My newest tutorial film Sacral Ignition teaches the inner protocol of one of the Chen Style Silk Reeling drills for the first time. Having understood this one, you have the key to all of them. This is pound-for-pound one of the most powerful internal protocols in existence.
The stages are as follows (visually modeled and verbally explained in the film. Begin in mabu (馬步) but shifted rightward so you have slight waist turn to the right and also your weight is 70% on right side. Feet straight forward or very slightly turned out, sit as low as possible.
- Extend: Begin with your right arm should level straight out to right side, palm down, fingers extended gently. Your left hand is relaxed resting on your left hip.
- Scoop: Curl your hand downward as you use mostly your body (waist, hips, slight leg rotation) to bring your extended hand curving down in front of your body. As you do this, your mind is entirely on the daling point of your inner wrist of the moving hand. Keep your fingers extended but relaxed, Palm comes to face upward at the lowest point, near your groin area between legs. Weight does not cross over the 50-50 midpoint in this particular drill (others do cross the midpoint).
- Raise: With your weight now centered perfectly 50-50, begin to raise your right hand from the mid body center line, low just above groin area up to solar plexus point. But though in reality your hand is rising on the outside center line of your body, you must mentally feel something different. Feel that you are raising your hand INSIDE YOUR BODY. You are mentally running your rising hand along the front surface of your spine inside your body. Do you understand 'front surface' here? It's as though you Grab a plastic model of the human spine; the place the back of it up against your torso, so its front is facing outward from yourself, and its rear side is pressed up against your body; then run your hand up along the front (exposed) surface. You are not running the power up through the center of your spine, nor along the outer (skin) side of it. You are reaching inside your energy body, almost like a Philippine "psychic surgeon" :)
- Project: As you reach to the height of your lingtai point, begin to turn your hand so that the inner wrist point (daling) faces outward, elbow horizontal. As you do this, you'll (eventually) feel a strong 'rod' or 'bolt' of internal power projecting straight forward through your chest, from the lingtai area in the back, through your solar plexus area (which is directly in front of the lingtai) then out through your daling inner wrist point. These three points should be all lined up as though an icepick would go straight through all three of them at once. You 'pretend' that your inner wrist point (daling) is somehow pulling or pushing the power from your spine inside your body, through that front point, to the inner wrist point. The power will actually suffuse your entire body at that point.
- Feel It: As you do the above, you'll (eventually) feel the rod of power which will quickly expand into something more like a 'wall' suffusing your entire body. At the end of the projection, before beginning the next Extension, while your daling is (briefly) fully turned out and forward in front of your heart or solar plexus center, and the power is perking in your whole body, if you then slightly sink/sit yourself just a little deeper into your mabu stance, that will hugely augment the full body effect. Try not to lose the arm charge as you draw your palm outward again back to the Extend position to start another rep. The arm charge will eventually become fully continuous with no break. But as a beginner you may have energy flow breaks at every stage above.
- Repeat: Do a few more circles on the right, then shift to left and do the same thing.
NOTE: The pic on this post is not meant to be representative of this exercise. It's just there for atmosphere, though it does show a good horse stance.