I’ve got it all backwards

[Anonymous]

This post is intended to help answer Robert’s question about how I organize the trigrams to train the 16 part neigong. I could write pages and pages on any single element – and truth be told, Bruce’s books, CDs, Mastery programs do it better than I can. So why bother?

I don’t think many students have figured out how to train. I’m odd in that I like to understand the whole before I understand the details, so, I thought I’d approach this from the end and work back to neigung.

In the end you are going to discover that you’ve been looking at the Bagua symbol all wrong. Twenty-five years of dedicated practice and it’s all to find emptiness. It’s all for naught. Too funny.

The whole is expressed by the Bagua symbol with the trigrams laid out in a circular pattern around an empty center. Forget about what all of the trigrams really mean. Forget about the Tai Chi symbol stuffed in the middle of most diagrams. Just look at the basic diagram. The trigrams are paired opposites. Heaven is opposite Earth. Wind is opposite Thunder. And so on.

Between the two opposites is empty space. If you look at the symbol this way, you have a symbol of the first seven bodies. If you realize that the trigrams are in the middle of space, not containing it, you have the bigger picture which has the possibility of including a complete comprehension of empty space. It also tells you that any manisfestation comes out of that empty space. In order for your mind to fully comprehend this isn’t possible intellectually because you will always be bond by the constraints of manifestation. Your back inside the Bagua diagram rather than perceiving the whole. Sorry this sounds like blubbering bullshit, but it is a lot closer to the reality than you might guess.

So, the truth is, all of this is completely impossible to understand if you don’t know what emptiness is about. And very, very few people know anything about emptiness.

Before you can understand emptiness you need to understand stillness. Before you can understand stillness, you need to learn something about neigung. Bear with me, I will answer Robert’s question.

Bagua walking and the single palm change can be used as a container for the 16 part neigung. You can also use any of the palm changes as well. But it is significantly easier to use the double-palm change than a smooth palm change. It is significantly easier to use the single palm change than the double-palm change. And significantly easier to use a neigung set where you are standing in one place than to learn while walking in a circle. And it is significantly easier to just stand still (standing postures) than standing in one place waving your hands around and moving your body. In fact, I thought sitting meditation was even easier than standing postures and learned much of the earlier neigung through sitting meditation. But I’m odd.

The point is that you can learn neigung using any form (container) and some are easier than others. There are some big advantages to training in the more advanced ways, but only if you can pull it off. Note, few people do.

Ok you want to learn your neigung in Bagau. How do you approach it?

First you have to know what a neigung element is. I’ve posted many rants indicating the gross lack of knowledge of this subject and Bruce himself has said he has only taught a small fraction of what he knows. That’s another subject.

But let’s assume you know what opening and closing a joint is. This is a small part of neigung #7. And you want to train this in Bagua.

What I did is start with one joint on one side of the body. Let’s pick the right wrist. I would perform the single palm change focusing on the close, open, close of the wrist.

Next, I’d focus on the left wrist. This is the single palm change methodology. You are concentrating on “one palm at a time”. You could think of this more generically as one side at a time. So, you might break this down further where you only concentrate on the opening or the closing. The gist is that you go back and forth, changing the direction of your circle and making sure you can perform whatever you are working on equally well on each side. Ideally you would practice until this becomes completely natural and easy to do before moving on.

Next, you use the double-palm change methodology to train the opening and closing of the wrist. Here you have to pay attention to the opening and closing of both wrists. First they open and close simultaneously. Later one side is opening while the other side is closing and vice versa. When this becomes incredibly smooth you might glimpse stillness. You might find that both the opening and closing are occurring simultaneously in both wrists.

The opening and closings are now acting as a specific pair of yang/yin opposites. If they can flow back and forth smoothly enough you could use a smooth palm change to train a mixing of yin and yang. That is highly unlikely to be successful at this early stage.

Instead, I would go back to the single palm change and add a second joint. I’d try to open the right wrist and the right elbow at the same time. Then, I’d walk the circle training the left joints and then the right side joints and then the left side joints. Back and forth. When I was able to do each easily, naturally, instantly, without strain — I’d move to the double-palm change. I’d work on opening all four joints at the same time, then close all four at the same time. Next you need to do all of the combinations yang/yang, yin/yin, yang/yin, yin/yang.

You add and add and add until you are doing every joint, and eventually every part of the 16 part neigung simultaneously.

In general, I always worked the arms first, then the legs, then the arms and legs together.

Over the years I developed a lot of ways to map yang and yin neigung elements to the lines of the trigrams. In retrospect, this was more a way to keep my mind busy and challenged. I’ve posted a lot about these, but the truth is you can’t understand the trigrams until you understand something about emptiness (Sorry, this is straight from Bruce.).

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