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Reconciling Opposites

Trying to lower my stance with a straight back at May competition

It’s been well over a month since my last post. Our training schedule has been in chaos for the last month, and it just seems like every time I might sit down and write, there is a competition,  or a performance, or a meditation period, or a bad internet connection, or something else to get in the way. A change is as good as a holiday, though, and I feel refreshed and ready to go now that training in Wudangshan is settling back into normal routine.

The month of May and the beginning of June were fairly stressful, because it seemed like we were never going to get a real day off to recover from all the events mentioned above. Everyone in our class, I think, felt this tension building under the calm we are trying to maintain. The harder we tried to keep a lid on stress, the more rigid our emotions became, and that rigidity fanned the embers of the stress inside. The calm produced was not really calm at all, but a facade over inner turmoil. One has to somehow face stress while staying light and happy. This seems impossible; the two seem mutually exclusive. One feels one must either escape the stress or embrace unhappiness. But we can’t do either.

This balancing of seemingly mutually exclusive elements is a reoccurring theme in my training. From day one, coaches yell at us to sink our stances lower, but keep our backs straighter. This seems impossible. To keep balance, you feel that you have to stick out your butt and lean your head forward if you want to get your stance lower. Or the coach tells you to do the movements faster and clearer, but you are already going as fast as you can and you feel the only way to go any faster is to fudge the movements. But though you ask the coach again and again to choose one of the opposing criteria for you to focus on, he keeps you on both horns of the dilemma. And then one day, through long, hard work, low and straight becomes possible, and fast and clear becomes fierce.

Often in our decision making, and particularly in the processes by which we find our emotional response to stimuli, we are too lazy to seek an ideal answer. Instead, we try to determine which extreme reaction will give the best result most of the time. Psychology calls this heuristics, and it is a very real part of how the human brain works. These shortcuts save time and reduce the amount of thinking we really have to do, but they also oversimplify  our inherently subtle world and thus make our path through it clumsy and misguided.

I think this is one reason meditation is so important: meditation changes the way one values time and helps prioritize balanced thinking instead of headlong speed. By slowing down and observing with greater sensitivity, we can hope to face each challenge with the right calm-happy, lazy-driven, optimistic-pessimistic, black-white, free-disciplined, push-pull, fast-clear, low-straight, give-take, yin-yang response.

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Habitat for Humanity Build in Baltimore

Sunny and breezy, with beautiful mid-70 degree weather… this past Saturday was a terrific day to spend outside. Instead of hanging at the beach or lounging in a downtown coffee shop, I arrived bright and early at a build site in Baltimore City to partake in a house demolition and reconstruction job!
Volunteering for Habitat for Humanity has been a dream of mine, but taking off for a week to build a house abroad just never seemed feasible with work and school. Who knew that Habitat for Humanity has local chapters that allow you to volunteer for day jobs (about 7 hours) during the week and/or weekends? I didn’t!

That is, I didn’t know until I came across Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake during a routine internet exploration. Registration is a breeze, and the site offers information about lots of different volunteer opportunities. If you’re not interested in labor-intensive work, maybe volunteering in the office will suit you better! You can request to do gardening and landscaping, or offer up your muscles for power tool duties. Either way, as long as you’re 16 or older, there is a job available for you!

The local chapter, Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake, has about 6 different sites in Baltimore city that they are focusing on over the next few months. In addition to novice volunteers (like myself) at the sites on build days, there are Red Hats who are veteran volunteers that have gone through additional safety courses and commit to two build days each month, Americorps members who are on job assignments with Habitat for 11-month contracts, and site supervisors who are employed by Habitat for Humanity and provide volunteers with wisdom, friendliness, and tasks!

I had a WONDERFUL experience getting to know other volunteers and spending the day ripping out old windows and frames, and reconstructing the exterior walls! The experience was so wonderful that I have already gone online and  signed up for four more jobs over the next two months! If you, or anyone you know, have an interest in volunteering in your community, I highly recommend Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake.

“Volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. You vote in elections once a year, but when you volunteer, you vote every day about the kind of community you want to live in.”

—Marjorie Moore

 

 

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Illusions of Power

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.

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Kungfu Blog

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…

 

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Internal Self-Defense Part II

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.

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Back in Training

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.