Just Bare With Me

This is one of those blogs that I always worry will make no sense. When I speak or blog about energy, chi, the 6 harmonies, it can be very difficult to find the right words.  And I think we all have very different vocabularies.  I also worry that I'm at such a rudimentary level in my exploration of such things, that I'm likely completely wrong about everything anyways.  And from one day to the next I'll be changing my mind about what I know...what I think...or what I think I know.  Lol.  So please, just bare with me as I drag you along.

I’ve been working on a couple things in Tai Chi that I’ve recently been able to connect directly to my Kung Fu. 

The first is that I've been trying to consistently keep my center lowered.  Initially, this meant keeping myself physically lowered.  Meaning nice bent knees...nice relaxed shoulders.  And when doing this I noticed a tremendous improvement in my stability.  But I also started to notice that sometimes, even though I might have small physical shifts up and down, I can still often stay grounded.  I think I've mostly used the terms grounded and centered interchangeably, but maybe that's not quite accurate.  Sorry, I started off on a tangent there that I'm not quite prepared to go on yet.  So we'll just leave this here for now.

The other direction I had been given was to focus on driving a technique from my hips, rather than simply using my arms/hands.  Even though my hands are the completion of the technique, they are not what initiates it or drives it.  It was very enlightening when I made this shift.  I realized that I was very disconnected between my upper and lower halves.  In fact, I learned almost immediately that when I brought everything through my hips, I seemed to shift off, physically, on a diagonal for some reason.  When I stayed true to the course I had set, it just seemed to be where I wanted to go.  After some further exploration, I eventually realized my Toyu stance was too wide, and I had been countering that by simply redirecting everything with my hands.  I was basically forced to disconnect from my feet/knees/hips in order to get the end result I wanted with my hands/elbows/shoulders.  But then, of course, I lost everything in between.  Only when I focused on remaining true to the connections within the 6 harmonies, did I realize that something was off.  I wasn't getting the result I wanted, but by working back, I realized the error was right at the start, with my stance.  Now I don't think this means that you can't shift gears or make adjustments when needed, but I do think it means that a technique will be that much stronger, that much more pure, if you can remain true to it from start to finish.

Anyhow, these things above will take alot more exploration.  But my original point with this blog was that these things came firing into my mind while working on the ball throws, double knife hands and the tiger claws in Lao Gar 3.  When I utilized what I learned above from Tai Chi, everything started to come together a little bit better.