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 get diluted and become a shoulder exercise or a stiff-lower-back exercise. So, to practice this, we need a partner who pushes lightly against our palms until he can feel that he is indeed pushing against the solidity of the ground ... and then we have to attempt to expand our push, using the lower back's opening, while keeping the solidity of the ground in our hands, for our partner to feel. It's something that takes a little practice.

There is a saying that once a push starts, "the hands do not approach the body". In other words, as you start a push, you don't first straighten the lower back, allowing the hands to come closer to the body, and then you suddenly finish the push with your arms. That's an arm push. It's a common mistake. Push with the expanding ground in your hands, not with the arms.

Incidentally, while I prefer to suggest that people work from the feet, rather than the dantian, I realize that a jin push is more complicated that just a line from the feet, so I added a tiny indicator of the amount of jin force that comes from the middle of the body, directly across to the elbows and out the forearms ("elbow power").




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