Module 4 – Level 11

I just saw the published event schedule for the year. I’m pleased to see Bruce’s focus on Spiraling Energy Body. It looks like it will be the year of the fire element!

I thought I’d post something on how the 5 neigung sets support the Bagua learning progression and hopefully explain why I think spiraling is so key. Keep in mind that it is only a high-level overview.

Core I, Opening the Energy Gates, has a number of elements: breathing, basic alignments, relaxing the body which progresses to outer dissolving, the 3 swings, and spine stretch.

Core II, Spiraling Energy Body, builds on all of these as your level of sophistication grows. So over time, the alignments become more about feeling whether the gates are open and unobstructed then about the gross anatomical alignments. Outer dissolving becomes more about the secondary and primary gates than just feeling the muscles. And over time you are continuing to develop your awareness deeper and deeper into the body culminating with the bone marrow and inner space (if you have learned Taoist meditation and inner dissolving). The gates can help facilitate and accelerate relaxing and releasing long held tension in any physical tissue within the body. Done well, the gates and spiraling in general can significantly upgrade your overall system and your ability to feel.

Core III, Marriage of Heaven and Earth, adds to the previous neigung sets. It utilizes and deepens all of the previous material. How the gates control and release the ligaments gets increasingly clear. You start to work with sets of energy gates which can allow the joints and cavities to open and close. Fully understanding this material allows you to gain control of the anterior and posterior ligaments of the spine: work that was started in Energy Gates. As you gain enough control over the spine to begin opening all of the vertebrae individually, you gain access and control over the yin-yang meridians, the cavities, and the organs.

Stated in the negative, the progression might sound like this: without the ability to feel you can’t find and control the gates. Without releasing the gates, the ligaments won’t release. Without the ligaments releasing the joints won’t move. Without movement in the joints, the spine and organs won’t function fully. Your body’s systems are degraded and you lack the full vitality that is possible.

In Core IV, Bend the Bow, the control over your spine and vertebrae gets much more sophisticated. Your goal is to be able to connect the arms to any vertebrae at will and control their movement. By the end you gain the ability to release the spinal ligament from the gates up and down the spine. Done as a set you can load and release the whole spine like a drawn bow shooting an arrow. Bruce hasn’t taught it the next part of Bend the Bow where the legs function exactly the same way as the arms and need to be integrated similarly.

Each neigung element is developed and deepened overtime. For example, the balancing of the left and right channels progresses from gross anatomical considerations like is one shoulder higher than another, to looking at whether one side of the body is released more than the other, to looking at whether the arms are connected evenly to the spine, to are the channels connecting the secondary gates equally opened in the left and right channels of energy. The progression goes on and on. It isn’t perfect, ideal, or “classic”. The reality is you fumble through all of it as best you can and the body releases in fits and starts organically, not methodically or linearly.

Gods Playing in the Clouds, Core V, adds more material including many chi flows and bone marrow washing. Again, each set builds on the previous material both adding and deepening your previous understanding.

With this brief overview, you start to get how important Spiraling Energy Body is in the sequence and how limited your overall practice is without it. You can open and close the joints without mastery over the gates but they’ll never fully release. This is one of the glass ceilings that Bruce metaphorically talks about. It is also why I think most students never progress very far-they are severely limited by their lack of mastery over spiraling. Without mastery over the basic neigung sets you can’t put that material into any of the internal arts of Hsing-I, Tai Chi Chuan, or Bagua. Without spiraling, every Taoist practive will be incomplete.