How to Do Fa-Jing –Issuing Energy — in Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Bagua
He was one of the greatest kung-fu masters in the world, a direct descendant of the creator of tai chi, and he was asking me to show him a punch. It was an exciting moment but also nerve-wracking. Trying not to be nervous, I settled into the posture and prepared to show him internal power. Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang stood in front of me, watching carefully.
Trying to remain relaxed, I shifted my weight from my right to my left leg and my right fist shot out, fast, relaxed, and powerful. At the same time, my left elbow thrust backward and my left hand stopped at my ribcage.
Grandmaster Chen was not impressed. He took my right hand in his left, my left hand in his right and told me to relax. Before I knew what was happening, he jerked the right hand out and pushed the left hand backward. I wasn’t quite relaxed enough and almost suffered whiplash in my neck.
Relax, he told me again, and once again he jerked my arms — hard — forcing one to punch and the other to return to my ribcage. For a minute, I was like a rag doll, completely limp as he repeatedly demonstrated how relaxed I was supposed to be when performing fa-jing.
It’s amazing how the internal arts of China — Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Bagua — have been distorted by teachers who take what they have read too literally. The subject of fa-jing (pronounced “fah-zhing”) is one example of how a simple concept is misunderstood and misinterpreted.
Fa-jing means “issuing energy.” Unfortunately, the people who desperately need to believe in the supernatural think that in doing fa-jing, you are shooting chi out of your hands or body. They take it literally.
It’s not magical or mystical. It’s a matter of physics, and in the internal arts, it’s a matter of body mechanics.
Boxers issue energy anytime they deliver a jab, a hook, or an uppercut. If you’re into karate, you issue energy when you break a board with your foot, and if you’re into MMA, energy is issued when you drive a knee into an opponent’s face.
In the internal arts, fa-jing — issuing energy — is more complex, but the end result is the same. You knock someone into next week.
Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang, whose ancestor,Chen Wangting created Tai Chi 11 generations ago, teaches that fa-jing is a matter of proper body structure (posture) and good internal movement. From there, he says you simply “step on the gas.” He likes using automobile metaphors. In other words, if you use good structure and mechanics and then add speed, you will create the unique relaxed power of the internal arts.
I’ve studied other martial arts and have found the body mechanics of the internal arts far more difficult and complex. For high-quality tai chi you must maintain ground strength, peng jin, whole-body movement, silk-reeling (spiraling movement through the body), dan t’ien rotation and opening/closing the kua. You must connect all of these skills through the body as you deliver the strike with speed, power, and relaxation.
It takes years to learn how to do this from an internal perspective, because we all bring bad habits to the internal arts and it takes years to learn the above-mentioned skills and learn to maintain the whole-body connection as you move. It takes years for us to lose the muscular tension that we’ve developed all of our lives.
When Grandmaster Chen worked with me on the punch, I didn’t have it the first few times I did the punch and he corrected me each time. Suddenly I understood, and the next time I punched I connected the relaxed power from my foot, through my body and out my hand, exploding and shifting my weight at the same time.
“Ahh!” he said, his face lighting up. “Good.”
As a martial artist, few things are better than getting a “good” from Chen Xiaowang.
A short time later, he astonished those of us attending his Washington, D.C. workshop by doing a series of fa-jing strikes.C. With each strike, it seemed his uniform was exploding in all directions. That type of power comes from being connected and relaxing — and from a lifetime of practice. When he does fa-jing, you can almost feel the energy even standing halfway across a room. It reminded me of being on the floor right behind the basketball hoop during a University of Iowa game. When the big players were slamming into each other beneath the hoop, you could feel the body heat and almost feel the energy as they collided. I’ll never forget it, and being close to Chen Xiaowang when he does fa-jing is very similar.
There are two myths about tai chi that all martial artists should put aside. One is that tai chi is a slow motion health and meditation exercise. In truth, it’s a powerful martial art that is practiced slowly so students can learn the body mechanics and later can speed up the movements and deliver amazing power without a lot of obvious effort to the untrained observer.
The other myth people should forget is about chi. Fa-jing has nothing to do with shooting energy out of your body. Instead of focusing on chi, which has never been proven exist in independent scientific studies and which is too often the focus of tai chi teachers, you should focus on proper posture and body mechanics. Do this and you’ll be closer to developing the relaxed power of fa-jing.
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Ken Gullette has practiced martial arts for 36 years and is best known for his high-quality instructional DVDs, his online internal arts school and his internal arts blog. He is dedicated to dispelling the myths surrounding tai chi, hsing-i and bagua, showing that the skills required for the internal arts are physical, not metaphysical.
How To Keep Martial Arts Interesting For Kids
One of the ways to keep a child interested is by setting up obstacle courses and having races. This drill helps to train the child’s body for martial arts such as coordination, but keeps it fun so that he or she enjoys it. In addition, obstacle courses help to train the child for endurance and speed, both of which are crucial to the sport of martial arts.
Often children find the actual courses hard to pay attention to, so by increasing the energy of the class, it can have a significant impact on the child’s attention. For instance, including some high-energy music can set the tone for the class and keep the child interested. Moreover, keep the class moving, do not spend too much time on one technique or rule, you can always come back to it later. By keeping things moving, you are moving at the pace of a child and keeping their interest.
Make sure you are well prepared for the class you are teaching and keep the content exciting and fresh every week. If you go over the same technique for three weeks in a row, you will surely lose several of the students to boredom. Remember, with children, you can always come back to a technique, the important part is to keep the classes varied and high-energy.
In addition, in each of your classes with children, you should make it fun and have games that may not be exactly related to martial arts, but that will have an effect on their strength, balance, coordination, and stamina. Moreover, games that help with timing and dodging are excellent to not only keep the child’s interest but it also helps to condition their bodies.
You need to engage children in fitness activities, but these can include a combination of activities such as squats, sit-ups, jogging, and dodge ball. All of these together help to keep the child interested while developing them for the more advanced aspects.
Children normally have a shorter attention span and therefore, an activity has to be fun in order to keep their attention. Martial arts can be learned by children of any age, but the classes as well as the techniques learned must be fun, high-energy, and easy for the child to grasp. When these three are kept in mind, the child can advance to greater levels.
[Top]The Louvre, From Supply Depot To Art Museum
The Louvre is generally regarded as the premiere art museum in France. With a collection of about 35,000 items contained in 652,300 square feet, it’s not hard to understand why. Why would you go anywhere else when every piece of art and antiquity you could ever want to see are contained in one place? But the Louvre is obviously not the only art museum in France. Several decidedly smaller art museums in France house collections comprehensive enough to rival the Louvre.
These lesser known but equally compelling museums include the Muse de l’Orangerie, the Muse d’Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris, even a geographically confused Palais de Tokyo – the list goes on. One particularly successful museum is the Muse d’Orsay. The Muse’s collection’s scope is admirable and covers several centuries of European visual and decorative art.
The history of this particular museum is long and illustrious. The Muse d’Orsay used to be a railway station, Gare d’Orsay. This railway station was built specifically for the glorious 1900 Exposition Universelle. This exposition was a World’s Fair held in Paris, and featured the rededication of the Eiffel Tower, which had been created for the previous World’s Fair. The Gare (“gare” means railway station in French) was elaborately constructed in the fashionable Art Nouveau style.
The design was the pride of the three architects who created it; Lucien Magne, Victor Laloux, and mile Bnard were top designers at the time. The vaulted ceilings of the Gare were made of tiny interlocking panes of glass, and intricate stone carvings paneled the walls. The sizable Gare, carefully crafted out of innumerable tan stones, overlooked the glistening Seine River.
For the time of the World’s Fair and up until WWII, the Gare . The Nazis appropriated the now-dingy railway station for transporting munitions, soldiers, and even looted possessions from European citizens. After the fall of the Third Reich, the Gare fell into further disrepair. The unstable economy of France prevented the Gare from getting the restoration it needed until the early 1970s. By that time, the station wasn’t large enough to adequately support a large amount of train commuter traffic. For a few years it was used as a hotel until in 1977. Because of faltering profits and public pressure, it was decided to convert the Gare into a museum. The conversion was complete in 1986 and was dedicated by then-president Franois Mitterrand.
Today, the Muse is home to an impressive collection of mainly French art. It is now well known for its broad selection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, of which it has the largest collection in the world, and is no longer a railway station. These include renowned artists such as Paul Czanne, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gaugin, and Vincent van Gogh, The list is endless.
There are even eighty-six Monet paintings in the Muse’s catalog. It also holds decent architecture and photography exhibits. While there are several larger Muses in France, the Muse D’Orsay should definitely be a priority for anyone going on vacation in France.
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