Scribbler Does Yang Cheng Fu

OK Folks. I promised it. So here it is: me doing the first third of the Yang tai chi set. The initiated will be able to see the weaknesses and mistakes (which I myself can see), but my form has "stabilized" into the state it will be in for a while. This is what I do every morning (three times) after I warm up with twenty minutes of Chi Kung exercises.

The outfit I'm wearing is my Easter Sunday outfit. I had my son take this video while we were there for family dinner. There's a strong tradition among some Chinese wu shu masters that they never wear uniforms, and only train in everyday clothes. I've worn theses clothes to the office, so that's fairly everyday.

Of heptads, rebirth, solar energy, tai chi and everything

It's a special day today. I'm buzzing with enthusiasm. Now lots of people – especially in our youth-oriented culture – would say I'm completely nuts about being happy it's my 49th birthday today. But I am. I've been looking forward to this day for weeks.

It all has to do with cycles of seven. Rosicrucian teachings say that human life unfolds in cycles of seven. First of all, there are seven days in the week. Then the years can be divided into seven periods of 52 days each, and then there are cycles in our lives consisting of seven years each. Anthroposophists and Waldorf teachers and parents will be familiar with the latter. Well... I have now finished the last year of a seventh cycle of seven. Something very "complete" about that. And what makes this year, and especially this day, so special?

Look at the star illustrating this posting. That star can be found in the Occult Philosophy of the Renaissance mystic/philosopher/magician Cornelius Agrippa, along with explanations of how to use it to calculate the planetary influences of a given day and hour. Every week starts with the day of the sun (Sunday), followed by the day of the moon (Monday) and so forth, following the lines of the star. The first hour of Sunday is the hour of the sun, followed by the hour of venus, following the points of the star clockwise. There are 24 cycles of seven hours per week, bringing you back to the hour of the sun in the first hour of the week. So, obviously the first year of each cycle is a solar year, and the first cycle of seven years is the solar cycle. So... I have gone through seven cycles, meaning this new cycle of seven is a solar cycle. This is the first year of that cycle, so this is the solar year, And this is the first 52 days of that year, so this the solar section of that year. And it's the very first day!

I am reborn today!!!

The wind is in my sails! And I know I had better take advantage of this, and use all this energy wisely, because times of such positive momentum are precious. Honestly. I feel an electric buzz all through my body and mind.

It was thinking a few days ago that I needed to do something special to mark this occasion, when I got a serious brain wave. And here's what occurred to me.


As my loyal readers know, I started relearning the Yang tai chi form about five weeks ago. I say "relearning" since I learned a short version of the Yang form in an Experimental College class at UC Davis, back when I lived in northern California. First of all, that was twenty years ago, and I didn't really remember much of it anymore. And I don't recall – if I ever knew – what particular style of Yang tai chi my teacher taught, but it wasn't as rigorous, nuanced, or detailed as the form taught on the videos of Erle Montaigue. Essentially, I had to learn it over from scratch.

Well, two days ago it occurred to me that I was only two moves away from finishing the first third of the Yang Cheng set, which is considered to be a short set in an of itself. I realized that if I busted my butt and learned the last two moves, I could do the whole set. That represents an accomplishment to me. Five weeks of daily work to not only regain something I could do in my late twenties, but to even learn it at a higher level than I could do it back then.

For the first time, this morning, the first day of the first 52-day cycle of this first year of the second solar seven-year cycle of my life (hope you could follow that), I performed my new Yang Cheng Fu tai chi set. It was still dark outside, and my family was still asleep, but I felt vibrant. What a wonderful birthday present to myself!

In a few weeks, once I've ironed some of the nastier wrinkles out of the form, I'll have my son make a video of me doing the routine, and I'll upload it to the blog.
I'll have a big party next year to celebrate my 50th, but that'll be for everyone else. This year's the important milestone to me.

Different Strokes...

I've had a change of heart. The Carradine DVD got me turned on to the idea of doing tai chi again (see previous post), and it was cool trying out some of the moves his sifu teaches. I even learned some nice warm-ups and stretches I never knew before.

But...

My years of being a dedicated martial arts student, although over a decade ago now, left an indelible imprint on me. As I tried to practice the form every morning, I kept coming up with more and more questions. "How do I get from this posture to that posture? Is that accompanied by an in-breath or an out-breath? Which way is the left foot pointed at that moment. How are the hands held when you do that motion." So, on the weekends I would pop the DVD into the computer and study what the sifu does as well as I could. And I got frustrated. Not enough clarity. I had an approximate idea of how it's done, but not close enough.

I kept looking at video clips on the internet of Chen style tai chi sets. Beautiful. Smooth. Stunning explosive strikes (fa jing) that erupt out of slow deliberate motions. I got some pointers, but... still not enough.

And I realized there were some things about Chen style that I just couldn't understand because they seemed to contradict what I'd learned in Yang Style.

Then one day I stumbled onto this video. And I was immediately drawn to this man. (First of all I love the Australian accent, since I had a close "mate" from Australia for several years. But that's beside the point.)

His name is Erle Montaigue, and once I looked into his background, it turns out he's a martial artist's martial artist. Mr. Montaigue is a proponent of teaching tai chi as a serious (and potentially deadly) martial art, as opposed to tai chi-as-new-agey-fitness workout. Now I have the greatest respect for Arnold Tayam. What he does on Carradine's DVDs shows that he is a serious martial artist, but once I started watching Montaigue, I realized that this was the genuine article, and the Carradine material was designed to tap a certain market, which doesn't necessarily consist of serious martial artists.

What I like about this video, as opposed to the Carradine video, is that it's so un-Hollywood. Just a guy standing in front of a camera carefully demonstrating martial arts moves and explaining vital details as he goes along. This is what sitting in a martial arts class is like. No slick production values like music and a pretty set. Nope. Just tai chi instruction. If that's what you're there for, that's what you get. And very precise instruction at that.

I started doing the Yang Cheng Fu set again, adding one move a day. It was a bizarre experience when I executed Push Left and then flowed into Ward off Right for the first time in twenty years. Synapses fired in places in my brain I forgot I had synapses. My body had that sensation of getting on a bicycle after not having ridden one for years: that odd but delightful feeling of familiarity.

I cruised on over to Erle's website. Can you believe he has over 300 instruction DVDs for sale? Not to mention free e-books. And an interesting marketing strategy. A great deal of his instruction DVDs are available on his website in Windows Media format. If you can't handle the small image and the compression distortion, then you can buy the DVDs for £ 33 each. That's steep, but you have to consider that he gives you the opportunity to see them for free if you want. They'll mail anyone all the clips (in Windows Media format) of the Yang Cheng Fu form for free, so I ordered it. (You can see the whole Yang Cheng Fu set on his website, too). I know very well that a year or two from now I'll want to shell out full price for the DVD of the Yang Lu-ch'an form (the older, more difficult Yang style), but that's fair enough. Good marketing strategy. And good karma, too, since he's not selling worthless trinkets.

I've learned something important about myself. If given the choice of how I want my tai chi, make mine a serious martial art.

Goin' to the Dogs... Chinese Style!

Folks, it's confession time. Remember how enthusiastic I was about The Five Tibetans? Well... er...

You see, there I was: out doing some family shopping with my wife and our one-and-a-half-year-old son during my long vacation at the Christmas holidays. I was wandering down an aisle of the drug store, pushing a shopping cart with my adorable son in the seat (the mention of the adorable son is supposed to elicit sympathy, you should realize), idly looking at this and that while Szilvi grabbed diapers, body lotion, whatnot. I was just minding my own business when all of a sudden I was ambushed, and ruthlessly attacked by a DVD, and it twisted my arm behind my back until I went to the cashier and bought it! Well,... Ok, wasn't quite like that. The end cap of one aisle had a small pile of discounted DVDs on it, in which I found a Hungarian-dubbed version of David Carradine's Tai Chi for the Body. It was ridiculously cheap. So I said to myself, why the heck not. I watched the odd episode of Kung Fu when I was a kid. Carradine's been practicing martial arts most of his life. He must know what he's doing. So I bought it.

I wouldn't have dared to attempt learning tai chi from a video, if it weren't for the fact that I practiced aikido for eight years and did some cross-training in tai chi during that time. When I was a brown belt (second and first kyu) I decided that tai chi would help improve my technique. I took a class in which I learned a 24-move Yang-style form. It took me days of searching videos on the internet to find the form I learned, because there are so many, but when I was just about ready to give up I finally discovered it. If you look at the top video on this page, you can see the form, although I could never do it as smoothly as this guy. It did really improve my aikido, too. I can't resist a little digressive anecdote. At maybe the second or third tai chi lesson, the teacher asked me if I practiced aikido. When I confirmed her suspicions, she smiled and said she could see that I moved like an aikidoist the moment I started doing tai chi motions. It was like I was speaking a foreign language with a heavy accent.

Anyway, I thought I could learn from a DVD because I already had plenty of experience with such aspects of martial technique as moving from tan tien (center), extending chi, coordinating movement and breath, shifting weight from leg to leg, and relaxing while in motion.

When I got it home I popped the disk into the laptop and was seriously peeved to find they didn't keep the original English-language version on the DVD. (Usually I can buy any Hungarian DVD of an English-language film, and the original is still available in the menus. Must be a copyright issue.) But then I started doing the exercises, despite the fact that the voice-over was in Hungarian (instead of Mr Carradine's dulcet tones), and I really started digging it.

Carradine is at the front of a room with three other people behind him: a very young woman who moves like a beginner, a middle-aged woman who has more grace and confidence, and a middle-aged Asian man, who is suspiciously smooth. It turns out that the Asian man is Arnold Tayam, Carradine's sifu. He's a martial artist, ki gong master and physician, with decades of experience in each. As the video rolls, the camera concentrates less and less on Carradine, and more and more on Tayam. Star power sells the DVD, but Tayam provides the quality content.

The presentation is very well thought out. It starts with stretches, then moves on to stances. After that it demonstrates simple techniques that you can repeat over and over. In the end, it takes all the little pieces you learn throughout the lesson, and ties them together into a short Chen tai chi form (a routine, or as the Japanese would call it: a kata). I haven't started working on the complete form yet. I'm still practicing all the little pieces and stances.

I was so jazzed about learning this stuff that I began doing it the very next morning for my morning routine, and... well... I dropped the Five Tibetans like a rock.

Why? Well, for one, I just find getting back to tai chi to be much more satisfying. Slowly flowing through those graceful figures while deeply pulling air in and out of the lungs all the way down to the diaphragm is much more harmonious than doing what amounts to repetitive glorified calisthenics that just move from one position to another and back again. Despite the fact that the Tibetans have a positive effect, they become a boring chore after a while.

And another is that one has to weigh the positive effects of the Tibetans against the negative. I began noting sensations that struck me as symptoms of repetitive motion syndrome. The downward dog to upward dog motion was making the carpal area of my right hand sore. I've seen ads on the Internet for cork blocks with handles one can hold while doing those yoga poses to avoid this stress, so it must be a common problem. It also struck me as odd how much counter exercise was needed to strengthen the lower back muscles to withstand the stress of the Tibetans put on them.

It's true that I felt good after doing the Tibetans, but it was a sort of heart-pumping, muscles-throbbing, lungs-gasping kind of feeling. With the tai chi, after 45 minutes of smooth movement and deep breathing I have an energized "electrical" feeling. And it seems to last longer.

I may or may not experiment with the Tibetans again in the future, but for now I want to do something that's more interesting and fills me with a sense of cosmic beauty. Now pardon me while go reel some silk.