Modern Vestments

Check out this slide show of a new show at the Met in New York.

Here is an image of traditional Daoist Vestments:

Chicago Art Institute

Here is an image from the show:

Creation of Laurence Xu & Mr Galliano, photo by Hiroko Masuike--NYT

Trivial and Not So Trivial

My executive assistant tells me that this sort of blog post I've just written below is very obtuse.  She says it is unreasonable to assume that my readers are going to try to connect all these seemingly disparate ideas.  Normally the writer does that work.  But perhaps readers will be inspired if I say that this type of obtuse post is a new type of puzzle, like one you might find in a daily newspaper, whereby readers have to stop and think about how it is possible that all these things are connected.

_________________

I've written a number of blog posts, and sketched out a few others in the last week, but could someone please explain to me how people finish things when the weather is so nice?

The weather in Boulder, Colorado, keeps trying to suck me away from my work.  Fortunately I have my early morning practice/teaching otherwise my guilt level about not getting work done would be off the charts.  I am considering becoming a night person and sleeping through the day.  I don't want to become a victim of good fortune.

Speaking of being a victim, I found some pants that I really like.  I can't even find the exact name (sorry) but they are made by Kuhl and are made out of stretchy material.  They are strong and comfortable and you can kick over your head and do the splits in them if you can do those things!  

I also wanted to comment on shoes.  I'm hard on shoes they tend to get torn up form all sides if I'm doing a full range of training in them.  The barefoot shoe movement has been fantastic.  I have for years and years been pulling all the junk out of my shoes and trying to find the flattest, toughest, lightest shoes I can.  I was very happy with Saucony-Hattori.  They are the lightest and most comfortable shoes ever.  

But I have also been wearing Merrell's, they aren't quite as comfortable, and they don't fit my feet quite as well as the Sauconys, but they are tougher.  They really hold up to a beating.  So I have to give it to the Merrell's trail runners.  They are a better shoe, if I consider the big three; tough, flat, and light.

The sad part of this story is huge numbers of people have been getting horrid cases of plantar fasciitis.  This actually has nothing at all to do with shoes, and everything to do with bad habits and overly enthusiastic marketing.  I went into REI about a year ago and the shoe guy was trying to sell me 'barefoot' shoes and was explaining how I need to run on my toes or something.  It was obvious he didn't know what he was talking about.  It is simply a failure of personal responsibility all around.  This is how the fashion goes.

Improvements in society, be they artifice, culture or freedom, can get taken away because people won't take personal responsibility.  Usually it is a bit complex, like it is in this case, it is partly the fault of individuals, part marketing, part distributors, partly just problems seeing how changes in artifice, culture or freedom will change behavior. 
It looks like the barefoot movement is on the way out because people are getting sued.  I'm considering buying a ten year supply because I've been waiting for these shoes for 30 years, and there is a chance they will disappear.   

Nia Sanchez, Miss USA!If you missed the controversy about Miss USA Nia Sanchez, you can catch up here.  Can I use the word retarded on my blog without offending people?  There is actually a movement falsely calling itself feminist that is trying to promote less responsibly for women.  It will fail, but it has the support of a lot of government agencies at the moment and a lot of universities too.  It can do a lot of damage before it goes down in flames.  Let me be clear, if you want personal agency, personal responsibility is non-negotiable.  If taking a set of actions has consequences that would be different if you took a different set of actions, you are responsible for that.  I mean, you can't have an anvil fall on your head unless you walk under it.  Someone might be trying to kill you, that doesn't make you somehow not responsible. 
That is the basic philosophy of self-defense.  You are the agent of your own freedom.  This is a new idea and I am grateful to Miss USA for helping to spread it.  

Gomde

After being on the road for three months and returning to San Francisco for just over a week, I headed up to Leggett California to join my wife Sarah at a Tibetan Buddhist Retreat Center called Rangjung Yeshe Gomde, or just Gomde for short.

Since I’ve gotten here I’ve had some time to work on my book everyday.  The retreats here taper off with the end of the September and we are staying around to help run the place for the next three months.  Hopefully this will give me a lot of time to write.  Lots of people have asked me what I’m writing about so I’ve conjured a proto-title: Obscuring the Martial Arts; how and why the arts have been cut off from their roots and what finding those roots reveals about contemporary practice.  It’s a start.

Anyway, Gomde is on the Eel River which is great for swimming this time of year and we have a canoe to paddle about in too.  We are sleeping outside in a big tent until things quiet down for the fall.  Hopefully by the time the rains start some private indoor space will open up.

 In this part of the country you have to really look where you are walking because you might step on a hippy, there are a lot of them up here.  I have deep respect for those highly evolved individuals who have developed the ability to manage incompetent people.  Blessings.

Besides my usual gongfu practice, writing and helping with whatever needs to get done around here, I’ve been playing my tabla drum and chatting with the Tibetan language experts and various Doctoral candidates in Buddhist studies.  Gomde is at the center of a project which is working on translating 84,000 Buddhist texts.  

I do plan to write about Tibetan Buddhism a bit.  I’m working up to it.  

Martial Arts Lifestyle

I often find myself, willingly I suppose, in conversations where the notion of martial arts is limited.  I'm speaking here about the expectations of whom ever I'm conversing with.  If someone where to randomly ask me, "Hey, what do you think martial arts are all about?"  I'd be like, "I could easily give you a satisfying definition of all the elements of martial arts in a 22 hour lecture format."  And after pointing loosely to the theatrical, the actual fighting skills, the religious, the healing, the asocial, the psycho-social, the sensory-somatic-developmental, the intuitive, the improvisational, the heroic, and of course the hermit-culture ways of thinking about the arts--I might elicit this response, "Oh, you mean, like, martial arts lifestyle! yeah, cool."Self-defense Style

Wait a second.  Is that what I mean?  Not to be confused with self-defense lifestyle, I suppose.  Or the tai chi lifestyle.  

In any case, it seems really important to get the fashion correct.  I wonder about the possible usefulness of leggings, explained here, there may be some health benefits, and I would think that wraps made out of leather, silk and chain might be the next big thing in urban armor.  And I came across this umbrella page too, not really my thing but moving in the right direction.

China Beat, the blog, just gave up the scene.  The final post was a bit unfocussed, something about Twitter and social networking having made blogging uncool.  It hurts a bit.  I mean, I don't where we are going!  But the idea that I might be a representative of some kind of lifestyle is intriguing.  

I keep hearing about people who don't have jobs right now, and I'm thinking, what is a job?  Is there such a thing as job lifestyle?  Back in June I moved to the Montclair part of Oakland, California. It is like a Daoist paradise up here.  The gentle fog floats down in the valleys and all I see is a sea of spiralling mists with scattered trees poking up from the abyss.  I can sit out on my luxurious deck and absorb the warm, fresh, quiet air.  It's not that I'm consciously avoiding being busy in my languid effortlessly inspirational purple mist, it's just that the rest of the world is doing something important.  (Even my wife is doing acupuncture and milking goats.)

The idea of "lifestyle," may trigger a bit of ironic caution in me but it is a potent force none-the-less.  I remember living in San Francisco in the 1970's when you couldn't walk anywhere without stepping in dog poo.  It was a constant struggle to survive.  Perhaps we cursed the dogs, or the dog owners, but there was an inevitably about it.  It wasn't until people with a gay lifestyle decided it was cool to pick up dog poo that the average person started to think, "Hey this is a whole group thing we're doing here, we can end this!" And now it's gone.  A change in lifestyle, is a change in the social-mind fabric of spatial rightness and wrongness.

So that's what I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about the martial arts lifestyle, how can I make it happen?  I'm not sure what the elements are yet, but I'll take a jab at it.

Fashion is big, fashion is communication.  People who see us need to know we are living the martial arts lifestyle.  A type of loose fitting but strong pants? A hat that can be manipulated for view obscuring, or to draw fire?  A "business" knife?  A think-twice-about-that pencil? Nearly barefoot shoes?  A swagger? Clothing that rips easily? or perhaps indestructible tyvek?  Short hair or long? a top knot? Stretchy and tight fitting clothes or loose and flowing?  And what kind of bag is best?  Is there a martial arts smell?  Look, it is already obvious to me when a person has a bit of mojo, if we make it into a recognisable look, how far away could consciousness raising be?  

Obviously it isn't just about fashion.  It is about practice.  And practice is about making time.  

Ah time, we all knew it would come to this.  Birth on one side, death on the other.  I have stumbled into a career of sorts, teaching martial arts.  My enthusiasm drives me even more than guilt.  I'm like a kid in a candy shop, an archeologist in a tomb, a mountaineer on an ice waterfall! And yet, teaching ain't easy.  The world changes around us.  I started out as an artist, I did ceramics at the high school of the arts and then I moved into dance.  I started thinking pretty early about how I could get the time to be an artist.  How I could be free to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to do it.  In the early 1990's before the Berlin Wall came down, there was a big fuss about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).  People were getting government money to make a type of art that was pretty offensive to a large swath of the tax paying public.  There was a lot of protest art being made, in general; I participated in a bunch of "no limits on what gets funded" performance projects.  For instance I danced naked at the LA Arts Festival and the Berkeley Art Museum, did the mud-people thing crawling through the financial district, weird public sex rituals, I'll spare you the details.  Fun stuff, inspired movement, iconic imagery, heck I don't know, whatever; but I came out of it thinking, "You know, I don't really see why people should pay for me to dance naked if they don't want to."  See I'm all for self expression, and breaking boundaries, and cutting edge, and protest, and offending the freaking pants off of people, but it just doesn't follow that government should be leveraged to that effect.  Some people argue that controversial protest art wouldn't get made if the government didn't fund it.  (Cricket sounds.)

Leg WrapsSo to make a long story short, if you want to practice, and have a martial arts lifestyle, you've got to get your money-time-eat-sleep-love-matrix in order.  Most people think they can show up to a martial arts class and just start learning martial arts.  But it doesn't work that way.  This is where I have to admit I have often failed my students.  The students who figure out how to practice on their own, usually have had some experience overcoming a profound obstacle to draw on.  The practice-every-day model that most music teachers try to instill is a good place to start, so is the meditate-for-an-hour-without-fail gig American Buddhists have going.  One would think that all the discipline we encounter in the world of sports and athletics would translate to a practice, but unfortunately these people are often motivated by a team, and even when they are deeply self-motivated they are often so aggressively goal oriented that the idea of practicing without a goal is too much of a leap.  The other problem with people who already have lots of movement training, dancers included, is that they are going to have to un-learn.  Un-learning is identity destroying.  To use George Xu's rather crude analogy, you have to un-pack your sausage.  Sausage, in this case, being a metaphor for muscles and minds conditioned to move in a certain way.  

In this Twitter-text(oid)-chillax moment, private lessons are all the rage.  Once upon a time, private students would get a time slot in my week, but now spontaneous flex-time is the norm.  Hey, I'm cool with it.  I'm thinking of making everything a private lessons.  In a way, I'm already doing it.  I mean, if you are going to a class, no matter what they call it, it's external martial arts.  Internal martial arts is taught one to one, period.  Even if I'm teaching a group, the instruction moves around the room, from person to person.  This, by the way, is another factor which disorients students who think they are doing exercise.  Internal martial arts might make you sweat now and then, but it isn't exercise in the sense of follow me, and now do twenty of these.  That's all a head fake.  Internal martial arts is about spontaneity and spatial mind flow.  

Okay, hold it right there!  I'm admitting I'm near the bottom and I don't know where we are going.  There are some very accomplished teachers out there who have fallen into traps.  Some become bitter, badgering their students for not being smart, or aware, or disciplined enough.  Some teachers of the internal martial arts claim enlightenment.  Some say you must do it their way!  Meaning that they try to make you feel guilty for going on a non-internal hike with your husband over the weekend, or a non-internal swim at the pool.  Yikes, it seems like there is this fence we're walking on, to one side it's all head-fakes and curriculum and goals and on the other side it's exclusive fidelity to a teacher's systematic, precious, transcendent ideology.  

Hey, at least I know where I'm not going!  That's where I got the idea for Martial Arts Cafe!  There are no rules yet.  If you want to come to a meeting of the Martial Arts Cafe send me an email and I'll let you know when it's happening next.  A space to fight, unlearn, drink coffee, and deliberately develop a martial arts lifestyle.

Throw Away Comments

I recently read The Yoga of the Yogi: The Legacy of T. Krishnamacharya, by Kausthub Kesikachar.  It's not my intention to review it here, I'm not qualified to comment on his organization of Yogic theory and philosophy.  I picked it up to learn more about the founder of modern yoga, who he was, his education, and his training.  It does cover that material in a terse way, but as an American reader of history, I would have benefited from a lot more inclusion of historical context and clues about how his relationships to specific people influenced his decisions to pursue knowledge.  Anyway please don't take my opinion as a review of the book.

The one thing that really caught my attention was that the author maintains a ritual practice of putting his guru's sandals on his head.  He also tells us that the tradition dates all the way back to the time of the Ramayana.  He frames this ritual practice around faith and devotion, but he also says that everything can be transmitted this way--meaning that because the practice is pure revelation, it transcends method.

What's that?  I can learn Yoga from putting sandals on my head?  But who even thinks about questions like this? They just throw these comments away.  Even people who do the sandal practice just talk about faith and devotion.  Only someone of the highest level would even think of suggesting such a practice.  

It just occurred to me that if my students were to put my old shoes on their heads they might learn a lot faster.  I have new found respect for Yoga.  After 30 years of martial arts practice I understand why and how this works, however; 1) none of my students would do it, 2) if I explained it, none of them would understand it, 3) if by chance they did understand it, I would have to kill them.

Which brings me to another book which I am also not going to review:  When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art, by Phillip B. Zarrilli.  I believe I wrote a review of this book some time ago and decided not to publish it.  The two things that interested me about Zarrilli's work, the theater connection and the China connection, don't get worked out in this text.  Too bad.  One thing I loved about the book was that he put everything he had to say about "Paradigms and Discourses" in the first chapter and outright tells the readers to skip that chapter unless they are a disembodied head stuck inside an academic box! Yes.

 On page 45; "[In] playwright Bhasa's version of Karna's story, Karnabhara, which illustrates the divine gift of power (sakti) which requires no attainment from the practitioner.  When a messenger gives Karna Indra's gift of an 'unfailing weapon whose sakti is named Vimala to slay one among the Pandavas', he asks, 'when shall I gain its power (sakti)?'  The messenger responds, 'when you take it in [your] mind, you will [immediately] gain its power.'"

What? No hard work? No training? This is correct, this is the highest level.  Do you really know what it means to put sandals on your head?  Do you really know what it means to put a sword inside your mind?  

Stuff on my Mind

Here is a woman in Australia who, like me, understands that "core strength" is a big mistake:  Edgecliff Physiotherapy.

I learned about her from Josh Leeger who also turned me on to Exuberant Animal.

Also from Josh I got to Philip Beach's site describing Meridians as Emergent Lines of Shape Control.  Here is a pdf of a paper which explains the theory.  This made me think that meridians don't really "exist" they are trained reactions which disappear the better your internal practice gets.  Which explains why Medical Qigong is the lowest level of qigong, the meridians are most apparent in sick or dying people.  It also corresponds well with the Daoist notion that the meridians are lines of fate, lines (and points) which provide a window into either freedom, or robot-zombie-like predictability.

Speaking of fate, here is a rationalist approach to Astrological Horoscopes!  I think the author nails it in his own quirky way.  My own experience following a Daoist Auspices Calendar for several years taught me a whole bunch of unexpected lessons.  Like that their is a lot of freedom in letting an external force (in this case words on a page) decide for me whether to go out and party or to stay home and study.  When you're free, you can waste a lot of time and brain power trying to pick a day and time to get a hair cut, or buy new shoes, or work in the garden.  Just looking at the Daoist Calender externalized all that strategizing and weighing of options--which freed up a lot of time and energy.

I've been reading Gustavo Thomas' blog and watching his videos, great stuff!

Look at all the stuff canceled in Tokyo.  We have found lots of stuff to do here anyway and people are happy to see us.  I had very fresh raw pork liver the other night, with beer, yum.  I'm happy to report that Tokyo is still full of great deals on delicious food, especially lunch.  For example at a sushi boat restaurant, if I eat as much as I possibly can it only costs about 8 dollars US.

We went to a Kabuki show.  My main comment is that the actors have to practice a whole lot of stillness!  How anyone could miss the connection between stillness in the theater and stillness in martial arts I do not know.  Oh, and the costumes are amazing.

Check out Akira Hino, Jazz Drummer, martial arts teacher, dancer.  Here is his Video Channel.

Japan is so fashion conscious, it is impossible to be here and not think a lot about clothes and shoes.  I hope I can find some time to work on making my own because that seems like the only really satisfying way to stick my head down that well.

Daniel Mroz published a book on martial arts and theater, check it out!  Now I really have to work on getting mine in to print.

I got the book Impro to Rory Miller at Chiron and he loved it.  We are still awaiting a review.

Check out Tokyo Probe. Beer.

Tunnel Vision and the Perception of Density

Understanding the nature of perception is profoundly important for the study of any movement art.  The martial arts have been particularly vulnerable to the modern dictum that, "what you see is what you get."  But perception just ain't that simple.

Kinesiologists and their fellow travelers have uncovered a plethora of experimental evidence that motor development, perception, and imagination, are all intertwined and interdependent.  For instance check out this upcoming workshop blurb from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen:

The senses are our organs of receiving information from ourselves and from the outer world.
Perception is the psycho-physical process of interpreting sensory information. This process begins as potential and develops in response to experience. The dynamics of perception explores how we filter, modify, distort, accept, reject, and use sensory information to bond, defend and learn.

In order to perceive clearly, our attention, concentration, motivation or desire must actively focus us on what it is we are to perceive. This aspect of perceiving, pre-sensory motor focusing, patterns our interpretation of sensory information.  Without this active focusing our perception remains poorly organized.

Sensory information comes to us through multiple channels.  Touch and movement are the first of the senses to develop. They are registered throughout the whole body and establish the baseline for future perception through the sensory structures of the head: mouth, nose, ears and eyes.  Sensory information from these structures is transmitted via the nervous system through cranial and spinal nerves...

[This workshop will explore:]

• The perceptual-response cycle.


• The developmental sequence of the senses and perception.


• The mouth as the first extremity to grasp, release, measure, reach, and withdraw.  It sets the foundation for the movement of the extremities (head, tail, hands and feet).
  The mouth and nose as the first initiators of movement of the head and spine.
  The inner ear as it registers vibration, movement, auditory tone and body postural tone.


• The eyes as they are dependent upon all the previous senses and, the role of the eyes in helping to integrate the other senses into more complex patterns.
  Cranial and spinal nerves from a cellular and nervous system perspective.

The perception of space outside our bodies is thus built on a foundation of both movement and feeling.  So for instance if I look at a tree, or just for fun, a guy named Hulk, I'm going to be using my eyes to determine his size, shape, motion, and density.  90% of that is not what I actually see, it is happening in my imagination.  My imagination happens to be very accurate for this task.  Even though Hulk's back is not visible to me, I've incorporated it into my visual comprehension.  If one of Hulk's legs was obscured by a trash can my mind would still imagine the leg and would be quite surprised if suddenly the trash can was gone and there was no leg there.  A very large part of this imaginative process develops through touch.  Hulk's density is frankly not visible at all, our perception of density is built on our experience of touching, squeezing, biting, lifting, pushing, bouncing and poking similar objects.

Embodiment is the new catch word being used to sell everything.  The packaging on my toothpaste tells me that it will leave me feeling more embodied, so does the flier for 25 Hour Fitness, and the meditation class down the street.  All of this embodiment hoopla is just the perception of density from the surface of the skin inward. The opposite of "Embodiment" then is disassociation.  I don't really know what disassociation is, but I'm guessing it is a failure of imagination.  Many drugs, especially the illegal ones, cause some kind of dissociation which probably temporarily damages the basic functioning of the imagination.

In Chinese internal martial arts, Tai Chi, Xinyi, Bagua, we take a different route.  I suppose we could say, "We do Embodiment inside out!"  The higher levels of practice are all about the cultivation of emptiness which is the feeling of zero density from the skin inwards.

As we discussed above, density is perceived through various forms of touch.  Every inch of the body is capable of perceiving density.  The feeling of cultivating Qi is hard to pin down but at least part of what we call "feeling qi" is the perception of density from the surface of our bodies outward.

If you just do a quick glace around the room, you probably aren't thinking much about density.  But now find an object like a vase or a can of deodorant, ask yourself, "Can I feel the density of that object by just looking at it?  Can I feel its density from a distance with my belly?  How about with my elbows?"  Most peoples imagination can do this quite easily.  When a cat is stalking its prey in a forest, it keeps its eyes on the prey but it is testing the ground for density with each step.  If you walk into a darkened room your perception of density suddenly goes on high alert so that you won't ding your shin or otherwise smack into something solid and unexpected.  That perception seems to reach out into space.  This is what we are doing when we practice internal martial arts.

If you hit someone, basically you are trying to make them feel more embodied.  The more they feel the pain inside their body, the more effective your strike was.  The more their perceptive faculties are focused inwards, the less they have available to find a way to hit you back.  So the opposite is also true, the more my faculties are focused outwards, the better my opportunity to fight.  This is true for the entire surface of my body and also for my ability to imagine out into space.

Along the same line of thinking, stare into the center of this image.  After a while the lines on the edges will start to straighten out.

This happens because we basically have tunnel vision all the time, it just seems like the whole world is in focus because our imagination makes it so.  But if you are in a fight for your life with an adrenaline surge, part of your imagination shuts down and you get tunnel vision.  This Wikipedia article suggests that there are pharmacological reasons for this, in other words they don't call it a loss of imagination.  But in fact it is both.

Theater ritual and martial arts are closely intertwined.  Masks have been used since ancient times to create altered states of consciousness.  If you want to know what it is like to experience the tunnel vision associated with being attacked, just put on a mask with narrow eye slits.  Mask work done with tradition and sensitivity has the ability to profoundly change the way we move and see.  It can change the way we feel and perceive both space and time.  Most traditional Chinese martial theater and ritual was done with elaborate spacial perception altering costumes and either heavy mask like make-up or actual masks.

Shaolin Nike Shoes

My feet appear to be growing a bit as a result of small changes in my practice, so I'm considering leaving behind the Feiyue shoes I've been wearing and trying something new.  If someone at Nike is reading this and you have a pair of size 10.5's of the  "Wushu Shoe" (say that three times fast) please send them my way.  Until then, perhaps my readers can share a link in the comments section to their favorite workout shoes, or even a quick review.

The Laundry Warrior

The Laundry Warrior is the correct and original name of a new movie which just came out under the bland title Warrior's Way.  This is a ground breaking film and I loved it.

Had I known it's original title I might not have been so astounded by the detail and beauty of the fabric and clothing in the opening scenes.  This is a film about beauty.  The sets and props are incredible.  Really! The film is also about fashion, the deepest subject there is.

Toward the end of the film it occurred to me that everything can be viewed as a rough allegory of the relationship between North Korea, South Korea, and America.  The role of America is played by a cowboy-circus group, they are very happy but regularly traumatized by gangs of other cowboys who are criminally evil.  The split between North and South Korea is twisted and complex, an inter-family feud among assassins over a baby.  The screams of the dead are trapped in the hero's sword, but the audience never sees or hears them.

Watch the clips here:  http://www.filmofilia.com/2010/11/18/4-new-the-warriors-way-clips/

The fight choreography is good and the love interest part of the story is as good as it gets.  Did I mention that the clothes are amazing?  Oh yeah, the fights are mostly with swords, a little old-school Zatoichi technique and a little slow motion computer animation like the movie 300.  The Koreans can all jump really high, especially out of water, it is almost like flying but they seem to come down hard.  This style of fantasy fighting is cool and can really work but they really should consult me on the nature of momentum.  The best fighters in the world, cats, do fight in the air!  But cats must spiral and twist.   Cats use rotational momentum combined with maximum internal power to fight.  The films fighters rely too much on force generated from turning around a vertical center-line.  Folks, if you are going to spend millions of dollars on an international project that employs people from Korea, Japan, the US, New Zealand, India and Australia--then I demand perfection!

Now to the important stuff.  Every little kid knows that the outfit, the kung fu or karate uniform, is a key component of the art.  I often hear parents tell me, "My son really wanted to do kungfu and begged me for a long time, but when I finally signed him up and he started taking classes I realized what he really wanted was the outfit not the hard work!"  Kids get shamed about this pretty early.  They are told that the uniform is just a vain symbol and that what really matters is doing forms.  Later they shame you about that and tell you that it's not the forms it's the applications and techniques that matter.  And if you make it that far you are likely to get shamed about those too, sparring and competitions are what really matter!  And if you make it through all that it's all about philosophy and health.  It took me many years to realize that the observations of little kids were correct all along. The power is in the outfit!

I resisted teaching with a uniform for at least ten years.  When I finally got one it made a huge difference.  Wearing a uniform helps get the teacher's charisma out of the way.  With out a uniform some kids may admire me right away and want to learn from me because they want to be like me.  But with a uniform it isn't about me any more, it is about the art, and everyone can relate to that.  Duh.

Adults think they are more savvy.  They are less likely to be 'fooled' by an ethnic costume.  But growing a beard doubled my credibility teaching at the college level.  Imagine what a couple of inches in eyebrow length could do?  What you wear and how you wear it has a profound effect on teaching.  Clothing conveys ones degree of seriousness, whimsy, toughness, or irony better than anything which can be said or written on a white board.

Readers may be thinking, dude, what about skills?  What about the movie you were reviewing?  At the higher levels of internal martial arts techniques and applications barely matter because whatever you do is unstoppable.  And eventually you realize that for self-defense in a surprise attack situation you can not expect to see, hear, feel, or know which way is up.  The five senses are likely to be seriously distorted.  That's why the old masters said, "Just do the form."  That's what you can count on, and if it is a well designed  form it will work for attacks from any direction, it will work in the air and it will work on the ground.  At the higher levels of internal martial arts structure, mass and even fluid, the inanimate aspects of the body, just don't matter anymore.  The body becomes like an empty suit moved by the spirit.  The spacial mind turns off all the controlling impulses of the gross and fine motor movement, and the whole body become like someone else's body.  Like a suit of chain-mail armor, or like a burlap sack (with arms and legs) filled with rice.  In the end the body becomes like clothing.

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Check out these cats fighting in the air with rotational momentum and internal power!

Dress Like a Master

I'm really getting into fashion lately.  I'm particularly interested in things with rough texture.

First off, I've been wearing Swedish Military Issue undershirts.  They are crazy, tight, and made out of a net like heavy twine designed to create maximum dead air space.

For a while now I've been wearing Feiyue shoes (I wrote about them, I'm certain but I can't find the post, could it really be lost? Quick history: Made first in France, copied by Communist Party, bought by Tiger Claw, USA).  They are flat so that I can feel the ground, they are dirt cheap ($14 a pair), and light weight.  I don't worry about wearing out the bottoms the way I would on expensive shoes, and I keep four pairs in rotation.  They also look good.  The problem is that they don't absorb moisture well, so my feet tend to get wet on the bottom.  That's a real problem when it gets cold.  In addition, during an hour of standing meditation on a cold morning at 5:30 AM, even my feet start to freeze.  Ice man I am not.  But I've solved both problems.  I ordered wool inserts for my Feiyues.  Warm and fuzzy, good grip and not squishy.

Finally I bought this thick, rough, heavy cotton shirt from St. James.