Electric properties of water, chi and internal martial arts

Water molecules have very interesting property. They are natural dipoles a self organize in electromagnetic fields. Effectively you can have water magnets and water levitation. This levitation works because any body containing water put into strong magnetic field will begin to levitate because of water molecules aligning with the magnetic field. This is how water molecules rise in the air to form clouds, even though they are heavier than air. They are kept in the clouds because of the electro static field that keeps them apart and suspended between the ionosphere and the earth’s surface. They start falling down on the ground as drops of rain, when the electric field loses its energy through electric discharge (lightning) between the clouds and the earth surface or between the cloud and the ionosphere.

We are constantly submerged in a very strong electric field that exists between the earth and the ionosphere. Our bodies are full of electric activity, otherwise known as chi. Because of this every cell is effectively a dipole. Through chi kung you learn how to manipulate this electric field in your body and your surroundings. What if you were somehow able to re orientate all these little dipoles and align them with the electric field that exists between the earth’s surface and the ionosphere? And then reverse the polarity. Would you be able to lose some of your weight, by help of electric antigravity? Maybe this is how the “standing on eggs” trick works. Who knows. The electromagnetic field of the earth is not uniform. It changes from place to place and from time to time. There is evidence that it was once, not such a long time ago, a lot stronger then it is today. What if people at that time were able to use that very strong magnetic field to charge their bodies with a lot more energy than we are able to do today? Maybe the old tales about heroes who performed feats of wander like levitation were true. Maybe they just had more energy at their disposal, and knew how to manipulate it. Who knows. But it sure is fun to think about things like this.
For those interested in antigravity experiments that they can do at home, here is the link that lists them all.
Here is a page in diamagnetism that talks about experiments involving levitation of living organisms.
For those who want to read about research done in electromagnetic properties of chi system, here is another link.

Have fun.

Knees and how to protect them during internal martial arts training

If you want to do martial arts without injuring your knees, you first have to strengthen and stretch all the muscles, tendons and ligaments that collaborate in moving and stabilizing your legs. That means pretty much every muscle and connective tissue from the middle of your back to your toes. At the same time you need to open all the joints in your legs starting from hip and going all the way down to your toes. This means that you need to be able to have full rotation around all possible rotational axes in your ankle and your hip, without twisting your knee. If you cannot put the knee over your foot, then you have a problem with your ankle or your hip rotation. Do not try to horizontally rotate (twist) your knees. They are not made to twist. So what do you do if you can’t put your knee over your foot? You need to stretch your leg muscles starting with your foot, then your ankle and finishing with your psoas and hip muscles. They are the ones that are preventing the rotation of these joints, and this is why your knee can’t be positioned over your foot. Being able to position your knee over your foot is extremely important. You should not do any moving and particularly not any power walking (sudden change of direction while applying downwards twisting pressure) exercises before and you can correctly align your leg joints.
To do that you have to start with static strengthening exercises, not moving ones. Every moving exercise involves joint rotation. If your muscles are not strong enough to stabilize the joints during the rotation, your body will fall out of correct alignment and you will injure yourself. To start, look for knee rehabilitation exercises. Or Pilates exercises. They are done lying down or sitting down, and are designed to strengthen and stretch your muscles without injuring them. Once you bring your muscles up to a necessary level of strength, you can start doing standing strengthening, stretching and rotational exercises. Make sure that during practice your knee is always over your foot and never pointing inwards or outwards. Knee should also never go over the beginning of the toes.
To test if your knee stabilizers are strong enough, do this simple test.
Do the starting weight shifting exercise which is exactly the same in any internal martial arts, and is the opening movement of any internal martial arts form. Before you start take your trousers off or roll up your trouser legs. Take your shoes off. You need to be able to see your ankles and your knees. Find a full length mirror or some kind of reflective surface. You will need to be able to check your body alignment. Don’t trust your mental image of your alignment. It is probably wrong.
Stand with your legs shoulder with apart. Your feet should point straight forward with your second toes parallel to each other. Unlock your knees. This means just slightly bend them. They should not go over the middle of your foot. Can you do this? In order to do this you need to be able to also unlock and slightly rotate your hips and open up your pelvis. Do you feel any tension in your ankles knees or hips? Look down. Are your leg bones aligned with your foot? Your knees should not be pointing inward or outward. Now move your weight over your right foot. Make sure your torso is still pointing straight ahead. Your knee should be still aligned with your second toe and is not going over the middle of your foot. Also make sure that you are not sticking your right hip out and tilting your upper body to the left and forward to counter balance. Your torso should be vertical. Can you do this? Now, with your weight fully on your right leg, lift your left leg one inch off the floor. Make sure that all previous alignments are still maintained. Can you do this? Now move left foot one foot forward, so that the heel of your left foot is now aligned with the toes of your right foot. Relax your left foot and lower it down until it touches the ground. The weight should still be on your right foot. Check your alignments. They should all still be in place. Can you do this? Now lift your left foot one inch up in the air and move it back to be parallel with your right foot. Your weight should still be on your right foot. Now move the weight to the center. Repeat the same procedure with the opposite leg.
If during this exercise you lose your alignment, this means that your stabilizer muscles are not strong enough, or they are not firing correctly, or your tendons and muscles are too stiff and short to allow full rotation of your hip and ankle joints. If you can’t do this, you should not do anything else, because you will injure yourself. The injuries don’t have to be sudden rips and cracks. They can be repetitive strain injuries, like tendon micro tears, cartilage micro tears. Eventually they can cause bigger injuries or can lead to arthritis.
You can use the above exercise to strengthen your stabilizer muscles. It should be done slowly with your feeling scanning your lower body for any overly tensed muscles and in particular any dead, not activated muscles. During the whole exercise your core muscles have to be engaged at all times. Make sure your breathing is smooth and relaxed. Don’t hold your breath. Stay in every intermediate position for the duration of 3 breaths.
Good luck.

Chi massage ear, hand and foot points

Massage and why it is important in internal martial arts

When I was in Bali few years ago, I went to a small island of its east coast called Nusa Lembongan. It is a beautiful island and is definitely worth visiting if you are near there. When I was there I practiced my chi kung every morning, and as you can imagine, people got curious and started asking questions. It turned out that Bali has its own tradition of chi kung, which was imbedded into their religious practices as well as Silat martial practices. Every Balinese temple is also a school, where priests taught children the religion, but also energy arts, medical arts and lots more. One of the things that everyone leaned as part of their medical training was a chi massage. Particularly foot and hand massage. There are 3 parts of the body where all the acupuncture meridians meet, and which act as holographic images of the body: ears, feet and hands. By applying chi massage to your hands, feet and ears, you are stimulating every part of your body. For general health, you don’t even need to know which point on your palm, sole or ear is connected to what part of your body.

All you need to do is this:

1. Relax and switch your mind off. You need to be present when you are doing any type of massage in order to be able to feel what is going on in the body.

2. Rub your hands while feeling the point of contact between them. This will bring the chi into your palms

3. Just put your feeling into the point of your hand foot or ear that you are massaging. This will draw the chi from your hands into that particular point, which will in turn stimulate related part of your body.

4. If you find any point that is painful, just stay on it and keep massaging until the pain subsides.

5. Do this every day. You will soon notice the benefits.


Anyway, Balinese are mad into cock fighting. The cockerels they use are mean killing machines, strong and supple, agile and fast. The funny thing is that the cockerels spend most of their time locked under tiny bamboo baskets, maybe a meter in diameter. They get taken out of the baskets every day, but they are not let loose to run around. Instead, they are carried around under their owner’s arms to a nice shady place, where they are massaged for hours. I actually sat once and watched one of the massaging sessions. All the muscles, bones and connective tissues are meticulously pressed, twisted, pulled and stretched. While the owner is massaging his bird, he is constantly murmuring and whispering secret magic words, and I was told that they are very important part of the process. But even without powerful spells, the process of dynamic massage is a great way to strengthen and stretch the body.


Here Bruce Frantzis explains how to perform twisting leg massage. This massage is supposed separate muscles and tendons from the bones, stretch them, and train your muscles, tendons and nerves to be able to twist or wrap around the bones. Bagua insists on twisting. This is because muscles that are wrapped around the bones in a twisting spiral way, develop more attachments to the bone and can therefore bare more pressure and have more strength per amount of muscle that the straight muscles. I once watched this video about the strongest girl in the world. Shi was 10 year old Russian, and was able to lift huge weights with ease. She was subjected to an intense training by her parents, both sports trainers from Russia, from a very early age. A big part of the training every day was dynamic stretching and twisting. When scientists did MRI scan of her body, they found that all her leg and arm muscles were wrapping around the bones and had 3 times more attachments then normal muscles would. They believed that this was why she was able to deal with such heavy weights. In the old times, children learning martial arts in monasteries were subjected to very similar training regimes, and probably ended up with the same bone muscle structure.

Too busy to Kung Fu

Kung fu means hard work. It means that you have to practice hard and for a long time, in order to acquire martial arts skills. Kung Fu in internal Kung Fu means exactly the same. Except that the martial arts skills you are trying to develop are different. Just because you are training internal kung fu, does not mean that there is a short cut, which would allow you to become skilful fighter without putting in an effort.
In the old times, people started practicing internal martial arts when they were kids and they kept on practicing for the rest of their lives, many hours every day. The reason why you need to practice for a long time is because internal kung fu trains small internal muscles, tendons, ligaments and your whole nervous system.
In order to train internal muscles, you need to do low intensity, high repetition rate exercises. You need to use low intensity exercises, because you want to switch off your big external muscles in order to engage, or activate your internal muscles. If you try to put too much force into your practice, the body will try to protect itself by switching the big muscles on, and your exercise becomes ineffective. You have to do these exercises for a long time with high repetition rate, because it takes a long time to strengthen internal muscles. They are just difficult and awkward to isolate and train.
In order to train connective tissue, you need to do a lot of dynamic stretching and twisting. This will increase the thickness and strength of the connective tissue. But this can only be done slowly. If you try to rush this, you will injure yourself.
The main reason why you need to do low intensity, high repetition rate exercises is because you are not just training your internal muscles and your connective tissue, both of which take a long time to grow and stretch. You are also training your whole nervous system. You are training your nerves to increase the speed and clarity of message transfer. You are also training your brain to change the order in which it fires activation and deactivation signals to different muscles and connective tissue as well as the intensity of those signals. This in particular requires a very long time.

So Kung fu means hard work.

How can you find all that time to practice every day? It’s simple. You need to start living your kung fu. What does that mean? It means that you start doing everything as if it is a Kung fu practice. And if you understand the fundamental principles of internal kung fu, everything can be a Kung fu practice. Waking up and stretching in the morning becomes a kung fu practice. Getting out of bed becomes kung fu practice. Walking to the toilet, sitting down on a toilet seat and getting up, even actually going to the toilet becomes a kung fu practice. Getting your breakfast ready, eating your breakfast, it all becomes kung fu practice. You spend at least 12 hours every day doing things that involve standing, walking, sitting down, getting up, moving, lifting, pressing, pushing, holding, bending. All of this can be done in an “empty” way, or it can be done in a “full”, “mindful”, kung fu way. By doing this, your life becomes kung fu practice, chi kung practice, meditation practice. You start living your kung fu. If you add to that an hour of formal martial practice a day (I think this is a recommended daily amount of exercise in order to maintain a good health), then you easily end up having more than 5 hours of training a day.

I know that this sounds like karate kid “wax on wax off” practice. And it is. Don’t do your kung fu. Live your kung fu.

Hand chi massage set (opening chi kung set number 1)

This simple exercise set can be used to energize your hands and your whole body in the morning, or at the beginning of your training session. It is a chi kung hand massage set, which draws chi into your hands, and then distributes it through all the meridians which end in your fingers. It also stimulates all the acupressure points in your palms and fingers. It is very important that during the exercise you keep your feeling inside the place that is currently being massaged. This will draw chi into the part of your hand that is being massaged. Remember this is a chi massage. Don't try to force chi, and don't try to visualize anything. Just feel it.
This set will improve the circulation in your hands. It will also clean the chi channels in the hands.
This chi kung set also has a martial arts application. It develops hand and wrist strength. It stretches hand muscles and ligaments. It also develops pushing and splitting power. It also teaches you how to perform palm pushing strikes and chops from a very short distance (less than the length of your palm). The splitting force strikes output the full force at the beginning of the movement, so you really don't need any distance at all.

The reason why the arms need to extended but rounded, is because this is the furthest point in which you can output the full force while maintaining proper body alignment. It is the most difficult position from which you could attempt to output force. No one really expects you to be able to output force from that hand position anyway. Which is precisely why you should be able to output force form that exact position. It adds fun to fighting.


There are 3 instructional videos.

The first one shows the whole set and explains how the set should be performed.

The second one shows massage closeup.

The third one shows martial applications of this set.

Eckhart Tolle - The power of now

Enlightenment - what is that?

A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. "Spare some change?" mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. "I have nothing to give you," said the stranger. Then he asked: "What's that you are sitting on?" "Nothing," replied the beggar. "Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember." "Ever looked inside?"
asked the stranger. "No," said the beggar. "What's the point? There's nothing in there." "Have a look inside," insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold.
I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.
"But I am not a beggar," I can hear you say.
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some super-human accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm. I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what's left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find out for yourself. He uses a negative definition so that the mind cannot make it into something to believe in or into a superhuman accomplishment, a goal that is impossible for you to attain. Despite this precaution, the majority of Buddhists still believe that enlightenment is for the Buddha, not for them, at least not in this lifetime…

This is the start of the best book on meditation that I have ever read. The book is called “The power of now” and was written by Eckhart Tolle. If want to know what meditation and enlightenment are all about, read this book. You can download this book for free here.

I am also including a link to a short video on silence and presence.