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Shen-Consciousness

Today I was doing what I am calling the modified planking. Just leaning forward against something in a seated position. When I do this I feel like I am able to better feel a stretch on my back that I cannot feel standing vertically nor do I feel like I have the ability to sense these stretches doing the normal planking.

A little while back I was traveling for work, flying to Washington DC.  While on the flight I got up to use the bathroom.  While standing in line, I really noticed how effective the stabilizer system is.  With each bump or movement of the plane my body instantly adjusted to stay upright.  I activated my foot couple and payed close attention to the effortless adjustments my ankles, knees, hips, and tendons were making.  They all adjusted instantly and without any feelings of effort or input from me.

Just coming to class was so hard today mentally. I was about ready to call it quits for the night but, as per usual, I stuck it through class. It's always rewarding in the end. I feel ok and my organs, especially my kidneys, are wrung out. Always new things to learn. Interesting (:

We all want stillness. States likened to peace, rest, harmony, always seem just out of reach. Yeah, I don't do that. This method doesn't foster that feeling. It's designed to reveal your intrinsic stillness, but you have to do some serious work to gain understanding. Now, I'm not criticizing other methods that give people relief from their suffering. I'm presenting this approach as an alternative to what you already know. Having inquired for almost 50 years, I'm confident that my approach is unique.

"The way of stillness, a path, the route, the method, anything that leads to striving, is not what I'm talking about. Cultivated stillness is not true stillness." - me

I've been noticing throughout my day a feeling like clearing up and softness throughout my torso like I can breathe better and see better and generally am more relaxed. I was wondering what it is - it would come at random, sitting in class or doing homework etc, I'd notice it especially in conditions that put me under stress because the feeling of ease stands out but it's not necessarily limited to any conditions.

Yesterday when doing the standing meditation I felt a stretch on the front sides of the abdomen. It felt a little like a balloon type feeling like there was a tissue being stretched over an expanding inner object. Normally all the other stretching feelings I've felt  in past, e.g. foot couple, transverse, stretch on the back, they've all felt more linnear but this felt like the stretch was being stretched over a more round shape. I also felt like the round feeling stretch a little in my legs as well. This only happened once so not sure if this will happen again or not.

When I was doing tai chi in college I remember Carlos saying that after you do tai chi for a while you could become ill because the tai chi movements help squeeze the lymphatic system which can make them release old junk that is store inside your body. After last class and the class two weeks ago I felt a little ill afterwards and the following day. Are the new movements we've been going over more likely to release junk that's been stored inside the body?

Last week there was one time when I was doing the standing and I felt like I had this sensation where the upper front part of the hip was connected into the front part of the abdomen, maybe it was the master cavity. When I would bend it would feel like that point on the hip was pulled into the upper abdomen part. I haven't felt that again though, not sure if this is just a passing sensation or if that kind of sensation is a connection we should try to be aware of.

Most recently my ability to feel or perceive what I've thought of as the back of the U has travelled futher up the back. I thought that the back of the U was from the lower part of the ribs down towards the sacrum but now it seems like the stretch in my back can be felt slightly higher than the bottom of the ribs. When I was standing earlier in the day and I was feeling more of the tissue/stretch it almost felt a little like spine lengthened. Then later when I was doing it in the evening I was noticing that it seems like the higher up part of the stretch was more on the left side.

The slack of which I speak can only be felt after cultivating coupled power and experiencing a bit of 'noninterference' in meditation. Conceptually, this definition is analogous to the slack of a geartrain. Slack for our purposes is defined as the range between 'softness-weakness' and 'strength-vigor'. This experiential range is subjective, and arises exclusively from interoceptive signals received from the deep core stabilizers. Chinese Martial Arts terminology at the start of this process is Jibengong or 'basic methods' and Shenfa, aka 'torso methods' as practice deepens.

I had an intersting experience this morning. I was having tightness in my neck and my throat, again (eye roll), and I was unable to get back to sleep so as I was lying there I decided to try to use the mental model of standing, especially the soft eyes, throat, and solar plexus. As I did this, I started to feel twitches and vibrations in my lower lip, the area around my eyes, in my throat, around and behind my strenum, at the solar plexus, and into my abdomen and perineum. These vibrations happened with these tissues softened and released. It felt like a bubbling brook flowing downward.

In the beginning when I first started feeling the back of the U it was just a tiny horizontal line up nears the back of the ribs that would sometimes feel a tiny pulling down when I would do bending. Then one day after I had been doing UCB for maybe a year I all of a sudden felt the back of the U separate like it was three sheets of something and that had been glued together and then glue finally came apart and now it was a longer sheet of stuff.

On my journey of undoing I have noticed that at times my upper torso actually feels like it is detatched form my lower torso. It's like two building blocks that are not just separate blocks but they aren't even stacked over one another. They are significantly offset from one another. When this feeling is clear enough I can "better stack" them and my body feels comfortable. I know that this is not the mental model we are looking for. It's just an observation. Feeling my body with this kind of clarity ibecome acutely aware of this kind of intense sense of physiological disorientation.

This is a weighty topic. When students first encounter the bones, they laugh. Bones don't make sense. I say:

"Bone Training is weird. You enter a strange and uncertain place. With gravity there is no Yin/Yang. How could there be when gravity does not vary? To separate meat from bones requires great and sustained efforts of mental transformation. Your body's state of bony separation never varies. Our expectations are what varies. At this time, to perceive bony cues is virtually impossible."

I know I've noticed this before I got busy with moving but I was doing the 5 elements some more and I noticed that after I do it when I sit down my stomach feels different, maybe larger or full? Is this just related to increased blood flow in that region or something from the different pressures on the organs? I know sometimes you've said if there is a full belly feeling it can mean that you are disconnected. Is this indicitive or something positive or negative? Or just what happens from doing the practice?

Many don't like this sort of thing, to me, any additional awareness is good for TaiJi and Chinese Internal Arts in general.

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, maintaining ease has been quite the transformational highlight during my UCB journey. On the one hand, shouldn't ease be easy? On the other, it seems clear why this should be the case. Afterall, striving and forcing have been my primary path to achievement in so many areas of my life. Frustration arises when these primary modes do not produce the desired results that only come through maintaining ease. I feel my capacity for ease is expanding but I notice my propensity for forcing and striving much more clearly when standing.

I'm not sure what I did but when doing t he standing I felt some kind of difference in the big toe. There was a feeling like something was pulling from the bottom of the big toe up and around back towards the foot as if the big toe was being lifted up a tiny bit inside. Then I felt a big stretch down the front of the U, when I would breath I could feel the big stretch. I took a quick break after not too long but then when I went back to the standing I didn't feel the toe or the big stretch again. 

Today I did some planking and back bear, beginning and ending with standing meditation. After feeling some of the most clear switch-to-stitch followed by a very strong and stable non-interference/pearls mental model, my body decided it was time to plank. It was incredibly easy. Yes, there was extreme stretching and even more extreme mental discipline, but the "effort" was nothing. I could only do three total.

When I was doing my standing meditation today I felt a stretch inside the right part of what I think is the shoulder cavity. When I was putting my attention on that area sometimes it would move and I would notice that there was some kind of random bubbling or pulling sensation that would only happen for a moment on the inner back near the shoulder blade. The type of stretch feeling in the shoulder cavity feels like the kind of push pull feeling in the feet or in the pelvic like the transverse stretch.

When practicing the back slap bear slap I was feeling a stretch in my lower abs on the side of the body that I was stepping towards while twisting the hips before the front of the chest moves. I don't think I had ever noticed this before and/or maybe I'm doing it differently now. Is this part of what we want to feel when doing this exercise?

Over the decades of training and teaching I have generally held that constant change is important and have tried to avoid the traps of sentimentality and routine. As I am codifying these experiences into something concrete and reliably transmissible, students ask for simplification. I try, but really, I feel that simplifiction is the most compelling trap of all. I'll do it, but will also show how seeking simplification when embracing complexity and uncertainty might be better.

After decades of work the remote learning UCB Walking curriculum is complete. This training aligns closely to the mind-body cultivation guided by my...

When separating the bones and the meat, finding the intrinsic stillness of bone is a big leap. What's next? It's simple, bones are hard, meat is soft. Why then can the bones feel soft?

A few years Sifu was telling me about cold tolerance and how it relates to our training. I can't remember everything he said. Personally, probably for unrelated reasons, I have poor cold tolerance. Less than a minute if exposure to a cold wind can cause me to go into shivers. This is obviously the wrong direction of development. Any pointers on what I'm doing wrong and how to address it?

If you would have asked how confident I was in my progress I would have said that I was really feeling everything was coming together and that i was feeling more comfortable in my body. Then, the week after Thanksgiving, everything shifted all of a sudden. The biggest thing that changed was my comfort level. Now, I have this "up" feeling at the solar plxus that pushes up on my throat. There are times when I suddenly sense what to let go of and it'll just drop away. Then, after some time, it will return and I don't know or can't feel what I need to let go so that it will drop down again.

I tried to asked this question in our last class but maybe I didn't really articulate it correctly. When I practice the standing meditation it feels like there are small tiny corrections that can be made to make the foot couple or backstop or bones pushing out feelings more clear. Whenever I am able to make some kind of correction it feels like my body becomes more connected. At first it was from the foot to the bottom part of the leg. Then foot to the knee. Now I am starting to feel connected to the hip.

Last night I felt like I actually had some kind of real sensation of standing. In earlier weeks of the pratice sometimes while doing the standing mediation I would shift my weight from front to back or back to front very slightly to try and see what alignment would bring out more clear sensations of backstop, foot couple, bones pushing, tissue pulling.

I have started to experience something interesting. When I Stand and relax my soft tissues they seem to "empty out". This void between the skin surfaces is filled with an empty support that pushes out in all directions and the muscles soften even more. I'm neither light nor heavy. The support in the tissues does not produce a feeling of high pressure. It feels simply full and soft yet there is some power when I move. It's very interesting. I can tell that it's a weak version of something that will continue to increase as I train. I've never felt this before. It's really exciting!

Effing --wham! --ugh-- seems like 2020 has been one body blow after another. All the while thinking: Keep your guard up. Stay on your feet. Keep training. Keep teaching. Change. Adapt. Overcome. Move forward. Keep pushing the skill. Wear that mask. These are not normal times.

Coupled power will remove 'uproot' from your vocabulary. We are not trees. We have no root. If your body is collapsed, root makes sense. If your chi is stagnant from your collapsed body, root makes sense. The mind-body integration that solves 'collapse' comes from understanding tensegrity and its application to our neuroanatomy. I really can't speak more plainly. Stop uprooting. There is no root to break. All you are really training is avoidance of direct contact with power.

A very rare photo taken in 1902.

NEW! I am rolling out the new UCB Program Live Subscription. Get started. Dip your toe in the depths. Satisfy your curiosity.

An introduction to basic mind-body concepts and terminology. Standing meditation and simple movements show how the generation of internal power is guided by specific qi sensations. These initial qi sensations are mapped to modern neuro-anatomy to fit clearly in a western scientific context.

There are 3 distinct levels to fully separate the bones and meat. The UCB Bone Training Curriculum is complete. Watch here for online coursework.

Understanding the relations between Gravity and:

1. Rotation
2. Pressure
3. Sacrum

Core UCB Program students have reached an initial functional awareness of the String Of Pearls.  Congratulations on completion of 540 hours of directed in person intensive instructon. Thank you for your hard work and commitment.

NOTE: PT's and other touch-based practitioners. If you want to grow your business of helping and healing, I have built Tai Chi Boost as a  certification program to better engage the allopathic medical professional.  Frankly, MD's, psychiatrists, talk therapists and other clinicians are completely uninterested in how badass you are in the ring. In fact, your fight credentials and marital expertise will work against you.

This course of study is now in development. 

Complete filling practice consists of highly detailed postural training and breathwork to access core internal power. There are three distinct skill levels:

Back in February, at the conclusion of the AZ Retreat, Sifu and I went out for ice cream and discussed a number of things. One of the things I asked him about was his opinion regarding the videos about "John Chang" and the Mopai school. I'm not sure if I shared this with Sifu, but I have been acquainted with a former Mopai student who spent time studying with Pak John in Indonesia.