6H Blog

  B-B- Butt Patrol The idea of a "suit" is that you develop the slight tensile connection all over the body and gradually learn to move the whole body (with dantian as main control) with the so-called "suit". At first, the sheet-like connections are hard to feel, but once some of the simpler ones are developed, it's sort of a game to find and develop the areas of "suit" all over the body and to learn to manipulate the body by means of the "suit", rather than just using muscle like we normally do. Just to give an example of how the suit works, let's suppose that I want to move the curtains in front of me to the side, so let's imaging moving my right arm from left to right, in front of me. Generally speaking, the whole "suit" should be very slightly stretched or else there will not be a continuous connection to work with. So, there should be a slight connection from the fingers of my right hand, down the outside of the rig...

  The Way We Talk on the 6H forum I remember doing some exercises (as a group) with my first Taiji teacher back around 1982-83. He was a native-born Chinese man who had grown up most of his life in Taiwan. He would sometimes say something before exercises like, "Let's get the qi moving". Bear in mind, BTW, that this man had a western Ph.D. in geology and worked with an American oil exploration firm. My teacher's world-view, though, was very much that of a traditional Chinese man and he taught many things using the qi-paradigm, as best he was able (I can't judge from any personal expertise). Of course, we westerners would describe a preliminary warmup exercise vaguely as "loosening up", "warming up", or some such term, recognizing that there are circulation factors, muscle readiness, and other things in a "warmup". The same physical action of preparing the body via exercise can be described as a "warmup" in English and ...