Do you treat your circle walk as Qigong or purely physical?

[Alexander]

Hey all,
So I was curious as to how to treat your circle walk. Do you treat it as a Qigong exercise (E.g. do it as the last part of your training, feel the Qi going into your hands as you shift into each posture), or do you simply treat it as an exercise in stability in motion, constant change, footwork, conditioning, etc.?

I always treated it as a "Lemme vary up my speed and make it interesting so I get some serious cardio out of this, while improving footwork" exercise.

Regarding the (cloudy) origins of the walk -- is it supposed to have a meta-physical component, or was it simply there to train the aforementioned physical qualities, and to encourage the practitioner to keep moving?

Interested in hearing some ideas..

[shawnsegler]

That's a loaded question. Those things both kind of flow in and out of each other.

You use it to both develop "chi" and manipulate said "chi" as part of how you keep your balance and change constantly while practicing your footwork.

Your body and mind are one thing, so to train the body correctly over time you have to train the mind.

Metaphysical/shmetiphysical. Prolonged circle walking (prolonged anything singlemindedly actually) will by necessity change the way you interpret the data coming into your body. Everyone has body awareness to some extent based on their life experiences and how doing life things over and over skews their mind body connection. When you start circling or standing or yoga, you are mostly a creature of habit and reflex. The deep introspection of these practices allows you to figure out what's going on with your psyche and why so that you have control over your reactions to incoming stimulus...this allows you to develop chi and relax the body tissues which allows you to feel and control parts of your body that you initially don't have control over...when you have control over those things it changes the quality of the data coming in (when you are all relaxed you can "feel" the forces of gravity and motion more directly between your nervous system, skeletal system and soft tissue...this allows you to move with your whole body mass fluidly and control the incessant locking of the mind on incoming stimulus...these things together allow you to move your entire body mass three dimensionally and to "feel" all three dimensions of movement simultaneously...this allows you to generate power in a very efficient fashion and to read incoming stimulus very precisely...etc...etc...etc....it's all one thing.

How you manage to take all this data in and reprogram your thought and movement patterns based on that is up to you. You figure out what you figure out based on how much effort you put in, how good your teacher is etc...

The process of bagua allows you to and requires you to find the intrinsic functionality and connection of many disparate and often paradoxical elements.

Anyhoo...less think...mo practice.

[edededed]

Circle walking has both physical and qigong benefits; to gain all of them, one must make sure he is doing the exercise correctly! One can see the results of these benefits as well in people who train correctly, both physical and "qi"...

[meeks]

or do you simply treat it as an exercise in stability in motion, constant change, footwork, conditioning, etc.?

plus jin training. the qigong part is a natural side effect of your training, not the focus of it. if you make it the focus of your training, you'll never get past that 'stage' and will limit your potential growth.

best advice about qigong I could ever give:
Your attitude should be "I wonder what I'll experience today?" rather than "I must experience *this* today".
and
think qi, no real. practice jin, qi come.

[Bob]

or do you simply treat it as an exercise in stability in motion, constant change, footwork, conditioning, etc.?

plus jin training. the qigong part is a natural side effect of your training, not the focus of it. if you make it the focus of your training, you'll never get past that 'stage' and will limit your potential growth.

best advice about qigong I could ever give:
Your attitude should be "I wonder what I'll experience today?" rather than "I must experience *this* today".
and
think qi, no real. practice jin, qi come.

Wow, those ring 20 years true--it is very good advice.

Good post!

[Walk the Torque]

What Shawn Sed

[Haoran]

Circle walking.. Developes Turtle back, Qi and blood flow to the palms causing them to become cū​ (thick) 粗. Structure links together.

[shawnsegler]

GBZ got a different method from most of the other disciples of GBT. Circle walking does not develop the turtle back in our style. Our method is more like yoga and moving the opposite of the turtle back which we call the open body posture. They both have their strengths and weaknesses.

There's all kind of thing to be accomplished on the circle depending on how you do them....all equally valid I might add, depending on the aims of the style and the practitioner.

Circle walking is like resetting your computer to a new operating system. All kinds of different OS's but you pick what you like based on your preferences.

Best,

S

[Haoran]

shawnsegler,

I've been curious about this (turtleback vs others) and have wondered about the theory of other Bagua styles which do not employ turtleback. Could you go into more detail about the theory of your style and which style do you practice? Circle walking employing turtleback development is quite demanding. How do you feel about your style (can we call it open technique?)?

Thanks,

[iwalkthecircle]

both.

[TaoJoannes]

Regarding the (cloudy) origins of the walk -- is it supposed to have a meta-physical component, or was it simply there to train the aforementioned physical qualities, and to encourage the practitioner to keep moving?

Interested in hearing some ideas..

Didn't this whole art start from "walking meditation"?

The way I understood it, the walking meditation came first, then they added the MA components into THAT practice to come up with what we know as bagua.

DHC: "Teach me how to fight, monk!"
Monk: "Go walk around that tree till you learn something."

[D_Glenn]

Hey all,
So I was curious as to how to treat your circle walk. Do you treat it as a Qigong exercise (E.g. do it as the last part of your training, feel the Qi going into your hands as you shift into each posture), or do you simply treat it as an exercise in stability in motion, constant change, footwork, conditioning, etc.?

I always treated it as a "Lemme vary up my speed and make it interesting so I get some serious cardio out of this, while improving footwork" exercise.

Regarding the (cloudy) origins of the walk -- is it supposed to have a meta-physical component, or was it simply there to train the aforementioned physical qualities, and to encourage the practitioner to keep moving?

Interested in hearing some ideas..

The practice of "circle walking" is actually called 'zhuan' which means to turn or to 'turn around the bridge you've made at the forearm with the opponent' or to 'turn around and meet the attack coming up behind you', so first and foremost the practice is a martial practice for improving the physical skills as they pertain to combat. The other aspect of holding postures is in sense part of the design but any posture held will have some sort of affect on the health. Bagua postures were identified on what meridians they activate and work: 'yang' postures work primarily the meridians on the sun-tanned sides of the arms and legs, while 'yin' postures work the meridians on the inside or shaded parts of the arms and legs. The 8 main postures also have different methods of stepping that work the leg meridians which is why in the 'classics' some of the references to a posture's benefits comes from it's stepping method but again the stepping methods are firstly for martial usage. So we have the different palms/postures being used to improve specific aspects of one's health and organs and are also loosely broken into postures to practice while you're young and the progression towards postures for when you are old. The postures are all 'daoyin' (qigong) practices so qi will move no matter what but the best way to move more and have a better affect on one's health is to put more 'yi'/intention outward which also benefits the martial side as you want to be able to move your 'yi'/intention (and hence 'qi') as quick as a thought. 'Yi' also ties into how we store the muscle memory of movements so the more 'yi' put out to the hands the quicker you can learn and refine new movements of the art. So the point is that in order to derive the most martial and simultaneously the best qigong effects one should move to their own physical limits while constantly striving to get a little more extension, twist, and lowering of body height. The problem in a lot of Chinese internal arts is that there was a missing generation where a lot of young men had to learn from very old men and the old men were moving to their own physical limits only the younger generation copied those loose, almost lazy, very high postures or rather the self-confining physical limits of an old man and erroneously correlated that with being "healthy" and that they could somehow against all odds obtain real martial skills from a practice that never pushes their physical limits and will only derive slight 'qigong' benefits in a younger body. The more combat oriented the circle turning the better the health benefits. Note that the speed in which you turn is not the difference as martially all different speeds of turning and changing should be practiced. While turning the yi/intention is out but when 'changing' the 'intention' is basically outward then 'gathering back to dantian', then outward again. Rough guidelines: slower practice should be around 60-70% of one's practice and there should be about a 3 to 1 ratio of time spent 'gathering' (3) vs. 'sending out' (1). So martial/combat oriented practice doesn't mean 'extreme', it's actually still pretty serene.


.

[shawnsegler]

Yeah, our words are like level, balanced, connected, smooth. Very easy to get meditative with that.

Yours too, but in a diffenrent way. What is it for you guys, something like cold, crisp, etc...don't remember.

There's a whole nother level of that NLP sort of aspect of bagua. I digs it!!

Best,

S

[D_Glenn]

Level, balanced...smooth, those sound like the basic Yin bagua turning guidelines- translation is something like not bobbing up and down, not swaying side to side...?

Cold, crisp, fast (leng, cui, kuai) are the 3 words Yin Fu used to describe his baguazhang. They refer to the actual usage while fighting and are also in the order that one needs to train them so that you're technically doing Yin Fu bagua. Like before you practice full speed, you first need to have the movements be cui/crisp or from dantian/waist to hand there is no interruption that slows or stops the movement so that the whole movement is crisp and clear. Before that though the movement must be cold or from a cold start with no movement to telegraph which comes from 1- being able to move/ and use your 'yi' to a high level like I mentioned above and 2- from learning how to 'change' which is why there are the basic forms/changes, consisting of 3-9 moves ending in an odd number to change directions, and then a person on their own time varies the order so that they learn to 'from cold' execute movements from many different starting positions that the arms could end up in after the previous movement. 'Change' is what happens between movements. If you only do line drills of a single movement then you aren't learning how to 'change'. If you do only one variation of a form your whole life you are practicing a very limited set of 'changes'. So 'cold' is being able to change at a level where the opponent can't really detect it, then it needs to be crisp so they can't interrupt it (or if they do 'change' in time it will still have enough power to set-up the next, and fast so it's too late for them to make appropriate 'changes'.

For the beginner our line sometimes adds 3 words in front of those: stable, accurate, and vicious, which are also in order of training and required before you get to the level of cold, crisp, fast. Vicious is understanding that this is a martial art and if you get knocked out your attacker could intentionally want to kill you or unintentionally as you're getting kicked while down and out and still end up dead or close to it, so you need to have the mindset to follow through with all your attacks and the 'yi' must be of a vicious nature or intent to hurt him before he hurts you. 'To be kind to your opponent is being cruel to yourself'.

***

I think the saying on circle turning is that "It's like a meditation but not actually", because you're getting into the wu wei state before you turn so you're not distracted and then after staring at your hand and the rotation of the world around you that you get into a state where you forget about the rest of the world and the passing of time and the longer you practice the easier it is to continue, but I think in bagua there is still a clear distinction between circle turning and the actual taoist and buddhist meditations that are inside of bagua, something having to do with too much internal movement. It's actually after time more conducive to wanting to go out and fight as it should leave you feeling energized, if not then something is being done wrong.


...

[meeks]

Didn't this whole art start from "walking meditation"?
The way I understood it, the walking meditation came first, then they added the MA components into THAT practice to come up with what we know as bagua.
DHC: "Teach me how to fight, monk!"
Monk: "Go walk around that tree till you learn something."

that is a common misconception often portrayed from schools that practice empty forms. Circle walking is a physical struggle, difficult to maintain, and is very demanding conditioning. Done correctly you'll develop some mad skillz and power. But if you're just holding your hands in the air wondering if your form looks good you might as well go sit down, you're not utilizing your time efficiently.

the real story is more like:
"teach me how to fight, monk"
"ok, walk around that tree the way I showed you to until your a fucking badass"

for example, if you walk in a circle, twisted towards center, in 'ta zhang' (some schools call it something else) - where your hands are palm down at waist height every day for 1 year with proper jin, not just "I'm coordinating breath with movement to feel my qi as I walk like I'm rolling pencils under my feet" circle walking, you'll have some amazing power. Ta zhang is an iron palm exercise...but it only works if you do it correctly for at least an hours a day...not 8 steps x 2 directions.
Unfortunately most schools teach bagua forms only. that means 8 steps change direction 8 steps change palm. repeat until you've gone through your 8 palm changes. move on to something else...would you like to learn my xing yi now? (little dig at a 'bagua' school in Vancouver) they know bagua forms - they don't know bagua.

there's physical training, and there's meditation. some meditation is standing, some sitting. some is moving. but the palm changes, while having a qi gong effect are conditioning. If you want to do dynamic bagua qi gong, I've got oodles of exercises from our bagua system - none of it even remotely resembles 'bagua'. the focus of circle walking is not qi. if you only think about qi you'll never really get past that.

In the illustrious words of my old bagua shifu who trained bagua and almost nothing but bagua his whole life (since the 1930s - and he's still alive today in his 80s):
"Yang shifu, what about the qi in this posture?"
*smacks your face, hard* "think qi? no real. think jin? have qi naturally. practice jin, qi come. no practice jin, maybe little qi come" *makes hand gesture to symbolize a measurement of 1/2" *