Snow Circle

It's rare here, and the picture is ugly (no less because of the truck that ran over my circle last week and made it all warped and bumpy or for the uneven snowfall due to my circle being rather near a tree), but I can start my "a circle for all seasons" project with my first picture of a snow-circle. It's snowing here today with the snow actually sticking, which happens once or twice a year typically, usually with less snow than today, and so I took the opportunity to go turn in it, setting aside my dissertation for a bit while I toiled in the cold and wet. At the end, I took a picture of my circle. Here's the result:


The goofy left side is where the truck's massive-assive tires ran through it, leaving ruts that I've tried to pound down a little bit and wrecking some of the hard-earned symmetry of my circle. Still, I now have a snow-circle photo. I'll see about creating an album on here over the next year: a circle in all seasons. Maybe I'll follow through on that, and maybe I won't take time to take the pictures.

Letting it Get This Way

I got the humbling again today. Usually, the humblings of this magnitude are reserved for when I work out in the presence of Matt or Jinbao, but this time, it was from my (thesis) advisor. He dressed down my dissertation again, which didn't bother me so much -- he wants it better and will get it that way, and he wants me capable of producing it on my own. I'm thankful for that.

The part that does bother me is that apparently, as has been indicated to said advisor by several of my previous teachers, nearly all of my coursework over the past six years as a graduate student has suffered from a consistent feature that is quite undesirable and is the primary shortcoming of my thesis now. Instead, though, of correcting that in me and garnishing in me the ability to present the material in a way that is acceptable, the practiced approach is to never tell me about the problem and to wait for my advisor to address it, rather harshly, some years later after the habit and design are well built into me, as if I should have realized by now that it was an issue by some incredible feat of self-examination. It is definitely something that could have been corrected, and proper habits could have been nurtured and developed instead of the ones I now have and am fighting to change.

What bothers me most is that it was let go for six years, never addressed before now, though clearly complained about. How did it happen that this much time went by simply allowing me to do things in a way deemed problematic? Hell, I think it was even, at times, encouraged as identifying my "style" or "voice." If this was a job, then certainly I would have been reviewed before this. If this was my education... oh wait, it is my education. Hmm....

What does that have to do with training Yin Style, i.e. what justifies its presence here? It makes me grateful for the corrections and efforts that are plainly extended by Matt and Jinbao (primarily) as well as others to correct me (and others) as well as possible as soon as a problem is evident. With my education, I'm left feeling a bit cheated, but with YSB, that's not a problem because, though tough, Matt and Jinbao don't let us slide (I hope... I'm a little mistrustful of such things for the moment). Thus, this is a call to everyone who has ever had their little egos smashed in seeing how far they have to go in Yin Style and how hard it can be to get there (and even how ugly they might be making it): at least someone is telling you, so be thankful and take the suggestions (not as criticism) to heart!

So, to anyone that wants to teach me: you can be tough on me any time. I know you're doing it because you want to see me reach my potential. Just don't do me the discourtesy of letting me continue to suck for years without mentioning it to me, or if you do, do me the courtesy of not being pissed at me when I'm not what I should be.

Stuck

Well... I'm stuck. Before I talk about being stuck, I want to talk about my circle again a little.

I haven't walked on it since the truck hit it. In fact, I haven't walked on it in months, turning either on something paved or indoors (usually in the small, unheated room we have with the windows open to get the pseudo-outside experience). It was and is a mud hole. Currently, it's a very bumpy mud hole. I did plod around it a few times to get the new feel of it. It's going to need some work before it's workable again, but it's not as trashed as I thought it was on first examination.

So... stuck. My training is only kind of stuck in that I usually have less than an hour a day that I can give to it (often enough much less). Still, there is training every day. My dissertation is my training, mostly, and it's not training me in bagua. Still, significant progress is being made on that, so that seems well enough.

What's stuck is my frigging back, or more accurately, my sacrum. It feels stuck, all the time, and has for months. This has the direct result of limiting mobility, limiting training intensity, and causing pain (sometimes severe and surprising), all of which cut into my training terribly. I've been working trigger points, and many of the symptoms of the back pain seem to abate but I'm still stuck. Chiropractic essentially hasn't helped, but it doesn't mean I haven't found the right doctor. Incidentally, that's a component of the "stuckness:" even a fair chiro used to be able to make my low back pop, but now it just stubbornly resists (and twinges with pain at the forced effort to get it to release something). Stretching seems to help some symptoms but not others. Meditating and releasing is the same way. The prevailing "stuck" feeling and subsequent shooting pains (particularly any time I lean back and to the left) persist. I wake up in a fair amount of discomfort every morning, and silly things like rolling over in bed hurt tremendously (compare that with doing squats, which doesn't hurt at all). It's most frustrating, to be sure.

I hate to be negative on here or anywhere, but honestly, it's starting to bug me that nothing seems to help this issue. In fact, I would rate myself as worse than I was six months ago despite a variety of expertly recommended and diligently applied tools that should help the matter. I desperately want to kick my training up, using what spare time I have around my thesis, but this problem has been and continues to hold me up severely. I've had enough, and I'm ready for it to be over!

Sigh.

Attachment and Change

All things change. That is a primary lesson of the Yijing and a primary (philosophical) lesson of bagua. As a result of this uncomfortable truth, attachment is to be let go of or never formed, which is an easier feat to accomplish academically than in reality, like so many other things. Today, fortune has brought to me a change and the opportunity to feel an attachment in a real way, and so I should be grateful. I think I'm sad, though.

We have a couple of trees in our yard that have needed to come down for a while... these not accessible to my sawing powers. In fact, the one I sawed down last summer by hand has decided to mutiny and is growing back as a vibrant and eager bush, so that needs dealing with too. That brought the tree people. Money convinced them to take the trees down. Doing that job the way they do things led to the destruction of something I am apparently quite attached to.

This story doesn't start properly with trees, though. It's starts with rain, lots of rain. It has rained here at least five out of seven days for a month, usually hard. Late last week, for instance, it varied between raining steadily and pouring heavily for around thirty hours straight, followed by some drizzle for half a day and more rain that next night. The river, viewed on my drive to work, which is lowered (via the dams) in the winter was full to its banks. It's rained so much that despite the years-long drought we've been suffering, almost everyone I know wishes it would just stop raining. Rain has consequences less dire than flooding, which due to our mountainish terrain hasn't been a serious problem for the most part. One of those consequences is mud.

I've talked about mud before and how mud ruins my circle. It becomes slippery and dangerous to walk on, besides being an utter mess, our soil being essentially 121% red clay. As everyone knows, clay of any sort, when it gets wet, gets soft and pliant. Pliant enough so that when a big, heavy truck drives across your well-tended, hard-earned circle, it FUCKS IT UP BIG TIME.

So that's that... the circle is in bumpy ruins with tire-tracks all through. What can be done? Dunno... I probably should turn more and think about it.

Growing into TKD

I was at a meeting for work yesterday and I ended up in a conversation with a fellow in his mid-50's that was explaining to me, for whatever reason, the virtues of staying active as we age. He indicated to me that he still runs regularly, hikes and backpacks with a heavy pack somewhat infrequently, and practices martial arts. That piqued my interests, but I didn't really ask anything about the martial arts initially because he was on a bit of a roll there on his soapbox of staying fit. Eventually, he got to the part where he encouraged me, which I knew was coming sooner or later, and he told me that based on my build, in his estimation, as I got older, I might find similar interests and enlightenment, and "who knows, I might even be drawn to the martial arts, like taekwondo," which is apparently "a good one" and what he practices.

I didn't say anything about it except that I thought it was neat that he did martial arts and that it was extra impressive at his age. He went on about it a couple of more times before the meeting commenced and our conversation died. I still didn't say anything about it, choosing to divert the conversation by focusing on his running instead. I guess, though, I have the good fortune of looking forward to growing into a phase in my life when taekwondo will be what I'm after.

In the meantime, I'll be practicing my YSB. This week's project, at least for the first half, will largely be the blocking strikes of the Lion System. Coming up with combination drills with them is quite a bit different in some ways than it was for the other striking methods. I figure that's part of their nature, though. Here's to exploring (in what time I have since my thesis advisor reinstalled "The Fear" deeply into me)!

Becoming the Rooster?

While I was practicing my lying step drills for a while today, someone came up and started watching me. After a bit, the woman said: "You look like a rooster." I took this, immediately, as a compliment on my technique and was excited to have heard it. Then it sank in how ridiculous that comment would be to someone who had no idea about Yin Style Bagua, and so I stopped what I was doing to ask her if she had meant her words the way I had taken them. Immediately, she clarified the situation by saying, "I wasn't saying it to be mean. I grew up on a farm, and that looks a lot like how roosters move." I was excited, to say the least. After all of these months of hard work on those techniques, someone accused me of looking like a rooster.

Other news in training has been, again, that it's not my dissertation, so it's been limited. What there has been has been focused almost entirely on the Lion hooking strikes for the week, doing various drills with them, some of which I thought were rather inspired though surely basic. This week is to follow up on last week's rather weak attempt at working the chopping strikes. The main thing I got out of last week's lesson was that it's a shame I didn't have more time to put into the chopping strikes because I think they're probably really effective. I'll address that later with my new-and-improved training regimen, to begin (and to be explained) once life gets back to "normal."

Holidays

The holidays are a difficult season to get training in, so this is a post not so much about amazing dedication as about squeezing a few drops out of what moments we have. In the two weeks, we've had a nearly constant stream of visitors from afar visiting us, one coming in essentially on the day that the last are leaving, and entertaining, maintaining a semblance of a working life, and all of the holiday hustle and bustle have combined nicely to make it seem like every moment that could be set aside for training is filled with something else. I even have some kindly shared notes on ideas for training when time is severely limited, and blocks of time to get through those exercises are as rare as blocks of time for proper training.

What have I done? To avoid being "weird" in front of company, almost every time I turn a corner to go into the other room, there is some form of a stepping drill or small changing drill applied with my hands and arms, and more importantly with my mind. Stepping is a particular favorite, in fact, at the moment. Every time I get the chance, I practice some form of exercise, particularly ones to build and maintain flexibility and strength, for whatever small number of minutes is provided to me. Every night as I go to sleep, I vividly envision practicing techniques in as as varied a way as I can imagine and try to create a real, tactile sensation of those practices and how they would feel "in action." It's been a two-week period of stealing minutes and seconds and making of them what I've been able to.

While I had hoped my brother coming into town for the holidays would provide an increase in my access to a training partner, as it has in the past, it starkly has not this time around. He spread himself, in my opinion, too thin socially, and so the amount of "company" around us when with him is even higher, when he's even around. I don't go out, and he goes out almost daily, so that didn't work out the way I had hoped. As I've said before... one of these days.

Today was nice. I was able to steal a block of time long enough to work up a good sweat with some basic drills, a few hundred strikes, and almost fifteen solid minutes (!!!) on the circle. I'm looking forward to getting back to my long-turning days, though I don't know when they'll be. I'm stealing minutes not just for training, as I said, but also for work, which is in a vastly more intense phase right now than before. Since I think it may be the case now, I think I've just found a couple more minutes to steal, so a few intensely intent-filled runs through some forms is apropos. Hopefully everyone else's holidays have been good to them in terms of the usual meaning as well as finding chances to find training!

Rising Yang

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the most yin day of the year. That means today is the day when yang begins to arise again. Our small group just got together and did some decent training to celebrate... well, actually because it's Monday, the day we usually get together to train. Rising yang or not, it was cold, which was in some ways nice and in others not so nice.

Here in the nearly deep South, we don't see many days a year that are below freezing, even for the low temperature. Tonight, however, it was quite a bit below freezing. Actually, it was 23 F while we were training in our little outdoor pavilion, enjoying the sight of the mighty warrior Orion in the (roughly) Southern sky while we stood and practiced. I would love to believe that I felt the rising yang energy of the world while I was turning there (with four shirts on), but I didn't. It was cold. Still, we put forth a decent effort in the pillars and had an all-around good night, though not as physically demanding a workout as we pulled together on Saturday afternoon, when it was quite a bit warmer (I was wearing one shirt... with short sleeves) and wetter. The weather here is good for teaching us about changes like that: warm and wet on Saturday, bitter and frozen on Monday. Still, there was training.

As much as I'm enjoying learning about my tolerance and ability to adapt to the wintry weather, I must say that today's promise of another cycle of the year, yang rising more to my liking, is welcomed. Working up the will to train hard this time of year is more of a challenge, and my work requirements increase while the available daylight decreases. As spring blooms and invigorating warmth returns, workouts become more accessible, frequently more thorough and demanding, and much sweatier. Still, there are two or three hard months of winter training ahead, and due to seasonal inertia, the coldest is most likely yet to come. On the other hand, just the thought that today had a few more seconds of daylight than yesterday is already warming me up.

Perhaps, if I think about it long enough, I can find the deep connection between the lessons of the solstices and the changes of the year and the changes that form the foundation of baguazhang. I don't believe contemplation alone is going to be sufficient, though. Getting out in the weather, cold and usually wet now and, at another time, hot and desperately humid and training those changes, one strike to the next, one step before the other, each tiny aspect of gradual transformation, will teach me more properly. I call to everyone training in this art and everyone that wants to learn from its lessons, then, to get outside in whatever you're presented with and embrace the change and see what it can teach you. Then, on days like today, come in and enjoy a nice cup of hot cocoa when you're done!

Changes

Finally, after what has seemed like almost three months of stagnation, I feel like I'm moving forward. First, my advisor set a fire under my ass, and so my dissertation is coming along better. That's well and good for my life but bad for my training. Second, I'm most definitely getting stronger. My proxy saber and I are getting along at least 3-4 times a week, and particularly with my right hand, I'm noticing rather dramatic increases in my ability with the tool, although I'm still nothing to Carl "Hungus." Third, my back seems to be letting up somewhat. The "stuck" feeling has remitted tremendously in the past week and a half thanks to an odd combination of serendipity, yoga, and highly salubrious bagua exercises courtesy of my friend from across the Pond. I've been stretching on my own quite well, my wife wrangled the living crap out of me in a rather uncomfortable position that I thought was going to kill me or maybe break me but seemed to "turn the key in the lock," and then I suffered unbelievably at the edge of my abilities through a couple of the health-building exercises of Yin Style, which led directly to my back crunching around and eventually letting go! The "stuck" feeling has, for the moment, left me, although the musculature on my left side (primarily my iliacus, psoas, gluteus medius, multifidous, and serratus posterior inferior -- looking these up helped release some of their anger) is very knotted and fly-by-wire. Still... my training can now, finally, resume at the level that I had this summer, at least as long as I pretend that my advisor will still be happy if I choose that road. In theory, though, a quarter of a year later, I feel stronger, not weaker, and moving forward, not stuck.

The moral: do your exercises regularly and within your capacity, not pushing yourself too hard too fast, and anything is possible. Also, sometimes you have to burn through your injuries, not overprotect them. That balance is difficult to find.

Changes

So since admitting to myself a recipe for healing and following it rather determinedly, though not flawlessly, and since implementing even more information about dealing with the lumbar spine and hips, things have been coming along. I'm better than usual, although things are still different, still feeling "stuck," but they aren't holding my training back in any case -- not nearly as much as my dissertation and family-in-for-the-holidays are.

Training is changing too, mostly with the weather. In the past few weeks, we've trained together out in temperatures well below freezing, in sleet, in snow, in the frustration of people not able to meet up with us, and in the excitement of new folks joining our ranks. I'm convinced that training outside is an amazing thing for the body, as I used to loathe being outside this time of year, claiming that I was more of a warm-weather kind of person, but now I find it entirely bearable to endure being outdoors for long periods, if at least mostly properly dressed, and over short periods, I hardly notice that it's cold except in my fingers. A similar turnaround happened for me two summers ago when training outside every day all summer long -- despite loving warm weather, eventually it would be hot enough and humid enough for me to write off on being outside. That situation is no more. I think it's important to live this way too because it just feels all unnatural to remember how sensitive to heat and cold I used to be and how strongly I rejected those natural phenomena.

More specifically, within my training, I've decided I need to learn to root better. I'm moving fairly well, my agility and strength are increasing, my understanding and application of the techniques is seeming to get slowly better, and if I had to isolate a single aspect that is holding me back most in applying the techniques, I would have to guess that it is in my rather limited ability to root myself. When experimenting with strikes the other night with a partner, I noticed that he was able to apply a sudden pushing force to me that would cause me to step back several steps. When I'd repeat the experiment on him, he'd step back one or two, but so would I. I established clearly through that experiment that my root is still too high, or it's not set, or some other terminology that means that I can't root myself well. Since in VT this year I heard the admonition "get heavy" about 1100 times and since throughout my entire martial arts life (extending back well before baguazhang) I've had a problem with achieving proper and heavy base (as my BJJ friends have happily exploited for years), I think I've been in denial of the fact that I never properly developed this particular skill.

When I stand calmly, say before turning or standing practice or just during qigong or while trying to relax, I can palpably feel "sinking qi" flowing like a wave down my body, almost from head to feet and sometimes below. I think that's what I'm looking for, but I believe I need it in a more dynamic sense. When I turn, I can get and stay low, but I'm now thinking there is more to sinking the qi properly, particularly while turning, than just getting and staying low in my stance. When I strike, I sometimes feel fairly rooted, particularly during static striking, but when adding stepping, I only feel somewhat rooted. I think I should be rooting into my legs at the conclusion of every step, every strike, every shift of the weight, and indeed, every movement -- not staying permanently rooted but rather being able to deeply root in an instant, by choice or automatically through disciplined training.

The thing is... how do I get where I need to go? I may apply a technique I use when teaching that is perfectly obviously the way to solve essentially any problem. If I'm given instructions to
get somewhere specific, even if all I have is the name of that place and some details about its location, then my first step is to procure a map. In training, the map is laid out by the requirements and the methodologies of the art, so I have a map, even if it's rather incomplete. Secondly, I have to figure out both where I'm going (which I laid out above) as well as where I am (which I also discussed above). In my case, I believe I might need more details on both of those facets before continuing. Once that is all in hand, so to speak, it's merely a matter of using the map to chart a course (training regimen) that is designed to get me from where I am to where I want to go. To summarize the method: Consider a reasonable representation of the situation (Map); identify where you are/what you have (You Are Here); identify what/where you need to get/be (Goal); draw course (Plan); follow it (Follow-through). As it's always a good idea to seek difficulties and pitfalls ahead of time whenever possible, I'll take a moment to note the largest of them in this particular case. Here, a main difficulty is that many of the roads that exist are not on the map, and since they're not physical roads, I may or may not be able to see them, much less where they go, as I come near them. It is always a good idea to reflect at the end to decide if you're really done getting where you wanted to get and to consider whether or not the path you took was the best one, but I have to walk the road before I can do that.