Bao wrote:Lol! You really like trying to confuse subjects, don’t you?
That is basic Dantian rotation practice. I mentioned silk reeling. Maybe sort of same but still different. Not what I spoke about. They say that Dantian rotation is a part of silk reeling, but I almost never see that kind of spine movement in silk reeling practice.
CXW
explicitly teaches that there is one (primary) principle and three techniques for achieving that principle. The First Principle is "when one parts move, all parts move", or "when the dan tian moves, the whole body moves". The First Technique is "moving the dan tian left and right". The Second Technique is "moving the dan tian forward and back". The third is any simultaneous combination of the First and Second Techniques.
As Chen Villagers practice them, the single arm silk reeling circles are the embodiment of the First Technique, moving the dan tian left and right. There is, by definition, little of the Second Technique involved. The second technique, moving the dan tian forward and back, involves opening and closing the chest and bowing and un-bowing the spine. One won't see a lot of spinal action in the Village versions of the single arm circles. There are Village exercises specifically for the second technique, one of which is rotating the wrists against the abdomen. In teaching that in a seminar, CXW stated, "Move like a snake", and then showed the action large and obvious, where the motions of chest and spine were very evident. He did that for all of about 3 seconds: if you blinked, you missed it. The rest of the time, there was nothing overt to see: if you blinked, you just learned to copy the visible external choreography, not the spinal "wave" that drives it.
Feng Zhiqiang has more exercises and more varied exercises. He also tended to perform the actions larger and more obviously, versus the Village performance that tends to be minimalistic.
One of the challenges in teaching/practicing in two distinct planes - forward/back and left/right - is the transition to three dimensional movement. That is realized in Hong's Practical Method, which doesn't divide movement into two planes to start with. Beginners start out trying to do 3D stuff, making it more difficult, at least at the beginning.