The most important thing in martial arts is not what style you study, or the brand name, but rather the level of fighting skill of the individual. A world-class racing driver in a so-so car will beat a poor driver in the world's best car. Only when two drivers are of equal skill will the technology of the car be the determining factor in who wins the race.

Each martial arts school has its special kung fu or "skill technology." For example, the lineage of Tung Hai-Ch'uan became famous for its special kung fu techniques. All students could learn the movements, but only a few learned the kung fu techniques that had ba gua's unique flavor and power. This kung fu is genuinely internal and is a subject of doing, not talking. Many people today, even so-called famous teachers in China and the U.S., cannot apply traditional ba gua techniques to unrehearsed fighting. Either they perform movement arts or they do ba gua movements using the power, flavor and kung fu techniques of Shaolin. An excellent external martial artist will beat a poor or so-so ba gua practitioner. There are monastic forms of ba gua that are purely about chi cultivation and meditation, making no claims to be martial arts, although some also make those claims.

So you've got the yawns, uh? Your eyelids are drooping. Your mind is sluggish and running on empty. It's way-y-y-y too early in the day...

One of the questions I get asked fairly frequently is: What should I do to combat exhaustion at my desk?

Try this: Stand up. Take a deep inhale. Then bubble the exhale through your lips. Make them shake, rattle and roll. Do this 10 times. Caution: You might laugh a little, and that wouldn't be so bad, uh?!

Shou-yi or shou-i means "embracing the one." This is very tricky because embracing the one means embracing the Tao. The one is the Tao. Lao Tse writes in the Tao Te Ching, "From the one came the two, came the three, came the 10,000 myriad of things."

To embrace the totality while doing an everyday mundane task means you never leave the totality regardless of the action you might undertake. This is the principle of shou-yi, which is extremely difficult to do. Initially it requires that you are able to embrace the whole--that you have the internal motivation to become capable of embracing that which is invisible yet connects everything, including the underlying currents. 

Wu wei is a very fundamental concept in Taoism, similar to wu wei wu, which means action, non action. Wu means nothing and wei means action.

In the West most people have clear agendas and they set out to accomplish specific goals. However, in Taoism one of the central themes is not acting until the timing is right. In fact Taoists say that until the time is right nothing will happen anyway, so a large part of wu wei is the ability to be as connected as possible to the universal flows of the TAO. When all of a sudden it becomes obvious that the time has arrived, only then do you take action.

The word Tao has many meanings. First, there is the Tao of doing anything, which is the same as the ideal way of doing something. You must travel on a particular path in order to wind up where that path leads. Going a little deeper, the word Tao considers the question: What connects everything and yet has no specific quality of its own? That’s the center of the I Ching. It has no quality and yet everything is connected to it, everything comes out of it, everything flows through it.

The word Ziran embodies a very important concept in Taoism and has a number of large meanings. If we go from the deepest to the most superficial meaning, it essentially has the same meaning as Tao. The Chinese actually call it Tao Ziran, which means “the great natural.” Ziran means naturalness. In one sense, it is about the natural way of the Universe, so you could also refer to this natural way as the Tao. Very often Taoists do not use the term Tao and instead use Ziran, albeit making translating Chinese texts even more difficult.

Most of the estimated seven million Americans who practice the ancient art of tai chi do so not for self-defense, but for health reasons. Western medical research studies are beginning to confirm what hundreds of millions of practitioners of tai chi have experienced for themselves: tai chi helps them improve their health, reduce their stress and combat the negative effects of aging. Tai chi is often called the elixir of life because it helps the body and mind to regain its youthfulness and life-affirming vigor. Time magazine has called it the "Perfect Exercise."

Most of us have heard the phrase: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Yet in the modern age being politically correct has come to a point where society responds to words as if someone where throwing stones at them. You’re likely to offend someone with just about anything you say. Maybe you’re even one of the people who regularly get offended by words. Surely the toll it takes on your body is hardly worth it. So why is it that we get so worked up over words?

The phrase “bones of the all” in the Tao Te Ching is sometimes referred to as meaning something old or ancient, but the true meaning is that all and everything is in the earth.

Taoists hold the position that the earth is a living entity with a consciousness of its own. Just as you have a consciousness, so does the earth. And just as what is most active in your body changes from day to day, the earth also changes.

You say you practice tai chi.
When my children were younger and every time I would come back from Europe, I'd always bring home a collection of coins from any country I visited. My youngest son would take the coins and mush them around, throw them up in the air and shout, "Money, money, money!"

Not everyone wants to learn about chi and not everyone wants to learn to meditate. I asked my teacher why he didn't teach meditation and he replied that most people don't want to learn it. In later conversations he explained that it has a lot to do with the fact that most people can't get into what meditation is and just forget about where they're going to end up.

We currently live in an extremely over-marketed society and you could sum up marketing at one level as getting people excited about a given benefit followed by affirmations - accurate or not - that they have achieved the benefit. Suddenly, they have bragging rights along with an identity based upon the benefit.

Many people talk about "peaceful warriors" to the point that it has become a cliché, not to mention an oxymoron because war is not peaceful. If you are a real warrior, in the classic sense of the word, it means that you're going to have to go out and fight, beat people up, kill them and be involved in war. Now for most people this is terribly unrealistic and not something they want to do. As a matter of fact the majority of people who have to go through war really wish they hadn't.

That said if you want to be a spiritual warrior, at least from an Eastern point of view, you are someone who will fight every battle that has to be won until you become enlightened, giving no quarter to anything inside you that prevents you from persevering. It's a fairly courageous act and one that, frankly speaking, most people haven't got the guts to tackle. The idea is really great. Everyone loves the concept and it's not that the concept isn't wonderful, but actually doing it is rough.

Everything changes. Every moment in time is unique unto itself. Every moment in time carries a shadow of the past and in many ways the future is nothing more than a projection of the past. What happened before is going to happen again, although in exactly what way is hard to predict.

The nature of change is that you have to have the capacity for it. Whether you're trying to go from one chi gung movement to the next, from walking the ba gua circle to changing directions, going from one meditative state to another or going from one event in life to another, you must be able to change.

YOU COULD SAY THAT THE initial level of the first two stages of Taoist sexual meditation are Taoist sexology. They have all this in the West too. Sexology: how to make love better, how to have more fun, how to have more orgasms, how to have a better time, how to like your partner after it's all over. That is basically what it is about. Sexology is how to have better sex. That is reasonable.

TAOISM IN THE UNITED STATES is known primarily through an understanding of certain of its pragmatic arts. The art of Taiji (Tai Chi) is fairly well known. The taoist martial arts are getting more exposure. As time goes on Qigong is becoming of interest. To a certain extent even Feng Shui (geomancy) is getting familiar. Chinese medicine which is a taoist (daoist) art is being used more. But the actual subject of taoist meditation is less well known because it has not taught that openly. The Taoist Canon consisting of close to 1,600 books that include the subject of taoist meditation has not been translated into English. The rest of the world has not seen it yet. This limits access to the complete view of the whole picture.

The punch launched out of chamber like a mortar from a tube. It hit the fat man's chest with the power of a jackhammer cracking cement. As Bruce heard the dull thud of bone on flesh, pain engulfed his hand and shot up to his shoulder-again. Ignoring the pain, he snapped a front kick into the big belly in front of him. This only resulted in making his foot feel like his hand. This wasn't right! No one remained standing when this young karate champion landed his best techniques. He fired a backfist at the fat man, who was suddenly gone. Although Bruce hadn't seen him move, his opponent was standing behind him.

B. K. Frantzis began training in martial arts, Oriental healing and meditation in 1961. Fluent in Chinese and Japanese, he spent 15 years studying full-time in Asia. After extensive Zen meditation, Shiatsu training and gaining black belts in judo, ju-jitsu, karate and aikido in America, B.K. Frantzis went to Japan for three years of advanced training. Next he studied Yoga and kundalini meditation for two years in India, and martial arts, qi gong tui na, and Taoist meditation for ten years in China. Raised in America, he is a lineage holder in tai ji, hsing-I, ba gua and Taoist meditation through the late Taoist Sage Liu Hung Chieh.

The Great Stillness, Volume Two of The Water Method of Taoist Meditation Series, presents moving meditation practices, sitting and lying down meditation practices, the inner dissolving process, as well as how to dissolve blockages in your physical, qi and emotional bodies. Another extremely interesting section is on Taoist sexual meditation with both techniques and good explanations of the energetic aspects of Taoist sexual cultivation. The last chapter is on internal alchemy, another fascinating and important aspect of Taoist self-cultivation.

Relaxing Into Your Being, Volume One of The Water Method of Taoist Meditation Series, is the first book that explains the essence and practical techniques of the Water Method of Taoist Meditation, originally alluded to by Lao Tse in the Tao Te Ching, 2500 years ago. The author is a long-time student of Taoism who studied in China for ten years. He is a lineage holder of the Water Method school of Taoism, under the teacher Liu Hung Chieh and has been studying meditation, internal martial arts and qigong for four decades.

Taoist Water Method Chi Kung and Meditation gently dissolves energetic blockages on all levels of a person's being. This differentiates it from the Fire Methods which burn or blast their way through energetic blockages. The more recent Fire Methods, better known in Asia and the West, include Taoist and Buddhist practices as well as Kundalini yoga from India and Sexual Magick from the West. The Fire Methods are known for powerful practices and speedy development, but may often make casualties of careless and weak practitioners. The Water Method is a slower, gentler, less precarious path to prime physical health, a calm mind, and spiritual development.

On a Sunday afternoon in late March, martial artist B.K. Frantzis is teaching an advanced workshop on The Five Elements in Taoism. The workshop has been going on all weekend in the large, open Feldenkrais studio on 6th and Bancroft streets in West Berkeley. Sunlight pours into the large room through skylights and glass blocks as Frantzis delineates for his students the sometimes subtle differences between the elements. The five elements of Chinese medicine and Taoist culture are air, water,earth, metal and fire. In the Sunday afternoon session, Frantzis, who advertises his method as "Mastery without mystery," segues easily from fire to earth.

Handed down for thousands of years, the ancient Chinese nei gung tradition of chi cultivation provides a systematic method for transforming body power into one integrated, unified, and dynamic whole. Offering immense benefits for internal and external martial arts practicioners, nei gung promises a body that can move better, faster, with more strength and stamina.

Connecting the dots between stress and allergies and asthma is easy. The most common symptoms of stress are achingly similar to those associated with allergy and asthma: tight chest, shortness of breath, insomnia, fatigue, muscular pain and headaches. Unfortunately, the more run down you get, the more susceptible you become to seasonal illnesses, such as colds, bronchitis, sinusitis and pneumonia. Moreover, clinical evidence backs up what sufferers know first-hand: tension and anxiety make symptoms worse. It is more difficult to connect improvements in these maladies with the slow, benign-looking, gentle movements of chi gung/qigong and tai chi.

Your ability to feel and control energy depends on maintaining continuous internal awareness inside your body. Without some minimal level of continuous inner awareness, you cannot focus long enough on your movements or energy flows to gain most of the wonderful benefits of chi gung/qigong, tai chi and other Taoist energy arts.

When you start learning chi gung/qigong, you have the intent for your chi to move. However, this is not the same thing as becoming directly aware of the chi itself, where it's a felt, living quality.

It's not that you have the idea, the imagination, or the ability to think about chi but that you actually feel it. It's the difference between the idea of eating and actually eating-having the juices in your mouth and tasting the food. The idea will produce some facsimile of the real thing and you might go so far as to salivate, but when the real deal is present the taste and sustenance of the food is either there or it's not. There's little thought involved.

Similarly, in order to actually feel chi directly you have to go through the Heart-Mind. You have to have a direct experience of moving chi in the body. To do this the body requires that the Heart-Mind be opened, if only to the tinniest degree.

When I was in Tokyo I studied yoga with Perr Wynter, a Norwegian man who studied with a yogi from India who, for some reason, lived up the fjord from him in Norway--a very rare situation.

When Perr was in his twenties he went to India and studied at the Shivananda Ashram in Rishikesh where he lived in a very, very tiny room.

He was an exceptional Hatha yogi. He could do any Hatha yoga posture that existed, and when he came to Southeast Asia and he was in Malaysia, his money and passport got stolen. So, what happened was he worked in a circus to earn his stolen money back where his act was folding himself into a suitcase, which will give you some idea about how flexible he was (also see images of Perr above and below)!

Now what made Perr so interesting is that if you're going to talk about Hatha yoga and Hatha yoga postures, then there's wasn't much he couldn't do.

We've been talking about the place from which intent and thoughts come from, the Heart-Mind. How do you get there? What is the method?

Let's take the process of Inner Dissolving, Lao Tse's 2,500-year-old tradition of ice to water, water to inner space. When you go from ice to water that's a yin-yang relationship; tension to relaxation is a yin-yang relationship. Now, if you want to go to the place where both of these energies originate, you effectively will move through two levels.

If you're talking about the level of human perception to arrive at relaxation (or water) you will move through the subconscious whether you realize it or not. But that in and of itself has more to do with the transparency of recognizing the deeper implications of what's involved with a specific yin and yang. It's much more about becoming aware of the subtle nuances associated with that yin and yang, which aren't normally terribly obvious.

The Heart-Mind is an important concept in both Taoism and in Buddhism. To understand the Heart-Mind, we must first understand the nature of intent in relation to Taoism.

There are two levels of intent in everything you do in Taoism and Chinese chi work. The first one is ordinary intent. The second level of intent is the place from which intent arises originally. That is, the place where intent is born.

Any level of intent has both a yin and yang component. If you want to walk across the street, that's a yang action because you have to go and do something. If you want something to come toward you, that's a yin form of intent. But then there's this question of where the intent comes from to begin with. Where do all your thoughts come from? Where do all your emotions come from? Where is the birthing room of yin and yang?