November 29, 2022
Impact Zone
In my book AXE: Advanced Xingyi Energetics, I constructed a purposeful and sustained analogy between the experience of solo Xingyi drills practice and surfing. This was bold of me, as when it comes to actual surfing I'm a total barney, having only surfed a few times in life (but in Hawaii, does that count for anything). So it may seem crazy that I emphasize this, but if this be madness yet there's method in it. It's an amazingly apt and productive metaphor.
Surfing is something you initiate. It's a skill and experience possessed by you. Nature, whether land, sea or sky, couldn't give less of a fuck about it or you. And yet, in the experience of surfing you are coordinating yourself with 'something else'. In this case, the ocean really is outside of you (well, most of the time LMAO!) You know what I mean. You are coordinatelly with an external, yet intimately felt, force.
Xingyi is not so different, except the force is even more intimate, in some sense 'inside' you and yet paradoxically the stronger it gets the more unified you feel with everything around you. So it's not that far a stretch to compare these things in the conceptual sense.
But the alignment works even better in the practical sense. A lot of it has to do with the element of Time. A wave has its own speed. It can seem fast or slow according to the situation, but anyway it's on its clock and you have to match your time sense to its temporal unfolding.
So in AXE, I repeatedly make the point that, of all the unique, amazing and distintictive features of the XYQ art, the timing dimension is perhaps the most striking. I can't compare it to every other art out there, whether self-cultivational (like most qi gong) or with more substantial martial legacy (like Tai Chi). That's too much for one blog post. So all I can do here is drop a few bread crumbs, of which the most interesting is this:
Xingyi operates at the speed of life.
What I mean is, with XYQ you must and you will learn to coordinate your physical dynamic with the rhythm of the internal energy process. In Tai Chi and Qi Gong, you can stretch out time to suit yourself. And that's great, and the internal power will accomodate that very well. Nothing wrong with that. But Xingyi has its own absolutely distinctive flavor because of the bite-size modular trajectory of each 'rep'. In Tai Chi there isn't quite this idea of a rep. Even drills like Chan Si Jing (Silk Reeling) don't have this flavor (though they are fantastic in other ways). XYQ is like internal archery where:
- The archer's body = your XYQ mind
- The bow = your physical body
- The arrow = your extended or 'caught' internal power blast
That's the deep reason the XYQ Classics often use imagery drawn from archery. And archery too has a non-negotiable nexus of temporal coordination. It's bite-size too, in the sense of bite-size 'reps'. You can zone out or Zen out between shots as much as you may want, but the internal dynamics of the actual execution of a shot are intextricably ruled by time. Same with XYQ.
But surfing and archery are at the end of the day physical (yeah, with all kinds of psychological and spirtitual depth etc. but you'll see what I mean). Whereas in XYQ you're dealing with something that you just never enounter in normal life unless you seriously deep dived in these arts: the internal energy as a living, almost 'external' power experience. And as such it has its own temporal properties.
In AXE I devote many pages to explaining the temporal progression of the internal energy surge with a single 'rep' of any XYQ technique (5 Elements, 12 Animals). It's the same force and the same basic progression in every one of those techniques, but it has a slightly different flavor and feel in each. But the progression is the same: regardless of the ultimate universal source of the power (brain center jack-in etc.) when you're doing a rep, the power begins instantaneously at your dantian, drops in a fraction of a pico second to your feet, rebounds up from your foot soles up through your legs to your hips pelvis, continues blasting up through your torso to the ling tai in your back, then the yang wave permeates your upper torso straight through from ling tai to heart center, and from there surges out throught your arms to be energetically solidified or crystallized in your fists or hands at the exact full extension and culmination of the rep (strike).
You can mess around with the physical execution of this. For example, most XYQ practitioners seriously rush around trying to look bad ass through sheer busyness. That's not true speed, that's just rushing for YouTube effect. It's a physical thing that in 99% of cases is ignoring and trangressing the temporal character and expression of the real internal power. Like an archer who's so hasty that he's not even notching the arrows on the bowstring, just drawing arrow after arrow crazily and dropping them at his feet. That's not respecting the XYQ process. This is not "the speed of life". It's just rushing. And oddly, with all that rushing, they are also way too tense, thus triggering even more rushing to overcome the slowdown caused by all that excess clenching and tension.
Or you can do like Tai Chi or Qi Gong, slow, even, meditative. Like Tai Chi itself. That's great, I love Tai Chi. But XYQ has a different flavor. Because that Tai Chi / Qi Gong speed is also not "the speed of life". True that some Tai Chi masters can deploy there power instantaneously. Even I have my own modest quotient of that snapping 'cold power'. Tai Chi does develop that. But here I'm not talking so much about the ultimate result, I'm more getting at the actual experience of the solo practice. Those arts, relative to XYQ, are like an archer who draws the bow slowly and carefully, to test the equipment and himself, but who then withdraws and never takes the shot. Tai Chi and Qi Gong don't have quite the crisp temporal boundaries that make XYQ practice so incredibly compelling and unique.
Each rep is like catching one wave. Checking yourself - are you temporally and gesturally alighning with nature of the force's expression from feet to fist? Just like surfing, sometimes you align with it perfectly, in every segment so that the whole notion of segments paradoxically disappears. Other reps... not so much. You may feel a 'local charge' in your fist at the end, but did you really bring it all the way up with no breaks in the above full progression and extension? With all the timing right so in the (admittedly brief! XYQ should not be rushed, but a kind of very fast and crips speed naturally emerges) upsurge at every frame of the physical unfolding of the rep, the power had risen to where it should be, from where it should have been based, and flowed seamlessly to and through the next frame? None of this philosophy, its an alignment of body and internal, non-physical energy that you will tangibly feel, just as real as surfing an actual wave - but the wave really is inside you this time.
I wrote about laterality in an earlier post, with reference to the first XYQ 'fist' - Splitting. Once you understand that point in Splitting, you can express that in its fullest form in the Horse animal. Becuase in Horse you can learn to experience bilateral laterality - symmetric laterality - that same permeation of your side torso as the platform for infusion of your striking arms, but with Horse its full and equal on both sides.
If you want to see just how the physical part of Horse should look, you can see that for free in my extended trailer (really a free tutorial in itself) on 12 Animals here (at timestamp 4:05):
But in that movie I'm not discussing the deeper energy stuff that's in AXE (hey that 'A' stands for 'Advanced', ok?) and also I'm not showing it at the real Xingyi speed where you'll seem to go much faster thatn what I show there, and yet without rushing. But if you begin the physical practice in the way shown, you can grow it out to real Xingyi speed.
And if you can do Horse with the complete wave connection, surfed as above from feet to (horse) fist... well that's an experience to be savored in this vale of tears. Almost makes all the hassles and horror of a human life worthwhile lol. As the greatest of Chinese philospohers has said:
One who hears and comprehends the Great Way in the morning can die at peace that very evening.