Hand To Core, Core To Hand

As I was recovering from my back injury, I was doing a lot of visualization work, and I noticed something in Da Mu Hsing 4 that I want to explore further.  For the time being, I simply need to get these thoughts on paper before they're lost.

During the second bell block sequence, we end with the ridge hand, then slide-step into a horse stance with a right palm and a slight push.  Please bear with me....I know that terminology can sometimes create confusion.

As I continued visualizing the movement, I found myself imagining my ridge hand remaining stationary while my body moved around it, almost like Bagua circle walking. I found this really interesting because I'd never thought about this section in that way before.

Once I began thinking of the hand as remaining fixed while the body moved around it, I started wondering what application might fit that idea.  Without getting too complicated, I imagined a ridge hand to the neck where the hand maintains contact as I move around the opponent (sticky hands?), followed by a palm heel, or even just a push, from behind.  This also reminded me a lot of the triangle stepping we do, where we continue moving around our opponent while they remain relatively stationary. I know there are several other places throughout our forms where this same idea seems to appear.

Discussing this further in a one-on-one, I realized I was only scratching the surface.  If I start thinking about expansion and contraction during these types of movements, it becomes even more interesting.

Typically, we expand by launching a strike outward and then contract by drawing everything back into our center.  In these cases, we still expand by extending the strike, but instead of contracting by withdrawing the arm, we contract by bringing the rest of our body toward the point of contact.  Rather than the hand returning to the core, the core returns to the hand.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this (and have since also experimented with it in my training), and I'm not even sure it translates well into writing.  But it feels like a different way of thinking about expansion and contraction and I think there's something much deeper here than I first realized.