Tag: energy

Why Practice?

Jacob1 Comment

Why practice your form of particular martial arts, meditation, silent retreat or whatever relaxation techniques? We practice to apply the principles we are taught.  While practice does bring benefit in reinforcing our learning, the true benefit lies outside of the practices and in the practical application of what we learn as applied to everyday situations.  Applying the essence of the art forms we learn to our interactions and experience has the capacity to lessen the suffering of both ourselves and others.

We develop situational awareness and understanding of our influence on what’s happening when we take the time to observe ourselves, our behaviors and more importantly the thoughts driving us in any given situation. We develop the capability of observing without judgement and more specifically without fear of loss and how we think others are judging us through the the art forms of martial arts or meditation.  This allows us over time to recognize the transient nature of our thoughts and emotions.  Thoughts come and go.  It’s our focus on the thoughts making them recur over and over until we generate the dis ease that filters into our body, awareness, and attention.  Emotions are the energy we experience in response to the unfolding moment including both external and internal realities.  When we hold onto our emotions and the thoughts they generate, we create the altered reality we generally experience in our daily lives.  This leaves us to ride the waves of our experience or get crushed by the force of them.

Practicing meditative or a martial art chips away at the mental and emotional structures we build up over our lifetimes. Practice begins to lessens the waves or at least the destruction caused by the major waves impacting the shores of our soul.  Reflecting on the essence of our practices allows us to simplify the practice into things we can apply moment-to-moment and not just to the situations of our art forms.  Our interactions slowly change to more manageable situations.  We find the emotional trauma and suffering doesn’t last as long.  Anger, sadness or happiness come and go just as the thoughts we witnessed in our practices.  Herein lies the true benefit of practice.

We bring about more life satisfaction if we can reduce how long we hold on to the anger, sadness or other things that make us suffer.  Reducing the suffering in our lives in turn provides an example for others to follow.  This is the pebble we drop into the stream of life having the potential to lessen the suffering not only of ourselves but those we interact with.  We help others by maintaining our calm and center during the storms we encounter day to day.  Instead of stressing out, we can simply adapt to the ever changing moment benefiting both ourselves and others.

When we apply what we learn in our practices in this manner, we move from practicing when we set time aside to do so towards practicing all of the time we are awake.  This impacts others even when we are not awake and thus we connect with something beyond ourselves when we turn our lives from practice into an art form itself.  May we all enjoy the practice of making our life into an art form.

Good Form

JacobLeave a comment

Good form is the most efficient manner to accomplish the purpose of a performance with a minimum of lost motion and wasted energy.
-Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

This is true no matter what martial art you practice.  Focusing on effective and efficient movement enables us to achieve our end goals in our art forms.  It also allows us to understand when poor instruction seeps into our classes or when movements do not work with our particular bodily capabilities and constraints.  To understand effectiveness in our form requires us to be aware of the purpose of the individual movements, their function and what is intended in the movement.  To understand efficiency is being aware of what it takes to achieve the intent and eliminating the unnecessary.  Thus, to practice good form, it is imperative we understand the intent of the form and individual movements.

Awareness is critical.

In-Out Up-Down Same Time

JacobLeave a comment

During the Dan-yu there’s a rhythm of movement to be synchronized with our breathing.  When we descend, our bodies draw life in.  As we ascend our bodies naturally exhale.  This drawing in and letting go is the nature of the up and down in the dan-yu.

The dan-yu is integral to the movements of Tai Chi, Lok Hup and Hsing-I.  Finding the dan-yu in the movements and listening to our bodies allows us to find the rhythm of drawing in and letting go.  With much practice the movement becomes more natural and timed with our particular body and its unique attributes.  Using our entire lung capacity, we may find ourselves timing the set of movements slowly.  Focusing on the beat of our hearts and flow of our cardiovascular system, we may find ourselves timing the movements more rapidly.  The key is not the timing nor the finding of connections with the various parts of our bodies.  No matter how “groovy” it may feel to tune into those things, the key to chi kung is simply to listen to the rhythm and let the movement express what’s needed in any given moment.  We must listen to our own timing which changes with our situation, environment, our health and age.

Master Moy Lin-Shin talked often of “up down same time.”  In classes we would work on the connections between the outer movements of arms and legs and the inner movements of our spines or for those more adapt at chi kung the movement of energy.   In the movements of chi kung, we have the capacity of moving both up and down at the same time.  Our outer form may be ascending, but our tailbones are already descending.  Our arms may be down in the bottom of the movement while our spine is already going up.  This internal timing is the following of the internal rhythms of our bodies and energy.  It is the flow of the movements if we can simply let go our conscious selves and listen with all of our thoughts, senses and perceptions.  Listening with everything we are stills the unnecessary in our experience and connects us with something more than can be explained with a few words on a blog.

Still the unnecessary in your experience with focus
Still the unnecessary in your experience with focus

Economy of Movement

JacobLeave a comment

A Lok Hup instructor once said, “You should be able to stop at any point in the form and be balanced.”  This isn’t an easy task.  I’ve been working on it for years.  The more I work on it, the more stable and grounding the form becomes.  It helps me connect with my surroundings more.  It’s worth trying, no matter what form you practice.  Obviously, if you are doing a flying kick, the instruction is not applicable.  For the most part any of the internal martial arts can use this instruction to discover more connectedness.

Constellate this with the idea out of industrial engineering of walking the process.  In the quest for continual improvement, a process is walked through.  During this, someone sees what the actual work being performed is, asks questions and learns what is happening.  This activity is then aimed at reducing waste and inefficiency.  Process engineering of this nature is about making every step and movement of product count.

I’ve been living this for some time in my life.  I try to optimize my activities so I can squeeze as much life as I can out of the time I have.  Recently, my wife made an observation.  We get up at the same time.  She starts a shower while I go feed the dogs.  In recent times, I’ve been able to get back up stairs by the time she starts her shower.  One morning she said, “Do you even feed the dogs?”  I laughed and shrugged it off, however, thought about it over the next few weeks.  The thing is, I optimize my time by expending as little energy as possible so I can have more energy for other things like getting back up stairs in the morning to do a couple martial arts exercises, stretches or writing before I take my shower.  The dogs just want their breakfast as soon as possible so my leaning of my tasks helps them and helps myself.

As in business, so in martial arts.  If we can use the smallest amount of energy in our movements of the forms, we optimize them.  The movements become more simple and easier to remember if you go without practice for a while.  Forms become more efficient and thus more powerful.  We are told many times by our instructors to keep the form simple or trust the form.  Simple form is efficient form and has a greater impact on our ability to use the form for its intended purpose.  When we move simply, we relax and enable ourselves to do more with what we have.

This is economy of movement.  When we are aware of the energy our movements take, we can more readily take corrections and learn new aspects of the form. We can establish good habits quickly which then become the foundation of more advanced movements using the same form.   When we get lost in all the things the form can do, it can quickly disintegrates into something other than what our instructors showed us originally. The key here is to keep it simple, balanced and use as little energy as possible thereby enabling us to use the form to discover more advanced aspects of the forms or deeper elements of ourselves.  With enough economy of movement the form itself can take on a stillness of sorts where there is not thought required.

This is one of the experiences of the ancient art forms that can incrementally transform our lives.  It occurs when stillness is born from our movements and movement is generated out of our stillness.