Sorry, couldn’t think of a good title.

Went to another qigong class at Small Steps last night, and enjoyed it. I’m coming to the end of the classes I’ve prepaid, and after that I think I’ll switch to the baguazhang classes to get some work done on the applications side of it.

They also organize Friday-night lectures and events connected with Daoism; this coming Friday, they have a session of individual zhou yi fortune-telling, which will be interesting. Apparently, the teacher coming to do that is a bagua brother of Liu Lao Shi, who gradually became more interested in the philosophical side of things. I was asking Dalida about it; she told me that this teacher was nominated one of the best at a recent convention held in Beijing of zhou yi practitioners from around Asia. She has been given readings by him before, and says she found them extremely accurate, so I await Friday night with anticipation. S. is going as well.

I had planned to go to yiquan class this morning, but was delayed by unexpected visitors, to the point where it wasn’t worth going. Instead, after they’d gone, I had another go with Scott Sonnon’s Flowfit. I’d decided that I was ready to move on to Level 2. I bought a yoga mat yesterday in preparation. I’m already impressed enough that I ordered FlowFit 2 last night from Amazon; that one’s about falling and groundwork….

Wow, though, level 2 is tough! Saying that – given there are four levels of difficulty, it’s really obvious how unfit I am Great exercise sequence, though, I really feel thoroughly worked out – even though I only managed half of the time i was supposed to do, being sneakily glad that I had a call come in on Skype….

That also highlights something about neijia styles – from the Flowfit, I can see my lack of fitness, coordination and strength – and yet, in the tui shou sessions, I really don’t have too much difficulty holding my own. Thus: a good insight into how internal styles are great for those who are physically weak, old, etc….

As I mentioned, the Small Steps school train in a different Beijing park every Sunday. Yesterday, it was the Temple of Heaven, right down in the south of the city. There’s now a subway stop outside the East Gate, so that’s how I went – but it seemed to take a loooooong time, and I joined the class about an hour and a half late. Next time we train there, I’ll go on my bike – I think it would be quicker!

The east side of the park is where the crowds are; loads of elderly Beijingers practicing ballroom dancing, Beijing Opera, that weird taiji badminton, kicking feathered weights and so on and so on… There was a new one I hadn’t seen before, of tossing large rubber quoits at one another, and trying to get your head through the centre so that you build up a set of them around your neck like some strange African tribe…. Past all these, and the tourists (both Chinese and foreign), past the vendors of chilled water bottles (yi kuai wu! yi kuai wu! Harlo! Two yuan!) Hehehehe, past the surreal flying saucers of the temple itself, and over the the quieter west side – more open and forest-like. Here, every grove seemed to have its own group of martial artists… One group, near where we were headed, were practising xingyi and bagua; young, heavily muscled, standing motionless in santi, or gliding in circles….

Then I joined Liu Lao Shi, Dalida, and a group of others, who had been there for a long time before I arrived! I was set to working on some of the qigong postures, including a long stretch of zhan zhuang. By the end of all this, my shoulders were really aching! After that, a session of the bagua ‘tea cups’ exercise, which I haven’t done in a long, long time! It was fun, though. All too soon, it seemed, the session was over, and we all went our separate ways.

One of the other students, the Canadian I mentioned, knows something about systema, and we’ve chatted about it before. We agreed yesterday to catch up some time to try training together; I think we could work on some of the exercises from Scott Sonnon’s Softwork DVD….

I went pretty much straight on to my afternoon yiquan class, pausing only for a plate of baozi. Mmmmmm, there’s a branch of the Qing Feng Steamed Baozi chain just around the corner from Yao Lao Shi’s school, and I often eat there on my way to class.

There were four of us there; two foreign, two Chinese. It was a good session, pretty strenuous towards the end. I managed to get in a tui shou session with all three of the other guys, and was feeling pretty strained afterwards; one of them is a lot taller than me, so I had to work pretty hard. Luckily for me, he has a habit of locking himself into a position and then pushing, so he’s pretty much unshiftable if you push against him – but with a swift change of angle, he can’t defend himself. He’s going to be tough to beat once he figures that out…

Then, on to Zhongshan Park. I worked on the ZMQ-37 as usual, giving it a few rounds. Next, the wuji long xing bagua form of Master Zhou – which I haven’t done for a good long while, and needs a bit of refreshing. That’s got a move very similar to one in the ROSS systema ‘wave’ DVD, of stretching out the arms and sending a wave rolling from hand to hand; something got a bit crunchy in my left shoulder when I tried that….

After that, a bit of xuan xuan taiji dao. Mentioning that, I should note that on my way to the park, I’d noticed that my bike was shaking unusually when I braked, so I stopped at the Drum Tower to get it fixed by the bike repair man there. It turned out that the rim of the front wheel was a bit buckled, so that needed changing. While he was building the new wheel, one of his friends noticed the sword bag slung over my back and wanted to know what was in it, so I told him it was a taiji dao. Oh, he said, a taiji jian. No, a taiji dao. Is it long? he asked. Yes. Ahhh, it’s a bagua dao. Sigh. I got it out of the bag to show him. Hahaha, it’s a Japanese sword, not a Chinese sword, he told me. Sigh. I gave up.

In the bag, I also had my shashkas, of course, and I ended my training session in the park with a spell using those.That, and trying a few simple Cossack dance moves…. I’m getting faster and more accurate with one, and a bit more coordinated with two. I don’t think I’m being too forward if I say that I can already do a lot of what this guy is doing (not as well; not as smoothly; but getting there, bit by bit); what I can’t, I should be able to do soon….

My left wrist is going to take a while to train up to be as strong and flexible as it needs to be, though, and my shoulders definitely felt the strain. The left, in particular, is still too tight; it’s difficult to let the sword in my left hand swing naturally. Hehehehe, and one day I must get someone to take a picture of me doing that while a platoon of PLA soldiers marches past, staring at me in curiosity whilst keeping perfect step….

Oh yes, and I mentioned recently that I was still working on finding the correct way to grip the shashkas. Well, since I bought my new MacBook I’ve switched my default browser from Firefox to Chrome, and discovered with great pleasure that it’s got an auto-translate feature by default – which has seamlessly made a whole lot of YouTube comprehensible… Thus, I found myself looking at this, which kind of answered my immediate questions:

I’m still reading the economic news, and crossing my fingers as the western economies creak and groan under vast amounts of debt. I hope that it will all work out and the world of abundance will continue as it has for the last twenty or so years – but I, like most of you, am old enough to remember how it was before, when flying to the other side of the world was only for the few, and stitching and mending and “waste not” were the rules we lived by, and so I can’t see how we carry on as we have been, living beyond our means as a culture.

So, sorry, I’m in a bearish mood still. (I never believed in “power animals”, even in the days when I knew lots of neo-pagans. I’m coming to suspect that if I have one, it’s a bear…..)

So, let’s talk a bit about what I’ve been up to.

Others are thinking along the same lines. Dave Pollard wrote about an article on Sharon Astyk’s site, which I liked very much. I recommend reading the original article, but Dave’s summary covers all the key points:

[Y]ou should move if:

Your mortgage is way more than the value of your house (especially since house values are likely to go lower)
You have young children or are elderly, and the people you’re closest to live far away
You have children you want to spend time with, or parents who need your care, living far away
You live in an extreme climate and are not adaptable to living without inexpensive heat, air conditioning, water, and imported food
You live in a community with people with mostly lousy (by your standards) values
You don’t think your children have a future where you live
You are planning on moving anyway (sooner is probably better than later)
You aren’t going to be happy or viable where you are if everything based on oil (transport, bought food, plastics, clothing, heat) gets much more expensive, or if your ‘commuter job’ disappears and you have to take (cheaper) employment locally
You live in an exurban area with no viable public transit, no locally produced food, and few close neighbours
You are not truly ‘native’ to where you live — never really fit in, called it home — and someplace else has always beckoned.

Now, I love living in Beijing; I love my work here, and there are very good people who share my values and worldview. Recently, I’ve been practising a lot in Zhongshan Park, and as I cycle beneath the walls of the Forbidden City with the morning sunlight and clear air making the red paint glow, or leaving the park at dusk with the air above me full of swallows flitting about and chittering as they return to their nests under the eaves of the watchtowers, or chasing insects amongst the willows that line the moat – well, I have to pinch myself to remind myself that yes, it is real, and yes, I am living in this amazing, fantastic city.

But I know that it won’t, it can’t, last forever. So, maybe it makes sense to think about how and when it ends – and a number of the points on Sharon’s list were already making me a little uneasy. I also got set thinking by a recent article on Afghanistan in the 1950s – a place of engineering success, rock and roll, and liberal values. I wonder if the people in those pictures ever suspected that within their lifetime their world would revert to being “a broken 13th century country“. Kyrgystan used to be a pretty well-developed element of the USSR; who, then, would have foreseen the ethnic cleansing and savagery that’s in the headlines this morning?

A lot of people are talking these days about beginning to build your tribe – or, as military theorist John Robb calls it, a “resilient community”. I’m not sure that I see that happening for me anywhere but Wales…

So, what to do? There are perhaps two options.

One is to seek to retreat from the world and let it go on its way without me. That’s the route of the hermit or the monastery. I still want to write about people who’ve taken that way, in the much-postponed next post in the “What’s it all about?” sequence of entries here. That did seem a strong option for me at one point, to be honest. I’m very drawn to Plum Village, for example… Still, starting from when I began dating the Siberian, I’ve been drawn back into the world of attachment….

The other route is to get involved in building a resilient community. The question is, what can I (or you, reader) contribute?

It’s a question that is provoking a new movement in my martial arts interests – and leading me along the Tea Road…. In other words, it’s why I’ve been posting a lot about shashkas and systema recently!

I’ve been reviewing some of the DVDs of systema that were given to me, and comparing them to the “Systema Spetsnaz” DVD on “Internal Wave Energy” that I recently purchased. I also bought Scott Sonnon’s “Softwork“; I gather that this isn’t what he teaches these days, being from an earlier period in his trajectory, but it brings together what he learned from ROSS and other Russian systems.

To be honest, I really don’t see any huge differences between the practices of the different schools. I really like the philosophy that they all seem to share, and which is outlined in an article that I’ve previously linked to:

The doctrine of Russian Martial Art is based on the concepts of non-violence, cooperation, non-resistance and conformity. The Russian Martial Art master absorbs blows effortlessly, contorts the body to accommodate the threat and maintains contact until the assailant is rendered immobile.

… which fits rather nicely with something I’ve also been seeking in my martial arts studies (see my post ‘The manner of victory is important‘).

So far so good, but if I can get this with the Chinese martial arts, why move towards systema? This is where community comes into the picture…. With the Chinese martial arts, I’m getting great results in health, mental calmness, and combative ability; yiquan in particular, as I’ve mentioned here many times, has been particularly beneficial for me. The thing is, even if I reach the level of being able to teach in one or more of these, I’m not sure how they help to build a community -especially back in the UK where they’re not exactly mainstream; in a community adapting to resource constraints, I rather suspect that they would be seen at best as “nice, but by no means necessary”.

The Russian martial arts, on the other hand, have elements that may be a bit more marketable. In particular, I’m thinking of its connection with Cossack dance and choral singing (hey, I am Welsh, after all!). These are elements that can be used to build a community – dance and singing could attract people of all ages when a lot of what has become popular entertainment turns out to be unsustainable, and people start working in larger groups again…. It is suitable for both genders and all ages… and inside the song and dance are health techniques and systema fighting methods… Add to that the connections with the theatre from Stanislavsky, Chekhov and so on, and you have a system that’s highly appropriate to community-building….

As an example, I’ve been following the “Siberian Cossack Group LAD” for some time; although there are some elements that make me wary – and I know there has been a falling out with Mikhail Ryabko, though I have no idea what it’s all about – they are doing a lot of interesting work in combining the elements I’ve been talking about, and taking these into schools, youth groups, and so on – take a look at their videos on YouTube. (And, as a point of interest, in a recent Yiquan class, we had a visitor from Hong Kong who trains systema there, and who has friends who’ve attended the seminar in Kuala Lumpur I wrote about before. We had a very interesting chat!).

Don’t take this to mean that I’m giving up on the Chinese styles – quite the contrary! I’m still really enjoying the yiquan, though I think this is something for me to work on in my original path of “martial arts and meditation” as opposed to ‘finding a role in a community’. I’ve also been training again in bagua, though for various reasons I’ve kept quiet about that; I’ll be writing about it soon, though.

I’d be interested to hear what you think about all this….

The air quality was bad yesterday, so I didn’t try to get to the hills in the end… Pity, the day before was beautiful, sunny with blue, blue skies and a cool wind; I’d got quite excited about getting away from the city…

Anyhow, I went on to the yiquan class, and was really glad I went.

I’ve been working for a while on the mo ca bu stepping; trying to engage the kua as I step.. I think I’ve got it working fairly well now, at least in the slow shi li stages. I notice that when I get it right, I’m really rooted on the back leg, so the forward foot is both weightless, and slides naturally along the curve that Yao Lao Shi shows us.

There are a couple of German lads visiting; they train with Yao Lao Shi’s student who’s set up a school in Austria. There were also a few young Chinese lads, whom I’ve seen before but not for quite a long time.

The tui shou session was great. First, I trained with one of the Chinese lads, who was very good. He landed a few slaps and punches, but I delivered a lot more, I think. Then, I went straight on to partner one of the Germans, who was a bit better than me, but not by a lot. He managed to turn me and uproot my a couple of times, but on the other hand I was able to slip through his defenses with punches fairly easily and often.

So, in review: both of these guys were much younger than me and train harder than I do, but I think I acquitted myself well enough. My rooting is generally pretty good, and my defenses are strong. The German, as I say, turned me round, but I think I know what I did wrong. My use of my kua is good in the slow testing, but I keep forgetting to do it in the heat of tui shou; once I can remember that, I’ll be better placed to use fa li. I’m getting much better at staying focused on my partner’s centreline, and at redirecting force away from mine. I’m a bit too passive, and tend to just stay on the defensive.

Not a bad position to be in, and I have some clear areas for improvement.

Master Yao asked me to write an article about my experience of being a student at his school; it’ll go on his web site, and also in a magazine that will be published soon (not sure exactly what that is). Yikes! I need to think about what’ll be the right tone and approach to take for that….

After the class, I went to Beihai Park instead of the hills, and mooched around for a while. I hadn’t realized how close it is to my apartment if I cut through the hutongs! I finally saw the famous nine-dragon screen…

I took one of the shashkas and found a quiet spot to practice some more with that, alone except for the impassive gaze of an old man and his caged songbird….

I got up early this morning, and headed over to Ditan Park for a change, just north of the Lama Temple. As you can see, it was a beautiful morning, with large numbers of people standing below the trees – stretching, chanting mantras, meditating, and doing lots of different forms of qigong. I spent a while in zhan zhuang with my back to a cedar (?) tree, and facing a small pine, inhaling the intoxicating scent of an early northern hemisphere spring day…. ahhhhhhhhhh…….

I took the shashkas. The pictures will give you an idea of what they look like compared to my taiji sabre. What surprised me is that they’re heavy – much heavier than the taiji sabre; of course, they’re stainless steel, while the sabre is aluminium, so it’s natural, I just hadn’t thought of it. The scabbards are also steel, covered with a very thin layer of faux-leather, so it was quite a bit of weight to be carrying altogether! The handles are hard plastic. I think they may get very slippery if I use them in hotter temperatures than this morning; in addition, the grooves were really grinding the skin on my hands – I have a few blisters. I think that somewhere I have a roll of non-slip tape, and I may put that over the handles.

That aside, they were a joy to use; they handle really well. I can see that using these babies will be a good workout for wrists, shoulders, back and waist…. Once I get the hang of it!

OK, I’ll report more later; now I’m off to yiquan class, and then I think I may head off to enjoy a sunny afternoon in the hills….

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