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I’ve been working on the neigung elements 12 and 13 for the past few months. I’m starting to move onto 14 and 15.
I found that the left and the right channels have to be worked long enough to start opening the central channel. I had worked with the central channel before but it never was as smooth and continuous as it is now.
Once the central channel can be used, the tan tiens start to become more important. In neigung part 14 the lower tan tien is opened.
The Bagua palms are great containers for practicing any of the neigung. To work with parts 14 and 15, I’ve started to work the opening and closings of the tan tiens in correspondence to the trigrams. So, heaven is an opening of all three tan tiens and earth is closing all three tan tiens. Wind is closing the lower while opening the middle and upper tan tiens. And so on…
But the opening and closings have a totally different meaning for me now.
Previously I’ve practiced the opening and closings like breathing. Open equals expand. Close equals condense. More recently I’ve started to practice them as continuous openings and closings. Instead of rhythmically alternating from open to close to open, I’ve been interpreting a yang line as a continuous opening and opening and opening. A yin line is practiced as a closing and closing and closing.
This all comes from an understanding of the single palm change as an expression of the expansive force of heaven. Previously, I’ve looked at the single palm change as series of neigung elements: twisting in and out, opening and closing joints, etc. But now, I see it as just expanding the chi inside and outside the body. This stems from the module 4 section 12 practice that I’ve worked on for some time; however, I found that neigung parts 12 and 13 are needed to open the energy channels enough to concretely work with the etheric body.
It is exponentially harder to do a continuous opening than to open then close then open then close. In NY at the seminar where Bruce taught the energies of the trigrams, the first thing Bruce demonstrated and talked about was this continuous expansion. This makes total sense as every other trigram is built from this energy.
Somewhere in my practice I found the double palm change. The yang flipped to yin. So, the symbol for yin represents two expansion forces meeting each other. Yin is two pieces of yang. Earth is made up of the same stuff as heaven which is represented symbolically as a bunch of yang lines. Two expansive forces or pieces of heaven are allowed to come into the center of the body – that’s yin. It is easier to find it as opposites like up and down, but that is one example of a more abstract idea.
In practice yin is found when you expand the chi outside the body enough to have it begin to expanding back into the centerline of the physical body. This is a very odd perspective. We are conditioned to only think of ourselves as the physical body. So expanding your chi that’s outside the body is bizarre. It is even stranger to expand it into the physical body. But that’s why you “never leave the single palm change even when you are activating extremely yin energies of the body”. For me, the double-palm change is the single palm change and so is the wind palm change.
Once you get the expansive force, ☰, and you can find how it comes back in, ☷, next you start mixing the two ☴ ☳ ☲ ☵ ☶ ☱.
I practice the wind palm by having one side expand while the other condenses. It is wind when the expansion of the extending/opening side expands into the condensing side and the condensing absorbs the expansion into the centerline which is simultaneously fueling the expansion. It is like an electric circuit.
The whole thing starts to get a little too complicated so I needed a way to simplify. I use the tan tiens to mix the yin and yangs and prepare for the more subtle work of opening the energy bodies.
The idea is to gain some control of the tan tiens while getting better at mixing the opening and closings so I can eventually use the tan tiens to fully open the body, mind and spirit. The lower tan tien will connect fully to the physical and etheric bodies (jing). The middle tan tien will connect fully to the emotional and mental bodies (chi). The upper tan tien will connect fully to the psychic and causal bodies (shen). The whole process helps you to find stillness then emptiness (wu) and finally the tao.
It might not be obvious from my post but the wind palm isn’t a splitting of the body with one half doing openings and the other doing closings. You can practice it that way, but there is more to it.
The tan tiens aren’t opening and closing. The lower tan tien is closing and closing and closing while the middle and upper tan tiens are opening and opening and opening.
More importantly the closing in the lower tan tien isn’t just a condensation or shrinking inward. It really is a complete opening of both the physical body and the etheric body until the expansive energy of the etheric expands back into the lower tan tien.
Simultaneously, I’m opening and opening and opening the middle tan tien.
Just like learning to open from the central channel in module 4, you have to learn to progressively open the middle tan tien (the emotional body). The frequency is slightly different but it exists in the same space that the physical body and etheric occupy. For now the upper tan tien is more or less along for the ride. This is a first pass at learning the palm and not fully complete.
Based on my current practice and understanding, I’d go as far as saying that if you aren’t working with all three tan tiens, you aren’t doing Bagua. Moreover, if you’re not, you’ve never done a mother palm.
The work with the three tan tiens is the real distinction between Tai Chi and Bagua. Tai Chi doesn’t require all three of them nor does Hsing-i for that matter. And this explains why Bruce says Bagua is a superior art providing you have learned the material. I suspect that Wu style Tai Chi as meditation adds this material, but who knows?
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