day 252: finding the dantian

concepts:

• dantian
• kua
• reaction force
  

lessons:

• chaang (spear)
• chen pao quan
  

this Sunday was a continuation of learning the dantian. and funny enough, i think i'm starting to get a better feel of what's supposed to be going on. Ching-chieh returned today, making it effectively her first day of spear training. we also had a surprise visitor in Jay, who had shown up for some review work (he's learned spear before in his shaolin training).

chaang (spear)

the spear is proving to be a weapon of some remarkable ironies and curious paradoxes. for a weapon that provides such a large extension of yourself, it requires a surprising level of subtlety to achieve full control. for something that it is so light, it involves an intimidating level of strength. for something whose danger comes from the tip of its point, it actually is reliant on the actions at its base. and for all of this to happen, the external manifestation of the spear's actions has to come from the internal operations of the practitioner's body. which means everything comes from the dantian...and to follow the commentary Sifu has made over the past few months, the dantian must be aligned with the center of gravity, since this provides the stability necessary to connect the force vectors from the center outwards--to the ground, to the legs, to the arms, to the spear, in a manner akin to the center and dantian acting as the railroad junction conveying power from one to the other.

there's a military analogy that a friend of mine in the marine corps once told me: to be able to send projectiles downrange with maximum speed and maximum directional control (i.e., the maximum velocity vector) you must have a stable weapons platform. i guess the spear mandates that the practitioner provide a stable platform.

we spent the better part of the morning working on basics, singly and in pairs, trying to master the movements using the dantian. i'm starting to get better, but it still requires quite a bit of effort.

something i noticed is that improving usage of the dantian is also improving the kua. they seem to be connected, with improvement in one producing improvement in the other, and the application of one requiring application of the other. this is necessary to be able to transmit and convey the force vectors into the ground, and to then receive and communicate the reaction forces back up through the body. with the spear, whether or not you are doing this correctly is really obvious, because any actions at the base are multiplied at the tip, and so really intensifies the level of effort and focus that are required by the part of the practitioner.

Sifu mentioned that with the dantian, we have to imagine that it's curling and uncurling in synchronization with the spiralling actions of the spear, and that it's doing so not just in 2-dimensions or on a single plane of motion but instead in 3 dimensions in multiple planes of motion. in effect, we have to see it curling and uncurling so that it traces an oval positioned at an angle that varies according to what direction the spear is moving.

chen pao quan

we finished class with a quick lesson on chen pao quan. Ching-chieh and Jo-san had missed varying parts of it to date, so we spent time getting them up to speed. as a result, we went just a little farther in the form, but focused on reviewing what we've covered so far. this only took a few minutes, since by this time was pretty much the end of the class.