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.

Standing meditation practice

In 1939, Wang Xiangzhai issued a public challenge through a Beijing newspaper. His objective: to test and prove the new martial arts training system of Yiquan, a system that placed standing meditation (zhan zhuang) at its core.
Expert fighters from across China, Japan and even Europe traveled to answer Wang’s challenge. None could beat him or his senior students. His standing meditation training produced superior results in a shorter time period, when compared to methods used in boxing, Judo, and other styles of Kung Fu.

Interested?

Here is a very good series of videos by a teacher called Mark S. Cohen explaining the posture and breathing during the standing meditation.

I particularly like the bit at the end of the last video when the teacher says: for healing you should do this for at least 40 minutes a day. For martial arts training you have to do this for at least an hour every day.

Kung fu does mean hard work after all.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Here is also a video by Bruce Frantzis, talking about the different stages of taoist meditation.

Watch video


This is an introduction to an online course. You can subscribe to this course here:

Science confirms Taoist wisdom about compassion and morality

When Bruce Frantzis talks about Taoist morality, he says that in Taoism morality is based on being able to really experience the world around you, and therefore being able to experience what others are going through, which leads to empathy and morality. So to be moral, you need to be compassionate. And to be compassionate you need to be present, aware, you need to be awake.
Here Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, talks about reflective neurons, a type of neurons that enable us to exactly experience what others around us experience. They enable us to empathize, to be compassionate. But then he asks why we aren't more compassionate more of the time. And he concludes that this is because people are just not present, aware or awake most of the time. We are too self-centered, too enclosed within our own minds, to notice others, the world.

Watch video

Illustration of the difference between the external and internal martial arts

I was walking on the pier in Dun Laoghaire this morning. The clouds were low and the wind was strong and gusty. I noticed a raven flying overhead. It was flapping its wings madly, trying to counter the blows of the wind, totally unbalanced and looking really vulnerable. Then, just above the struggling raven, I saw a seagull. With its wings spread wide, it was gliding effortlessly on the same wind that was causing so much trouble for poor raven. The seagull looked completely relaxed. It did not fight the wind, it was using it. It did not try to go through the gusts; it glided and slid over them. The raven was like an external martial arts practitioner. It was strong and able to fight against a strong opposing force, but spending huge amount of energy to achieve this, and constantly on a verge of defeat. The seagull was like an internal martial arts practitioner. It didn’t fight the opposing force. It evaded the force, used it, and moved through it, all the time in a perfect balance and calm, using minimum effort to achieve maximum goals.

And then a really strong gust of wind blew my hat straight into the sea.