So easy a baby can do it

Bruce once showed how the hand could move similar to the way an octopus moves. It is too difficult to describe in words; however, if you’ve ever seen video of a squid or octopus moving you should have an idea of what I’m trying to convey. I remember Bruce’s hand moved as if it were boneless. The palm would suck into it and then push out the outside of the hand in all directions. It was based on the exact same mechanism that every baby uses to suck. So, this is something that we all could do, but have long forgotten. I think he taught this at the first Wu Short form instructors training. It creates a yin energy in the body. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you can do it in the hand, you can do it in other parts of the body. Every cavity is capable of doing this for example.

I recently rediscovered this. It just came up as I was training. It was taught in the context of Tai Chi and I’m not sure if it really is applicable to Bagua; however, it came up in my practice and I started playing with it. This is a good example of how to be spontaneous in your daily practice. It also illustrates how Bruce’s teaching can come back up at an time. You have to decide whether it is appropriate to follow and explore these spontaneous events or if you are going to work on something else. Welcome to free will. These are the choices you’ll need to make regularly as you progress through your practice. I think it is really important to take responsibility for your decision and practice.

On this particular day I choose to follow and here’s a little of what I found…

If you read my post entitled Balance, you’ll remember that I talked about the opening and closing of the joints and its yin/yang aspects. Well, that whole thing goes a lot farther than what I previously described. The sinking and liftings don’t just apply to the joints or the muscles or the fascia. They also apply to your energy and it permeates the entire body. Remember outer dissolving in Energy Gates? Well here’s where it can go. All of that time you should have spent trying to feel the body on plane after plane going down the body deeper and deeper pays off here. But, you need more than that. You should also have learned dissolving upward plane after plane going up the body (both physical and etheric) in Spiraling Energy body. If you did both of those practices, you should have started to gain access to the basic flow of Heaven and Earth, down and up the body. This is the foundation for all of the sinking and liftings of the body. At first you learn some big ones like the tailbone sinking into the legs and feet or sinking the chest. Then you start to learn some of the gross liftings like raising the arch of the foot or raising the energy up the back. Eventually, you learn more and more sinkings and liftings and they get more and more subtle.

When you get this, you’ll notice that you can create sinkings and liftings at every single plane of the body. Practicing this really opens up the body in a way that none of the previous steps could. Don’t get me wrong. You’ve been opening more and more as you learned each step but now you go to a whole other level. Without a strong foundation in each of the previous steps, you won’t be clear at this stage. You have to pay your dues so to speak; otherwise, you’ll be building an inherent weakness (same as imbalance) into your body.

So what does this have to do with sucking your thumb as a baby?

Well, this squid like movement can create a very relaxed yin inside the body. In fact it expresses yin energy culminating just before it is changing back to yang. So it is an extremely yin. The planes of the body are like the surface of a lake. You pull energy up the body to any level and then you can express yang at that level at will. In any movement, you can use this to fluidly pull energy inside body. So, the hand, the foot, the cavity of the shoulder, the kwa, and the tan tiens can all pull energy up the body or down the body using exactly the same internal motion.

Now it all starts to come together. You start to feel how the sinkings and liftings are complimentary opposites and how they balance each other as well as add to each other by creating circulation. So, it isn’t just dynamically opposed forces like an isometric exercise. The yin and yangs open your body and allow the fluids to move. As you progress and use less and less tension, the feeling will progress from feeling like pressure to directly feeling the soothing movement of chi. The chi doesn’t have a buzz to it. It is cleaner, more like pure clear water. When the mind moves this very directly there is absolutely no sense of effort, tension, or strain.

Note how the layers of Bruce’s teaching are all important. Note how they build on each other. Hopefully this gives you a sense of how you’ll build layer upon layer. This is not intended to frustrate you by making it sound too difficult. It isn’t. Remember the mechanism I just described is something a baby can do. But you have to break down the pieces into doable parts that are possible to train well. I hope it inspires you to perservere and I hopes it helps to make more sense why you have to learn all of the begginer material very well before moving on. I hope it also gives you a sense of how you eventually will need to use your intuition to decide what and how you are going to practice each day.