the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Zhu Wenqing - honorary adopted son of master Yao Chengguang, in 2004 when he was Yao's assistant, and some years later winning in professional sanda and mma tournaments. The clip apeared yesterday on weechat and includes footage from our 2004 training with Yao in Beijing.

30 December 2022, a professional sanda tournament. Zhang Funing from Linqing Yiquan School winning by TKO. Linqing Yiquan School was founded by Chen Ming, a disciple of Wang Yufang and student of Yao Chengguang. He's been sending his best students to learn for some periods of time with Yao Chengguang and Cui Ruibin. Young Zhang Funing is the next generation - a student of his students.

An Yiquan festival at Gu Wudang - "Ancient Wudang", not THE Wudang you think about 11-13 November 2023

It's the same in all IMA, no need to focus on the dantian or any other body part. If you learn correct body movement, you will organize your movement naturally from the center. Any shenfa/body method should be trained so it comes naturally, so you don’t need to think about it.

Bao wrote:It's the same in all IMA, no need to focus on the dantian or any other body part. If you learn correct body movement, you will organize your movement naturally from the center. Any shenfa/body method should be trained so it comes naturally, so you don’t need to think about it.

How can you learn correct body movement though, if you do not focus on the dantian?

Appledog wrote:

Bao wrote:It's the same in all IMA, no need to focus on the dantian or any other body part. If you learn correct body movement, you will organize your movement naturally from the center. Any shenfa/body method should be trained so it comes naturally, so you don’t need to think about it.

How can you learn correct body movement though, if you do not focus on the dantian?

In Tai Chi, correct body mechanics are first and foremost whole body movement. You shouldn’t really add the Dantian into the equation until you can organize your movements and when you have understood how to sink. When you have started developing roots and understand how to move from the core, understanding the dantian won’t be hard. A little bit of adjustment and some practice should be enough. Using the dantian is actually something quite natural. Why people don’t understand it is because they don’t know how to arrange their body movements. Some people make too much fuzz over it.

And as always, learning and doing are different things. You only focus on how your feet move when you learn to ride a bike. When you can do it, you don’t. You never focus on the mechanics when you know it. That also goes for swimming, playing instruments etc. so however you twist and turn the issue, dantian coordination and movement, or moving from the dantian, must be a natural part of your overall body method.

Appledog wrote:
How can you learn correct body movement though, if you do not focus on the dantian?

how do we learn to move in harmony with the world/our surroundings, by exploring it or by musing on a point in the belly ?

Appledog wrote:

Bao wrote:It's the same in all IMA, no need to focus on the dantian or any other body part. If you learn correct body movement, you will organize your movement naturally from the center. Any shenfa/body method should be trained so it comes naturally, so you don’t need to think about it.

How can you learn correct body movement though, if you do not focus on the dantian?

The Qi sinks to the dantien before it is mobilized to the limbs.

This happens as a result of proper movement.

Once achieved, a different kind of movement is possible, but it is not accessible through focusing on the dantien.

I think there is a divergence of teaching on whether the dantien is a physical organ that exists from birth or an organization of energy that must be cultivated.

The problem is that in that same area you have all these useful muscles and also more neurons than exist in the entirety of most animals.

So if you're told to think about, train, and use that area... which part?

Going by the prevailing theories of TCM and TCC, if you are thinking about qi, you're doing it wrong. We use awareness to guide the qi where we want it to go. If our awareness never leaves our dantien, then our qi is stagnant in the dantien.

Yang style is clear in that the motion comes from the waist and the qi is in the dantien. Wu style is clear in that the yi qi awareness is not initially present and must be cultivated before it can be understood.

So, the short answer, we focus on movement using the whole body. The core muscles are important, but they aren't everything and they aren't the dantien in the sense that some of us mean it. The awareness goes everywhere and the qi follows it.

But that's not saying you're wrong. Dantien is not well defined. It's not objectively demonstrable.

So in one tradition they say dantien just means core muscles, fine that's a perfectly valid model that delivers real results and produces martial artists of tremendous skill.

In another, they mean an energetic center, like the other two dantiens in the solar plexus and brain.

What they say it feels like is a bag or balloon that stores the fluid like substance of qi that then inflates the rest of the body like an additional balloon.