Over the months., Yiquan has grown on me more and more. I put in at least one to two hours work on that per day. Over the months since my hyper-intensive August
"7-days/week-7-hours/day" thing in Beijing with Yao Chengguang last year, this practice has accumulated a radical new kind of energy that feels way different from the ordinary qi circulation previously built up by 35 years of Taijiquan. The Yiquan guys call this energy Hunyuanli (omni-dimensional power). I don't know about names, since I go by feeling alone. It's a new experience to me. And this HYL power of Yiquan just feels so cool! It's like nothing else out there that I know of. Keeping this post G-Rated, I could say that the only body feeling that even trails it in distant second place is when sometimes, after an utterly exhausting 2-hour Led Session of Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series you get a high that also feels great, but really even that doesn't hold a candle to the feeling of crazy power you get from just half hour or so of the basic Yiquan work: mo jin or shi li or even fa li practice.
Crazy Power - yeh that's the phrase for the feeling of it! If it were a visual experience (it isn't) it would be comparable to the flash-directional graphics in some sci-fi movies, pioneered in the Jupiter entry sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If it were an auditory experience (it isn't) it would be comparable to the highest-speed, most poundingly rhythmic chant or acid rock you could possibly hear. If it were a performance experience (it isn't) it would be like the wild energy Richie Havens puts out in his classic "Freedom / Motherless Child" acoustic guitar cri de coeur at Woodstock, multiplied by the thermal radiation of a thousand suns rising in the sky at once. If it were a dance experience (it isn't, except for Yiquan's awkwardly titled "Health Dance" advanced practice), it would be like when I attended cheesy Sock Hop dances in Junior High School, and just ask a girl and then you both just go totally nuts fast-dancing out on the wood gym floor, no technique whatsoever, no thought, no personal consciousness, no touching, just absolutely wild unbridled energy spazz out. In short, HYL is what the Spanish call duende - a sensation normally obtainable from only the finest-grade 'China Cat' catnip smuggled by only a few hardy dealers at infinite risk of life, limb, and liberty directly from the cloudforests of Upper Yunnan province.
That's how great the HYL cultivated by Yiquan practice is - and yet Yiquan is all totally street legal! Obviously if the Feds knew how cool this practice is, they'd ban it onto Schedule I immediately. But they'll never know how cool it is, because Yiquan has no visible, audible, or any other detectable effect on the exterior of your mind or body. Your body remains absolutely still, calm, totally controlled and collected. This isn't like any kind of externally flailing kriyas thing, hyper-exhibitionism as found in some weirder forms of yoga and qi-gong. Your mind is also clear, calm and at peace. In that infinite calm, space seems to open all around you, yet it's all charged with the most incredible throbbing of Big Bang potential power.
It's like, you know when you've got a little gyroscope really, really going fast, and you cup that in your hand and it doesn't exactly move you externally but you can feel the coolest, smoothest feeling of whirling power from within it. Now imagine every body organ, every joint, and every bone and muscle are functioning as supernaturally spun-up gyroscopes. That's the idea!
But! Hang on there a sec, Tabby Cat (I can hear you saying), not to throw cold water on your ecstatic flipout here, but wasn't there something somewhere in the fine print about fighting? I mean, isn't Yiquan supposed to be a martial art, or has there been a misunderstanding here?
Yeah. Well. You raise a good point. This where is I'm still a bit at sea with the whole thing. Not that I have any particular problem fighting. My current favorite thing is boxing, but I've done lots of other combative stuff, including of course Yiquan sparring itself. And I have no problem with all that. Take boxing for example. I'm an ok, perfectly good-enough competent boxer (especially after having my fundamentals upgraded recently by a former Soviet Olympic boxer, but too much to get into now). Point is, yes - I'm into combatives. And at the same time, (as above) I'm also very appreciative of Yiquan "internal" practice to cultivate HYL.
But now the canker gnaws: how (or whether) those two things can link up? When I'm boxing I'm just... boxing. You know, you warm up with skip rope, speed bag, heavy bag, shadow box, then you find some lurker who wants a sparring partner and you have at it. No problem. But... how to airdrop some HYL onto that? You might think Yiquan's own sparring practice is the answer. True, there's also a lot of sparring in Yiquan. In some ways that YQ sparring superficially resembles some aspects of Western boxing, but the big difference is that they basically want to close in and push, butt, or throw you as soon as possible. And also in Yiquan we use lite weight MMA type gloves for sparring, or no gloves at all, for the lighter form of slap sparring.
All that stuff, both the Western boxing and the Yiquan sparring itself, are all fine, all well and good as far as they go. But I have not reached the Final Frontier - I want to be able to express the Crazy Power of HYL directly into sparring. Of course, Western boxing has its own form of rhythmic, quasi-musical Crazy Power feeling, that's one reason (actually, the main reason) that I like it. But even that isn't the real HYL (see above).
Therefore, I will make the weary trudge back to Beijing in late Feb and early March, to continue struggling up the cliff face of Yiquan, under the expert tutelage of Yao Chengguang. Maybe one more intensive training period with him will enable me to close the HYL expressive gap. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Therefore um... watch this space. Whenever I have more to say about it, something will appear under "Combative Training" category.
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