Hi Meghdad,
You ask some very good questions and make some very good comments. I have found it hard to know how to answer your post well.
By the way, it seems to me that the same solo form practice, which I mentioned in my previous post,
that is for bare hand should also be done for weapons, do you agree? For example for Jian and Dao.
I know a great deal less of the weapons than I think I know about bare hand practice, but I believe the answer is yes, except for one important caution. Since the Jian and Dao are edged weapons, strong energy is usually of less use than with bare hand practice. These weapons are more about finesse than percussive force. It takes very little effort to cut or to pierce and so there is less reason to train to generate a great deal of force and more reason to train agility and sensitivity. From what I understand, the staff and spear are a little different, since one of the basic techniques with these is to use your energy to knock your opponent's weapon away or even out of his or her hand.
练拳不练功，到老一场空。
I agree completely with this, but am wondering at how to translate it. After several failed attempts, I have arrived at the following attempt:
To train techniques without training their base yields an old bag of tricks full of nothing but space.
What do you think?
I also believe that such skill - feeling Peng in all parts of the body and being able to issue from
all parts of the body - depends so much on one's Neigong.
I very much agree with this as well, but might not be quite as quick to single out Neigong from Waigong. From what I have been told, our Tai Chi tends to train from the inside out, but we do actually train the outside as well. For example, we actually do want to train strong legs, and this in fact may be one of the main reasons that elderly people feel an improvement in balance.
Whatever skill I may or may not have in "issuing from all parts of the body" has resulted initially from doing some training with the repetitive staff exercises (抖杆 dǒugān). I got up to doing only 50 or so on each side, before it seemed enough for my purposes. Then I needed some knowledge about the mechanics of Fajin, and then some exercise to explore it and practice it.
As for "feeling Peng in all parts of the body, I feel you need to understand quite precisely what it means to "relax" in our Tai Chi and then need to do it over and over again in the form. Master Yang Zhenduo talked about folding and forging iron over and over again to form tough flexible steel. I find that our concept of "relax" is very easy to confuse with other methods that stress minimal muscular usage or with the notion of "relaxation" we use in daily life. I find that neither of these is appropriate for the feeling you want to cultivate in the form, especially initially. I find that even if you have a good idea of what to do, it is easy to neglect applying this principle throughout all parts of the body and throughout the form without a lot of coaching or a lot of conscious mental effort.
I recently spent about an hour and a half just going over, joint by joint in the upper body, the feeling of "relax" and the exchange of empty and full in the first Repulse Monkey. I spent this long for several reasons. The people I was training with were experienced people who know the form well and do the external movements to a high standard. As a result, what they wanted and needed was depth, not more postures and more breadth. They also know me and my teaching quite well and so know that whatever axe I may have to grind is more or less the axe they want sharpened. In other words, there is no argument about basic theory or what version of the postures is best, etc. The basic method is quite simple, but hard to apply consistently without a lot of training and often without a lot of hands-on correction.
Lastly, I think there is another parameter. It is easy to get confused between external and internal power. Often during my teaching, I see students who naturally focus on the result more than the method and so unconsciously rely more on external methods than internal ones to achieve the result they want. To avoid this, I have occasionally tried to become much clearer about what I understand to be external and internal.
For those who like to think in terms of modern science, I have become to explain that power can be thought of as mechanical energy. This is the energy we generally encounter in non-living objects when we are not dealing with electricity or fire. Jin can be thought of as merely trained mechanical energy.
Mechanical energy, by definition, is composed of kinetic energy and potential energy. Kinetic energy is the energy that is obvious in movement. I think of it as external energy. Potential energy is the energy that is hidden or latent in how an object is positioned in its environment. I think of it as internal energy. These energies can convert into each other.
If we are focusing on external power, we focus on movement energy. We think of acceleration, speed, and transferring energy at one moment from a hard thing to another. There is a trade off between acceleration and mass that will lead us to try to use different parts of the body to add acceleration to a relatively small part of the body, like the forearm and fist. We want our bones to be hard and our muscles to be strong and rigid.
If we are focusing on internal power, we focus on the energy of position and configuration. We think of elasticity, contraction and expansion and transferring energy with the largest wave possible. The trade off here is that we must learn to manage our energy: storing and releasing it as appropriate, rather than generating speed whenever we want. We also have to unify the body in order to create an energy wave that is as large as possible. We need softness to carry the wave and achieve hardness by making the "height" of the wave high, but its "length" short, so that the energy must transfer all at once. I want my tendons, ligaments, and sinews to be tough and resilient in order to absorb and release energy freely. Since kinetic and potential energy can change into each other, I can use my potential energy to send my opponent flying away. There are other aspects of using internal energy, such as breathing and Qi management, but these are not so hard to differentiate or explain.
Using external energy, you often will add in some potential "internal" energy in order to "cheat" at the physics. For instance, you may want to use leverage, which is a tradeoff between length and power. Using internal energy, you often want to borrow kinetic "external" energy in order also to "cheat" at the physics. We often borrow the energy of movement by storing it in curves or circles, which means allowing movement to change one configuration smoothly into another. This is why, I think, the old Tai Chi masters and the ancient Chinese militarists like Sunzi focused on configurations/postures (势 shì), such as Tai Chi's so-called thirteen postures. They were interested in the potential energy stored and released in these postures.
I should admit that I have
to work very hard on the practices I already know (no matter how limited my knowledge is),
since there are so much new and exciting experiences and insights I can gain and feel from
long term commitment to them. I believe this everyday practice should be combined with
the love of learning new things in order for one to move forward.
I absolutely share this sentiment, and think it is one of the things that can separate good students from mediocre ones.
I am also aware of other solo and partner practices to develop Fajin that do not
appear to be taken from the form....We talk about feeling Peng in all parts of the body
and being able to issue energy from all parts of the body.
It would be very helpful if you share more with us in this regard in the future whenever you
would feel right.
It is hard and perhaps inappropriate to share too much of such things over the Internet. Practicing Fajin is probably the point where the ratio of risk to reward in terms of health is no longer quite clear and where moral issues can become prominent. It is best to practice under close guidance and quality instruction of someone you know and practice with those you trust. If you look at some of the two person exercises in
this video, you might get some idea of what I am talking about. The video is focused on warm ups, rather than, Fajin, but Eric makes occasional to reference to how they might relate to Fajin practice.
This post was too long, but I hope it is helpful.
Take care,
Audi
but any ways this is pretty interesting hope someone will help you i would like to know also some of the practical guidelines/information that can be applied to the Sword form..*crossfinger*
although I always try to be mindful of small movements of the waist while standing.