There are two sides to the movement coin in Chinese Martial Arts – particularly the so-called internal martial arts. A Yin and a Yang, if you like.

On side a) of the movement coin you’ve got a kind of basic postural advice. Directions we’re all familiar with like – ‘suspend the head from above’, ’round the shoulders’, ‘droop the elbows’, etc. The goal of these directions is to achieve a level of relaxation (‘Sung’) through working with the least level of resistance to gravity. If we can align with gravity it becomes our friend, instead of our enemy in movement. We can discover a sense of lightness and ease in our movements.

On the other side b) of the movement coin there are more subtle instructions to do with things like ‘moving from the dantien’, ‘intent’, ‘wrapping and coiling’, ‘silk reeling force’, ‘open and close’, etc… While these terms are generally unknown to people outside of the Chinese Martial Arts, they are usually familiar to people within them, even if we all understand them in slightly different things, and are willing to go to war over the small details!

Obviously (like Yin and Yang) the two sides form a whole, after progressing beyond a basic beginner level most people assume that they’re ok with a) and spend most of their time working out what the heck b) is supposed to be anyway.

I tend to think that there’s more to a) than we tend to think there is. I’d like to suggest that we put the focus on a) as much as on b), since it’s a) that really has the most impact on how we live our day to day life.

Here’s an article that can help. It’s to do with something called The Alexander Technique, but don’t let that put you off. It’s just great advice for how we ‘use the self’ in everyday life, and it relates directly to part a) of the coin I talked about earlier.

Have a read and see what you think.

http://alexanderviolist.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/understanding-the-primary-directions-which-way-is-up/

Finally, a translation of the Gu Ruzhang (Ku Yu Chang) Tai Chi book, Taiji Boxing, by Brennan Translation. This is the style (a version of it, in the same lineage) of Tai Chi that I personally practice. The form in the book is the long form that he learned from Yang Jian Hou, and you should recognise the postures from other Yang forms. It’s not just a book on form movements, there’s a lot of theory here, much of it from the Tai Chi classics, so it’s worth a read for practitioners of any style.

Master Gu Ru Zhang was also known as “King of Iron Palm”, mainly for doing things like this:

His approach to martial arts was to take both Internet and External as a whole. He was most known for his Northern Shaolin, but as his Tai Chi book demonstrates, he practiced soft style martial arts as well, including XingYi and Tai Chi. He was an early proponent of the idea of cross training (mixing martial arts). He obviously saw this as beneficial, and trained in many arts, and enjoyed exchanges with different masters.

Find out more about Master Gu.

Are the Internal Martial Arts the “Next Big Thing?”.

Great blog post.

“Our ancestors are very great, the principle of Taichi is very mysterious and beyond every word,” I heard this all the time.

I am not denying the greatness of that circle composed with two fishes, although according to some experts, the two-fish circle can only be called yin-yang diagram, the real taichi diagram is just a plain circle. Besides, it really looks cool when a person practices taichi in that circle or builds a house by drawing that circle at the center of the house or puts that circle on the clothes. It is so popular that as long as Chinese culture is mentioned, it mostly probably comes out covered with a mysterious face with the introducers’ blinky words. If you have some questions, they would say, “it is normal that you don’t understand, it is very deep and our ancestors are too smart.”

I think just this can best show the attitude of modern Chinese to traditional Chinese culture— they pretend to know it by pretending not to know it.