"mechanical trick"

[origami_itto]

Is it useful, only in so much as its a label when talking about different types of force...

Agreed that the term "jin" is mostly useful as a label on different types of "force". Or maybe as describing different "qualities" of force or strength.

IMO, the best explanation of "general jin", or as here, specifically general "taiji jin", I would say that it is the natural result of Taijiquan practice and using Taijiquan principles. How well you understand Taijiquan principles (through your body and mind) and how well and how long you have practiced Taijquan, will determine the quality and "pureness" of your Taiji jin. If you understand how to use and express a taiji shenfa it will automatically express jin.

So understanding what jin is intellectually is pointless. Practice right and practice until you get it right, and then you will understand jin.

Certainly, until it's there it isn't there.

But what I'm getting at in asking everything is I'm trying to figure out what he's chasing specifically.

Like what, in his words, jin is and how does he know when he gets it.

Because I know you're looking to Adam Mizner, everything. I've completed the first five years of his curriculum and maybe there's something more in the next two sections which I'm not subscribing to, but so far it's all just jibengong, physical exercises, and drills.

I mean he says some things in the public videos but that isn't the instruction he gives to achieve anything. If you're going off that material for useful information you're looking for good fish in the copper market.

Physical exercises condition the body to allow it to produce what can be rightly called jin, then IMHO it's a matter if strengthening and refining it.

The formula is yi qi jing but these refer to means of controlling and moving the body, or allowing it to be a conduit for energy.

Energy in the Newtonian sense. Potential like a stretched rubber band, kinetic like when you release it.

Energy expressed as force, which has a magnitude and direction.

Force that can be redirected and controlled through precise tension and micro adjustment.

The writing of past masters says that it must first be understood in the mind before it can be expressed in the body.

I believe if you are confused about what it is, you may be chasing something else entirely different.

[wayne hansen]

The only Jin is ting Jin
Listening energy is the birth of all
No matter how much you watch
How much money you pay for never ending courses
It is passed on from hand to hand
Hand to hand
Hand to hand
Only hours of direct interaction allow it to cross the bridge
Seminars are good once you have it but unless you spend hours working with teacher till the point of exhaustion
It won’t cross
Hand to hand
Tricks are good Demos impress but years won’t help

YLC,s story about holding the pig tail while he runs all over the court yard
The bird that can’t fly from the hand
Only when it crosses the bridge will you know

[origami_itto]

Yeah I basically just work out alone all year, push hands as often as possible, and then spend two days with Sifu and get something new to work on.

There is always the instruction first though.

But all this prep work and thinking pays off for me. May not have "it" but I'm getting something.

Currently chewing on movement to position and movement to release energy and how one nests in the other but is independent of it.

Oh and six harmonies thanks to Mr congeniality.

[windwalker]

Interesting reading the comments.

The type of forces one felt, in my work and those I trained with in China are categorized as 勁 "jin"

The expressions listed in English. For example sinking, short, wave, empty. Ect.

Listening also used, more of a descriptor donating the ability for a person to feel the inner force of another person.


In the other cma styles I’ve trained in, that would be categorized as external or outer.

The Expressions used reflected the types of power they produced.

Quite different

[windwalker]

Many of The demos done that teachers use. Are designed to force a student or someone looking to try to understand how it was done, or attempt to understand what was done.

In My teacher‘s group, he had many people long-term practitioners of other styles.
It was quite interesting as they tended revert back to their previous training attempting to figure out what was being done.

Sometimes with heated arguments by those who couldn’t do it, arguing with others about the theory they knew, but also couldn’t do.

My teacher would watch, come over and throw them around in such a way that they still didn’t understand what was being done. But could feel it, being done.

The expectation was for them to figure it out.

[windwalker]

Some people have mentioned Qi
Have always felt that all CMA is internal just a matter of how the Qi is trained and used..

This view comes from my back ground with Mike Staples my first teacher in CMA...

A small story.



Ron Dong, and Mike,,,crane and ape aspects of Tibetan White Crane..

Hi guys. Dave asked me to say a few words about the burning hand, and I am happy to do that. I'm also open to talking about most things, so it doesn't have to be just about the burning hand as far as I'm concerned (but I know there are protocols for these kinds of forums). So, the burning hand... But first, perhaps a story. Remember… I’m a writer. I like telling stories.

The force of qi, an integral feature of the burning hand, is one of those things you need to experience in order to really get the idea. You can watch a gongfu master send a student sailing through the air, but there is a part of you that figures it’s either a trick, or there is an explanation that isn’t going to boil down some mysterious, unexplained force.

And yet…
My first White Crane teacher was a character of sorts. He was short and stocky, always wore a silk Chinese vest, and spoke with a kind of Pidgeon English I too would adopt for some odd reason. He fancied himself a race-car driver, though no one really knew what that was about, and, so he said, an expert cha-cha dancer (it was a Hong Kong thing). He would make appearances during our workouts, gathering the students around him to demonstrate various techniques. One of us…mostly me…would serve as the attacker and he would demonstrate how to do this or that.

As we practice it, White Crane was a predominantly “long arm” style of gongfu that called for a healthy program of forearm training. We all worked diligently a hitting, smacking, and generally abusing our forearms so that they could take the abuse of sparring. Indeed, I was one of the more fanatical forearm trainers, able to bring tears to the eyes of those working the “three-point-hit” exercises where babies would cry, women would scream, and forearms would turn to mush.



Ron Dong, Teacher Gorge Long

And so it was that during one of Mr. Long’s demonstrations, I lined myself up in a typical attack position, then came barreling in with a punch aimed at Mr. Long’s nose.

At the time, Mr. Long was mostly talking as I was coming in with my punch. He wasn’t paying much attention to me, and as a result, he deflected my punch by “slapping” my forearm away a bit too hard.

The “Burning Hand,” was Mr. Long’s signature technique, and he was quite open about teaching it those who wanted to learn it. It was an “internal” specialty, different from “external” pushing power. More a slap than a hit,

Mr. Long would sometimes place a phone book on your shoulder and give it one of those “slaps.”

You could feel two things coming through the phone book. The first was a push (the external component) that would set you back a foot or two.
That was to be expected, but it wasn’t anything to worry about. It was the second thing that was nasty... a sharp, stinging sensation that penetrated your shoulder.

This second force seemed to follow the more external, first force. It seemed to lag behind.

But the external force was then gone in an instant, while the stinging second force stayed -- and grew.

Now, I am not a gullible person, and it was going to take more than a trickle of this second force through a phone book to convince me that this slapping stuff was anything much.

And so it was that Mr. Long deflected my punch with a slap…just a little too hard.

And as a result, my arm locked out in front of me, as if frozen, while a searing pain moved through the flexor muscle compartment of my forearm.
My jaw clenched shut as I could feel beads of sweat forming on my face.

Mr. Long continued to yack away at the other students, unaware of my predicament. I was struggling to breath, actually. I couldn’t move, actually.

But out of the corner of my eye, I could see the other students now looking at me with some concern.

For his part, still talking to the group, Mr. Long began pulling back to strike again.
He still wasn’t looking in my direction. I tried to retract my arm, but couldn’t move.

Then finally, I managed to whimper something out… like “Aaaa!”

I know that sounds dramatic, but that’s what happened. And lucky for me, it was enough to get Mr. Long to stop talking and turn his head to see that I was in some serious hurt.
I would not have been a happy camper had I been hit like that twice.

The next day I had a huge black and blue mark on my forearm, pretty much the size of his palm. But this was not a result of force #1. That kind of force would have maybe broken a bone, had he hit hard enough, or maybe it would have done nothing,
if he hadn’t hit hard enough, but this was something from force #2.

And call it whatever you like… call it qi, or burning hand, or whatever… it is something you need to personally experience in order to get the idea. And I got the idea.

https://rumsoakedfist.org/viewtopic.php ... be07febda8

but there is a part of you that figures it’s either a trick, or there is an explanation that isn’t going to boil down some mysterious, unexplained force.
[/b]

This some 20yrs later found also true in China,,,even among the locals there...took awhile to get past this....

[C.J.W.]

Seems to me the Taiji guy in the OP's videos is basically copying off Sifu Mark Rasmus' Taiji instructional materials.

[Giles]

The only Jin is ting Jin
Listening energy is the birth of all

There's a point in a book by Patrick Kelly where he quotes Ma Yueh Liang: "Peng is sensitivity". Which I always thought was interesting, and nowadays I think I understand a bit better what Ma meant, even when dealing with strong incoming forces. It's a massive simplification of course, and omits some basic building blocks, but a good marker for where you want to go.

[origami_itto]

here is someone who seems to have a "mechanical trick" (he says to "roll under") approach:


and a (compliant) way to practice it for "rebounding"


maybe this is "structure" or "fascia" or "bracing" or "eccentric" or "non red muscles" or something like that to some people. as a "feeder", he is essentially throwing himself out. it's not very clear to me why they are doing this. he seems to want the "thrower" to feel like a trampoline. he says something about "train the fascia" and getting to "energetic part" later...

I finally got around to watching these videos. I like what he's doing.

The stretch is a big part of what I'm working on.

He explains it very straight forwardly I thought in his video about sung (I watched a few more)

You are training to use your sinews (tendons and ligaments) instead of your red muscles for the bulk of the work. Your sinews are ALWAYS involved in anything you do with your muscles because they attach muscle to bone and bone to bone. So we reduce the tension in the red muscle tissue, let the white tissue handle it, then stretch that tissue.

It grows slowly and you can tear it, so you start with no load, right? Get the form and feeling correct thicken it a little.

Then these exercises to find and strengthen that stretch and start to harness the energy that it contains. The partner becomes a load and you work on increasing the power you can store and release.

Rubber bands, the plunger on a pinball table, a bow and arrow....

[Doc Stier]

Tendons and ligaments have very little stretching capability by comparison to muscles. That's why they are easily injured when forced to move beyond their normal, limited range of motion.

As such, it is primarily through increased flexibility, relaxation and release of the connected muscle tissues that injuries to the tendons and ligaments is avoided.

[Quigga]

Make it stick to the bones

[windwalker]

In china, we used the following distinctions when differentiating training between external and internal practices

External

bone
skin
tendon

Internal

yi (intent)
qi (inner energy)
shen (spirit)

It's what we used, others may use different distinctions or even not feel there are...

We used them to separate and explain training, and why some training is incompatible
although it may look the same


many demos showing the differences....

Was wondering if others also have ways of showing differences (if they do feel there are differences)
What do you do to show whats done is not "mechanical" in nature

[windwalker]

The only Jin is ting Jin
Listening energy is the birth of all

There's a point in a book by Patrick Kelly where he quotes Ma Yueh Liang: "Peng is sensitivity". Which I always thought was interesting, and nowadays I think I understand a bit better what Ma meant, even when dealing with strong incoming forces. It's a massive simplification of course, and omits some basic building blocks, but a good marker for where you want to go.

Depending on how or what one views (peng jin) expanding energy as...

in our practice peng jin, can expand beyond beyond the bodies physical boundaries
and shrink inside the bodies physical boundaries..

[Doc Stier]

The only Jin is ting Jin
Listening energy is the birth of all

There's a point in a book by Patrick Kelly where he quotes Ma Yueh Liang: "Peng is sensitivity". Which I always thought was interesting, and nowadays I think I understand a bit better what Ma meant, even when dealing with strong incoming forces. It's a massive simplification of course, and omits some basic building blocks, but a good marker for where you want to go.

Depending on how or what one views (peng jin) expanding energy as...

in our practice peng jin, can expand beyond beyond the bodies physical boundaries
and shrink inside the bodies physical boundaries..

Yes, of course, the outward expansion of peng jin not only generates a repelling affect, both defensively and offensively, but also generates an inwardly receiving medium through which one can feel inbound force and intention with greater sensitivity as well.

[windwalker]

Yes, of course, the outward expansion of peng jin not only generates a repelling affect, both defensively and offensively, but also generates an inwardly receiving medium through which one can feel inbound force and intention with greater sensitivity as well.

We might have some different thoughts on this,,,which is ok

Curious, the main inquiry of the previous post,

how would you demo this ?

How would you separate the expanding force from what some might call a "mechanical trick"

what type of demo would some one use to show this, if the same ideas are used ...

an open question,,,not necessarily directed at the post quoted..