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Everything you need to understand the Mountain Palm Change is in Module 16 video 2. In fact you only need the first 12 and a half minutes.
At 12:10 Bruce answers a students question which in my opinion is the “secret sauce” that makes it all work. He says take your tailbone and bring it to C7 and you take your C7 and make it go to your tailbone and your spine is solid. You do not use your spine when you do this. The warning after this is both important as well as humorous.
You won’t get this if you haven’t done the Water Palm properly. The first time around, I didn’t get the water palm going into the guts (lower tantien). This time around I did; however, I’d argue that this was the beginning of the Mountain Palm Change mixing with the Water Palm Change. I guess what I’m saying is that the end of Water was the beginning of Mountain when I got it.
The secret sauce makes the difference for the guas to seprate and begin to activate. Then it isn’t so much that you are trying to do all this turning in the guts. It is more like I continue to do all the stuff that I was doing previously but now the guas turning this ways and that is just happening in coordination. I’m simply not impeding it.
I doubt this will help you learn it before you are ready, but once you are getting close, these posts should help cut right to the material you need to sort out the final details. Anyway, that’s my hope.
OMG!
“Secret sauce” indeed.
Many years ago I attended annual workshops with William C.C. Chen.
I got pretty good at “rooting,” I always thought.
I could transfer the energy of a push by a partner down my back leg to the foot and into the ground below–
I was unmoveable; they were now trying to push the ground below my feet.
Problem is: I couldn’t move either.
This system had to be carefully rigged.
The partner had to apply force steadily and directly without gaps or diverging vectors of force.Your discovery shows that the problem is that this is all uni-directional.
As Bruce says, it merely involves the “Li,” straight line muscle force–from point A to point B.When other Masters explain the “secret sauce” they use line diagrams.
Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming is a mechanical engineer.
Martin Mellish (“Tai Chi Imagery Workbook”) has a Master’s degree in Mathematics; one of his images shows energy coming up the legs to the hips, then transmitted by a rod to the elbows and arms.
All straight line force from point A to point B.Bruce’s technique is strangely bi-directional.
Although I could not see or replicate what he was doing with Isaac and Jess, I now understand how it differs from a straight line transmission of forces.
It is also illustrated in Bruce’s “Dragon and Tiger Medical Chi Gung” Movement 6, Dragon and Tiger Pierce Heaven and Earth.
As one sword hand goes up as the other is going down.Bruce does this from his gut–
1. Bottom burner going Up (or down?)
2. Middle burner (Lower dantian) (gut) in the center
3. Upper burner going Down (or Up?)Equal and opposite reactions. (hhhmmmm–shades of Newton).
Anyway, with your discovery of the Water Palm jacking up blood pressure from the gut, this internal technique may overcome my immobility while “rooting.”
Thanks for all your explorations.
Bob
This is a perfect example of only getting an arc of the circle. It is exactly what I was trying to explain in my post “Arc of Learning”. You did exactly what you were told and ended up stuck and wondering how do you express power without disrupting your root?
Three additional comments: 1) I think the bi-directional nature is fully understood in the Tai Chi space. There you really get what the yin within the yang means and what the yang within the yin means. 2) Mountain is expressing all eight directions simultaneously. The guas are balancing each other sort of automagically as a consequence of using fluid pressure and linking the body up properly from years of practice.
3) The Water Palm explores the mechanics. At first I only found the pressure in the bone marrow, then I found it in the lower tantien, then I noticed how each gua could express it independently and in combination. Today I think I found how it can cross from the right arm to the left leg. I don’t believe that Hsing-I or Tai Chi does this. For example, in brush knee, the hand that is going down toward the knee is the hand that is locking the pressure. The other side has the pressure building and expressing in two directions – out the striking hand and down to the foot (on the same side of the body). Bagua can cross. Note that this is the first time I’ve really talked about the cross.
There’s another way to look at the Mountain Palm Change. If you found the technology of pressurizing the vascular system in the Water Palm, you can look at the Mountain Palm Change as building on that.
In the Water Palm I first found the pressure mechanism in the bone marrow and then later was able to do it in the lower tantien.
It is possible that “moving” it the the lower tantien (or perhaps more accurately the lower gua) is part of the Mountain Palm Change. In the Mountain Palm Change you’re building on the Water Palm in stages until you find stillness. You start with performing the vascular pressure mechanism using the lower tantien. Then everything is effectively flipped upside down and you perform the mechanism pressurizing the upper gua.
When you are pressurizing the upper gua, one hand is still locking the pressure and the other is amplifying the pressure.
Then you start to realize that you can do both the upper and the lower at the same time. Each hand is both locking and pressurizing. It is too complicated to describe without diagrams, but the idea is this: the hand is locking down pressure in one of the guas and amplifying the pressure of the other gua. Both hands are simultaneously doing this.
Yes there is a lot going on, but that’s why it is so multi-dimensional. You find stability in all of these dynamically opposed forces.
I’m really starting to think that the Mountain Palm Change is intended to be manifested in the lower and upper guas, but it is more universal than that. It is when yin and yang are moving in both directions in the same space.
Here’s a challenge: in the Mountain Palm Change form where one of the legs lifts off the ground, use it (the lifting foot) to facilitate the locking in function. Remember in the Water Palm where Bruce showed how to have one arm lock in the pressure and the other extends and boosts it. Here have the lifting foot lock in the pressure into the upper gua.
I’m not sure if this is part of Mountain or Lake, but I found a different way to perform the lock (go back to my post on the Water Palm Change Revisited if you don’t know what I’m referring to.). Instead of creating a solidity to push off, I’m able to make the “locking” hand absorb into a gua. I can do this now in the Water Palm Change where I’m only concerned with the lower gua or in the Mountain Palm Change where I can choose to concentrate on etiher the lower or the upper gua, or I can make both happen at once. When you get to Lake you add the middle gua and each hand is now absorbing as well as expanding from both the lower and upper guas simultaneously.
In Mountain there are still yin and yang. The lower gua tends to control the yin absorption and the upper gua tends to control the yang expansion. You are working toward waking up the middle gua so both move through the middle. The final integration will be completed in the Lake Palm Change.
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