kai/he

[mixjourneyman]

how does your style express kai/he?
in the chest?
in the hips?
in other joints?

I know a bit about kai/he and chest waving in xingyi and xybgz, but I'm fairly new to it from a tjq perspective.

What we seem to be doing in our sun shi taiji is expressing opening as the ribs separating and closing as the ribs compressing.
My teacher's in Shanghai seem really big on movement from the ribs/chest/and back.
For the xingyiquan and xybgz that I'm learning from master Yang, we just straight up wave the chest in a lot of the movements.
I think both methods are useful, but I like YH's method the best because I get the most power and feeling of the body opening from that practice.

I'm interested to hear about other's experience of kai/he and it's application.

[GrahamB]

The whole body opens and closes in Tai Chi Chuan and it's related to the breathing. I like to think of it as being like a bellows that causes the body to breathe. Helps to break it down into various body parts to learn it.

[Ron Panunto]

All 5 bows must be involved, i.e., the whole body should open and close.

[somatai]

if the spine is to move the ribs must express opening and closing as part of it.....kai/he, is a very deep study and a key to xylhq.....the whole body must be made into a ball to he and explode into the bounce kai

[Zha Leijie]

From a Sun Shi BGZ perspective, there is also a Kai/He in the mind (Yi), which drives Dantian and coordinates the expression of energy. The idea is that there is always a Kai after a He and viceversa, and that there can be He inside Kai and Kai inside He, during the same movement. Transformation from Kai to He, quality and speed of the change determine the quality of Hua (trasnformation). From open to close, from soft to hard, Kai/He is a key to understand body suppleness and coordination in order to transform the jing in the body. The first Shili in Yiquan is also an horizontal, very clearly visible Kai/He movement. And if Wang Xiangzhai kept it in his method, it means something.

[Bhassler]

Very rarely in the chen style I learned does the whole body open or close simultaneously. Open and close might be viewed as the method for generating power, and the sequence in which one opens and closes various areas might be viewed as the means for integrating and directing power. Just one way of looking at it that might be fun to play with.

[NoSword]

Very rarely in the chen style I learned does the whole body open or close simultaneously. Open and close might be viewed as the method for generating power, and the sequence in which one opens and closes various areas might be viewed as the means for integrating and directing power. Just one way of looking at it that might be fun to play with.

I suspect this is connected with taiji theory -- never totally open (yang) nor totally closed (yin) but always some harmony between the two. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the martial arts I've studied (esp. Tongbei) are characterized by more obvious kai-he oscillation.

Looking at Derek's XYLH, I get the sense that the mechanism of power generation is very similar to Tongbei, but tends to emphasize the opposite direction. As near as I can tell (and I have a long way to go in the system), by comparison with xingyi/XYLH, Tongbei is strong on 'shen' and weak on 'suo', or contracting/locking power. Another way of putting it would be in Fullerian tensegrity jargon: Tongbei is strong on tensile forces but weak on compressive forces, whereas xingyi/XYLH tends more toward the opposite.

Tongbei will typically 'fa' on the 'he' phase of the oscillation, so it's more like a pair of snapping jaws than an exploding rubber ball. The back is stretched to the limit of its range of motion (while maintaining six-harmony requirements) and released. This tension and release drives the motion of the limbs.

Needless to say, this is all very connected with dantian, etc. For the uninitiated, one of the maddening aspects of TCMA theory (just like TCM) is that it has no discrete concepts -- each term/idea is synthetically interrelated with every other term/idea in the system. Either you get all of the ideas, or you get none of them. This is very different from Aristotelian categorical thinking, which structures much of our thinking in the West. But that's another thread.

AK

[DaDa]

My teacher talks about Ziranmen tun and tu, swallowing and spitting. It's about the torso flexing in and out. Kinda like tongbei/Xinygyi stuff I think; from the description posted at least.

Secondly-
It's kinda hard to write about but we have an oscillation switching from one side to the other side of the body. So when one side is open the other is closed.

Together they form Ziranmen's shenfa.

[Bhassler]

Very rarely in the chen style I learned does the whole body open or close simultaneously. Open and close might be viewed as the method for generating power, and the sequence in which one opens and closes various areas might be viewed as the means for integrating and directing power. Just one way of looking at it that might be fun to play with.

I suspect this is connected with taiji theory -- never totally open (yang) nor totally closed (yin) but always some harmony between the two. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the martial arts I've studied (esp. Tongbei) are characterized by more obvious kai-he oscillation.

I agree with the notion of always having a bit in reserve, whether open or close, but that's not specifically what I had in mind. I was thinking more of a segmented and sequential series of movements as a mode of generating wave power. It's less about theory and more about function. I see a lot of it in this short demonstration by George Xu:



Certainly this is characteristic of certain branches or lineages of Chen style, but I wouldn't go so far to say it's representative of all Chen style, let alone all of taiji.

[Ralteria]

Bhassler,

Just so I'm on the same page as what you are getting at: The body isn't going to be all open all close (in fact, in thinking about at least in the Yang form the only all open and all close I can think of is in form commencement). The body is going to be moving constantly and different parts are going to be closing to compensate for others opening. The different parts of the body are going to compensate for power issuing on either side (left side of the torso closes as right side of the torso opens for example). Explaining all the openings and closings of just the major parts (shoulders, ribcage, hips, etc.) for just one posture would be tedious, however they should be moving and exchanging continuously depending on where power is being issued. At least that is my understanding of it.

[Bhassler]

Well, the whole notion of opening and closing is somewhat paradoxical, since if a part of the body closes on one side, it opens at least to some extent on the other side. If you close the front of the ribcage, you open somewhat (or possibly a lot) in back, so the concept of opening and closing implies a sort of coordination, but has to apply in reference to a specific area.

In a broader context, if you think of a compression wave through a spring (Slinky, anyone?), as the wave moves through one part of the spring (closing) the part it has passed through recoils (opening). In this way the spring conducts a ballistic impulse without the net length of the spring changing. Naturally, a human body is much more complex, so we can combine multiple impulses in various linear or spiral trajectories. The aggregate shaping of the body will depend on the transmission requirements of the various impulses while operating within the constraints of gravity. To me, this is a significant distinction from "everything goes together" in the sense that if everything is going at literally the same time in a direction, we lose some ability to change it once the movement has been initiated. If it's a pulse moving sequentially through a relatively free-moving yet self-stabilizing structure, then changes in circumstance might automatically redirect the pulse in the appropriate direction, guided by the intent of the practitioner. All of which doesn't make anything simpler or easier to understand....

[NoSword]

Well, the whole notion of opening and closing is somewhat paradoxical, since if a part of the body closes on one side, it opens at least to some extent on the other side. If you close the front of the ribcage, you open somewhat (or possibly a lot) in back, so the concept of opening and closing implies a sort of coordination, but has to apply in reference to a specific area.

This is true, but the human body is designed such that it has a clearly designated 'front' and 'back' -- yin and yang, dorsal and ventral surfaces. From a functional perspective, the back and the ribcage are not 'equal.' Marcus Brinkmann uses the analogy of a starfish: bilaterally symmetrical but not equal in all directions (like, say, a sea urchin). His qigongs use some visualization techniques which involve imagining the dorsal surface of the body 'lit up' while the ventral surface remains 'dark' and examining how different open-and-close movements affect movement across these surfaces. Very tasty stuff.

(Could these visualizations possibly have been inspired by the Alexander Technique, to which I know he's had some exposure? Didn't ask; Marcus, if you're reading this, we'd certainly like to hear your input.)

AK

[Bhassler]

Very cool stuff, NoSword. I'd love to read more about it.

[Scott P. Phillips]

What is the importance of kai-he, which loosely means ‘opening and closing?’
While this may be a good translation of the Chinese, the metaphor is confusing because it is easily conflated with the process of emptying and filling which requires opening key gates in the body. To properly do kai-he, all the gates must remain open, there is no closing action. The correct metaphor for kai-he is expanding and shrinking the way most wild animals do when they are showing dominance or submission.

As is often the case, the subject of shrinking and expanding does not have an inherent order. Like so much of martial arts it is actually a process of unlearning (apophatic). In attempting to invent a curriculum, the goal should be to reveal an underlying order, a natural way of being. That said, here is one possible curriculum order.

Level 1. Individuate shrinking and expanding in different parts of the body. (Kumar Frantzis created a long list of different body systems which can be expanded and condensed, beginning with individual joints, muscles, soft tissues, internal organs, glands, blood vessels, meridians, the nine palaces, and cerebrospinal fluid.)

Level 2. Shrink and expand the entire body with the breath.

These first two levels do not take long to develop (a year or two at most) but in order to maintain a big range of movement they require regular practice.

Level 3. Shrink and expand the whole body without the breath. That is, de-link the movement from the breathing. This will make the movement softer and will reveal jin, or natural structure. To do level 3 well, requires that the spacial mind relax and expand out beyond the body itself.

Level 4. At level 4 the spacial mind does many complex operations including shrinking while the body is expanding and the reverse, expanding while the whole body is shrinking. To do this level well the body must be completely empty of tension and all the gates must be open--then one's power will increase dramatically and one's root will disappear.

Level 5. Only the spacial mind is actively moving, the body follows unconsciously.

Because we are dealing with an entirely natural process it is possible to skip directly to level five.

You can read the rest of this lengthy post on me blog...
http://northstarmartialarts.com/blog1/?p=1801

[NoSword]

Very cool stuff, NoSword. I'd love to read more about it.

Off the top of my head, I don't know that I've got anything more to say on the subject, but if you can come up with a specific question, I'll do my best to answer it. Hope Marcus can be persuaded to chime in.

Scott: Far out stuff man. 1) through 3) make perfect sense to me; 4) and 5) are a bit beyond my realm of experience. Do you have any concrete suggestions for those who wish to experience these levels of training?

AK