Creating Hexagrams

The intent of this post was to express the frustration that arises periodically in our training. I thought I’d juxtapose that with a post where idea are flooding in faster than I can process and I can’t sort them all out and at the same time try to deliver on the original title for the thread.

So, I’ll talk about hexagrams and one idea that occurred to me while practicing and see where it takes us. Here is a set of hexagrams I want to focus on:

,䷀, heaven
,䷌, gathering men
,䷠, retiring
,䷫, coupling

The names don’t matter. I’m only concerned with the bottom two lines of each hexagram.

The idea: What if the lines of the trigrams correspond to the tan tiens? The natural conclusion: the Wind trigram tells you to create yin in the lower tan tien and make the middle and upper tan tiens yang. We know that Bruce has taught that the lower tan tien is a special point where you can access/connect the entire energy of the physical and etheric bodies. The leap: What if the hexagrams are more granular? What if each line corresponds to a specific body (from the bottom up: physical, etheric, emotional, mental, psychic, causal). Conclusion: I would need to be able to control whether the physical and etheric bodies are either yin or yang in four combinations represented by the four hexagrams. How would I do this?

First, like the trigrams I would create a different form for each hexagram simply to be very clear with myself about which version I was trying to perform at any given time. Later, when this is mastered it wouldn’t matter and could be performed in any movement including a single palm change.

Obviously I have to understand how to create yang and yin, and I have to have access to the etheric body outside the physical as well as the tai chi space.

Next, I would assume that the trigram of heaven and hexagram of heaven are really the same. That is, all of the tan tiens are expressing yang and so both the physical and etheric bodies are yang. Similarly, the hexagram of Wind is the same as the hexagram retiring,䷠. Here the middle and upper tan tiens are expressing yang and both the physical and etheric bodies are expressing yin in the lower tan tien.

So, if I’ve understood the trigrams correctly, I’ve only got two, new variations to understand:

,䷫, coupling
,䷌, gathering men

What’s happening here? I think coupling,䷫, is a little easier to understand and I found this a long time ago in my training. I’ve posted about it as well. The etheric body is expanding from every point in the etheric field. You allow it to expand into the physical body. It feels like the expansion of the etheric body is compressing the physical. But there is a new dynamic that wasn’t as clear when you are just performing the trigrams. You need to clearly work with the higher bodies – they need to be clearly expanding and working with the middle and upper tan tiens within the physical body doesn’t seem to be enough. For example, I’ve never opened the emotional and mental bodies beyond the boundaries of the physical and etheric bodies. So, I need to understand how the Taoists approached opening these up.

Hmmm…

But before I try to figure that out, I work on refining what I know. I need to work through what it means to clearly perform yang-yang, yin-yang, yang-yin, and yin-yin in the lower tan tien. The sequence is ䷀, ䷫,䷌,䷠.

So I start training. Since I don’t know a form for each of the 64 hexagrams, I keep it simple and use the single palm change as the container. It is simpler this way and I won’t have to concentrate on movement. My mind can focus on the energies. I warm up by playing with what I know. I need to enter into the tai chi space to have the clarity that is needed to separately control multiple things at once.

I walk the circle and play with the palm changes I already know. Then back to heaven. Everything expands. All three tan tiens and everything else I can connect to and feel. Then, the mind go to the lower tan tien, the smallest most focused point I can feel. I make it receptive. I want it to allow all of the expansion to go into it. I don’t want to control what happens. I just set it up. That’s the control. Now, I let the chaos happen.

Nothing.

I play with this over and over until I’m a little tired. I sit and think about what I’m trying to do. Working like this can be exhausting. When I get up to start again I notice the sense of the tai chi space is dramatically clearer.

Hmmm…

I need to go back to sleep but before I do I’ll try to quickly summarize another one of the crazy ideas that came out of this type of random thought.

I had been playing with how I think Chen style Tai Chi uses the side channels to find the Tai Chi space. I noticed that my mind tended to focus in the hand and arm when I do the movement. Particularly when I wanted to create a down movement in the side channel. Why? Habit I guess. So, I used my Bend the Bow training and simply decided that I would connect the side channel to the leg instead of the arm. I got a similar result but stronger. Of course! the legs are 10X stronger than the arms. The etheric is 10X stronger than the physical. So what if I could use the etheric field to move the channel. After all what is the difference between connecting to the physical body and connecting to the etheric? Nothing if you can do it. What if the double palm change is manipulating the side channels and the single palm change is manipulating the centerline? So, I practice the single palm change by going above the head and connecting to the centerline. And, I practice the double palm change connecting each side channel to the etheric below each foot.

It works. It feels stronger. Is it the beginning of Bagua as a celestial art? Is this the distinction between post-heaven Bagua where you concentrate on the physical body and pre-heaven Bagua where you concentrate on what you had before you were born and what you’ll have after you no longer have a body? Who knows?