Opening and Closing the Joints

[Anonymous]

I often get hung up on understanding exactly how to do neigung components. Although I learned to open and close my joints after a few years of studying with Bruce, over time I’ve come up with different ways to do it. I’ve never heard this described by anyone, but given that no one is posting, I thought that I’d throw something out there for people to think about and possibly discuss.

There is a whole progression of ways to open and close the joints. One of the later ways is to flood the secondary gates with chi. You move the energy from the central channel to the outer gates. This is counter-intuitive because the energy is moving out from the center gate along the central channel to the outer gates. To open, you reverse the flow so it stays in the central channel like a pressurized hose. The tighter you can condense the area of the pressure, the greater the force you can generate.

A more advanced way to do this is to “jump” to all of the gates at once. You can “jump” them back to the central channel as well. I found this practicing the Thunder palm. It facilitates extremely rapid changes of direction with little inertia. In fact, when I do this in the Thunder palm, I split the body in half. The side that makes the smaller spiral closes while the other side opens. It is a bit of a mind game to be able to jump all of the gates out on one side of the body while the other half of the body is jumping them all into the central channel simultaneously.

It will be interesting to see if Bruce teaches this as part of the Thunder palm or if it is just another neigung component that is possible, but doesn’t really have anything to do with the Thunder palm. I guess we’ll see.

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