Balanced Life Skills Martial Arts

In many ways, Aikido is a lifelong journey. There’s always something to learn around the corner,always something just out of reach. This is what makes practicing Aikido so rewarding. You are always on the path, and the path never ends. I have practiced with Aikido practitioners who have been on the path for many years but never tested. Their Aikido was no worse than those students who pursued rank. The Aikido journey is not one of rank. It is one of personal development.

The journey of Aikido—and all martial arts—is not driven by the attainment of rank or recognition.These are external things that contain no inherent value; things you show to others to gain the recognition and admiration of others. The things that matter: technical skill; personal confidence;and the ability to teach others have nothing to do with a particular belt. A practitioner of the “lowest” rank has the ability to welcome a new and unranked student and show them what he or she knows. Likewise, the “highest” ranked student has every opportunity to learn something new from even the newest class participant through the act of instruction.

When we as martial artists start personally identifying with a particular “rank” or colored belt, we are at a very high risk of technical and philosophical stagnation. Such a personalization of rank is very dangerous for several reasons.

First, if we identify too strongly with a rank, we are effectively closing off our ability to learn from everyone on the mat. A white or yellow belt has the potential to teach a black belt just as muchas—if not more—than the dojo instructor. The mechanism is different, but the learning is the same. An instructor imparts a technique by describing and demonstrating it to the students. An advanced student learns from a beginning student through the act of instruction. Having to describe and show the technique in a way that the beginning student understands is the highest educational experience for the more advanced student.

Additionally, focusing on the attainment of a particular rank can very often get in the way of focusing on what’s important; internalizing the techniques and developing a deep sense of how the techniques work best for your skill level and body type. The rank means nothing, your mental and physical ability to internalize the skill set is the greater focus.

Finally, a myopic view of rank and belts within your specific school ignores the broader context of martial arts. In all Japanese martial arts systems, a practitioner is a white belt until they are awarded a black belt. I say “awarded,” because there is no test. When the instructor feels that a particular student has achieved a certain skill level, that student is given a black belt. There is no test, no ceremony, and no recognition. It just is. Often, this process takes 10 – 12 years.

The system of colored belts was only adopted after the Japanese arts were introduced to American culture, which is inherently impatient and demands visible signs of progress in the form of colored belts, ignoring the more subtle—but more important—visible signs of progress in a student’s technique over time. Further undermining the idea of a particular “colored belt” meaning anything is an examination of the Tae Kwon Do rank of red belt. In Tae Kwon Do—a Korean martial art—a red belt symbolizes the highest ranking non-black belt student. However, in Karate—a Japanese martial art—a red symbolizes the absolute highest level of mastery, a 9th degree black belt which is only earned after a devoted lifetime of study and training. The Korean red belt was deliberately adopted to make a social and political statement against Japanese supremacy and occupation during
World War II.

So what does a belt mean? Why are there colors? What does rank mean? What does a test mean?The answer is nothing, and everything. A belt, or obi, is a tool to keep the gi top closed, and the pants up. It is nothing more. If your school has adopted a colored belt system, the purpose of a belt is not to be “above” your peers. Rather, the colored belt serves as a declaration to other students concerning what you are able to teach them, and identifies who the lower ranked students should goto with questions. A test is not a particular moment in time. A test occurs every time you step on to the mat, every time you practice, and every time you learn.

Ultimately, if you are striving to attain rank, you will never truly achieve it. Rank is not a static or singular  entity or status that can be captured, conquered, owned, or mastered. If you cannot see and appreciate your technical and philosophical progress independently of colored belts, testing, and attaining rank, you have not fully understood the essence of the martial arts journey.

On the subject of internal arts and the effects of emotions, I’d like to talk about anger a bit. It is the emotion that I am most aware of struggling with in my own training, and I see it every day in others.

I think the allure of anger is that anger feels powerful. When the world is not as we want it to be, or we don’t like how we are treated by others, it is comforting to feel we are kings, as if our displeasure has the ability to reform things to our liking. When we are angry, we do not feel helpless, we do not feel vulnerable.

For an example of anger, let’s consider weapons shop vendors here in Wudang. My classmates and I are learning spear, so the other day I had to go to one of these shops. I struggle to finance my training, and I can not afford to throw money around carelessly on anything. However, it is standard practice in these shops that when a foreigner walks in the first quote rockets up above %1,000 and no amount of haggling will lower it to any realistic value (I am not exaggerating, and thank the rich, gullible tourists for that). Despite my best efforts, the best price I could get was 70 yuan, down from an original quote of 110 yuan, while my Chinese kungfu brother walked out of the store with the same spear for 20 yuan.

This makes me angry, and in my anger I feel righteous. I think, ” They’ll regret making me angry. My friends and I will never shop there again. I’ll write a blog about these jerks and ruin them internationally. I ought to go back there and throw a brick through the window of the shop, I’ll… I’ll…” But reality sets in and each of these angry thoughts is revealed as pointless and wrong. I will have to go back to that crook the next time I need a new weapon. My friends will do the same. Gouging customers is how these guys make their living, and no one blinks at it. That brick, though tempting, would be cowardly, petty, and probably make a lot of trouble for me, my master, and other foreigners in the area. Once I have left the store with my purchase, I am every bit as powerless as I feel. My anger does violence to me, and that vendor doesn’t lose any sleep at all.

Truly that vendor is part of my training, a sparring partner of sorts. I have to accept the fact that he is part of a system that is so much larger than me that I can not fight it. What can I do? I must proceed in a yielding way. I can try to learn to haggle better. I can make friends and they can shop on my behalf. I can be thankful that as a white American male, I have been given an opportunity to understand discrimination and compassion as I would never have understood it had I stayed in my own culture. But most importantly, I have to learn that though is nice to imagine myself as a king in my castle, inviolable and potent, there will always be forces in this world greater than me and lesser than me. And regardless of my actual ability to change my surroundings, I must be able to relate to them with tranquility. Thus, China itself tempers me.

I sometimes worry about how I will someday teach these lessons to Americans at home, where everyone tells you you can, “have it your way.” Anyway, more next time.

And if, in the unforeseeable future, I find myself in charge of regulating commercial tourism practices in Wudang, that salesman had better keep his head down ;-p.

Lately as I think about what I want to write in my blog, my ideas seem to move in a more philosophical direction. I hope that I can still provide anecdotal illustrations of life in China, but for the next few months I expect I will be writing more about what I am thinking related to my training. First, however, I feel like I need to lay some groundwork for this kind of thing.

First, I want to reiterate that what you read in this blog is distorted by the imperfect lens that is me. What you read here is not a faithful record of my master’s teachings or Daoist practice or Wudang martial technique. I am a student working through some rather difficult lessons, and you are reading the flotsam and jetsam of that learning process. I am likely to be wrong, or at least incompletely correct.

Second, the nature of my training is in essence unintellectual. By writing a blog about it, I bring it into the intellectual realm, but it can not be entirely expressed here. Language bridges the gap between your mind and mine, but this training is a thing of bone and muscle and character, not of the mind, and only a shadow of it can cross that bridge. It’s an common mistake to think once you have read and understood some piece of martial arts theory, you understand martial arts.

So if you read my blog and like what I am talking about, please remember: practice is what makes this stuff real, not comprehension. The Chinese say, “Kungfu equals time plus sweat,” and that is just as true for internal martial arts as external. Reading is fine, but training is what it’s all about. And that training should be monitored by a good teacher, not a blog.

Phew! Now that I feel like we won’t fall into the more common pitfalls of this type of writing, I can get on with it…

Last year I wrote in this blog about internal self defense, what it means and its importance. I focused on the power of emotion and the need to learn to protect oneself from negative feelings. This is a major thrust of my training here in Wudang, and I thought a little more discussion was in order.

Remember that in Daoist theory, a person is like a bottle filled with water. We are a container of vital energy. When we are born, that container is full. We spend that energy in our everyday activities, sometimes intentionally and more often through habitual leaks. When the bottle is empty, we die.

To continue the water bottle metaphor, this is a bottle that takes a lifetime to empty, so from day to day the change is so minute we might overlook it. Indeed, a person can go for years thinking they are as vital as ever, only to wake up one day to notice that an important reference point has been passed. It’s a quarter empty! It’s HALF EMPTY! But the perception that the water suddenly vanished is wrong: every action of every day effects the level.

I am learning that a big part of my training is sensitizing myself to the effects my actions have on my vitality. The exertion of full-time training, plus my master’s insights about replenishing our energy, means that the level in my bottle drops and rises more noticeably, which with practice is helping me learn to monitor it and make good decisions that fill up the bottle.

I explained that so that I could explain this: I am starting to understand that the vital cost of my actions themselves is not as significant as the vital cost of the emotions engendered by those actions. A training day when I allow myself to be grouchy and negative is many times more draining than an identical day when I stay calm and positive.

This puts me in mind of some of the elderly individuals I have had the honor to know. Many of those who reach a great age and still seem vital and energetic are those whose characters are calm and optimistic. These individuals do not avoid effort in order to spare themselves the expenditure of vitality. But in their industry, they face each task quietly and purposefully. When the task is over, they do not bemoan the effort or overly celebrate it’s completion. They seem calm and gratified.

Other people I have known, of all different ages, seem prematurely dissipated. They seem to have a greater emotional reaction to every new task. If they are working already, they complain of the additional work. If they are resting, they resent the end to their rest. When a task is finished, a celebration is in order, and in this celebratory play they are as excessive as they are in their work. Each action carries an unnecessarily heavy toll on the water in the bottle.

The key here is that the vitality in the bottle is not just sand in an hourglass, measuring out a lifespan. It is the essence that determines the quality of a life as well. Without the toll of negative emotion, there is more energy to spare each day on the things we do and the things we love, without diminishing ourselves.

I returned to my master’s school in Wudangshan a week ago. The time since has been spent catching up with friends and shaking off jet lag. More than anything, however, it has been spent coping with what I shall call, “Week One Syndrome” (hereafter WOS).

WOS is the inevitable period of adjustment necessary to go from part-time training, no matter how rigorous, to full-time. It goes like this:

The first day, you feel fantastic. Maybe your moves are a little rusty, but your muscles are fresh and loose and ready to go. Maybe your stances aren’t as low as you would like, or maybe your kicks aren’t as extended, but with all that stored-up energy, it just feels great to move.

Second day, however, you wake up in agony. You drift up out of the warm darkness of sleep, try to sit up, and—BAM!—hot knives in your thighs, abdomen, back, chest, calves, and everything else. Particularly sore are the muscles at the front of your hips. Trying to raise your leg to step into your pants is impossible. The test I use to gauge how traumatic WOS is going to be is stairs. If I can still walk up or down the stairs normally, one foot in front of the other, I am doing pretty well, even if it is a struggle. If I have to cling to the hand rail and haul myself up step by terrible step, it’s going to be a rough couple of weeks.

You want to rest, to recover, but day two has all the same training that did you in on day one. Except this time, your muscles are killing you, and on top of that, they have tightened into these angry knots like twisted tree roots. Day one, you could touch your toes. Day two, you wish you could touch your knees. You’ve lived through the WOS ordeal before, though, so you know that if you get yourself thoroughly warmed up and stretched out, you can make it through and even recapture some of the joy of motion that you felt in day one.

Day three and onward continue much like day two, but the muscle pain slowly falls into a weekly pattern, peaking in the training week and slacking in the rest day. Pain and stiffness are still at a high, but slowly they reach a barely manageable level, where they will remain for the duration of your training. At the same time, however, injuries that you had thought gone after your vacation start to crop up again, and your reserves of energy are being drained. By the end of three weeks or a month, your emotional and physical resources that you saved up during your vacation are running low, and every day of every week is a struggle to replenish your strength at as fast a rate as you burn it.

After that description you may not believe this, but it is amazing to be back. Maybe I am a sucker for suffering, but this place feels like home and there is nowhere I would rather be. I can feel myself calming down after the faster pace of life back in the U.S.

And as a sign of my growth, WOS gets a little milder every time I endure it.

This week has been crazy and awesome.  As I sit down to write about it, I realize one of the major differences in my life here and my life training in Wudang. There, when I train my mind is either off or focused on what I am doing, and outside of that I have fairly few demands on my attention and I have plenty of time to reflect and plan. So writing a blog happens fairly naturally.

Here at home, I work at an architecture firm, I teach, and I do demonstrations and talks about Wudang. There are always demands on my attention, and reflection often has to wait. So while in Wudang, the physical side of my training seems my prime concern, being home is a training ground for my internal art. This is where the theory meets reality.

That said, I had a wild but fun week. Thursday night I attended a Chinese embassy celebration of the Chinese New Year at the Meridian Center in DC. Definitely one of the neatest evenings I have had in a while. There were a lot of diplomats there, a beautiful musical performance, and two Chinese art exhibits, one of woodblock prints and one of modern paintings on porcelain. I was there with my kungfu sister who is working hard to establish avenues for the sharing  of Wudang culture and wisdom with D.C. and the U.S.

Friday was spent at the Bullis School in Potomac. I did a collaborative demonstration with two Shaolin monks. Of course, they were masters and I am still a student, so it was quite an honor to share a stage with them. I really enjoyed meeting them and other amazing members of the kungfu community in the D.C. area. It was wonderful to meet other people who dream dreams like my own.

January 9th through February 14th, I am pleased to be offering a seminar in Qigong at Balanced Life Skills. Qigong has been one of my favorite discoveries in the course of my martial arts education, and I am always excited to share my love of it with others.

What is Qigong? Imagine the practice of martial arts as a line. One one end is fighting, and on the other end is purely health oriented exercise. Qigong would fall near one end of the line, and it might look like this:Literally “Chi Work,” Qigong is a kind of moving meditation. In a series of dynamic poses combining breathing, flexibility, strength, and mental focus, it seeks to nourish the internal health of the body. It is adaptable to the level of the student; a sedentary newcomer and a conditioned athlete will both find challenge and growth.

There are uncountable permutations within this broad category of exercise, each with its own focus, theory, tradition, and practitioners. In Wudang, I have learned a few different Qigong practices. My favorite is Five Element Qigong.

In the seminar this year, I will be focusing on Five Element Qigong, but will range as well into other aspects of my own practice that have informed and enhanced the experience of Qigong.

The seminar will be held, January 9th – February 14th,  on:

Mondays 5:0o PM and 7:00 PM

Tuesdays 11:00 AM

Students should plan to attend at least one hour-long session a week, but are welcome and encouraged to attend additional classes for more guided repetition. Those interested are welcome to try a class in the first week for free. Seminar fee= $10/week

Corey Hopp in Yuxugong Temple

Corey Hopp is a full time student of kung fu.

Eight hours a day, six days a week, ten or eleven months of the year, he can be found punching, kicking, and jumping on the paving stones of Yuxugong temple in rural Wudang Mountain, Hubei Province, China. However, in January and February of 2012, Corey will be at Balanced Life Skills Martial Arts here in Annapolis, sharing some of his experiences with the local community.

Corey is a student of Master Yuan Xiu Gang of the Wudang Daoist Traditional Internal Kungfu Academy. Wudang Mountain has its own special style and tradition of martial arts, emphasizing softness and sensitivity, flexibility and balance. Students of Master Yuan’s school learn a variety of disciplines, including Tai Chi, that are intended to impart not only the ability to defend oneself, but also to protect and nourish one’s spirit and vitality.

Though he had been studying martial arts for a few years beforehand, Corey’s kung fu training truly began in January 2008. He had been teaching English at a small university near Nanjing for the fall semester. During his Chinese New Year holiday, he decided to follow his interest in martial arts and visit one of the ancient homes of Chinese kung fu. That first dark, cold January visit left its mark of snow, sweat, and muscle pain, and the determination to learn more about Wudang’s unique art.

Corey is now part of the traditional program at Master Yuan’s school. It is a rare and demanding opportunity for non-Chinese martial artists to be immersed in the same physical and mental training that has been handed down through many generations of kung fu practitioners.

Having grown up in southern Anne Arundel County, Corey returns here every year to spend the holidays with his friends and family and save money for another year of training. For six weeks in January and February, he will be offering seminars in the basic health practice called Qigong. Qigong combines breathing, stretching, and meditation to strengthen and relax mind and body.

I would like to invite all of our students and others in our community to meet Corey and practice with him for the short time he is here in Annapolis.  You can then follow his studies next year right here on our site.

I’ve had the chance to try a few different kinds of exercise and methods for improving the body and mind. Soccer, PE classes, lacrosse, yoga, running, swimming, and other pursuits. My experience here in Wudang has helped me understand how vitally important maintaining your body is (I’ve come to think of it as rather like brushing your teeth- you feel better if you do it, and if you don’t, you won’t have much to work with a few years down the road). But so much of my training here is only tangentially martial in nature. So sometimes I wonder, “Why martial arts?” Couldn’t I be just as happy studying yoga or some other art that would keep my mind and body connected without the occasional traumatic punch to the face? Why do I instinctively feel that there is something special about martial arts?

I have quite a few answers for myself, but recently I have been thinking about a new way in which the “martial” bit of martial arts is crucial. What it does is it teaches, in very clear, black and white terms, the lessons of personal responsibility and acceptance. Under the supervision of an attentive teacher or master, the dynamics of a fight or sparring match (and the preparation for such)  strip away excuses and provide clear consequences. Getting hit stinks. You quickly learn to want to avoid that at all cost. But if you got hit, it is because you let your opponent hit you. Hitting you is your opponent’s job. There is no, “I wasn’t ready,” no,” That’s not fair,” no, “Can we do that over?” At the same time, you can’t dwell on the pain of the last hit. You have to accept it instantly and move on, or experience it again, and worse.

Under a good teacher or master, this acceptance of pain and responsibility spreads from the fighting scenario into daily training, and from there into daily life. If you got hit, you need to prepare better, train harder. If you didn’t train hard enough, it’s because you felt ill because you ate too much or didn’t sleep enough the night before. If you didn’t sleep enough, it’s because you procrastinated at work or school and had to stay up late to finish a project. You are %100 responsible for all of these things. At the same time, when once you mess up, you have to accept it and use it to get ready for next time, because next time is coming. There are other ways to learn these lessons, but the martial arts are teaching them to me in clear, non-negotiable terms.

Kungfu stage show by a local performance team

As I mentioned in my 5th International Wudang Taichi Tournament post, traditional martial arts are undergoing a period of change. Well, more accurately, they are constantly changing, not only from generation to generation or year to year, but from moment to moment. I will not try to define traditional martial arts, because to do so would be to limit and diminish them. But I can talk about the faces the art presents, the way it adapts to narrow niches in order to survive in the material world. Survival means that the narrow but popular and materially viable niche thrives and sustains the art so that a new generation can be trained in the deeper traditions.

From the stories our Master has told us, kungfu schools here in Wudang a few decades ago resembled nothing so much as street gangs. I speculate, but it seems the art was still reeling from a loss of relevance. Individuals were still trying to exist as they had when fighting was the daily test of the art. But in truth modern combat, in warfare and elsewhere, had no place for them. Still speculating, but I think the turf fighting between kungfu schools that our Master has spoken of was evidence of Wudang kungfu’s displacement. While a few individuals kept the spirit of the art, its true face was lost behind an outdated mask. Kungfu schools attracted few students and slowly dwindled away.  After all, why send your child to a school if the only future it offers is violence and eventual imprisonment?

More recently, traditional kungfu has adapted by taking on new appearances. It caters to entertainment, tourism, sports, and health. Each of these outlets are, as I said of the Taichi tournament, narrow but necessary expressions of kungfu. Movies and TV keep the art alive in the popular imagination, though they twist the image so as to be more attractive. Performing for tourists and teaching them for a few days at a time brings in a little much-needed money, and wins the support of political and economic leaders who also profit from the tourists. Making a sport out of the art provides an publicly acceptable competitive outlet, the same thing the old street gang kungfu schools failed to do. Kungfu also appeals to those who search for a well-rounded health practice, though this too is only a small facet of the larger practice.

But if the art only exists in these outlets, it is lost. No one of them (or even all of them together) encompasses the breadth and depth of the traditional teachings. Nonetheless, we who want to preserve the old ways must accept both the necessity of these outlets and the responsibility of maintaining the integrity of our practice. And hope that someday the world will once again value this hidden treasure.