Posted on

Usefully Useless

DSC_0003Years ago, Shifu sat my class down for a lecture on Daoism and culture, and in the true Daoist tradition of illuminating paradoxes, began by writing these words on the blackboard:

 有用无用

无用有用

Which means, “Useful is useless and useless is useful.” He explained thus. Imagine a can of paint. It is useful because you can paint a wall with it, but just sitting there in the can it’s not really serving any purpose, so it’s useless. Take the paint out of the can and spread it on a wall, it is now useful because it is serving its role as cover and color, but now that it is on the wall it can never do anything else, and is really kind of useless to you — you can’t take it off again and spread it anywhere else.

A few years ago, I came to realize that I was not being very welcoming toward short-term students passing through our school. I empathized with them, knowing that if I was a newcomer in a strange place, I would want the people already established there to be friendly and open to me. But my time was all so useful already — I trained many hours a day, and when I wasn’t training I was studying or resting up for the next training session. Every minute of the day was accounted for this way. All my time was useful to me, which made it useless for camaraderie and human generosity.

On the other hand, think of a stereotypical working family man. His time is useful to his boss, to his company, to his family, to his children — but kind of useless to him. When can he spend time on his own health and well-being? He can’t — useless

But sometimes I take some time out of my day and set it aside to be useless. After training sometimes I sit on the stoop of our dormitory and see if anyone comes and talks to me. I don’t always do this, and when I do it doesn’t always amount to much. But that time never fails to be precious in my mind. I have nice leisurely conversations, meet new people, deepen existing friendships, or have a few minutes to reflect on my day, or sometimes I just realize the weather is much nicer than I had previously noticed. My useless time ever proves useful.

There are certainly limits to this, and I think they are frequently defined by the boundaries of moderation and good sense. A useless half-hour watching TV might prove useful, provoking, and stimulating, but a useless 5 hours on the sofa thumbing the remote seems unlikely to yield any rich bounty.

We must strive to be constructive, to be helpful to others, to take care of ourselves, to cultivate our character and our connection with the people around us. But this axiom reminds us that we benefit by making room in our lives for potential that can be realized into new and real concrete good, and by accepting that when that solid usefulness fails, new possibilities are opened.

Posted on

X-men: Paradigms of Perfect Health

Colossus_and_WolverineAny description of life for me and my class would be incomplete without some small mention of hypothetical X-men questions. If you aren’t familiar with the X-men, I’ll refer you to the movies that have come out over the last few years portraying these superhero mutants from Marvel comic books, each with distinctive super-human abilities. If you are familiar with the X-men, you may have played this game yourself with some friends. You ask, “Would you rather have Storm’s powers or Rogue’s?” Or “Would you rather be able to teleport or be able to fly?” The question on my mind today is this: which is better, Colossus’s hard invulnerability or Wolverine’s seemingly infinite healing capacity?

Now bear with me. I know this question is pointless, except in that it parallels my own shifting sense of what is healthy. When I was living and exercising in the U.S., I used to think a hard muscle was a strong muscle. I suspect many people out there think the same way. However, others may have changed their minds, like I did. I have come to believe that a happy, strong muscle is soft. A hard muscle is one that can not relax. Either through bad posture habits or chronic mental tension, the muscle is always in a state of contraction. Often this hardness is even a sign of weakness: a muscle in the body that is too weak to do its job efficiently gradually locks down into a sort of brittle death grip. Hardness is a sign of blocked circulation and imminent failure, not strength. A healthy muscle has strength ample for the tasks that will be asked of it, and is able to relax when not called upon to contract. Because it is loose, blood, fluid, and nutrients circulate freely and easily within it and through it to other parts of the body, so it recovers from injury more easily.

I have also come to think about the immune system in a similar way. I feel like in the west no one trusts their immune system very much. We go to great lengths to keep microorganisms outside our skin, because we take it for granted that once they’re in they will do us harm. This seems to me to be a brittle and ultimately futile strength. Though we must be careful not to take in too many pathogens or toxins, accepting that we are permeable to our environment seems vital to me. The body has mechanisms that filter toxins, generate cells, and repair what is broken. We must trust in these sometimes, augment and strengthen them, and they will serve us much better than gallons of hand sanitizer.

Sound familiar? Kind of like Colossus and Wolverine, right? Not so much? Oh well, that doesn’t matter. What I think is important is spreading a more accurate idea of what a healthy body really is. If, when we train, we focus on how to strengthen and augment the body’s natural resilience, we stand a much better chance of weathering the health obstacles that life throws in our path.

Why do I ponder the relative merits of comic book heroes? What can I say — my class spends an awful lot of time together, and these days, who isn’t a nerd at heart?

Posted on

Self Defense – Health – Ovarian Cancer Awareness

I was at a meeting yesterday when I learned some things about women’s health that I believe is important to share with everyone I know and hopefully you will share it with all of the women in your life too.

ovariancancerOvarian Cancer Awareness

Every year over 20,000 women will get ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is NOT detected by a PAP Smear. Here though are four symptoms that if you have almost daily for a few weeks you need to see your GYN.

  • Bloating that is persistent
  • Eating less and feeling fuller
  • Abdominal pain
  • Trouble with your bladder

There may be other symptoms too. Check out SHOUT against the whisper on Facebook

This is Self Defense – Protecting Your Health

Posted on

Push-hands with the Elements

IMG_3548There is a common two-person Tai Chi practice walled tuishou, or push-hands. It seems, from what I have seen, that it varies in its details from school to school, but I hope the core practice is the same. Two practitioners stand and push one another, trying to maintain constant contact while looking for the opening to unbalance their partner. The secret, as far as I have grasped it, is the smooth and accurate transition from pushing to yielding in perfect synchronicity with your partner’s transition: when the other person is pushing at 80% power, you are exactly 80% yielding. When they are 30% yielding, you are exactly 30% pushing. One can not be always pushing or always yielding: obviously always yielding gets you knocked over, and always pushing seems strong but against a skilled opponent gets overbalanced. Clearly this requires great skill and sensitivity. There is no single “answer” that solves the “problem” each and every time, only by reacting well to the constantly changing situation does one stay on one’s feet.

In this way, push-hands becomes one way to understand Taiji. Taiji is the Daoist philosophy of ever-shifting opposites. This is the philosophy the physical practice of Taijiquan attempts to capture. This practice has in turn become known (somewhat confusingly) as just Taiji, or Tai Chi (See what we did there? Made a nice little circle).

So I bring this up in an attempt to offer, once and for all, my solution to what is known in my class as, “THE HAT QUESTION.” Shifu has told us, “You must protect your health, and so you must keep your body warm in the winter.” He has also said, “Don’t wear hats during training.” So the question is this: do we or do we not wear hats to protect our health in training? And I think the answer is Taiji. Taiji the philosophy, not Taiji the physical practice — although I guess exercise helps stay warm too 🙂

If we imagine the weather as our push-hands partner, I think it becomes clear. When we are at rest, say, in our room, we are in a yielding, receptive state. The weather, cold and harsh, pushes against us. Bundling up is the passive response to cold weather, so we must bundle up. However, to maintain balance, we can’t be passive all the time, sometimes we must stoke the body’s internal fires and push back against the cold. When this happens, we don’t need or want a hat —  it is a crutch that limits us and a blockage to the natural path of the body heat rising from our center.

The answer is that there is no single answer for every situation, hat or no hat. We must match our head covering to the weather and our own state of yielding or surging. Right now, are you more yin or more yang? But since Shifu is Shifu, and he expects us be fired up for training, we should be pushing against the weather during training and not wearing a hat. So no hat.

It’s funny to be writing about bundling up when it is just August and I am stewing in my own sweat every moment of every day. But the principle of trying to match my body and behavior to the circumstances still applies if I am trying to figure out if I should be strolling in a blessedly cool afternoon rain shower, or running for cover.

Posted on

Kungfu Attitude

I IMG_3555missed my usual blogging goal this last couple weeks because I was very excited to have my first ever visitor from home. I was trying to be a good host and put myself in the frame of mind of a newcomer, thinking back to when I first came to China and when I first came to my master’s school. I realized how much my own attitude has changed in the years since my arrival, how it has become a kungfu attitude.

When I first arrived in China, there were a number of things I had accepted as facts about myself. I knew my stomach had problems: I knew I would get seasick before my friends or a stomach ache if I got nervous. I knew that I got colds a few times a year. I knew that I got angry about the things I encountered in China pretty often. These and other observations were a minor appendage to my self-identity. I ascribed them to genetics, or just “that’s how I am.”

Somewhere along the line in the years since my thinking has changed. Part of it is the belief that it’s not just a matter of, “that’s how I am,” but that these are weaknesses that I can improve if I set out to do so. It’s a combination of accepting responsibility and raising awareness. I know that if I am wise about my dress, diet, and exercise, I need not get sick and my stomach is happy. I know that through meditation and attention, I can avoid the anger I used to feel. These things are in my control if I take control of them.

I am reminded of this time when I was a young teenager. I was walking out of a science museum in North Carolina with my Aunt, and I obliviously let the door slam in her face behind me. She yelled at me — gave me a really hard time for being rude and inconsiderate. I thought at the time, “How can you possibly expect me to keep track of who is behind me when I go through a door? That’s like trying to see the back of my own head!” But her admonishment helped me to realize that a higher level of responsibility and care were both possible and expected. That is a kind of kungfu attitude.

The kungfu attitude is summed up, to me, in a quote I heard from another student here at the school. “Chinese medicine does not ask why you are sick, it asks why you aren’t well.” A person has the potential to be perfectly happy and healthy, and any obstacle keeping us from that well-being is able to be improved upon by long-term effort. When I grasp this completely, I believe I will really understand kungfu.

 

Posted on

2013 Wudang Qigong Seminar

I am once again excited to offer a winter Qigong seminar at Balanced Life Skills while I am home in Maryland. I like to teach Qigong while I am home because I feel that it is a health practice that I can offer a student in a fairly short time, and if that student sticks to the practice they will find growth and improvement even without close supervision from a teacher.

What is Qigong? As I said describing it last year, 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.

The goal of this seminar is to provide parents and students in the Balanced Life Skills community and anyone else a balanced and self-contained health practice. Is your kid in Taikwondo class? Come do something for your own health while you wait. All are welcome.

The seminar will be held January 21st through March 5th, on:

Monday 5:15 pm

Tuesday 11:00 am and 5:25 pm

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= $20/week. Come try the first week free.