Another day another rant: the Morsel of the Day today is probably the most essential thing for internal power training via the methods of traditional martial arts. I once saw a strange movie about of all things, real estate salespeople. The only thing I remember about it is the head sales manager screaming at his underlings:
"ALWAYS BE CLOSING!"
He meant that every moment of every interaction with any other human should be 1000% dedicated to pushing a sale of something, anything, to its final culmination - the Close. That's abbreviated as 'ABC'. the guy was an asshole but one had to admire his relentless pitbull tenacity. And I'm grateful for his teaching in that his use of those three letters makes any concept easy to remember.
For internal martial arts training, we can say the same: ABC! However the letters mean something different. In our game, ABC means:
"ALWAYS BE CHARGING!"
But charging what exactly? And how? And why? I've actually brought this up before in several books. But I realize that only like 3 people, if that many, have really taken the message on board and figure out how to work it. So I'll try to explain again here, but I'm also going to hammer this remorselessly in my new feature-length specialty tutorial film 'ZMQ37-X The Hot Zone (Xtreme & Xtended Tai Chi Form Details)'. But let me try again here and now.
First of all what do I mean by charge, and what/where should be be 'charging' all the time? Strangly enough the 'where' is your ARMS. Those who follow my books and films should be shocked to read that, because I'm constantly raving againt other methods for being way too 'arm centric'. Yet here now I'm saying ALWAYS be focusing on your arms. Yep that's right. There's no contradiction. It's merely a matter of doing it the right way.
My criticism of almost every internal energy method and program out there is that they are way too 'arm-centric'. What this means is that they mostly ignore the most essential point of all: the source of power is the lower body, legs and hips. Just as Sagawa Yukiyoshi constantly stressed. Most Qi Gong etc that you see is 98% arm stretching, waving, waggling and swinging. It imparts a little nice feeling of easeful relaxation and stretch, but has nothing to do with the real internal conditioning. You need to train yourself to feel the power rising, tangibly and concretely not as a concept, theory, metaphor, or image, from feet and legs, through hips and pelvis into torso, thence on to arms and hands. But it's constantly streaming up from the lower body.
So what about arms? They are the terminals. Not really of course, as the energy constantly flows in a circulation. But the wrong kind of arm focus and "arm-centricity" will block the entire process. Most people when they do Tai Chi or Qi Gong or any other such training have their arms in one or another of the 2 classically wrong conditions:
- Full but Tense
- Relaxed but Empty
In condition 1, they many in fact have their mind in their arms, but so much (unconscious) tension comes along for the ride that the real energy has no chance to surge in. In short they are not sourcing anything from their lower body. They haven't really even begun to train their lower body at all. The new film is all about conditioning the lower body as the energy source. They have never felt the real internal charge, but they've heard about it, so they try (consciously or unconsciously) to simulate what they think it must be by tensing up (sometimes fooling themselves they aren't tensing their "muscles" only stretching their "fascia" or "tendons" LMAO). In Chinese we call this: 拔苗助長 (pulling up a young plant shoot to make it grow more).
In condition 2, they may have the arms emptied out alright, but they don't know how to use their mind to actively and substantially fill up their arms with the fully tangible internal power.
Both are wrong. You need to have almost total arm relaxation, along with full mental feeling into your arms. That means at every moment as you drill anything, whether fast like Xingyi or slow like Tai Chi, whether in a transition or preparation step or when 'finishing' a full move in a set. This is how the apparently senseless Chinese "forms" become awesomely substantial like you just wouldn't believe.
If you've read my books you know I make much of my other acronym, describing the energy flow: ARC. That is (in cultivation mode) 'Accumulate Rebound Catch' or (in deployment mode) 'Activate Rebound Catch'. ABC is a sub-concept of that, remind you how and when (always!) to be doing the 'Catch' phase. It just means experiencing the incredible packing of your arms from shoulders to fingertips at every moment of your movement of any kind, any style, with or without weapons - it's going from "On Demand" to "Always On".
This is not because we take the arms as a primary fighting weapon. They may or may not be, but that's not the point. The point is that they are the essential terminal node of the whole process. If you are not continuously feeling a sense of overwhelming tangible power surging, packing, and almost puffing or ballooning your arms at all times in practice, you're doing it wrong. You're probably focusing on arms in the wrong way. It's hard because you have to keep doing your lower body correctly to trigger the power and keep it continuously flowing, but you can never lose the mental engagement and intention to keep your arms totally packed with the resulting upsurge of power, by relaxed concentration at all times.
When you can really do this, it feels infinitely beyond AMAZING. People sometimes wonder and write me, how can Xing Yi possibly be an internal art, given it looks so fast and forceful? But it is! If you can ABC at every moment while practicing Xingyi (whether in the prep, step, or strike phases) it will blow you into high lunar orbit. The sensation is absolutely out of this world, SO MUCH FUN. Too bad all my in-person teaching activity has been shut down by this fake pandemic, as I could now teach this foundational concept and practice better than I used to. But the new film will cover it in tortuous excruciating detail, like you've never seen Tai Chi training before.
Anyway, I just want to remind you: Always Be Charging! (or if you prefer the vernacular: Arms Be Charging!)