Leaderboard

When I first got into running, I read a great book called Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. One assertion the book made is that we are hairless due to natural selection. Our lack of hair and ability to sweat gives us a distinct advantage in hunting over hairy, four legged animals that are much faster. They can run faster but can only lower their temperature through panting so they are forced to periodically stop and rest or they overheat. Humans, on the other hand, can lower temperature through sweating so it is possible for us to keep running for hours, even days, without stopping. As long as we can keep the faster animal in our sight, we will eventually catch them. McDougall postulates this is one reason we have come to dominate other species. The book goes into some interesting territory, including the Raramuri people of Mexico who are amazing runners. One just won an ultra-marathon, in fact, running in traditional sandals and a long skirt with no formal training. Before running the ultra, she walked 14 hours just to get there. https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/post/indigenous-runner-wins-canyon-ultramarathon

I am still here arguing with some old timers. Arguing with the same old things. I hope I'll never win. If I do, then, there is nothing to do here anymore.

No, you may mean something else, but what I said refers to the level of skill, the development and refinement of qi with all its taiji-specific derivatives including fajin -- and its availability on a whole new level to those who had developed and refined it. Short jin refers to its concentration into ever-smaller units (in actual distance of application, among other things, but not only) of ever-greater power. Basically you generate it at what looks like a simple touch, not a punch, not a kick, not a push... just touch. You need to place yourself on the receiving end of short jin in order to get an idea of what it's about. A high level teaching master can show you... once. Once is enough, and you won't ask for more, I guarantee it. But you will understand what you're working toward. (And there's no other way. )

Yes it’s very hard to loose someone you love. Wishing you well.

Urgent update on the imminent demise of TDB

I quit wheat many years ago and haven't looked back. Before I quit I was itching all the time, now it's very rare. Just that would have been enough to quit wheat products, but lesser effect were that stomach problems became less common and inflammation reduced.

If only we could find a panel of scientists and a video camera to film those bears DOING magic. Oh, and the bears will need to be naked to make sure they aren't faking anything. Although if memory serves we would also need to spend the next 10 pages of comments discussing which scientists, and how naked, which seems excessive.

Welcome back. I often think the Golden Era of Taobums is behind us, but reading about bears and Egyptian magic, I´m not sure if things have changed at all.

Look up Hex as in magic sign. https://occult-world.com/hex-signs-hexenfoos/

Hello fellow DBs My name is Steve Clougher; I live in an unusually beautiful and peaceful part of the square world under the Southern Cross. With a loving wife, a feisty cat and fourteen chickens, who eat a lot. Plus 100 sparrows, who eat my chickens' food, without moderation. My mission is to learn how to teach moderation in eating to sparrows, after succeeding in which I will turn to teaching it to myself. I've just discovered nei-leh, which is exciting. Sorry. I'll try harder to sound calm and tranquil. For sixty years, nearly, I've studied and meditated: I Ching, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Gurdjieff and his pupils, are my loves. Enough about me, i hope.

Born to Run made such a big splash that it´s now spawned professional detractors. Health guru Mark Sisson recently came out his latest cheekily named tome, Born to Walk, in which he argues that walking, not running, is the locomotive motion of choice. Surely "Born to Crawl" can´t be far behind.

never saw the play, "cats" but from photos it looks like it was fun...and many they had their tails.

Of course I meant the queen of England when she was young and feisty (rumor has it she used to hit and punch the king -- but not with taiji -- back then), and Noam Chomsky when he was a linguist whose Transformational Grammar I studied at the university many moons ago, rather than a political sellout to ___________ (not filling in the blank to avoid the dreaded politicizing of the thread). The first one then did (rumor has it) something I wouldn't mind being able to do myself, and the second turned the English language upside down and inside out for me, which was quite beneficial for my then-budding ability. So don't dismiss them without consideration... although neither one did anything for my taiji... oh and all the taiji reading material, whether in English or not, didn't do that much either beyond giving me the ability to engage in taiji parlance... most folks in my lineage who practiced and developed it for the previous 400 years were illiterate to begin with.

Maybe not the kissing part yet, but the rest 🤍💛

Thats you in old age ..... baldy .

Yes, I could see the video. Peng does resemble ye ma fen zong and kao does involve the shoulder. If that is your understanding and you want to leave it there, I am happy to accommodate you.

The subject of this thread is beyond me (so please excuse the interruption), but I´m grateful that my abilities in English, such as they are, have not turned me into the queen of England or Noam Chomsky.

subconscious gremlins?

As a reggae song goes, The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. Too bad you didn't have better luck with finding a group to your specs. Thank you. I credit my master, my grandmaster and the other three of the Four Tigers of Chenjiagou, as well as my practice partners and students with giving me a bit of a clue over the years.

How in the world we got this into the OP?

We shouldn't doubt the narrator because of the fact that Paul Morphy passed on in 1884, should we? Still, it's a good story.

I watched it - a Stephen Chow movie. He and a gangster head immobilized for very long during a duel. The gangsters were initially ready to fight but nothing happened so they resort to smoke, joke, eat, call others....

The only "external" thing about fajin is that you release the force externally instead of circulating and returning it to the interior as you normally do with your qi when practicing taiji. It fully depends on internal processes, the difference being that when you don't use fajin they remain internal throughout the practice and your qi is not lost -- whereas when you fajin you do spend some, especially when you initiate it instead of waiting to use the opponent's. (That's fully legit provided you don't do it often.) I've seen it in situations where, e.g., two equal-skill level (high middle) and equal stubbornness level practitioners, in push-hands, were standing against each other for some thirty, forty minutes, hands touching, stance perfect, rooting equally solid, just listening for the opening... and neither one offered an opening. So to the less-than-clueful observer they were doing nothing the whole time. And to the one with a clue, it was a battle of wills in full force. (Of course both were women, the patient gender.) The workshop participants started making bets as to which one will lose patience first and initiate something. (I don't know how it ended because I was busy with my own tuishou partners, I think I went through a dozen in the same time they were trying to NOT fajin first... 'cause every time I was done with the next partner, I'd sneak a peak and those stubborn girls were still in the same position, unmovable like statues. )

Don't mistake the external appearance for the internal 勁. By internal, I do not mean anything that is woo-woo or unmeasurable. Internal can simply refer to all of the things that are happening in the mind/body, the physics and anatomy, that combine to generate the resulting force/strength that is not necessarily visible to the eye. It is easy and convenient to describe techniques by their external appearance but that does not capture the essence of the 勁. Anyone can hold their forearm up and push it outward - that is not the 勁, it is not 掤. 掤 is the force or strength that results from a particular and precise way of using the mind/body. None of the eight methods are limited to a particular posture, direction, or body part, they describe energetics that are very flexible and lend themselves to infinite variations once understood.

We are the only hairless primates for the same reason we have bred the Sphinx cats. Someone, a long long time ago, was bothered by our fur when redesigning us. (Allergies? Or the same fashion craze as the modern obsession with exterminating all hair still remaining on the human body for cosmetic -- or rather profit-driven -- purposes? Or envy? -- those green/grey alien thingies that messed up their own genetics and lost their hair and a few other things couldn't bear looking at shiny-furred happy people? And what about not having to first kill other furry animals for their fur to stay warm and later not paying for the heaters in winter? They couldn't stand it... )

Alien chicken.

agreed, and I wonder if Apech has done anything for his hairless/furless cousin besides turning up the furnace during cold winter days? (or sun block for sunny summer days)

I googled images for hairless bears, bald bears, and almost cried. They exist, poor things.

Chinese source does not equal competent source. My "English source" is also a Chinese source -- my Chen lineage master. In addition to his native Chinese he speaks pretty good English. He also holds a Ph.D. degree from Shanghai University as a taiji researcher, but more importantly he showed me short jin in real life. So my reasons for looking for a different source are exactly zero, both academically and empirically. I thought you knew by now not to try to teach me. Native Chinese proficiency does not make a self-taught taiji fan an expert or a master, anymore than English proficiency makes one the queen of England or Noam Chomsky, .

bare bears?

Demo in real life, which is more important than words. This is what TM is talking about. Chen Xiaowang's son, Chen Yingjun, demonstrated this to a student I used to hang out with in the past as he was also a BGZ student in my group and he said it felt like being hit by a tank but he was only demoing it. It was in one of his workshops:: https://brisbanechentaichi.weebly.com/ Second pic. He is on the right wearing black.

So I stay away for a month and come back to the tail end of the thread about the demise of TDB morph into bears and Egyptian magic.

There is every need.

Agreed . How can anyone involved in the western magical tradition NOT appreciate Tool ... even if one does not like that type of music . I was presenting a little agricultural talk as a way of explaining my 3:4 observation * ( not 'theory' as it is an observation from nature ) . I draw a triangle on the whiteboard and label each corner N P K - nitrogen , phosphorous , potassium ; the three main elements needed for good soil and plant growth . BUT more is needed , the 'micro nutrients ' ( much smaller amounts ) . So I draw a line across the inside the bottom left corner to represent them . There are three main micro nutrients and a bunch of lesser ones , so now we can label the three points of this triangle in the corner of the bigger one . and also draw a line across its inner bottom left for the lesser ones and guess what ... within that there are three major ones and a bunch of lesser ones . I paused and looked at the drawing ... it only just dawned on me .... hey ! Thats a fractal ! Fractal ; in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth and galaxy formation. * its in my PP .

The Dutch word for witch is ‘heks’. Oh, Google ‘etymology heks’: likely from the word “heka”.

Yup. And then there's "long jin" (chang jin 长劲) and "short jin" (duan jin 短劲) for all of the above. When a high level master shows what looks, to a less-than-clueful observer, either fake, staged, or magical -- that's the short jin. The difference in explosive power between the "regular" long jin and the top level short jin I would liken to the difference between regular powder explosion and nuclear explosion. The first one relies on a rapid chemical reaction (combustion) of an explosive material like gunpowder or TNT. The second one involves nuclear fission, where atomic nuclei are split into smaller fragments, releasing immense energy. (Bear with me, these are only metaphors, I don't mean short jin can split atomic nuclei... ...or can it if it's very short? )

A good way to view these jins, is that they are basically permutations of yin yang within the human body. Shapes and flavours of power. There are the primary 4 peng lu ji an, and the 8 of we include cai lie zhou cao. And alot more practiced by various lineages. We train these main jins, and extended Jins, to cover all the ways energy can transform. So meeting any force from the opponent, we have the Jins available to navigate, use to deal with incoming forces in a variety of ways. The purpose is to smoothen the Jins and their relationship to one another seamlessly, so the practitioner becomes free to allow changes in Jin and energy to transform to their advantage. We do not train a Jin, to insist particular jins in a fight. We train it so it is "available" to be used when the opportunity arises, and skillfully navigate between them, shape the forces to the is ideal for the situation. And how masters seem to able to use the jin they want to use, is NOT because they insisted on it. They responded with the right Jin at the connection, and transform/ guided the forces to the conditions ripe for the Jin of their choosing. It happens quickly, so it seems they use the jin they wanted. No. They created the conditions for it still following the principles of taiji Quan. They will tell you if the conditions are not there, the particular jin will not arise.

phew thank goodness I evacuated the whole country before he arrived.

I also got a reading from Eric about some health issues I was having. He struck me as a nice guy, well-intentioned, and knowledgable about ayurveda and the body in general. I will say, however, that his psychic take on what was going on for me did not match up with diagnostic lab work I received a few days after my reading.

I think that is the fallacy most people thought that 掤 is an energy or strength. I have made that every clear that it is not. It is a name that was given to the method of Fajin for the posture. Ofc all the actions of the body parts are controlled by the mind. PS To be exact, 掤 is equivalent to the gesture of 野马分鬃。

It is a treasure you find in your own heart and a strange sense of freedom from learning to trust in God and empty yourself of your self 🙏 Thank you so much, it has been a hard two months, difficult and changing for me, but hardest on my oldest child who “lost my best friend” 😔 and it’s so hard to watch your child suffering as you mutely impotently stand by as all you can do really. He was my very close to be my son in law and I think of him as part of our lineage and clan, it was an and is very very hard on us. We are 6, wife and kids but very close. He was the first to truly join our circle. I met a famous spiritual teacher named Malati at his passing. She was the reason I say his death was “spiritual” for me. He grew up practicing Hindu with his parents but they all had drifted away from it, but kept some private practices. But Malati is very famous I guess, perhaps some of you know her? She was a spiritual advisor to the Beatles and is based in West Virginia. She arrived unexpectedly at the moment of his death. That is a true thing. She was supposed to be there that day to bless him (he was expected to pass in hours to days) at some point but no one knew when and she was just there, hugging his family and mine and she was just there right when she was needed. And she has incredible peaceful radiance that is pure and deeply touching into your being. I hope to meet her again and would welcome the chance. And I think I will.