Training Anchors

Training the martial arts, particularly Yin Style Baguazhang, can be very dry and very challenging at the same time. That's a recipe for making it very difficult to pay the full attention to the practice that you need to in order to develop well. With physically demanding practices that have to be done repetitively a large number of times, it is very easy to "check out" mentally and just let the process become one that is mechanical until the body points out that it's just too much to continue. That's pretty much the last thing you want if you want to get real development in this (or any) art. So how can you avoid it?

The easy answer is "mental discipline." Forging your will to your practice (one of the internal harmonies). Unfortunately, that easy answer is tough to act on when you're pounding out hundreds of repetitions of something and starting to feel the wear on your body that those repetitions bring or when you suddenly have all kinds of interesting ideas for what to do next, later, or in a way entirely unrelated to training while you're training. Those ideas come up often enough on their own and distract the mind even during training. Something I've found that helps in those kinds of situations are what I'm referring to as "training anchors."

A training anchor holds you to your practice. I'm going to take it as a given that unless you're an absolute Superman with an unnaturally disciplined and tamed will that during longer training sessions, you're going to check out sometimes. The goal isn't so much to prevent this naturally occurring process, which will become a distraction in its own right, as it is to pull your attention back to the training at hand. Like an anchor for a ship, which doesn't keep it fixed in one place, it holds a slightly drifting ship close to where it's supposed to be. We all know, if we train Yin Style, that we're supposed to be putting certain attention on several things at once while we drill: proper hand form, proper alignment, proper execution, proper breathing, proper body use, proper motion of the waist, proper speed, proper timing, proper standing, proper generation and emission of force, proper harmonies, proper etc., etc., etc. We also know that it's frickin' hard to do it the whole time and that our minds wander. If Jinbao was watching us train when that happened, he'd tell us that we need more spirit in our training and have to keep our minds on the task.

So when my mind wanders, I've found a number of "anchors" that help me bring it back to task. For me, one of the best anchors is the feeling that properly making the hand-form gives me. In the ox-tongue palm shape, it's the stress in the opponens (thumb) muscles that I can most quickly and easily turn my attention to when I catch it wandering. When I'm making a fist, it's on keeping it as hard as rock. From there, I can do one better and, since my mind is already on my hand: I set my new anchor as double-religiously watching my hands as I practice. For some reason, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on my hand opens the door to being able to focus again on something more subtle, perhaps the tension in my waist properly generating and emitting force, without the desire to close my eyes and just feel it happening. This same kind of attention works great for me during standing and turning pratice as well as during striking and forms drilling.

When I turn, I have massive amounts of mind-wander that sometimes (frequently?) overcomes my ability to think about the hand and settle everything into that first as a gateway to running through the checklist of proper form. Often, I find myself thinking over-much about my feet to the exclusion of attention on my upper body. When that happens, I redouble my effort, usually pulling harder with my thumb (which makes it hurt) to force my attention to that area until I reaffix my gaze and mind to my whole-body experience.

I don't know what anchors other people use and am curious, though. If you've got something to share, particularly something more effective than the "think about the stress in your thumb and then watch your hand" that I use, I'd love to hear it!