Anatomical structure of dantien & ....

[GrahamB]

I've got dantien-envy now.

[Bodywork]

I've got dantien-envy now.

BUT....
It's only one way of moving. I tell fighters..."Forget it. By the time you develop one your career will be over. Do this later."
Sure I think that overall it is the superior way to move. But for younger guys? Forget it. Go do their thing, do this later.
Dan

[GrahamB]

I've got dantien-envy now.

BUT....
It's only one way of moving. I tell fighters..."Forget it. By the time you develop one your career will be over. Do this later."
Sure I think that overall it is the superior way to move. But for younger guys? Forget it. Go do their thing, do this later.
Dan

Ha!

I appear to be living my life the other way around

[wiesiek]

For younger guys - best to treat Dantian as the centre of the "body ball", and it was explained this way by my judo teacher almost 50 years ago,
for older it is centre of the Wei qi,
internal sharks are connecting all three dantians in one, /still in theory in my case/

[Doc Stier]

It's only one way of moving. I tell fighters..."Forget it. By the time you develop one your career will be over. Do this later."
Sure I think that overall it is the superior way to move. But for younger guys? Forget it. Go do their thing, do this later.
Dan

Hope springs eternal for many, often much like chasing a nebulous pipe dream. In the end, your most effective efforts to make your internal development happen can only be to train the mind and body with sound, time tested principles over time, with instruction and correction from a competent teacher, and then simply allow the continued process to naturally manifest observable results. In this way, consistently doing your thing eventually leads to the desired goal at some point later on, if you never abandon proper training. Later thus comes sooner than you may think initially.

[kenneth fish]

Dan wrote:

...it is more complicated than that. The knowledge, and one might say *passive* existence of these meridians will avail you not. It is the working of them, in conjunction with other critical tissue that creates a dantian out of prior uncoordinated tissue use. In other words, you don't have a dantian...you create one, through constant training. The circular "feel" of movement in the dantian can be shown, but if your dantian were tissues actually completing a physical rotation... you would eviscerate yourself and be dead. There is a difference between actual tissue moving *to a degree* and directed energy , or force, completing what feels like a rotation.

Thank you. That is a clearer view of the point I was trying to make. WIth regard to the second part of your post, the people whom I have met and trained with all emphasized placing the student's hand on the teacher's belly, spine, and other areas where there was activity in order for the student (in this case, me) to get some idea of what was going on physically, not just conceptually - Master Zhang Junfeng, Master Zhong Fusheng (very high level of control, and very clear movement), Master Liu Peizhong, Master Lam Sang, Madame Zhu Suyi, Master Hu Jiemin and others...all demonstrated almost exactly the same thing. I am not listing these people to be a name dropper - I firmly believe that this skill was fairly common among better level martial artists of the older generation (i.e. older than me by a generation), but has nearly disappeared. Why? First (IMO) the popularization of CMA lead a lot of people to do their internal work on their own via books or instruction that was not hands on, and so their results are mostly in their own minds. Second, without a teacher willing to demonstrate and a student of sufficient focus and maturity to engage in the practices that produce these results, the skills are not passed on.

As I have stated before in previous posts, if you are not invited to put your hands on your teacher when they are trying to explain qigong and neigong, your chances of apprehending the details are slim.

[Bao]

In my opinion, traditional Chinese martial artists borrowed the term "dantian" from other disciplines, and use it to mean something quite different from its original mystical or cosmological meaning. My experience is that the older generation of traditional Chinese martial artists used the term to describe the actions and training of the deep muscles of the pelvic basin.

Mysticism and cosmological stuff tend to become more a matter of theory and abstract thinking when the teaching is directed towards western people, or spoken about by western people. Chinese tend to sound philosophical to western people, but in fact what they mean is often most practical. Just like a Word "qi" is used in everyday words like "angry", "weather" and that food needs to have yin-yang just means that it needs to have nutrition. Everything in TCMA is based on the most natural everyday language and all of the meaning is very simple and practical, yet it's turned into mysticism and things that sound "hard to grasp" just because western people want to have it this way. "Strengthen the pelvic basin" sounds boring. "Standing and feeling harmony to develop mystical Qi-energy" sounds exiting.

[I am...]

I've got dantien-envy now.

BUT....
It's only one way of moving. I tell fighters..."Forget it. By the time you develop one your career will be over. Do this later."
Sure I think that overall it is the superior way to move. But for younger guys? Forget it. Go do their thing, do this later.
Dan

Amen to that, unless you start training very early and have a skilled teacher and some luck, developing your natural athleticism is going to take you much further much faster. Once the afterburners of long years of training kick in later though, movement and awareness become a very different animal.

[kenneth fish]

Bao wrote:

"Strengthen the pelvic basin" sounds boring. "Standing and feeling harmony to develop mystical Qi-energy" sounds exiting.

+1

[windwalker]

I've got dantien-envy now.

BUT....
It's only one way of moving. I tell fighters..."Forget it. By the time you develop one your career will be over. Do this later."
Sure I think that overall it is the superior way to move. But for younger guys? Forget it. Go do their thing, do this later.
Dan

which illustrates the differences and amount of work/training to develop it.
what I have found is that for some its very difficult to drop their sense of power, they dont have much of interest in redoing or working what they feel they understand
and know even when confronted with what seems to be a very different way of doing things, to much into the "fighting aspects" not into the develop aspects.
with others they seem to stop at the dantien development for them this too becomes a kind of power
that they focus on, feeling this is it, instead of just a different point of development.

[GrahamB]

Some "internal" arts, like Yi Quan and some lines of XingYi, for example, seem to not use the Dan Tien concept at all, which is interesting again. Some old reading on the matter:

viewtopic.php?f=3&p=156621

[middleway]

It is one thing to debate on line, quite another to actually place your hands on someone who has a developed dantian and feel it move and feel it express yin/yang.

.... the people whom I have met and trained with all emphasized placing the student's hand on the teacher's belly, spine, and other areas where there was activity in order for the student (in this case, me) to get some idea of what was going on physically, not just conceptually

I remember the first time one of my teachers asked me to put my hand on their lower abdomen and 'feel' what was happening I was really shocked.

Now i have a bit of a grasp on it and saw the same shock in the faces of the guys on my course. It takes a long time, of specific and focused work to get the development. For most people this is too hard to commit too.

I think the majority of material out there is actually describing (in an esoteric convoluted way) the intent part of the process and not the 'material' part of the process .. without which nothing really works out.

Suffice to say ... If your teacher talks about and promotes 'dan tien' development/rotation etc but doesn't do what Dan and Ken are describing above, letting you go 'hands on' and actually really feel it ... you should have some questions.

Everything else i am working has been discussed one way or another here so i don't really have anything else to add.

cheers
Chris

[AlexF]

Suffice to say ... If your teacher talks about and promotes 'dan tien' development/rotation etc but doesn't do what Dan and Ken are describing above, letting you go 'hands on' and actually really feel it ... you should have some questions.

Totally agree, its very different to theorize about say dantien rotation and quite another to feel yourself being crushed or uprooted by a vertical rotation or dragged along with the dantien during a horizontal rotation.

IMO some internal arts train to connect the body (pulling silk, feeling full, peng... whatever you want to call) and use the connections developed from this training to express the arts applications and fighting strategies. This is a valid model for internal power development, can be and feel very powerful to others but its not the only model. Others contain the above training but in addition train the dantien to be the driver of the connections developed. If the connections are weak and dont support the point of contact etc. then using the dantien means nothing as the "energy" wont reach the limbs or beyond. Its trying to drive a body full of slack. This deficiency is often masked by flexing the muscles (to take out the slack) and by funky applications, changing your body position, speeding up and other such things to mask the internal connection. Its often not questioned as the person doing this may well be a good fighter and is thus seen as effective and all knowledgable on the subject.
This is why its such a difficult topic to discuss (especially over the net) with separate component parts being mixed too early, some are not developed sufficiently to support the next stage, explanations not given or ignored, students jumping ahead to the cooler stuff, its a minefield, no wonder internal arts is seen so poorly by most sport fighters and so few are able to represent.

Some simple questions.
What is the model for IP development? How does if differ from an external approach?
How is the body connected and why is this important? (Cross line, shoulders over hips always etc.)
Breathing exercises, are they integral, separate?
Dantien development.
How do I marry my IP development to my fighting strategies.

At the moment this is how I see the sequence for development going, (I would consider myself at No.2-3)
1. Realising you dont actually have a dantien, usually by feeling someone who does and admitting to yourself that you can do that.
2. Trying to build one slowly.
3. Joining the dantien to the other muscle/tendon/fascia lines (meridians...) you are connecting so it can support the point of contact anywhere in the body.
4. Making the dantien the starting point for movements ie its already connected to these lines and is the starting point for your movements.
5. Practise No.4 under increasing resistance from a partner.
6. Extending dantien so it reaches the tip of your weapon.
7. Go play in freestyle with and without weapons to inform you on where you need to work harder.

[Bodywork]

It is one thing to debate on line, quite another to actually place your hands on someone who has a developed dantian and feel it move and feel it express yin/yang.

.... the people whom I have met and trained with all emphasized placing the student's hand on the teacher's belly, spine, and other areas where there was activity in order for the student (in this case, me) to get some idea of what was going on physically, not just conceptually

I remember the first time one of my teachers asked me to put my hand on their lower abdomen and 'feel' what was happening I was really shocked.
cheers
Chris

Once developed, Dantian is ...in...everything.
So...
What about, upper abdomen?
Back and front together?
Side of dantian?
how about touching a teacher ANYWHERE..and feeling unusual forces going on?
How about...
everywhere at the same time?

How I see it is someone is either full of shit or they are not.
"When one thing moves everything moves" has meaning. And I am sorry. I think most people are not up to the task.There are world class, famous, teachers who are not up to the task! And they know it.

[yeniseri]

I would add that my experience of CMA teachers is that they rarely mention what the teaching is or what it supposed to do or the end result. This depends of personal affiliation relationship and attitude of the student. One of my last teachers was teaching a neigong method (I do not know the name and he did answer when question in a polite way ) but it involved some basic neigong standing and something called Opening/Closing of 3 Dantians as part of this neigong/yangsheng! method. After 3 weeks, most of the class refused to show up, or had some excuse but they did show up for the taiji forms class since few of us were doing competitions at the time. After 2 months he indirectly made a comment about teaching forms to pay the bills, send kids to college. He did run TCM 'pharnmacy'. My teacher, when telling us what to do (different teaching 'style") never mentioned what we call anatomy of TCM known principles.

My basic commentary is that anatomy is out of the question though a reference/referenes are needed for those who may have problems dealing with 'vague" terminology. Interestingly, I note that his books on TCM point locations did have western terms of anatomy and physiology.