Appledog wrote:To recap, so far in the thread we find we need to develop a kind of sunk or heavy energy, or even a kind of lightness via possibly, standing and keeping the head alight -- okay, but we also know that isn't peng. I would point out there are too many videos of (especially older) masters with poor back and neck posture demonstrating excellent peng. Yet, so far no one has been able to explain what it is or how to train it. I would have expected at least one person to mention push hands, but I like what you have said here about two first timers. If someone could expand upon that I am sure we would find the answer.
No man, the sinking is to create the stretch. Once the stretch is there, it doesn't have to be ramrod straight. A bow is curved. But if you're curving while you're trying to establish that base condition, you're never going to get it.
To create it across the back you can open the back and rotate the shoulders out to push the scapula down and the fingertips towards each other, then expand that structure from the inside out... like inflating a balloon, contract from the outside in, like the air is coming out and the skin is unstretching.
Then work in the back with the stretch between bai hui and I forget the name but it's basically Jen Mo 1 around the taint/coccyx with the golden thread, sitting on the barstool idea. The sitting should also help you get the right feeling of springy roundness in the legs and hook that into the mix. This was last thing I've gotten. The springy feeling in the legs and the pressure from leg to leg.
In time it starts to feel a lot like a balloon structure coming from like the dantien to the mingmen and up the back, through the hip kwa to the bubbling well/k1. You can do the inflate and deflate as much as you can stand it. I like that and the up and down of beginning taiji as my main thing.
There's a lot of details I won't go into publicly, but that's the meat of it.
How I describe it to beginners is like standing.
When you are first born you don't know how to stand, it's the hardest thing you've ever done in your life, but you want it, so you work at it and you practice and you teach yourself what upright is and what balance is and how to maintain it. Like when you learn to drive at first there's a lot of variables that you have to track and control closely with a large amount of your attention, but in time the neural connections get set and reinforced and grown and the sense feedback loop is programmed and the thing that was once so impossible just becomes your default condition, you can do both that and a number of any other tasks simultaneously. Any threat to that balance supersedes all other concerns until you feel you have reestablished control.
And you get really good at that, the power that your body can unleash to maintain that balance is surprising and can be overwhelming, just ask anybody who winds up being caught up in a fall or recovery. USUALLY we can recover pretty easily though, it's just, not even second but FIRST nature. Breath, balance, heartbeat.
So point being, it's muscle and mind and senses coming together to make standing and walking and jumping and gymnastics possible in an additive fashion, working off that basic uprightness.
Peng is like uprightness but instead it's expansiveness. It's that sense of being that inflated ball with equalized pressure in all directions against the skin, maintaining the round shape. When force deforms that round shape it increases the pressure throughout the skin by an equal amount. In the case of a ball, the pressure is equal across the whole surface area, but as D_Glenn mentioned in the human body some of it takes it more than other.
With the human body the sphere is sort of conceptual, it can be as big as the universe or small enough to fit in your sleeve, really but the opening and closing of the whole body powers its operation. Consider forming the hook in single whip vs moving to the fully expanded posture. Tiny sphere in the hand and wrist, driven by the body, opening up to huge sphere across the back, also driven by the body. Same power in both movements.
That's the difference in my opinion between internal and external, for lack of a better word, external is a set of isolated pieces working together, internal is a truly unified whole. It's literally a transformation of the way the structure holds itself together and moves. That sounds trite, but once you really get what I mean it's profound.
It's not a bicep and a tricep into a deltoid into the trapezoids into the spinal muscles into the psoas and all that razmataz. It's a connection from fingertip to fingertip, and elastic force stored along the entire length can be expressed at any point. Also fingertip to foot, other foot, foot and headtop covering every inch in between.
No overwhelming load at any one place, but cumulatively, if we don't let it escape, we can send all that stored energy where we want it and even add a little more.
Starting with peng the way starting with uprightness leads to The Biles on Beam.
Kinda got on a roll there.
nice one
