by kreese on Sun Mar 04, 2012 7:04 pm
I should point out that Meeks website, the URL fails me at this moment, has some nice, straight forward demonstrations of bagua movements against grabs, which I think allows you to get the tactile feedback needed to know if you are just muscling it or applying your trained force in the right directions against the weak...angles, I suppose, of your opponents structure and force vectors.
I think once you get this down, you can start to see these weak angles before contact, and can enter or counter accordingly.
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If the orthodox CIMA share certain principles, a big one is not meeting force on force. From my own experiences doing tui shou and wrestling, most people (myself included) will tend to get stuck at "one", and the result is some very un-IMA looking work.
Here the philosophical aspects of IMA come into play. It is easy to say not to meet force with force, to be relaxed and able to change, but to actually accomplish this requires a total reformatting of your entire being from the inside out.
Neigong/Qigong work is not just adding techniques to the existing system, it changes the system, your OS if you will, like switching from DOS to Mac OS...but this process is gradual, subtle, and so the ji ben gong will not have the immediate satisfaction of installing a new application/techniques/movements.
Most people don't get to the deepest, ugliest parts of their inner being because you basically have to give up a lot of things that give you the illusion of strength and power, and you have to bring your weaknesses from your subconscious to your conscious mind, a process which the mind would never willingly accept.
Hence the training paradigms of the IMA, Yi, Qi, Xin, etc., are described in terms of emptiness, stillness, and other non-technical jargon, and it makes it hard to modernize the concepts underlying the training.
But real conflict will often affect us to the core; killing and/or injuring people and watching your comrades get killed and crippled may not leave physical scars, but it damages those intangible parts of us that tend not to be addressed by outside-in type training regimes.
IP could also be translated as inner power, something you can see and feel, but could never measure with equipment or other modern sensors.
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I'll look up the URL (if meeks doesn't see this) later and edit this post with links.
"Ignore the comments, people will bitch about anything." - Ian