Students came from as far away as Ottawa, Ontario and Rochester, New York!  The ages ranged from 20s to 60s. I must say that these folks are inquisitive and intelligent, while remaining open to exploring the Jiulong principles and making their own discoveries. My function is to provide a environment in which everyone can learn and find out how the Nine Dragon Bagua methods work. Most importantly, we had lots of fun!

We started with Quiet Sitting, and spent some quality time practicing a deep relaxation exercise. The idea here is to relax the body as much as possible in order to better perceive subtle sensations. When we are agitated there is a corresponding tension in a variety of places in the body so an overall relaxation exercise is quite effective for reducing this tension. In addition it trains the use of the mind to generate sensations in the body, which is a necessary precursor to creating the energies of the 8 Palms later in Jiulong training.

The next lesson was in training the peripheral vision. The exercise involved learning to appreciate the size of the peripheral field and to understand how to sharpen one’s use of it to see movement. The exercise is done in two phases, one standing still with the other while walking. Peripheral vision is very important as it is the visual tool for noticing movement. For more information on the Jiulong Baguazhang use of peripheral vision, visit Shifu Allan Marshall’s article in the Jiulong Journal.

Next was the main event for the day. Namely, training one’s ability to sense the momentum of a body in motion. In the previous workshop, I had emphasized the skill and control of one’s own body. We worked on balance and structure with particular focus on the the Jiulong Ridgepole – that sense of the perfect vertical alignment of the body from the top of the head down to the feet. (read the review here)

In this session, the focus was turned outwards to feeling the momentum of a partner’s body. Being able to feel one’s partner in motion is needed in order to be able to eventually control his balance. So we played with sensing the momentum of a partner while they walked, along with narrowing that focus down to feeling the momentum of an arm as it throws a punch (slowly!!) This lead to starting to see how the Jiulong basics principles start coming together to create whole body power. Among the most exciting aspects of this art is that of personal discovery. As each student starts to see how they can move and actually deal with an opponent, their excitement with the art increases. I had the pleasure of watching this happen.

I recorded the deep relaxation exercise from the Quiet Sitting session. Once I have reviewed it to ensure the recording quality is acceptable, I will release the mp3 file to those who are interested. Stay tuned.

Jan Carstoniu led the class while I spent time with individual people. The focus of this particular session was the famous Jiulong shifting exercise. This the essential training for teaching one to drive the body with the legs and learn to understand how power is brought from the ground into the body. We explored the way this exercise prepares one to learn how to use the whole body as a power source rather than only an arm. By far the most difficult aspect of this and other exercises is to be able to maintain “sung” or relaxation while moving. It becomes particularly difficult when someone touches you and starts to push or pull. Maintaining relaxation when one is being moved is challenging. But, it seemed everyone was getting the idea.

We look forward to future classes along these lines. It has been said in our art that the basics are the advanced materials. This starts to make sense when one begins to work with our principles and finds it difficult to get the body and mind to behave as desired. This is of course, the main purpose in coming to a class. To experiment with the methods with colleagues and get instruction and ideas from those with more experience.

Thanks for coming everyone. See you next Saturday.

But make it they did and we had a great group with a nice mixture of experienced and brand new people.

These workshops are designed to highlight specific components of our Bagua basics program called Rolling the Pearl. So, since I knew there was to be this mix of people with varying degrees of Jiulong Baguazhang knowledge, I selected 3 main principles with which to work.

1. The Ridgepole

2. Turning the leg in the hip joint

3. Sung (relax – release)

These 3 are very important to overall mobility in our art and I felt it made sense to help experienced people become more familiar with being able to move, turn and adapt. For the new people, it was a chance to make some discoveries about how they can connect to their body and balance in order to gain greater control over these.

We started with Standing and went deeply into it, as it relates to the theme of control and mobility. There was a guided meditation used to assist people in creating and feeling the release, and this sensation was transferred into the movement portion of the workshop.

Turning the leg in the hip is practiced in our warm up exercises called Dao Yin. Specifically, the exercise is called Square Stepping which involves walking in a pattern designed to facilitate the rotation of the leg in the hip joint. For mobility, this leg rotation is very important in the Ba Step. This latter is designed to allow one to turn without losing the momentum of the body mass.

These components were practices separately and then combined into several exercises so that participants could get a sense of how Jiulong Bagua feels when the whole body is moving. We engaged in partner play as well as solo practice, and went as far as pushing on each other in order to start learning how to adapt to incoming forces. In other words, one would walk while maintaining the principles and try to maintain them when being pushed (gently of course).

The 3 hours flew by and it seemed everyone came away with a better understanding of these principles. It was not the understanding held only in the intellect as a result of listening to my explanations. It was the understanding created by actually feeling it inside their own body. This is always my goal. To try and communicate what I feel when I do Baguazhang and to help students feel it too.

If you are intrigued and would like to try one of these workshops, check back here regularly. Or better still, sign up as a subscriber as we notify those folks in advance of a general announcement. We only allow a maximum of 20 people to take a workshop so it is best to reserve a space ahead of time.

There will be a series of workshops in addition to the regular Tuesday and Thursday classes. Shifu Painter will be here the weekend of April 30 and I will be offering more “Basics of the Basics” workshops.

In addition, there are some really exciting DVD projects in the works that will provide students with excellent learning tools. Shifu Painter is getting ready to release some of the “inner circle” knowledge from the Daoqiquan tradition. But this will only be released to those who are truly interested. Watch your email for more announcements.

If you have been thinking about coming to the Toronto school, this promises to be a exceptional year for doing it. The upcoming video and online information, much of which was only available to workshop participants and private students will help you uncover the reality behind Daoist health and internal martial arts. In our school, we will be exploring this information as we aspire to improve our abilities and our lives.

Here’s to 2011!!

Shizi Eric Reynolds

So please click here for the survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D2KBL2N

Thanks,

Eric

The on-going classes were changed to Tuesdays and Thursdays, headed by Dr. Jan Carstoniu. The “Rolling the Pearl” basics class was assigned to Thursday evenings, while Tuesdays was kept for the Jiulong Research Group. This is comprised of students who have basic facility in Rolling the Pearl and are interested in exploring deeper aspects of the art. If anyone is interested in finding out more about these two classes and how they differ, please contact us here.

In order to provide an opportunity for those students who were unable to attend the regular classes but still wanted to continue learning, I started a series of workshops called “The Basics of the Basics”. The idea behind these is to select essential components of the basics taught in the Rolling the Pearl classes, and go deeper into those components. This would provide those students who were unable to attend classes some on-going involvement in Jiulong, while also offering the regular class attendees a chance to deepen their knowledge.

When I conceived of the series I wanted to select what I thought were those components of the basics that were fundamental to being able to use Jiulong for self-defense. Since the purpose of the Rolling the Pearl program is to teach new students a systematic way to create whole-body power, I thought it would be interesting to look at what components of those basics were……basic. Hence the title of the workshop series. I also wanted to offer some material that was not simply a repeat of the Basics classes, but be a unique learning experience. I think this was achieved, but the participants of the workshops will be the best judges of that.

Each workshop was 3 hours and was designed to explore a principle as it appears in each aspect of the art. The first principle for our focus was the concept of the Ridgepole. This essential element of the Basics is so fundamental that I felt the students would benefit from a deeper exploration of it. Like all the basics on which we focused, this one permeates the entire Jiulong art from beginning to end. It appears in each aspect of the art, namely quiet sitting, standing, shifting, walking, circling, and applications. So we spent time exploring the “feeling of perfect vertical alignment” from sitting all the way through to applications. It was interesting to notice that as we got busier, especially in applications, the Ridgepole as the focus of our exploration would get lost in the desire to perform the given application. This is a very common challenge for each of us, me included. In the desire to “be good” at a particular defence application, it is easy to forget the essential body alignments that make the application work. When this happened, we would slow down and in some cases stop and return to the Standing practice. In this way, each student could reconnect with the Ridgepole and bring the feeling of it into the application.

The next session was focused on the feet. There is a lot of discussion about walking in Baguazhang but I wanted to highlight it in a different way. Remember that the purpose of these workshops is to go further into the basics so one can better integrate them into overall movement. So I wanted to be sure to connect the feet to the Ridgepole in order to have continuity from one workshop to the next. In this case, it was a matter of paying attention to the feeling of the feet being directly underneath the Ridgepole. We explored a number of ways of doing this and worked with some exercises that enabled each person to keep the feet where they need to be. What was most interesting was the improvement and ease of overall movement when the alignment of the feet and Ridgepole was correct. Again, we explored this alignment throughout the sit, stand, shift, walk, circle, apply sequence of training. This is an ideal way to ensure the principle one is working on is consistently felt as one starts to speed up.

The third workshop was arguably the most interesting. The principle was Sung. This is possibly the single most important one since it is required at all times. Every posture, shape, and movement is improved by relaxing all muscles not needed for that movement and using minimal tension in those that are needed. After a lengthy sitting session in which we used a guided meditation to create sung throughout the body, we stood up and focused on the most neglected exercise in the art – the side to side arm swinging. This is an ideal exercise to start moving while maintaining sung since the arms are supposed to remain relaxed and the body simply turns on the Ridgepole. Those who had attended the previous two workshops were primed to receive this lesson and made personal discoveries about how the body really feels when moving with sung. We then moved into the Five Circles with this new sensation of sung and everyone found that they were able to perform the circles with a beautiful fluid motion. When it came to start doing applications, we kept the speed very slow in order to maintain sung and ensure the alignments learned in the previous workshops were being enhanced by staying relaxed.

The final workshop of the year was an attempt to bring all the information together and integrate it into each movement. In fact the theme of the workshop was integration since that is the overall goal of the Rolling the Pearl program. Whole-body power can be thought of as “all the principles integrated into each movement” So we spend some time reviewing the components we had worked on in the previous workshops and then spent the rest of the workshop on applications. Again, these were done slowly in order to ensure the principles were not being lost. In some cases we sped things up a bit to see where the principles start to get lost. This is very valuable as long as one stops to examine what is being felt and comparing it to the feeling of the principles being done slowly (or while sitting an standing).

I have not discussed the specific exercises, visualizations, and practice sequences we used as that would take up to much time for you, the reader. However, if there is enough interest I will consider creating some videos to show what we did along with some audio guided meditations that help you find the feelings that were created in the workshops. The bottom line in these sessions was to create the feeling of the principles being correctly integrated into the mind and body and then carry that feeling all the way into applications.

My impression was that this was a success based on the feedback I received after each workshop, and the future for these sessions looks bright. If you are interested in knowing when the next workshop is, please contact us here.  CONTACT