Arc of Learning

[Anonymous]

I’ve been posting about the Lake Palm lately, but one of my long terms goals has always been to understand why Bruce is so much stronger than any of his students or instructors. I think the answer is the arc. An arc is a part of the circumference of a circle. It isn’t whole.

When Bruce teaches, he can only teach a part of the whole at any one time. When he transmits, he transmits the whole.

What I’ve come to realize is that his power comes from the circle, a complete circle. Most of the time he talks about a quarter arc. He’ll go into great detail about the arms. He’ll go into great detail about the legs. He’ll even tell you to do them both simultaneously. But why isn’t this enough to get the type of power he can produce?

I think the answer is that doing the arms and the legs at the same time is only half the circle.

Bruce isn’t just making a yang and then making a yin. He is making both yin and yang simultaneously in all directions all the time. He simply calls something yang when it is mostly yang. the tai chi space is the key.

Look at all of the video where Bruce has a student try to do something that he is teaching. They always make the same mistake – they try do exactly what he said to do. They are doomed to failure. Not because they can’t do what he said, but because they did it in the extreme without the balance of its opposite. Their bodies, chi, and minds ultimately lock into an extreme yin or yang. Bruce remains balanced. He completes the circle. At best we get half of the circle or an arc.

Think about the kou of the hand. You probably think in terms of two kuos: one “C” on a vertical plane and one on a horizontal plane. I see six plus the sum of all of them. That’s what Bruce is doing. That’s why he doesn’t lock up and the source of his relaxed power.

[Anonymous]

I re-read my post. It captures the idea I wanted to convey but is likely too brief to be understood.

So, I’ll give you another example of the “C” that I’m talking about. The flow up the back and over the head which starts to flow down the front. In Bagua, this flow includes down the tailbone and under the pelvis and then up the front. When Bruce teaches Bend the Bow, this is the big “C” that gives Tai Chi, Hsing-i, and Bagua their primary power.

That’s only part of the flow. He doesn’t talk about what happens when the two flows wrap fully around and meet in the middle, or more interesting when they continue to flow and they are tracing exactly the same “C” in the opposite direction.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I think everyone has heard Bruce talk about this big flow – the microcosmic orbit. So half of that orbit is the big “C” of the spine. If you extend the flows to the arms and legs, you get the macrocosmic orbit, but it works exactly the same.

We’ve also heard Bruce talk about wrapping. We wrap from the spine to the front. He uses the Chinese work kuo. It is just another “C”, but on a horizontal plane. On rare occasions he’ll talk about the third dimension and the “C” that forms the coronal circles. These are emphasized a lot in the Fire Palm.

That’s three “C”s, in three planes: vertical, horizontal, and coronal – x,y, z.

But there’s more. Each of these contains and implies their opposite flows. There’s actually six of them. They are all there at the same time. They form a sphere. And, every part of the body does the exactly the same thing. This is step #4 of Liu’s Overview: “For martial purposes, understand and embody how every square inch of your body can rotate like a sphere.”

[Anonymous]

As I re-re-read my last post on this topic, I realize that it implies that this is THE way to find the spherical nature of Bagua, and that isn’t correct. There are many ways and even more ways of slicing and dicing the subject.

For me, it made more sense of all the kous that Bruce has taught over the years. The idea that we can only talk about one small piece at a time is more important.

You train one piece at a time. The goal is to be connect and doing it all at simultaneously.

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