Lengthening

[Anonymous]

Lengthening is an important neigung element. One of its most important purposes is to open the body. This phrase, “open the body”, has many meanings in Bruce’s system. In this context the most basic concept is to stretch the body. The Taoist stretch both outward which most of us are familiar with, as well as inward which few are familiar with. Ultimately the stretch should produce a single connected and felt sensation throughout the tissue. In this way, lengthening becomes a vital element of connection.

On one level you need to make everything into one connected whole. Bruce once said that there were a few fundamental ways you could express the whole of the art. Love, balance, compassion, and connection were among them. Connection struck me as odd. It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand why it was so important and lengthening is one of the keys to connection and making the body conscious. We are all one connected whole. From a spirtual perspective, making the body into one connected, conscious being is a metaphor for our connection to everything and nothing. But this is way, way down the road. We need to focus on the simple, the doable.

We use lengthening to connect the body. You can think of lengthening as taking the slack out of your tissue so you can feel the “pulls” and “tugs” that connect it. In Bagua as soon as you begin raising your arms to go into the Single Palm Change posture, you are starting to lengthen, to take all of the slack out of your tissue. You are really trying to connect it in a felt, tangible, concrete manner. In other words, you are trying to be able to feel the pull along the entire length of the body from your head to tips of your fingers and toes. This isn’t imagined and takes a lot of time, patience, and practice.

Bruce described how to maximize lengthening in great detail in the second installment of the Ba Gau Mastery program (in the context of the SPC posture), but if you are new to this material, you may have missed how significant this is to the art as a whole. There are a bunch of ways that Bruce teaches how to connect. He uses breathing, sound, tapping, shaking, dissolving, etc. If you have ever taken Bend the Bow, you should be very familiar with how to use lengthening to connect to a segment of the spine or even a single vertebrae. Step one is to move the arms away from the spine, to lengthen outward. Again, this takes the slack out and creates a pull on the tissue you are trying to connect to. You want to be able to feel that moving the arms moves whatever you are trying to connect to.

Sound is another method Bruce teaches. I never cared for this method and it makes me nearly piss myself with laughter every time I think about all of us sitting in groups or even sitting in trees humming and buzzing to vibrate our tissue so we can feel it. As funny as this may be, it still is valid and useful. The point is to be able to feel something that you couldn’t previously feel. Lengthening can do the same thing and in BaGua we use twisting and spiraling to enhance it.

Any movement we do that turns the limbs and torso is legthening the tissue. The turn or twist or spiral that you create is about making the tissue travel a greater distance. It has to wrap around the radius of the bones. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That’s the way most external arts work. They only engage the tissue linearly, in a straight line. All of the internal arts use circular movement and the small horizontal muscles to twist around the bones. If you do the math, this is minimally 1.5 times longer than a straight line. So you can twist less but lengthen more than a linear movement. For martial artist, this reduces your external movement which means you don’t have to telegraph your movement as much and also means you can move less and still achieve maximum power. You can be faster and more powerful while being more stealthy.

If you really get what I’m trying to articulate, you can see how lengthening and twisting are very related. They are connected. So, lengthening, twisting, and connection are connected.

The turn of the torso toward the center of the circle produces a large spiral that lengthens the whole body from head to toe. The radius that the tissue has to travel significantly increases the amount of lengthening that is occurring. You want the stretch to be smooth, even and felt. Feeling the stretch makes it conscious and allows you to feel what is the appropriate amount of stretch at any given moment. You better be able to feel what you are doing otherwise you are going to tear your body apart. You can increase the stretch so much that you can rip insertion points, organ attachments, etc.

This is one of the reasons why you do straight line walking for a long, long time before you start turning the waist toward the center of the circle. When you do start adding turning, only turn enough to feel a gentle pull. It should be significantly gentler than you imagine. You turn only as much as the tightest part of your body allows. That could be very, very small and changes every time you practice.

Take your time. Be patient with yourself. Let the body “open” naturally. Never force it.

Remember that everything is already connected. You don’t really create connection. You make the existing connection conscious.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the thoughtful post, James. I think one of the most interesting and striking things about Bruce’s system is that the concepts of the 16 nei gong are manifest in all the different arts he teaches. So lengthening is part of Wu style tai ji, you get a good introduction to it in Heaven and Heart, it’s essential to Gods Playing in the Clouds, and we’ve seen it in the Bagua Mastery Program. I really feel like having studied the other energy arts with Bruce and his teachers has prepared me well for this program. That said, I’m still a beginner in bagau, so I have to guard against wanting to move too quickly. One thing that I do like about this program is that the whole 16 nei gong seems present and accessible through the bagua style he teaches. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

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