my findings on this may not be the direction you were trying to lead me, but perhaps it's overlapping. in any event, I'm glad I was pressing on you to spit it out. lol I think everyone in this thread 'knows' me enough to realize not to take it personal and I appreciate no one did (or at least didn't show it ) anyway....

That article bridged the gap between what you are trying to describe, and what I understand. all of this you are descibing is in order to become 'aware' of muscles and supporting structures that we are not usually aware of.

and I think you are right to some extent, that my previous training did not specifically point out exactly what it was we were doing, but rather instead, put it in terms of 'rooting' and 'sinking' and 'gripping the floor' etc.

While never thinking of it in terms of concepts, but rather in terms of doing something, subconsciencely my body has been learning them that way.
but since the actions were in certain terms (gripping, rooting, etc), then the underlying muscles/structures were only being optimised towards those terms.

because of the subtlety, training these structures is really only thru imagery and repetition. after a while the imagagery goes away and is gradually replace with just a keen 'feel' for it.

I already know imagery works as a training method. what I didn't know is the subtlety it could be used for. so it's basically the same as I understand it, but with a finer grainularity.

It's given me food for things to incorporate in my training......meanwhile, as we wait a year or so to allow my body to learn what my brain has....can we continue the thread in whatever direction the next person steers it? or we can talk about this more if we want...

one more thought...or maybe another way of explaining what is physically going on ...another way to describe the 'suit'. imagine if every fiber of muscle and every strand of tendon, ligament, etc were replaced with either a '1' (on) or '0' (off). as we stand flatfooted and top-heavy, there is a certain pattern of 1's and 0's which we can think of as our current position's 'fingerprint'. a real actual fingerprint has swirls and broken lines etc that follows a rough pattern, but it's certainly never perfectly symetrical. back to the body's 'fingerprint' - imagine if we could change the structure of the pattern so that we had alignment of the swirls in a particular vector at any given moment. control over each '1' and '0' state would happen automatically as long as we had the proper image of which pattern to use.

to equate concepts to tie this back:
'the suit' = 'the digital fingerprint'

now what was so hard about putting that into words? lol

also, putting what I said into 3-d just to blow people's minds, is like when you squeeze an egg on the sides with your thumb and index finger it breaks easy...but using the same two fingers positioned top and bottom of the egg, and its' damn near impossible to crack.

the standing egg.

You got it bud! It's the choice of words.... sorry, I did that deliberately to screw with your imprinted paradigm.

Yes, it's really really subtle stuff... hence relaxing and opening your mind to increase sensitivity and awareness.

Definitely a different way... not for everyone.

Sorry, was at work earlier, so couldn't write much.

I'm glad the article helped. Different words connotate different meanings. The trick is sifting thru the ritualistic myth/mystical stuff and working out the pure concepts.

The mental imagery is part of the training.

Basically, the idea is to learn how to transfer forces to and from the ground thru your structure (by that I mean the "suit" and how that is attached to the skeletal structure).

The next step is to learn to move using the ground and transfer of weight. Then learning the "tricks" of using the mind to manipulate the forces. And then strengthening the forces so that they can be used for fighting applications rather than simply staying within the realm of "cute tricks".

Quote:

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one more thought...or maybe another way of explaining what is physically going on ...another way to describe the 'suit'. imagine if every fiber of muscle and every strand of tendon, ligament, etc were replaced with either a '1' (on) or '0' (off). as we stand flatfooted and top-heavy, there is a certain pattern of 1's and 0's which we can think of as our current position's 'fingerprint'. a real actual fingerprint has swirls and broken lines etc that follows a rough pattern, but it's certainly never perfectly symetrical. back to the body's 'fingerprint' - imagine if we could change the structure of the pattern so that we had alignment of the swirls in a particular vector at any given moment. control over each '1' and '0' state would happen automatically as long as we had the proper image of which pattern to use.

to equate concepts to tie this back:
'the suit' = 'the digital fingerprint'

---

I wouldn't put it that way... but could you be subconsciously referring to yin/yang (positive/negative)?

On some level it is. The taiji folk talk about full/empty, open/close, substantial/insubstantial. It's basically balancing the forces so that the net effect can be neutralized.

The other thing that you may come across in the CMA literature (and CMA influenced JMA) is "balancing the energies of heaven and earth", or more precisly, connecting the "upper" and "lower" thru the "middle".

Instead of fingerprint, how about "energy" print?

I'm going to stop there, I have some things to work on. (cup runnith over). feel free for anyone to continue or guide the thread... thanks all, some good stuff here.
-E

Excellent debate!

Now, do we consider neigong to be a method of how we train? or would you consider it to be specific sets of exercises?

I could see it being either. Neigong basically means internal work. If I plug in the theory bejhind neigong into all of my forms is it neigong?

I do specific sets of exercises that are described as neigong. For example; xingyi neigong, jiben shou fa, and tien gan. These are all specific neigong exercises.

My forms are not called neigong. We have our post heaven sets (hou tian) and pre heaven sets - circle walking etc. Being an IMA practice, (neijia) they have the same core principles as the neigong. What sets these apart from specific neigong exercises?

Once again - good thread.

An excellent point Chris. I see it primarily as a method of how we train.

To the casual observer, exercises can mean nothing - after all, you see someone "standing" and it doesn't look like they're doing much - apart from standing in a silly stance.

Additionally, unless you know the specifics of the exercise and what you are meant to be exercising and how it is being exercised, the exercise itself is meaningless.

Hence the reason a lot of so-called qigong (and yoga) books are aimed at the health and "new age" market - because a lot of the "internals" (i.e. methods) are deliberately omitted.

This is an awesome vid of Tetsuzan Kuroda, especially the last 10-20 sec of the clip. If you look closely, there's a lot of stuff he's showing of what's possible with that level of skill in redirecting forces internally.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InlQtTMK5Ys&search=kuroda%20martial


AJ link to Kuroda interview. Mentions some stuff already discussed here.

http://www.aikidojournal.com/article.php?articleID=85

eyrie, that interview link has to be about the best I've read in a while! deserving of it's own thread of discussion.
thanks for sharing it

Here is a link to a specific Neigong practice called Tiandi Neigong.

http://www.yizongbagua.com/Comm_article_tiandineigong_Buddy.htm

Check out the link at the bottom of the article for a vid of the exercise. (May take a little bit to load).