Here's a training angle for super charging your whole body internal infusion via your legs. This is something I got from my original XYQ teacher in a very indirect way. You may recall from some of my prior posts that I've written about my teacher's "Xingyi Flying" LMAO! Not actually flying, but it was a very weird skill that he had of covering vast distance with single leaping step. You know that Xinyi moves are either strictly linear, or linear-directed via tacking (like a sailboat moving zigzag when heading into the wind). My teacher could easily cover the length of a basketball court (long direction) in just two XYQ techniques. The 'look and feel' of this was well captured by an early traveler in Tibet:
Alexandra David-Néel, in her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, describes how she saw a lung-gum-pa runner in action. After witnessing such a monk David-Néel described how "he seemed to lift himself from the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum ... the traveller seemed to be in a trance.
According to Alexandra David-Néel, Milarepa boasted of having "crossed in a few days, a distance which, before his training in magic, had taken him more than a month. He ascribes his gift to the clever control of 'internal air'." David-Néel comments "that at the house of the lama who taught him black magic there lived a trapa [monk] who was fleeter than a horse" using the same skill.
His Xingyi wasn't for those purposes but it had the same vibe as that passage, when he wanted to show it. When he was writing the manual for me, I asked him about that and he promised to cover it. However it took me a lonnnnggg time to understand it and really feel it working for myself. And I'm NOT saying that I can do like the masters and monks just cited. I'm only saying that
- my teacher had that long-span ability
- when I asked him about it, he promised to include the essential training method for it (leg power internal cultivation)
- he showed me the place in the final manual where he taught it, but he kind of laughed and said I might never really understand it
The thing about not understanding it was totally right for years, due to limitation of my Chinese at first and later due to just not feeling it, not grokking it in my own personal practice. But I just kept it in mind. Even now the "not understanding it" is still correct in the sense that I cannot cover the length of a basketball court with one or two Xingyi technique reps, no effing way do I have that skill. So if that's your main goal in reading this, turn away now.
The other difficult is that the 'technique' (if it can even be called that, pretty simple to describe) is done in the Santishi framework, the basic energy cultivation process of Xingyi. If you don't know and have an established practice of that, it's just not possible to pick this up raw. Another thing is that even if you do have an established Xingyi/Santi practice, there are a few foundational points on it, emphasized by my teacher, that are, in my (possibly parochial) view, essential. Which means that you'd have to get my latest book AXE Advanced Xingyi Energetics. And my even mentioning that is going to get me accused of SEO shilling and all kinds of horrible skullduggery. So back off right now before you step in that!
For anybody left here, I've given away the process in the pic above. I've made a page of nearly impenetrable literary Chinese exposition comprehensible and usable at a glance. Here's the deal:
- Set up your Santi as normal, following the book's basic directions.
- Now, pay particular attention to your lead/long leg and foot (p. 54-II in print edition). Play around with relaxing your front leg, without changing its placement or position, as explained in that section of the book.
- Now, let's think about the normal directive: 70/30 weighting. What is that (front foot) 30% really? 30% of your body weight is very roughly equivalent to the weight of one full leg, if completely removed and placed on a scale. So, even though nobody normally thinks of it this way, if you totally relax your front leg, while leaving it's placement unchanged on the floor - that can be understood as 70/30 weighting. You are just letting the leg's own weight 'rest' on the floor, but your body weight overall is otherwise entirely on the back leg (with the stipulations covered in the book as to how to set that up).
- Now, RELAX your entire front leg and foot. Keep same configuration. Relax everything from femoral joint to toes: thigh muscles, knee joint muscles, calf, ankle, foot.
- Now, 'feel' with your mind 99% with barely 1% physical accompaniment that you are s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g out that front leg. But a little different than normal forceful yogic style stretching. You can't move your front foot. It is energeticaly glued to the floor. You need to stretch your entire relaxed leg by kind of pulling (in feeling only) slight up and back with your body. It's more like (the idea of, not the pain) when the Spanish Inquisition used to stretch people on the rack - THAT type of stretching, a feeling of extending the entire limb (not any one muscle or muscle group) like a holding one end of a licorice stick firmly with one hand, while pulling the piece longer lengthwise witih your other hand pulling the other end. All this is99.9% mental feeling!
- Then the payoff: if you already have some energy experience, very quickly you'll start to notice entirely new streams and torrents of the energy running along the edges of your legs, thighs, calves - everywhere. Then those reverbs will also move inward through the length of your legs, including bones and muscles.
- Within a short time of begining to work with all this and starting to feel it, your legs will feel transformed. At first only in this practice, but later they'll feel super spring powered in any practice you do. Or just standing in line somewhere, you'll realize there are these massive power streams running up and down your legs. And in any practice: XYQ, Ba Gua, Tai Chi - anything.
Sorry I still don't understand the final secret of how to translate the above into the actual functional lung-gum-pa skill. But believe me the experience above by itself should be thrilling enough for now.