I’m just back from a yiquan class, and I thought I’d type this while I still have use of my arms: soon my hands and back will start stiffening up, and I may not feel like attacking the keyboard!

I’ll talk more about the vipassana retreat some other time, but there are two things to mention. First, I came down with a bad cold while I was in Singapore which stopped me sleeping so, combining that with the sleep debt accumulated over the past year, I was pretty groggy during most of the retreat. This made it really hard to concentrate during the meditation. Secondly, when you do these courses for the first time, you usually sit in a group in the main meditation hall, or in your room in the dormitory. Towards the end of the course, you are assigned your own windowless meditation cell in the main meditation building, next to the meditation hall. When you have already participated in one retreat, you get your cell from the first day. This was my third retreat.

I struggled. Retreats are always challenging, but because I was so tired going in, after a few days of rising at 4am I was really not keeping a clear or focussed mind! In one of the evening dharma talks, Goenkaji suggested that if you’re tired, you might leave the meditation hall, and try meditating while standing. Aha, thought I.

So, for the rest of the retreat I spent most of my solo meditation sessions in my cell, alternating between sitting and zhan zhuang. I tried not to mix techniques, so I didn’t really use the yiquan visualizations (springs/water/etc) but just held the posture while performing vipassana.

One morning, listening to the tropical dawn chorus, I had something of an epiphany when, for perhaps the first time ever, everything fell absolutely into place, and all my weight was being held and transmitted solely by tendons and ligaments, which creaked and cracked as I swayed gently like a ship under sail with no weight on muscle or bone.

Since I got back, that’s really been a guide for me, and I’ve found that I’ve really been noticing small things that make a big difference to posture. I’ve continued to do most of my meditation practice in a standing pose, often with steel rings on my wrists. I do a lot in my office when I need to take a break from the screen – though since my office has a glass door I don’t doubt that rumours and gossip are now rife in my department!

In class, I find that as my sensitivity to where my weight is being held increases, I’m finding it easier to see how full-body power develops – which is not to say that I’m achieving it but, for example, I’m maintaining my balance much more during some of the exercises. I’m also feeling how small changes in the position of my feet have big effects elsewhere.

Last week, during a tui shou session I really felt everything fall into place; my back formed a perfect bow shape, everything connected and transferred power and weight smoothly, and I was able to really control my partner, who I think has done a fair bit of yiquan training.

Pride comes before a fall, and in today’s class I was totally locked down by three different partners. It was very frustrating. Interestingly, they were all taller than me by at least a head; that’s unusual – I realised that until today I’ve almost always trained with partners who were about my own height or shorter. I came to realize that I now had my arms at completely the wrong angle, so there was no connection to my back and legs. No wonder they were able to overwhelm me! I’m going to have to think about that.

Still, I am more convinced than ever that yiquan training and vipassana meditation go together very well indeed. More on that soon.

Added later:

I think I may have reached the point where I’m ready to start taking an interest in yiquan applications. That may seem a strange thing to write, but it really hasn’t been a focus of mine up until now. Ever since I started blogging, I’ve been complaining about the tightness of my shoulders and lower back, and lack of mobility in certain ways, and I’ve mentioned several times that it’s only the yiquan practice
that has had a significant effect on them. As a result, my focus in my yiquan practice so far has been on the health effects more than anything else. I still have a lot of work to do here, but as you may guess from what I wrote above, I feel I’ve made immense progress, and I think now I can pay more serious attention to the combat side of it – which means getting started on strength and endurance training. More on that soon as well.

Sorry for the long silence – re-insertion into the world of work has been …. hectic. I’ll get a real blog post up here soon.

In brief, the yiquan has been going very well, and I learned a lot during the holiday that’s led to some improvements. I’ve been meditating, and last night got time to attend an improv acting workshop, which was cool.

Lots of ideas are buzzing about in my mind, hopefully I’ll get to write something about all that…

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.

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

Just for atmosphere, here are some short shots I took yesterday of Master Yao Cheng Rong’s Beijing Zhong Yi Yiquan Wuguan. It was a beautiful winter’s day, with crisp, clean air, blue skies, and bright sunlight…

Finally, a hutong near my apartment, brightly lit so no skullduggery can go unseen:

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