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Fong Ha’s Yiquan is characterized by a focus on the ability to listen. A general guideline in our two-person practice of push hands (tui shou) and free hands (san shou) is don’t collide, don’t separate. This kind of skill is another way that our Yiquan is more than a martial art. It is truly an art of life. Ha Sifu says that Yiquan is a small way that can lead to the Way. The ability to listen is especially difficult for strong people to grasp. We can get away with so much just pushing the world around. We don’t have to listen to get what we want – or so we think. Usually, we end up doing so much damage getting what we want that the end result is misery and suffering for us and those around us. Physical strength is great, but, like steel, it is greater when tempered.
When we listen, we can understand. When we understand, we can take appropriate action. Things go well for us when we take the appropriate action. When we can’t listen, we can’t know what to do. We can’t know what the situation requires of us. How many situations in your life would have gone better if you could have stayed connected without colliding?
Another important aspect of our Yiquan training is the focus on developing a soft power. We do this by not struggling. Struggling implies resistance. Resistance means you are going the wrong way. So, what’s the difference between struggling and just working hard? The difference is in the world’s response to your actions. Struggling is when you continue to act despite a negative response. Hard work is action to which the world responds positively. It might be active and dynamic, but the world responds favorably to it. Appropriate action is pulled out of you by the world around you. If your kid is in danger, though you may sweat and grunt to save them, the action is not forced. You feel as though you have no choice with right action. You just do it. You do, of course, have a choice. You always have a choice. But, when Spirit moves us, we just find ourselves acting. Nearly all artists, athletes, etc. describe a sense of whatever it is that they are good at just flowing through them – that’s it. We call it being “in the zone.” Bruce Lee said once that after years of training his hands and feet would move of their own accord – same thing. We must sense our selves, then the world, process that sensation, and act. That is the sequence. If it gets all jumbled up and we are trying to find ourselves while trying to act…we fail.
The more we stand in stillness, the more comfortable we become with ourselves. The more comfortable we can be in our own skin, the more we can focus on the immediate reality before us. When we have to manage all of our insecurities we are distracted. If we feel confident and sure of ourselves, we can respond to our environment from a position of strength rather than weakness.
With our Yiquan practice we are doing more than just cultivating martial power, we cultivate a sense of self that pervades our entire lives. Fong Ha absolutely embodies these principles. It is inspiring to see the benefits of such a practice in such a wonderful person. I have a real problem with know-it-all guru types hawking magical powers. Fong Ha is the exact opposite of this. He, despite his world-class martial pedigree, is always in the “beginner’s mind.” Ha Sifu begins with listening – with a question. When asked a question, he works from the ground up to as high as you want to go. That is power to me – real power. To create from scratch each and every time is adaptability. That is the power to be.
Yiquan, especially that of Fong Ha, is more than a martial art. The founder of Yiquan, Master Wang Xiang Zhai said: “what cannot lead to comfort, happiness, and gaining strength does not deserve to be called martial art.” This about sums it up. Most martial arts focus on learning techniques and ways of dealing with particular situations. There is nothing wrong with this other than the time you spend doing all of that would be much better spent cultivating your own innate power and ability. Yiquan is the pursuit of not only great martial prowess, but also a good life. Don’t get me wrong. I know as well as anyone that most arts address this idea. The difference between Yiquan and other arts is that this is the main focus, rather than a side note.
Zhan zhuang (standing) is the main practice of Yiquan. It makes up about 80% of our training. The main benefit of standing practice is much like that of meditation – you get here and now. The way to incredible power is not hidden, nor is it anything mysterious or far away. We aren’t looking for the supernatural. We are trying to leave the subnatural behind. We do this when we cultivate stillness and equilibrium. Only the real remains when we are still. When we are standing still we are soaking ourselves back in. All the energy – mental and physical – that we devote to the memories of the past and the fantasies of the future comes flooding back to us in stillness. This can feel like something magical at first but soon you realize that it is just you. You remember your power and your self. This is the source of Yiquan’s power. It helps us be better people. Not better by some arbitrary standard – better by our own standards. No one can be you better than you so why let someone tell you how to be or how to move or how to think. Yiquan is a way of individual freedom. There is no room for fixed movements.
Most of the problems people have as individuals and as societies can be traced back to the inability of people to know themselves. People come up with laws and rules out of fear. We are afraid that we won’t be able to handle what comes up so we try to make rules to anticipate our reality. Laws and rules can serve the purpose of clarifying things as stop signs do for traffic. They can also come to be tools of oppression and interference like “hate laws.” The Dao De Jing tells us that foreknowledge is tinsel decorating the Dao and is the first sign of ignorance. In Yiquan we don’t rely on our ability to anticipate future realities. Rather, we cultivate our ability to sense and engage the world right here and now. To do this, we strip away rather than add. We strip away all the useless crap we’ve told ourselves over the years to reveal what is. Again this is a very Daoist principle. The Dao De Jing says the Dao is a process of stripping away day by day while learning is a process of accumulation day by day.
“Don’t move the body – you train your Qi. Don’t move your mind – you train your Spirit.”
This is a proverbial saying that Fong Ha brings up at his workshops (in Austin anyway). It is simple and to the point. I’m not entirely sure where the quote is from. It may be from Wang Xiang Zhai, I don’t know. I like it because it captures the essence of years of training and wisdom in just a few lines, as do all great and enduring proverbs. The idea in Yiquan is that in stillness we can achieve the greatest cultivation, Da Cheng another name for Yiquan is Dachengquan, which translates to the way (quan) of great achievement, or perfection (dacheng).
There is a lot of confusion regarding the concept of Qi in Yiquan. Wang made many comments critical of the mystification of the martial arts using concepts like Qi. He also, however, made many comments using Qi. I have seen no quotes of Wang’s where he says Qi doesn’t exist or that it is a useless idea as many of his descendants seem to imply. Qi is simply the understanding of the fact that the world we live in is a connected whole. It is a continuous field of energy. This is what we know today in physics. Now, this theory has and continues to be used to promote all kinds of stupid ideas and delusions. You have to be able to sort out the good from the bad, which is what I believe Wang was telling us. Any theory that isn’t readily demonstrable and observable is weak. Chinese endeavors are guided by the notion of Dao, the Way. The Dao is the commonest of denominators. This means that the more powerful your theory, the more prevalent and obvious it is. We have the same idea in the west. A major part of our scientific method is that experiments should be repeatable and clearly demonstrate the accuracy of our theories. Yiquan follows the notion of Dao. Wang simply asked us not to focus on the rote memorization of forms and theories. He cited many exaggerations and misuses of traditional theories to warn us of what happens when we get lost in our ideas and forget about the immediate reality before us.
Stillness allows us to achieve great skill because it is in stillness that Qi gathers. In this sense we could look at Qi as potential energy. As we stand in postures only moving enough to keep upright, the system is very quiet. The activity of the mind and body are turned down to level that we can comprehend. We can observe the interaction of mind and body when we are still. The interaction of mind and body is the definition of Qi for a person. So we’re literally cultivating this energy in its potential form by standing still. Likewise, when our mind is still we aren’t adding any thoughts to the ones naturally bubbling up and our Spirit can be calm and grow stronger. When our system is idling it can repair itself – much like when we are sleeping.
Remember – Yiquan is the art of “doing nothing and achieving everything”
A Meditation on Meditation
Lots of people say they have a hard time meditating. They tell me that they have a hard time quieting their mind. Quieting your mind is not meditation. Quieting your mind is quieting your mind. My favorite author, Alan Watts puts it perfectly:
When you realize that you have come to your wit’s end, you can begin meditation. Or meditation happens, and that happening is simply the watching of what is, of all the information conveyed to you by your exterior and interior senses, and even the thoughts that keep chattering on about it all. You don’t try to stop those thoughts, you just let them run as if they were birds twittering outside, and they will eventually become tired and stop. But don’t worry about whether they do or don’t. Just simply watch whatever it is that you are feeling, thinking, or experiencing – that’s it. Just watch it, and don’t go out of your way to put any names on it. This is really what meditation is.
So, meditation is not about doing anything. It is about stopping doing everything, well nearly everything. You sit or stand or walk and stop adding to the situation. Stop adding your commentary. Stop adding your predictions of what will come and stop adding your analysis of what has past. Just stop. That’s it. There is nothing special for you to do. There is nothing really special you can do. You are what you are and that’s it. In meditation we stop adding on so that we can experience what is here all on its own. What is here all on its own is our natural state. In this natural state we are in tune with reality because we are more clearly ourselves. Being more clearly ourselves, we are able to accurately understand and interact with what’s going on around us. We put on all sorts of filters and blinders to protect us from things we think are bad. We ignore natural filters and feelings to get things we think are good. In meditation you stop putting on all these apparata and experience the world as directly as you can. Meditation is stopping. You get still by stopping moving. Getting still is not something added on. It is something stopped. Meditation is stopping. It is stillness.
Your mind is going to chatter. That is what it is. You can’t use your mind to calm your mind any more than you can use a fire to cool something down. Your mind is going to chatter because it is a source of information. All those thoughts and memories are neurons firing off in your brain. You feel those neurons. All of your senses are just neurons firing. We feel thoughts just as we feel anything else. Quieting your mind is like numbing your foot. Disconnecting from a source of information doesn’t change anything. It just puts you more in the dark. In the deepest states of meditation I’ve ever reached, the mind is still right there chattering away. It is feeding me information, calculating – all the things it always does. The difference is that it is relegated to one of three hundred sixty degrees rather than the whole of my experience.
Most people suffer because they have confused the map with the terrain or the menu with the meal. What you think and what you say about the world are not the world. They are what you think and say about it. When you take action based on information that is a skewed perception of reality rather than reality itself, you screw up. Screwing up causes chaos and confusion. If you follow reality, even if you do something that seems like a huge mistake, at least you can learn from it. If you are bobbling around living in your head you have no bearings by which you can navigate. You are, in every sense, lost. Meditation is a way home – back to reality.
