Thank you for giving such an open reply, jjy.
You have a good lineage. That´s always a blessing. Few practitioners find that in whatever field they pick.
You can easily check most of my background in my bio here on EF. I have studied standing practices with students of Kenichi Sawai as well as other standing traditions, including older daoist versions predating Dachengquan and Xingyi, including doing cross-research into the original shamanic standing practices in other parts of the world. You can also check my websites at
www.levandestillhet.se or
www.livingstillness.se. The swedish one has 700 pages of info written straight for the Web. In the Published Articles section on either is an interview with Lam Kam Chuen that might interest you if you do Yiquan.
I am glad that you have good experiences with the standing you do from Yiquan. I used to do similar practices a lot, and still do in Xingyi. I have, however, since been trained in another system from my chinese teacher, which focuses more on change for real combat, and hence has a different view on training once you have done basic standing work to get your system to a certain level of connection and root.
I still stand by my opinion about not forcing standing. I have taught full time for the past ten years, to people who are both practicing only for health and to people with professional interest in using the material. I think it´s also important to look at how standing is taught to westerners rather than chinese, as the body-types and energy-systems between the both are very different. I know several people I have met over the years who have done forced standing and have gotten systems filled with internal tension and "dead stillness", and others who have done too much without softening their bodies first and ended up with issues of severe tension around lungs and heart and to and from the brain that really wasn´t good for their health. It´s all a matter of how you tailor the material. But you are right in that many in the West now teach "standing" without knowing what goes into it. The amount of standing will also vary depending on if you are a martial artist, a security professional, or Joe Smith who needs better health for his job at the office.
But these are my views from working full time with teaching it, tailoring it, and working with it in other circumstances, and I will be happy to disagree as long as we discuss it in constructive tones. Thank you for detailing your background, that was polite.
Lazyboxer´s comment is important. A student needs to acquire a certain amount of relaxed mind and body in the standing before starting to work detailed parts of the internal form in the training, otherwise their nervous system will be programmed with tension that really isn´t helping. Even more so if they are training purely for health, and live here in the West.
Best of luck with your training
D.
Sarcasm. Oh yeah, like that´ll work.
