I don't want to insult you because you are a foreigner but your criticism of my use of my native tongue is not only erroneous, it's laughable. As are most of your posts. You never add anything to these conversations, just idle commentary. Your fortune cookie platitudes lack any insight, humor, or interest. You are, in a word, jejune. Let me leave you with (unfortunately once again) your own words, that the irony might sink into your thick skull: "You don´t have to read the mail if you don´t like it. Just erase it!"
you just do not learn! First, go back to grammar school and try seriously to learn a little English. Then try a few vitamins or something so that you make things function. And then work on that anti-human chip you always have on your shoulder. Normally I'd try to stay on topic, but I'm compelled at the moment to butt my head where it doesn't belong and comment on this exchange. Namely, this is for the reason that I believe good topics get obscured by a volume of useless exchanges. Two things:Useful Messaging:
Armando, though I don't always agree with the way that Buddy makes points, he does generally make some. Witness the highly productive thread on alignment.Controversial...but specific, referenced, and useful. While your demeanor online is what I consider to be very pleasant and nice (you certainly have Buddy beat here), the content of your messages is usually quite thin.
I get the most out of posts on this board that are on a certain topic, specific, referenced by the experience of poster (i.e. it feels like this), and where the source of said material is mentioned. You may well have much to offer, but please do it in a way that is not only pleasant in language, but specific and applicable to group consumption.
Buddy, enough with whole "I don't give a damn" line. Those who don't give a damn, don't respond.
You know someone who doesn't give a damn...Bruce Frantzis. This board has his picture on it and is largely absorbed in posts that reference his materials. We say whatever we want about him and and his system, good and bad. We call him fat, and unpleasant, and highly skilled. This is just one corner of the internet. There are many others doing the same thing.
Yet, we will most likely never see Bruce personally commenting on this forum. He seems far too busy teaching, and generating books, web content, and learning materials on qigong, IMA, and meditation that span an entire globe. He says, "Here the best stuff I have to offer...in print, DVD, blog, and person. Practice it or don't. I hope that you do, but I don't give a damn."
And he doesn't.
That brings me to #2
Respect for one's teachers:
All of your gung fu is indeed your own, Buddy. Earned through blood, sweat, and tears. I might mention that all the gung fu that Bruce has accumulated is also through his own blood, sweat, and tears...and if there's one thing to be said for Bruce, he can really sweat.
Yet every training I've ever been to has always been closed with a dedication to his teachers, specifically Liu Hung Chieh.
To differ from the one's teachers in practice and mindset can also be a form of respect, a show of dedication to the improvement of one's gung fu above merely being a yes man to the dogma of a system or man.
We should just never forget that it's dumb luck if we manage to find a teacher who can lead us to an excellent gate to walk through.
Hello Kristen, you asked me in the past about similarities or disparities between Alexander Tech. and standing qigong and AT similarities with Feldenkrais. Alexander was almost his contemporary a or even little older.I had very little exposure with Feldenkrais Method but I often heard the two are either confused with one another or thought to be similar. In some way there are parallels in the sense that both techniques aim to re-educate the nervous system in connection with habitual ways of moving (and thinking etc., ) which at present may not be the most effective. But what is unique in the AT is the idea of inhibition, which means withholding automatic response to any stimulus, and instead redirecting oneself by using a mind-body cooperation process into a more natural and balanced response to a stimulus; (a stimulus is anything that makes us respond with movement and with thought/emotion; the way you are reading this at the computer right now, how you are sitting, where is your head in relation to your spine, how you use your eyes, if you agree or disagree, etc., this combination of activities is your response to the stimulus of reading, it's a constant for every living being.)
This may sound a bit heady, but in reality is extremely practical. One major feature of the AT is that essentially there are not exercises to regain good posture. In fact it will not directly approach what is wrong with the body alignment, but it will give you a foundation to let the right, natural thing happen. But the problem with us human beings is our habitual tendency to try getting things right. In the AT we get to the thing we want (good posture for example , with an indirect procedure, bypassing our desire to be right, or assume the posture we think is right (inhibition) and then , making sure we are really not reacting, with our neck muscles being free, setting a pattern of release throughout the spine, torso, legs and head freed forward and up, we arrive in a sense to the balance (our innate uprightness) that is a result of releasing tension. This is best tried in person, believe me. If you can find a teacher that can give a hands on experience of the above, you'll say: aha! There are actually many aha moments in AT lessons.
But now returning to standing qigong and the similarities with AT: First of all I assume that standing qigong is a technique that if done correctly can help a person to open her body, to become healthy through the free flow of qi in the gates and meridians as well (…and much more)
The first similarity I see with the AT is the idea of raising the occiput to open the cervical spine or neck, minding the front of it as well. The neck is very central to the AT especially in releasing it, not holding it into a position. When we learn an alignment we first learn it as something that we need to hold perhaps, versus to let it be free. The end result of the new exercise would be to become freer, but more often than not we tend to fixate. So our job as we hold the posture is continue direct the neck to be free to allow the occiput to lift up off the neck.
The chest hollowing and not moving can give lots of confusion, again if we "do it" we maybe forcing it down and even fix it , so the key word would be softening the chest, which in general in the western world we do tend to push out or inflate through a shallow breathing. As we let the chest soften down we raise the spine, sound familiar? Yes. But one direction down can also pull the neck down into a compression, so again letting the neck be free allows the head to move up while we soften the chest. Arms rotating forward to open arm pits: this is a bit more of a rotation that we actually need in our daily life. As I said I read in one Alexander book that when standing naturally with arms hanging the palms would be facing back, from the front we would see the dorsal part of the hands. But the risk here is to round a bit more to hold the position, and maybe getting a little of a hump in the upper back, which pulls down everything, and twisting the head of the upper arm a bit much towards the front (not minding the spiralling out of the humerus, I learned this the hard way! ouch!)
In the AT again we go back to the neck and head, and once this little unit connected to everything else is released and directed we again can trust to rotate the arms as described in the standing qigong, with the lifting of the head to the sky, but without pulling up either, and again minding the opposing spiral-directions of the bones and muscles as well.
So you can see that all procedures can be checked using the Alexander technique, the standing Qigong should not be viewed as a posture per se, but more like a dynamic alignment of gates and openings and allowings, where you remain standing but in reality you are continually checking in to maintain the posture as free as possible.
I am sure you know this!
I remember from the EA training in 97 an example from a TV show, a cartoon maybe , that described this process of adjusting one thing, and seeing another one getting out: bear with me, I am not from the US and did not see this TV show; BKF using it as an example described a chest of drawers, with several drawers; you close one in (let say this means you lift the occiput) and the other comes out open (you raise the chest) …anyone remembers this? Maybe Buddy, I think he was there. So when we change something in the body's alignment, another part will tend to compensate with another form of pulling down or tensing up.
This is important to watch and stop from happening otherwise we will see a worsening in fact of our overall posture.
Generally our tendency is to DO and bring our postural habits in the new things we learn,. So, the directions in the standing qigong if performed incorrectly can indeed aggravate our tendencies. But I have also seen the reverse, meaning the standing qigong helped some people to acquire a better alignment overall even into daily life and normal activities, they actually learned from the prescribed alignment, I see this especially with people who have practiced Tai Chi a lot.
I do not think I can write briefly or concisely about this,but we could continue the discussion a bit at the time. I hope this was clear andfor me perhaps it makes me understand what Buddy says when he says: your method is killing you, from my perspective this would be: the way you practice the method is killing you, and yes killing is a strong word, we can even use the term damage, even seriously. (Your method is damaging you) This subject at large is very important because again it brings to question where we are with our bodies when we learn something new, what are our pre-existing conditions in terms of habitual patterns in our posture when we are not practicing qigong; and then last but not least the way the teacher imparts the method, and how we tend to respond to what other people and teachers instruct, often blindly, because we do no know better, we go to a teacher to learn something new after all. And the teacher is not God, and his or her teaching maybe another piece of the important puzzle leading to our well being. It's not the whole picture. We must remember that too and maybe take a little more responsibility in our learning or perhaps to leave the questions open instead of thinking that we got the answer. (being in the unknown as Alexander Tech. explains)
PS regarding palms facing towards the back when standing relaxed doing nothing, I have observed that a well coordinated child has this pattern, unlike another one who has already lost the natural poise., so soon! :(
If you observe an adult who "naturally" does not let her arms and hands hang like such, I bet this person has habits of holding her arms stiff, with the outside of elbows tips pointing toward the body instead of away from the body.
*Sorry if this shows up twice. Can't tell if I actually sent it*Wonderful post! Thanks for sharing some information about AT and the way it relates to qigong/taiji. I've always been curious about AT. I feel that you hit the nail on the head when talking about being less absorbed with the idea of maintaining a specific alignment, and more concerned with the positive sensations that a good alignment allows the body to feel.Like Kristen, I have also at times shut my body down in places in the name of maintaining an alignment. Specifically, this has been true of the chest area as it relates to breathing. Alignment based upon holding through muscular force cannot be maintained comfortably (and as an extension, I'd add mental and emotional states to that list also). I have always had better success when finding what I need to allow to happen inside my body for an alignment to manifest, rather than focusing on what an alignment "should" feel like.
When I practice a specific alignment during standing now, I try to keep my mind on one and really follow its cascading effects throughout the system. In the past, and still now when I stop being as aware, I'd spend more time chasing the effects of an alignment and treating them as separate events to be dealt with individually. The result would be similar to what Marisol mentioned about the "one drawer shuts, another one opens" thing. But if I keep my mind on a specific alignment, say the occiput being open, and keep it steady in my awareness even as I experience the effects of that alignment moving through the rest of the body, then those effects and commensurate releases eventually create the space for the alignment of the occiput being open to actually stabilize and be there naturally.
A student of mine had once been experiencing nausea and light headed-ness when standing and almost passed out during class one day. This gentleman is quite body aware, but it turned out when I took a look at him that he was massively collapsing his chest on top of his diaphragm in the name of really getting his "belly to breathe". He has had decades of experience with diaphragmatic/belly breathing, but that began to take such precedence in his mind, that he was actually shutting down his breathing to accomplish it BETTER. It was a one minute fix to correct the alignment to moderate levels...and boom, no more nausea or lightheaded-ness.
It's amazing what we do to ourselves in the name of being right in lieu of being comfortable and natural.
The flip side of that I suppose, is that doing what is natural for the body and mind doesn't always feel good. It made me think of this when Ellen was talking about studying standing with Fong Ha. If the body and mind have habitually modified themselves to accomplish a task in a way that violates their natural design, a correction to this problem WILL yield temporary discomfort as our weak links are exposed. But excessive focus on what SHOULD be happening in the body creates a tension that masks what proper alignment actually FEELS like.
I guess that's the balance of studying alignment in my opinion. We benefit from the teaching of an ideal to strive toward, but must constantly test that ideal against our own experience of whether that alignment, or the way we are attempting to accomplish that alignment, is helping us to achieve the end goal of plugging in to our energy and removing any impediments to its flow.
No comments:
Post a Comment