Natural movement/XingYi animals/Morris

[Josealb]

Natural means being number one on the reactions list. Being instinctive. Like Segs said.

The trick, what we all train for, is to replace our mother nature given reactions to things, with whatever plan or quality of movement we want. Make them instinctive so we don't have to think before we use them. Force them to be natural.

[BruceP]

Bhassler wrote:

Even if I am able to throw the form out the window and move from a purely intuitive, natural, and mechanically optimal standpoint as you suggest, wouldn't that first require that I change a mindset and start to emulate someone else (you) from the standpoint of shen or yi?

No change in mindset is needed. Nobody taught you how to fart. When it's appropriate, we just let it rip. Farting like a cheetah is the probably the only function we may ever share with a cheetah. And we may only ever pull it off once in our lives.

Nobody taught you how to spread strawberry jam on a slice of toast. It's something we do naturally and without thought. It's probably the closest thing to a predatory act many of us will ever get right. Just don't drop the toast. If we do it mindfully, our awareness gets tunnelled and we become artistic rather than martial in our pursuit of tasty toast. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's just that the knife's function is reliant on our paradigm, just as our movement is. Notice how movement differs within each paradigm. There's more elbow and wrist action when we get artsy fartsy. And jam may give you gas to fuel that cheetah fart.

Nice to see you posting again, Shooter. A long time ago, on the original eF, you posted a bit on optimally structured sparring, and one of your side-notes had to do with taking a person's spontaneous untrained reactions as a starting point for application work and martial practice. I'm finally starting to understand what you meant and how the process works. Just wanted you to know that every now and then something a person posts on these things can make a difference, even if it takes a couple of years to sort it out.

Thank you, Bhassler. That's heartening.

Check back in another couple of years and I'll have the skipping thing sorted out-- I've got as far as walking but haven't determined why skipping is better

It's not that skipping is necessarily better. It's just a method I use to reconnect. It frees up the body and builds speed, explosiveness, rhythm, and a sense of distance that can be covered in a single stride. I used to skip for miles when I did roadwork. Kids all over the world know how to skip. Nobody ever taught them how to do it. It's as natural as walking...until we decide we're too manly and heterosexual to do that anymore - Just as Morris alluded to in several of the points he was trying to make. I see more and more athletes doing it - from sprinters and decathletes, to MMA fighters and soccer players.
I was one of the first people to apply it in MMA using what is now called a 'Superman Punch'. I just called it skipping Not as easy as it looks. Especially against someone who's equally strong and well trained. I had the element of surprise against my opp because he'd never seen it before. My skipping before the match did elicit some laughs from the other fighters in the warmup area though Not one of them would laugh these days.

Anyway, in the words of Chuang Tzu:
The right way to go easy is to forget the right way, and to forget that the going is easy.

[shawnsegler]

Bruce!!!

S

[BruceP]

Shawn!!!

[BruceP]

affa wrote:

would you mind riffing on this a little more? by "external" do you mean:

according to somebody else's standards?
according to the external (i.e. "gross") elements of locomotion (as opposed to "internal")?
according to the relational demands of your environment (i.e. external circumstances)?

etc. etc.

I may have gone beyond the scope of this discussion with that question. It's best left where it's at. Apologies, affa.

[GrahamB]

My son can't naturally spread stawberry jam on toast. Maybe he's not a cheetah?

[Josealb]

And a cheetah cub cant get lunch by himself.

[GrahamB]

That's deep man, and probably internal too.

[Josealb]

Shut up and eat your flan.

[affa]

It's best left where it's at. Apologies, affa.

heh... no worries. it's prolly better that i chew it over for my self anyway

Nobody taught you how to fart. When it's appropriate, we just let it rip

importantly, though... people taught us how NOT to fart... so much so that some folks may constrain themselves needlessly, even when it's really more appropriate to let it on out...

[Ian]

I read the article. Basically, I think the natural/intuitive - learned/counterintuitive dichotomy is intellectually dishonest and overly simplistic. A load of old bollocks.

If something is intuitive, then by definition, it isn't taught. It means a given behavior is inherent in human physiology and species-specific, capable of being demonstrated with maximum proficiency with no learning.

My dog, never having been taught to kill small furry animals, intuitively bites into stuffed toys and shakes them until they're 'dead'. That's intuitive.

The fighting skills you currently own - don't almost all of them involve specific knowledge? Did they feel right and fall into place on the very first trial, or was there a structured process leading from unfamiliarity to familiarity?

How about driving - did you intuitively feel the changes in your surroundings the first time you made a life or death decision to merge onto the motorway? No. Nobody innately possesses an intuitive set of techniques to address the procedure of driving. There's no way you could've interpreted the data and made complex observations, orientations, decisions and actions (OODA) with the same ease as you do now. You're only able to do the work at a near subconscious level thanks to step-by-step, day-by-day integrations of specific skills into a familiar, seamless process.

[Pandrews1982]

Did I read a different article to you guys?

What I thought he was saying is that on an unconscious level your body knows what it is doing in a natural situation, the alignment will be in such a way that it will be comfortable and move safely and freely. The example of picking a box up is a classic example of how a child will naturally use the most efficient body alignment, however an adult is lazy and will try to cut corners but will run the risk of doing damage through being in the incorrect structure.

He's talking about the way in which the body moves and aligns primarily and not whether or not is or is not a reaction which is intuitive/counter intuitive. But this isn't his main point he goes on to explain somehting about hwo to go about improving on the natural human fighting strategy.

I agree wholehartedly that fighting effectively is counter intuitive. As a social species we have evolved to hurt and damage our rivals but not necessarily kill them. If a hunter gatherer fights with his neighbour over a mate then it makes no sense to kill his neighbour as that will reduce the number of effective hunters in the group and reduce the long term survival of the group, give him a slap put him in his place but remember you still need him attitude. The natural evolved reaction to violence is to tense up and reduce the ammount of power generated by a strike and for the other person to tense up and try to limit the damage to a specific area of the exterior of the body to reduce overall damage.

So our evolved state of fighting unarmed is ineffective when compared to a predator attacking prey and even our defense response is inefficient when compared to prey species, we don't have natural armour, we're not particularly agile or fast we have little natural defense against violence. So we have developed an unnatural strategy, one of rational planning, of tool use, of cooperation, use of traps etc. To use xing yi terms, our xing, the human Xing/Strategy is one of tool use, cooperation and rational intelligence not natural predatory instinct. Our strategy is to beat strong with clever, to beat natural with technological. If we are faced with a tiger and we are alone and unarmed we're dead meat, but ten guys with spears or bows or guns and its a different situation altogether, this is why the ancient hunter gatherers could take down a mammoth for instance. But the paradox is that in evolving this use of tools, cooperation and use of traps etc. we move further from the natural way of all other life on our planet, we have become outside nature. In fact I read recently in new scientist magazine that some scientists believe that physical evolution of humans is coming to a halt because we have as a society created a situation where we have almost eliminated the effects of natural selection.

Anyway what this means is that if we want to fight unarmed effectively you can either unlearn the evolved responses you hold and relearn new responses albeit that the body movement and alignment should be "natural" or does not detract from what you are using. Or you can look for strategies, or other ways of achieving your goal, which are already proven (in fact proven through millons of years of natural selection and evolution) because if it doesn't work for a cheetah or rabbit or girraffe or whatever then they'd be extinct. If you just take the movements of the animals and try to emulate them using your human "bad habit" type body movement then they lose much of their effectiveness, if you look deeper and see what makes the animal successful and then add this to "good habits" or "natural" type body movement then you're on your way. This isn't an exercise in external or internal or hard and soft either, both hard and soft styles can benefit from this kind of thing.

I'm not saying the xing is the holy grail as has been suggested but I see it like this. Firstly xing isn't a just specific ways of doing things e.g. snake targets small areas etc. its the whole reason an animal is able to survive - how does it behave and interact with its environment, how does it think, etc. By looking just at specific aspects such as wrapping, folding, strike small targets you are only half way there, still emulating. take a look at this guy, he folds he moves with his whole body but he's not doing snake its what i'd call "wooden snake" maybe he's doing it for the camera, or maybe he just ain't got no soul (xing)



If you go onto the 6 harmonies then in 5 elements - Xin (your spirit/unconscious thought/mind) gives rise to intent (yi) gives rise to energy (qi) gives rise to force (li). In animals you replace your Xin (your mind/spirt/whatever) with the Xing (evolutionary survival strategy) of an animal. Xing ->Yi ->Qi ->Li. Beyond this you would be looking to replace Xing (animal strategy) with Shen (universal strategy). Animals still make mistakes, predators are not 100% efficient, they get distracted etc. Shen is like tao or enlightenment, you fit into all natural situations and into all natural environments without disturbing the balance of nature (by natural I am refering to not human creation). At this level you'd be able to react accordingly to any attack and put yourself into the right positions to counter without risk of being countered. I see Shen as being an almost theoretical level, and its also linked heavily in the spiritual.

Then we hit the human paradox again though. If xing yi is so concerned with Xing and Shen and natural fighting ability why is it also so concerned with weapons. Well this is an historical thing and a necessity from the medieval period when the arts, tactics and techniques which were ultimately to become part of the xing yi ideology were used. Also we can't 100% take the human out of the equation so there is always some small rational, crafty, planning mind however supressed by the unconscious mind. The only "mythical" animal I see in the traditional xing yi sylabus is the Dragon. The dragon has been attributed by some to the crest of the Yue family, it was most definately associated with the Chinese empire and emperor, all very human, very civilized. So it is conceivable that the Dragon xing of xing yi can be attributed to the Human Xing/Strategy. Dragon xing is often associated with non-intuitive movement, going one way only to strike another, trapping the opponent, tricking them, thinking five steps ahead and it is very effective with weapons. I have no proof of this its speculation, but still it makes sense to me.

Final points. You can disagree with me or just not get where I'm coming from I don't mind I'm just trying to pass on my opinion. I agree in many ways with Jose when he said that you have to just do the things you want to learn but there's other things in there too, there's a process. In my view Xing yi is 80-90% experience and 10-20% theory and i'm not just sat here spouting theory i am training every day and putting my theory into (not so great but getting better) practice, and i can see it working for me. If you've got another way and it does what you want it to do then fine. If a guy tells me he does tai chi and I ask if he can fight and he says "no i just do it for enjoyment" then in my book that guy is getting what he wants from tai chi, not 100% of the tai chi potential but 100% what he wants and that's fine. I like what Ghandi said "Be the change you wish to see in the world", as such I try to "be" the animal I want to use not just a mirror reflecting an image of that animal.

[GrahamB]

I think people just translate Xing literally as "shape" and then assume that's all it means - just the physical shape the body adopts. Nothing deeper.

[somatai]

natural to me means innate, already there, pre-existing

[Josealb]

Pra,

Very detailed explanation, thanks. I think i pinpointed the detail that makes our understanding a bit different....you said Xing-->Yi...but i actually think its the other way around (xing is born out of yi).

Not that different in the effect, just a little bit in the cause of things.