6H Blog

  Keeping the intent from the ground in the hands It's fairly easy, once you've been shown/taught to make a jin path from the hands to the feet. The idea is to accept, for instance, a slight push against your hands and allow it to immediately sink and be at your feet so that the pusher is pushing against the ground. I've seen so many people try to force a connection to the ground, though, that I have to caution that it's very easy to do a "ground path" jin wrong. So, let's look at the first picture below where I'm standing there and manifesting a jin path from my feet to my hands. Pretend, for a moment that I am just a right-angle carpenter's square and there is a path from one end of the square to the other, supported by the structure of the carpenter's square. That's really all that we're doing. The trick is to keep the straight line of force from the feet to the hands while extending the body ... but not allowing the jin path to...

  "Take the Slack Out" A number of Chinese and Japanese martial arts have old sayings about "taking the slack out", so the idea is pretty common in the Asian martial arts that use ki/qi as their major paradigm. Although there can be some health implications in "take the slack out", the most important idea has to do with forces. If I am going to push an object, using the ground as the source of my force, that force can only be optimally propagated through my body if I don't have any slack in the body structure. Similarly, if I pull something, just imagine a rope and note that to pull something with a rope, there must be no slack in the rope, in order to maximally transmit the pulling force. The forces going up from the ground through our bone structure to our hands are called the Yang qi and those forces are really from the 'solidity of the ground', aka the Qi of Earth. The Qi of Earth (gravity) is also responsible for the downward pull on o...

  CAST IN RESIN, MOVING AGAINST WATER, AND SO ON The idea of "cast in resin" is the same basic idea that has been discussed a number of times in this forum: if you arrange your mind and body, without moving, to get ready to move into any given direction and, the imagination (if it is realistic enough and has real intent in it) is enough for the subconscious mind to trigger the involuntary muscle systems that we use in so much of our movement. The general procedure for "cast in resin" is to stand in a balanced position, one foot forward, and without moving the voluntary muscles, feel yourself getting ready to move forward even though your body is imaginarily only held in place because you are inside of one of those clear, plastic resin cubes. Don't make any physical movement, but just get your body ready to move as a whole unit (just like you are pushing your body through water). Don't actually move, but try to realistically feel that you are ready to move fo...

  Reverse Breathing for Elastic Store: Basic Clapping Example There are a lot of posts on reverse breathing in the archives, if you search for them, but I want to expand on the post I made a few days ago in order to give an example that generally applies to the whole "Store and Release" mechanism: https://www.facebook.com/groups/349208698527821/permalink/3407766482672012/ Let's use the example of a simple clap: open the arms out to the sides and then clap the hand together in front of the body, arms more or less straight. Start with the arms straight, but mostly relaxed, in front of the body with the palms almost touching. In this position, the tissues across the back, down to the lower back, and the tissues along the outsides of the arms are under a light pre-tension. Begin by inhaling and slightly pulling in the abdomen, and let the resulting increase in superficial tension go to the already slightly-tensioned back and outer arms area. Let that breath tension across ...

  The "Balloon-Suit" We all have internal/imagined models for the things that we do, so I thought I'd share the general visualization that I use for movement with qi, jin, breath, and dantian, just as a matter of perspective and in case it helps anyone. The qi-tissues of the body are nominally the involuntary-muscle and fascia tissue systems that are more or less under the control of the subconscious/unconscious mind. In other words, generally speaking, we usually learn to control these systems, to the limited degree that we can, by imagining scenarios accurately and thus getting our subconscious mind to activate the proper involuntary-muscle/fascia system. For one example, I can imagine that I am at a beach on a hot day, laying with my hands slightly under the warm sands … and my subconscious will begin to accommodate this scenario by loosening the involuntary-muscles within the vascular systems of my hand. A second example could be my receiving a push to my forearm and ...

  A Qi Perspective 11/12/2020 I tend to think of the body's functional "qi" as various normally-unconscious functions involving involuntary muscles and controlled mainly by the subconscious mind. For those of you that think of "qi" as being some unseen etheric "force", well, yes, that was part of the original postulate of the qi-paradigm, but the major functional and important workings in the real world are as I put it in the first sentence. It's the physical part that we can actually work with, test, discuss, reproduce, etc. A nice example to think of, in terms of a physical qi demonstration, would be picking up a box from the floor and placing it on a table in front of us. A western descriptive visualization for most of us would be a study of the muscles and bones and joints that are used to pick up the box and move it. In reality, there are a multitude of other systems, controlled by the subconscious/unconscious mind that assist at every time i...