, my feet were strapped tightly into boots that were specifically designed to limit ankle movement. I suspect that must have had an effect…

The second is one that I mentioned before – the fall I had on Orchard Road just over two years ago that trashed my left Achilles Tendon, and injured most of the foot’s soft connecting tissue. It’s all gradually healed up, particularly thanks to some therapeutic massage in Beijing (material there for another post). Practising the IMA has actually been of huge benefit in this process. Still, it’s only this year, in the last few months really, that I’ve found I don’t wake up in pain from the tendon on a daily basis – and that it now actually feels pretty normal, except for the odd twinge. Perhaps that ongoing pain changed the way I carry my weight…

The third derives from the second, and is what I’m finding the most interesting. As I’ve been working on this issue over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been paying very close attention to what happens as I sink my weight down. I’ve found that as my weight approaches my ankles, there’s a very clear mental hesitation, and even resistance. This is not a conscious response; my active will is directing the weight down, but it meets a deeply, deeply ingrained and powerful barrier. This all happens very subtly, and I’ve had to think about it and repeat it a lot, but it’s become clear that my intent is meeting a very strong, remembered fear of pain, that’s intimately bound up with a physical location in my tendon. In other words, even though the tendon is now healed and perfectly capable of load-bearing, the memory of the extreme pain from the time when it was injured is subconsciously still there, tied very specifically to that tissue, and still have an identifiable impact on my actions. That action is very clear – changing the whole way I carry myself – but the cause is very subtle, and I’ve only found it after a lot of work. And even then, there were a lot of clear signposts…

Many of you will see where I’m going with this… For me, this is a clear vindication of what many Buddhist and Daoist teachers tell us, that memory is intimately tied up with, and stored in, the body – in the organs, muscles, and fascia. Intense experiences, moments of strong emotion, and the like, are stored in the body and have a strong but subtle effect on our subsequent behaviour. With meditation and/or inward study of the body through qigong and the IMA, we can gradually identify where these powerful emotions are stored, soften the body, and rid ourselves of their influence.

As I’ve written before, I’d already had powerful experiences of this before – once through intense practice of taijiquan, once through Vipassana meditation. This week’s experience, though, is the first time that I’ve actually found myself identifying the physical location where a strong fear is stored. Very, very interesting… Now I have to work hard to root it out and escape its influence. I wonder whether something like this, long, long ago, was the root from which someone wise conceived of Vipassana..? In any case, it shows clearly how mind, memory, and behaviour are inextricably bound up with the state of the body…

Dazed and confused

It’s been another heavy week and I’m tired. As in, really tired. However… I’m not working tomorrow and, with nothing in particular to do in the morning, I’ll be sleeping a lot. Yay me!

My site traffic is going through the roof, and I’m not able to tell why – WordPress’ s statistics isn’t giving me any clues – why has the number of visitors trebled recently?

Anyway, events in the last week…

- Back to class with Madam Ge, where I also started a revision class in the sword form.

- My Drunken Sabre teacher was unwell, so no class last Sunday.

- Qigong class on Monday night, and this evening were very interesting. The Nam Wah Association is participating in the Singapore Sun Festival. As a result, this week’s classes have been held in the Colonial District, outside the Asian Civilisations Museum, looking across the river to the towers of the CBD, and Boat Quay. It’s been very cool We’ve moved on to more focused qi movements, and to the ‘vibration’ exercises to soften and relax the internal organs. I have a very long way to go here before I even get back to where I was before. Nevertheless, I know I’m on the right path because I’m getting flashbacks to times and places I haven’t thought about for years: an emotionally charged visit to Welshpool; a happily melancholic day at Portmeirion; galettes and mead in Rennes. I’ve already written about how I think these qigong exercises have many similarities with Vipassana meditation, and for me this week’s lesson have only reinforced that. Very encouraging…

So, tomorrow, sleep and random stuff, before heading for class with Master Zhou in the evening…

Cultivation and compassion

An interesting post from Scott Phillips showed up in my RSS feeds overnight: Pretense. Tongue firmly in cheek, he suggests that the real reason we study martial arts is simply because we want to look good. Well, hehehe, that might work for some, but my waistline is proof that taijiquan is not the way for those who want to look buff! Still, there’s something to what he says, though not perhaps in the way he intended.

For me, the study of martial arts is a part of my attempt to “cultivate my person”, in the Confucian sense:

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy”.

Kong Fu Zi

Through the practice of martial arts, and the internal forms in particular, we learn to govern our bodies as well as our minds. Having learned to govern ourselves, we can treat others with openness and respect since, if we truly can understand and control our own selves, we need not waste  our energy on negative emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and so on. Having no negative elements in our behaviour towards others, we automatically  become more likeable and attractive: we are, in fact, cultivating “inner beauty”. So Scott’s got it right!

This attitude reminds me of the answer many Buddhist masters give when they are asked how, if they claim to desire to free the world from the chains of attachment, they can justify going on long meditation retreats in which they don’t interact with any other people at all! Their answer is that to help others become free, they must  have compassion for them. To have compassion for others, you must first have compassion for yourself. How can you help others to free themselves if you cannot free yourself? Therefore, being able to understand, and regulate, your own mind and feelings through meditation is the key first step to liberation for yourself and others.

This takes us back to martial arts. As my Chinese tutor explained to me, the term “wu shu“ is derived from the ancient characters meaning “no spear”, and has the sense of “the absence of conflict”. This is very interesting: why is that?

The most obvious interpretation is that if everyone  is trained in martial arts then there will be no conflict; no-one would start a fight because they would know that their opponent could defend themselves. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the martial arts world, of course, will know that this theory simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny! There seems to be an endless supply of meatheads who just love to fight for its own sake…

I think that the answer lies with the aim of the role of martial arts in self-cultivation. Using martial skills to beat up your opponent, to overcome them with strength and leave them crushed, is a very primitive application of martial arts learning, and really is only the beginners. Don’t get me wrong here: I know from my own learning that it’s far from easy even to master this level of skill, to be able to beat someone in a fight. I’m nowhere near even this level of achievement.

I think, though, that we need to aim higher. We need to use the self-cultivation aspects of our martial arts training to reach the  point where, through our skill, our  understanding of ourselves, and thereby our understanding  of our opponent, we can not just defeat them but also transform them – that is, to defeat them but not harm them, thus demonstrating the futility of violence and the value of self-cultivation. Thus, a world “wu shu”, of the absence of war, is one person closer.

I know that we’ve all seen this idea a thousand times in cheesy kung fu movies, and that it  risks losing its force because it becomes a cliche, but it’s a pretty good reason for studying  martial arts all the same!

As the hero of the “Eight Diagram Pole Fighter” puts it:  “Brothers! We monks should not kill – but we must also defeat evil!”.

Awareness: benefits and dangers

About a fortnight ago, I popped into the Awareness Place bookshop down in the Bras Basah complex, and found a copy of The Discourse Summaries. I’ve been wanting a copy of this for some time, so I bought it, and have been gradually working my way through it since. It was buying this book that kind of woke me up again out of the slump I’ve been in for the last month or so.

The book is a transcript of the recorded talks played every night of the 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats organised by S. N. Goenka‘s Vipassana Research Institute. As I read it, I’m transported back to the Dhamma Hall in Thailand, where I’ve attended two retreats (so far), and I remember the benefits I experienced – of which, more below.

As I say, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend two of these retreats, and they truly have been life-changing. On the second, I was struggling with a badly hurt foot and ankle, which were a big distraction. The first was a tremendously powerful experience.

I went on that first course after I’d been in Singapore for a year, in the gap between the end of my contract and the start of my MBA. Following the course, I was heading off to China for the first time, to study Mandarin for a few months.

During that year, I’d been studying taiji gong with Nam Wah Pai, at Lorong 29 in Geylang. I’d completed the basic qigong set, followed by the 24-move basic taijiquan sequence. I’d begun the Xuan Xuan broadsword set – but it started three months before I was due to leave Singapore, and normally took six months to complete. So, I decided to accelerate my learning.

Now, so background is needed here. A lesson at Nam Wah Pai is three hours long: the first and third are spent studying whichever form your class is working on; the middle hour is spent with the entire school going through qigong exercises. In my personal experience, I found those exercises to be extremely effective and powerful – not immediately, but with practice. The qi awareness is then applied during the work on the forms. As a student, you attend class two nights a week, and learn the taijigong under the supervision of an instructor. You’re also welcome to attend the school on other evenings; in which case you practise solo, but can work with one of the instructors in the middle hour, while their class are doing the qigong.

So, with the broadsword form, to get it finished before I left Singapore, I started attending class four nights a week, for about two months, with some individual tuition sessions on weekends. I got to the point where I could do most of the form without needing to think about it, and instead was able to focus my attention on the flow of qi around my body.

In the last couple of weeks, strange things started happening. While I was going through the form, I started to get flashbacks, reliving memories of stressful experiences. It was very weird, a little disturbing, but I was focused on other things, and only mentioned it in passing to the instructor who was giving me private tuition.

In the end, it worked out very well for me: I discovered that the attention on the qi flow was very similar to the attention to physical sensations that is the focus of the vipassana technique. So, very shortly after I’d been getting these flashbacks in taiji class, I got the same thing on a much bigger scale on about the sixth day of the meditation retreat. By that time, though, I’d been trained, and prepared, and knew what to do and how to deal with it. In the theory of vipassana, this indicates that deeply-rooted karmic seeds, stored within the body and exerting a constant emotional influence, are being released and losing their power. It’s this that – in my limited understanding – helps vipassana practitioners to clear away their bad karma and avoid rebirth. When I was talking to a Buddhist nun in Bangkok earlier this year after studying vipassana with her, she mentioned that this was one of her goals.

So, buying that little book has been just the boost I needed. It’s reminded me that qigong works and is very powerful. It’s reminded me that vipassana works, and is very powerful. It’s also emphasised the need to have the right teacher. If I’d been working on those qigong techniques with no teacher, or with a teacher who didn’t understand the effects they could have, it could have been dangerous for me, I think. I’m very lucky that this all took place just as I was about to go on the retreat. It’s also why I either need to really boost my Mandarin, or find an English-speaking teacher, so that these issues can be discussed clearly.

Sorry, another rambling post, but there you are, it’s just a blog…

Added a bit later:

Let me just be clear, that Nam Wah Pai’s qigong techniques are powerful and effective, and that’s why they take their learners through a stuctured course under supervision. I deviated from that path, so the fact that I got these experiences unexpectedly shouldn’t reflect on them at all. I would confidently go back to them, and in fact hope to do so again (though this time to the school in Lorong 7; I know the instructors there better).

The mental states of martial arts

I’m gradually coming to understand that different martial arts require very different mental states in order to work properly. Longer-established practitioners will probably laugh that I’m only now coming to see this, but anyway, I’ll welcome any feedback.

Taijiquan, for example, is very meditative. It requires a still mind, in order to develop the fine-grained physical sensitivity that makes it really effective. In many ways, I find my taiji practice is at its best when I achieve a state very similar to vipassana meditation.

When I’m practicing baguazhang in depth, I find that I slip into the state that Erle Montaigue calls “eagle vision” (or something like that) – that’s to say, I’m highly aware of movement, with my concentration applied equally to a piercing focus on ‘the opponent’, and on peripheral movements; it’s a bit hard to describe. This mentality is highly focused on the beginnings of movements, and lining up to take immediate advantage of any mistakes.

Capoeira, on the other hand, develops a ‘playful’ attitude, in which performance, style, and trickery are as important the ‘defeat’ of your enemy. I know that capoeira is an effective fighting style, but the mindset is focussed on mind games as much as physical actions, or so it seems to me.

This difference is why I gave up capoeira – hopefully, only temporarily. I found I couldn’t keep the mindsets separate, largely because I was too inexperienced in both arts. Slipping into a ‘bagua’ mindset whilst playing capoeira made me too aggressive, and took the fun out of the roda for the other player. Practicing bagua with a capoeira frame of mind… hehehe, the mind boggles! I imagine it could be done, but at my level of ability, it just comes across as messing around and not taking the lesson seriously. I actually think that to have ability in both bagua and capoeira would be an extremely effective combination, but I would need to learn them consecutively, not concurrently.

I’m on this train of thought because of the upcoming xingyi classes. Xingyi also has a specific mindset: to singlemindedly advance , crushing the opponent. I recently linked to a page about Fu style bagua, which also has this to say about xingyi:

In order to screen the best practitioners for teaching positions at the Central Academy and in the provincial schools, General Li, General Zhang Zi Jiang, and General Fung Zu Ziang held the first full contact, national competition in 1928 in Nanjing. Hundreds of the best Chinese martial artists participated in san shou fighting, weapons and wrestling in a lei tai ring format.
[...]
This tournament is historically significant in China, but somewhat wicked to recall. After the first several days, the fighting competitions had to be halted because too many competitors were seriously maimed-two were killed. As some records have it, the Hsing-Yi practitioners were considered the most brutal fighters, displaying little or no conscience when they fought. Many BaGua Zhang practitioners were considered as skilled; however, they displayed more humanity when it came to all out combat.

I’m uncomfortably aware that I have this ability to focus my will on achieving results without regard for consequences. In fact, it’s got me through some tough times, but it’s also responsible for the periods that I most dislike about myself. One reason I’m so glad to have discovered meditation is that it enabled me to step away from that, and to become more compassionate. I’ll have to be careful that studying xingyi doesn’t re-awaken that aspect of myself.

I’ll be very interested to hear what other people think about this…

Oh, as an aside: when I first went to Beijing to study Mandarin, I made a couple of very good friends – a Norwegian guy, and an American woman (who became an item, and in fact are going to be married in the not-so-distant future!). Anyway, when our time in the language school ended, I came back to Singapore to start my MBA, and they went to Nanjing, where the woman was enrolling on a Master’s degree. The Norwegian was in the middle of an anthropology doctorate, and wanted to spend his time in China doing research on groups of people meeting up to practice martial arts and qigong. We all thought that Nanjing would be a great place for this – but it turned out that he really wasn’t able to find much. I wonder if it’s because martial arts in Nanjing is too closely associated with the Guomindang-period schools? Perhaps there were more than the usual number of purges or re-education campaigns there? Anybody know?