Mapping the Palm Changes to Liu’s Overview

This is my summary overview of Bagua as a system that is based on Liu Hung Chieh’s perspective in Bagua and Tai Chi: Exploring the Potential of Chi, Martial Arts, Meditation and the I Ching.

1) Get everything from your finger tips to your toes and everything in between to become integrated into one unified entity.

2) Open the three tan tiens, yin/yang, left/right, central, and all of the smaller channels.

3) Create a stable mind.

4) For martial purposes, understand and embody how every square inch of your body can rotate like a sphere.

5) Find the one change.

6) For spirituality, learn about the chi of spirit and emptiness so you can eventually understand the chi that enables you to know who you are.

7) Eventually understand the nature of the universe.

You can map the palm changes to this overview although it might be arbitrary. I’m doing this to help everyone organize the material and begin understanding the progression and order you should be trying to learn the material.

So, I’d say that palms 1-4 (Single, Double, Wind, and Thunder) are where you should be learning all of the neigung material which is step #1 of the overview. This is a huge subject.

The Fire and Water palms are where step #2 is learned. I think the Mountain palm is part of it as well, but the real point of the Mountain palm is to learn step #3, create a stable mind. The Mountain palm does this by balancing yin and yang. It creates this unique state where yin and yang are literally creating opposite actions while complimenting each other.

Step #4 is mastering the palm changes for martial purposes. It is what I like to call applied sciences.

Finding the one change, step #5, is a result of all of the first seven palm changes. Step #6 is the beginning of the shen phase in the sequence jing, Chi, shen, wu, tao. It is the subject of bien hua or I prefer to think of it as the study of inertia.

The eighth palm change, Lake, is where you start finding emptiness. In my experience there is a way to go into inner space. Your mind creates or experiences a sense of emptiness that is distinctly going inward. I’ve also had “peak” experiences of the mind expanding way out beyond the body. I’m trying to find how to create these simultaneously so they are both balanced, smooth, and continuous. So, the eighth palm change is using the energy of the seventh palm change in a very particular way to find and explore emptiness. Step #7 of the overview is just getting better and better at the previous step until you eventually understand the nature of the universe. I imagine that you are able to simultaneously go in and out while increasing your experience of emptiness, this sense of space and the expansion of consciousness. But before you approach that lofty goal, you have to master all of the previous material.

So, moving onto the shen phase could be thought of as simply trying to understand the energy of the Lake palm or finding emptiness.