Meditation and taijiquan

Discussion on the three big Chinese internals, Yiquan, Bajiquan, Piguazhang and other similar styles.

Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby GrahamB on Fri Nov 26, 2021 1:48 pm

British people just generally take the piss out of each other if they like them. No worries. You're not going to shoot me now are you? You are an American...
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Doc Stier on Fri Nov 26, 2021 1:51 pm

GrahamB wrote:British people just generally take the piss out of each other if they like them. No worries. You're not going to shoot me now are you? You are an American...

Haha! Ok, got it. Thanks for the clarification. Much appreciated. And not to worry, may you live long and prosper, my friend. ;D
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby windwalker on Fri Nov 26, 2021 6:15 pm

Some thoughts on practice

Paraphrased / google translation

so before i have been saying, if you can not stand loneliness, do not practice tai chi kung fu, because it is a gradual process, especially the change of consciousness, to rush it is useless.


the truth can guide practice, but can not replace practice. just like we watch football, you look at all understand, understand,
but does not mean you can go to play,
to understand the truth, do not take detours, slowly practice, and so you really have something in the body, is real understanding.


https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8jYQQy9t4wVcfdyB_sdVUQ

Very much reminded me of taiji


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T12Tj_1Tc_s&t=3266s
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby origami_itto on Sat Nov 27, 2021 9:18 am

Doc Stier wrote:Hahaha! Get serious, Jason. 15 minutes is wimpy. ::)

My daily meditation practice is usually an hour of seated Raja Yoga meditation both early morning and late night, plus an hour of standing meditation at midday. It's all good! :)


Oooh, called my by my government name, this must be serious.

That's a lot of practice, but about on par with what the other folks mentioning this have claimed.

So I get that meditation is beneficial in and of itself, but what I'm curious about here is this:

Does any part of your meditative practice directly affect your fighting ability or taijiquan skills?

You mentioned "first in the mind, then in the body", does visualization of movements make up part of your practice?
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Doc Stier on Sat Nov 27, 2021 1:13 pm

oragami_itto wrote:
Doc Stier wrote:Hahaha! Get serious, Jason. 15 minutes is wimpy. ::)

My daily meditation practice is usually an hour of seated Raja Yoga meditation both early morning and late night, plus an hour of standing meditation at midday. It's all good! :)


Oooh, called my by my government name, this must be serious.

That's a lot of practice, but about on par with what the other folks mentioning this have claimed.

So I get that meditation is beneficial in and of itself, but what I'm curious about here is this:

Does any part of your meditative practice directly affect your fighting ability or taijiquan skills?

You mentioned "first in the mind, then in the body", does visualization of movements make up part of your practice?

Yes, of course. See it, believe it, and receive it. Whatever you regularly visualize mentally in a meditative state of focused concentration will be what you eventually manifest physically. 8-)
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Bob on Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:01 am

Functional "Meditation" in the Bajiquan/Pigua Zhang system I am acquainted with goes something like this:

1) The "meditation" is not engaged in until you have done basic foundational training (3 years minimum) in order to assure proper structure, breathing and relaxation. Typically this involves the first training form, xiao baji jia, in which you hold each posture and direct your thought to a given area for a relaxed in breath and then an outbreath e.g. shoulder, elbow, wrist/hand area - you also would be many other types of training during these 3 years such as da qiang and pi gua zhang so this is not done independently from weighted training.

2) After this phase is completed you can then sit in a chair, standard relaxed meditation posture and direct the mind/imagery qi to the palms of the hand - after some time you should feel warmth and a general swelling (due to increased blood flow or if you wish, qi). This will increase your strength and when you engage in application you direct your thought to the area to be employed, e.g. your fist, and your "power" will be increased.

Interestingly a number of studies indicate, as posted below, show how mental thought can increase strength and the effects can be long term.

No arguments or proofs here - just a point of information for those who might be interested in seeing meditation from another angle.

THE SCIENCES
How to Grow Stronger Without Lifting Weights
A study finds improvement from pretending to move muscles


By Clayton Mosher on December 23, 2014

We yearn to believe that we can get fit without effort. We build “ab belts” to electrocute our muscles to give us six-packs. We invent chocolate-chip cookie diets to make us thin while eating fat. We wish to get fit from doing absolutely nothing. We wish to lie in bed, think about going to the gym and then, poof, obtain the body of a Greek god.

Well, a remarkable new study from Brian Clark at Ohio University shows that sitting still, while just thinking about exercise, might make us stronger. Clark and colleagues recruited 29 volunteers and wrapped their wrists in surgical casts for an entire month. During this month, half of the volunteers thought about exercising their immobilized wrists. For 11 minutes a day, 5 days a week, they sat completely still and focused their entire mental effort on pretending to flex their muscles. When the casts were removed, the volunteers that did mental exercises had wrist muscles that were two times stronger than those that had done nothing at all.

The idea behind the research is not a new concept – just a concept that’s often neglected in the field of neuroscience: our bodies and our brains evolved together. Even though we treat our mind and bodies as two separate entities (brain vs. brawn; mind vs. matter), they are ultimately and intimately connected.

Indeed, even before Brian Clark published his study, other researchers had demonstrated links between the brain and the muscles. Ten years ago, Guang Yue at the Cleveland Clinic reported that imaginary exercise increases the strength of finger muscles by up to 35%. Just five years ago, Kai Miller at the University of Washington, showed that imaginary exercise activates the same brain areas that are activated during real exercise. Brian Clark’s research adds to this body of knowledge and provides compelling evidence about the role of neuromuscular pathways in strength training.

To examine brain-muscle pathways, Clark and colleagues placed a magnetic field above the motor cortex and stimulated neurons in the brain. When they turned on the magnetic field, they saw the muscles of the volunteers flex and then become momentarily paralyzed. By measuring the amount of muscle contraction and the duration of paralysis, Clark and colleagues were able to make inferences about the connections in the brain. The longer the paralysis lasted, the weaker the neuromuscular connection. Not surprisingly, the volunteers that performed imaginary exercise had stronger neuromuscular pathways and hence, stronger muscles. The mentally-lazy volunteers had weaker neuromuscular pathways that were beginning to degrade.

Whether we get weak from wearing a cast, or we get weak from lack of exercise, or we get weak from aging, keeping the mind active keeps the body healthy. But, the mind alone cannot keep the muscles strong … any more than zapping your muscles with an ab belt builds a six-pack. Lifting weights or playing sports is more effective than mental exercise alone or muscle-zapping alone, because it activates both the mind and the body at the same time. In fitness, and in health, the mind and the body both matter.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Clayton Mosher is a postdoctoral fellow at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He studies how the brain gives rise to emotions and produces social behaviors.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... g-weights/


Mental gymnastics increase bicep strength
21 November 2001
By Philip Cohen

It is a couch potato’s dream – just imagining yourself exercising can increase the strength of even your large muscles. The discovery could help patients too weak to exercise to start recuperating from stroke or other injury. And if the technique works in older people, they might use it to help maintain their strength.

Muscles move in response to impulses from nearby motor neurons. The firing of those neurons in turn depends on the strength of electrical impulses sent by the brain.

That suggests you can increase muscle strength solely by sending a larger signal to motor neurons from the brain,” says Guang Yue, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio.

Yue and his colleagues have already found that mentally visualising exercise was enough to increase strength in a muscle in the little finger, which it uses to move sideways. Now his team has turned its attention to a larger, more frequently used muscle, the bicep.

Thought experiment

They asked 10 volunteers aged 20 to 35 to imagine flexing one of their biceps as hard as possible in training sessions five times a week. The researchers recorded the electrical brain activity during the sessions. To ensure the volunteers were not unintentionally tensing, they also monitored electrical impulses at the motor neurons of their arm muscles.

Every two weeks, they measured the strength of the volunteers’ muscles. The volunteers who thought about exercise showed a 13.5 per cent increase in strength after a few weeks, and maintained that gain for three months after the training stopped. Controls who missed out on the mental workout showed no improvement in strength.

The researchers are now repeating the experiment with people aged 65 to 80 to see if mental gymnastics also works for them.

The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... z7DXHR6MEH
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby origami_itto on Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:05 pm

That's good stuff. There's hard science backing the practice of visualizing movements to improve sports performance. The way I've seen it explained is that your brain can't really tell the difference between something currently happening, something you're remembering, and something you're imagining. The body will respond the same way to stimulus as to imagining stimulus.

The extrapolation of some actual influence on muscle (or nerve?) Development makes sense, but I don't know how fleshed out that research is.

Something I've been looking for clarity on is the relation between the dantien and the enteric nervous system.
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Steve James on Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:44 pm

The way I've seen it explained is that your brain can't really tell the difference between something currently happening, something you're remembering, and something you're imagining.


Yeah, that seems to be it, and it's been known for a while. Visualizing an activity is the same as doing the activity, to the brain. And, it will have some effect on the muscles. I also know from cycling that if you injure one leg, it's possible to maintain some muscle tone by exercising the other leg. The better one can visualize, the stronger the effect. Now, whether one can get fitter just by thinking about exercising, imo, there's a limit.

Ya know that when you're asleep, your brain also makes your body stiffen up so that you don't act out what's happening in your mind. Though, some people sleepwalk --but that would have been disastrous for our ancestors.
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby GrahamB on Mon Nov 29, 2021 12:33 am

Steve - I'm pretty sure you don't "stiffen up" when you sleep. Well, maybe in some areas. ;) You're actually super relaxed - I believe what happens is that a hormone released in sleep disconnects your brain from the bits that cause your your body to move around.
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Bao on Mon Nov 29, 2021 2:56 am

"Standard REM sleep involves vivid dreaming as well as atonia, which helps prevent acting out dreams. However, under normal circumstances, atonia ends upon waking up, so a person never becomes conscious of this inability to move."

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasom ... -paralysis
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Taste of Death on Mon Nov 29, 2021 5:03 am

Steve James wrote:
The way I've seen it explained is that your brain can't really tell the difference between something currently happening, something you're remembering, and something you're imagining.


Yeah, that seems to be it, and it's been known for a while. Visualizing an activity is the same as doing the activity, to the brain. And, it will have some effect on the muscles. I also know from cycling that if you injure one leg, it's possible to maintain some muscle tone by exercising the other leg. The better one can visualize, the stronger the effect. Now, whether one can get fitter just by thinking about exercising, imo, there's a limit.


Try chess
https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27 ... ying-chess

Steve James wrote:Ya know that when you're asleep, your brain also makes your body stiffen up so that you don't act out what's happening in your mind. Though, some people sleepwalk --but that would have been disastrous for our ancestors.


Sleep paralysis
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasom ... -paralysis
"It was already late. Night stood murkily over people, and no one else pronounced words; all that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village---just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity." Andrey Platonov
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Bhassler on Mon Nov 29, 2021 10:18 am

Worth noting that these studies typically use untrained people, and thus they get a lot of "beginner gains" no matter what they do. There was another group that actually did the bicep exercises that the experimental group was imagining, and they saw something like a 47% increase in strength. So visualizing is not really the same as doing. Moreover, it's pretty easy to accurately visualize bending your arm with little to no training or context. Accurately visualizing complex integrated whole body movements would be something else entirely, and likely requires quite a bit of actual practice to gather enough somatic input over time to enable one to have meaningful visualizations. There's a lot to be said for the neuroplasticity that can occur in a relaxed state, as well-- in that context you're allowing the brain to just do it's thing and process whatever learning you've been doing without any sort of active visualization.

For anyone who's interested in the brain stuff, I highly recommend the Huberman Labs Podcast. He does a nice job of explaining the science and underlying mechanisms in an accessible way without getting too caught up in the pop narrative. He also provides practical tools for making use of what the science indicates.
https://www.youtube.com/c/AndrewHubermanLab/videos
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby Steve James on Mon Nov 29, 2021 11:15 am

Yes, I'd say that visualization works best when one already has some physical experience with what's being visualized. Downhill skiers always (afaik) previsualize the entire run. The muscles don't know the difference. Preparing the muscle-memory also relieves the brain of trying to figure out every twist and turn as it happens. It also leaves the brain freer to compensate for unexpected occurrences.

When it comes to tcc, specifically, imo it's somewhat the same. I.e., for a tcc beginner, visualizing the form won't have as great an effect as if one has been doing it for a while. I'd say that doing the form in one's mind is really helpful. Of course, an experience practitioner can visualize more. For ex., they can visualize different applications (or applying forms differently). If someone can visualize (use imagination) well enough, they can actually create.

Afa mediation, I think the mental aspect of tcc (combined with the form's slow pace) is meditative. I also think it's that mental state one wants to maintain --in particular when there is a physical threat or conflict. (The emotional state, however, is the opposite. The brain will naturally speed up. There's interesting science behind this. Instead of seeing/processing (visual) input at around 23 frames per sec, the brain goes into overdrive and will process many more images. That's why --like the effect of a high speed camera produces slow motion when played back-- time can seem to stretch and happen in slow motion. Car crash; same effect. The brain is racing, but the "mind" shouldn't be; thinking is way too slow).
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby wayne hansen on Mon Nov 29, 2021 8:57 pm

Visuliasion is a basic level of tai chi in both pushing and combat
The real ability comes from feeling not thinking
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Re: Meditation and taijiquan

Postby origami_itto on Mon Nov 29, 2021 9:48 pm

wayne hansen wrote:Visuliasion is a basic level of tai chi in both pushing and combat
The real ability comes from feeling not thinking


What sort of meditation practices do you incorporate into your training?
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