Hsing-I Chuan or Mind Form Boxing is said to be the oldest of the internal martial arts of China and also one of its most effective fighting methods. Hsing-I fuses a relaxed, open body with a clear, focused mind - free of any gaps or breaks in one's intent. This creates the ability to react to a situation with the appropriate response without ever losing control of one's stability of mind.

Learning to Feel in Martial Arts

One of the most difficult aspects of learning an esoteric art like Taoist meditation or Ba Gua Zhang is learning to feel the more subtle aspects of the physical body and how energy moves through the body. There are many layers of energy and infinite possibilities of pathways it can take and ways it can manifest.

In our last blog we talked about the importance of recognizing breaks in one's awareness during practice and we mentioned that the San Ti practice of Xing Yi is a great way of achieving this goal. There are two basic components to San Ti practice-the physical part and the awareness part.

In terms of the physical structure San Ti's focus is on developing a sense of "whole body" power where every part of the physical body feels as though it is directly connected to every other part of the body. The first stage of this is developing a sense of the "Six Harmonies," key alignments that put the body into its most optimal state of balance and resilience. There are three internal and three external harmonies. The three external harmonies are hips aligned with shoulders, knees aligned with elbows and hands aligned with feet. The three internal harmonies (which isn't part of this article) are the heart aligned with intent, intent aligned with chi, and chi aligned with spirit.

Greetings from cyberspace and welcome to our Spiritual Martial Arts Blog. Our purpose is to share our thoughts and the thoughts of our elder school brothers and sisters about our experiences training in traditional martial arts for fighting skill as well as "spiritual" and meditative purposes.

It is our belief that martial arts offer a unique perspective to approaching the spiritual side within us. We live in a world which is plagued with anger and violence. The martial arts are a way to harness and overcome negative actions and emotions. The internal martial arts that we practice are the antithesis of violence, they train us to control our own dark side and to protect ourselves from the misguided actions of others.