Category Archives: Practice

Opening the Chest 2

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In the first post I talked about opening the chest.

To reiterate :-

The first thing you do is to touch your neck to the collar.

Once the collar thing is done, you next imagine a stone sitting at the top of your chest. The weight of the stone causes the swing doors supporting it to open downwards.

As the swing doors open, your shoulders will relax and open up sidewards. This also causes your elbows to open up sideways.

The stone continues to drop. Now it reaches your dantian, where you imagine the stone hitting a pool of still water, causing the water to ripple outwards. This ripple causes your back to fill out. Then your wrists elongate.

Continuing the above process :-

The stone continues its downward journey, arriving at your crotch. At this point the stone becomes splits into two, becoming two energetic flow.

This energetic flow splits into two. Each flow continues moving down along the inside of your legs, going down the thighs, passing the knees, calves, ankles and finally to the Yongquan acupoint.

The two energy flows then ascends up the outer side of your legs. The energy flows continue up it reaches the side of your hips. Then each energy flow turns inwards to meet at the Mingmen point, becoming a pulsing energy dot.

From the Mingmen point, the energy dot descends down to the tailbone where it pauses for a quick second, before going forward and up to the front of your body. 

When the energy dot passes both your kua, it triggers an energy field that radiates outwards for about a meter to become the Kua Chi Ring. 

The energy dot continues to rise past your waist, triggering the formation of the Waist Chi Ring. This ring radiates outwards about 80 centimeters.

The energy dot keeps rising until the shoulder level, causing the Shoulder Chi Ring to form. All 3 Chi Rings formation have been formed.

This completes the creation of the Yang-22 body structure through the use of intention.

The formation of the Yang-22 body structure takes quite a few steps to go through. Each step must be properly carried out in turn.

Once you have practiced all the steps to the point of familiarity and have automated the process you will reach a point where you can perform all the steps in one go.

So instead of taking 1-2 minutes to go through the entire process you now can perform the entire process within a second.

Opening the Chest

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In Yang-22 we do not concave the chest, convex the back i.e. slightly sink in the chest while raising the back.

Instead, we open the chest. You might think that this is the same as sinking the chest, raise the back, however, it is not.

Opening the chest is the second step after touching the back of the neck to the collar. Opening the chest allows the internal energy to flow freely.

If you open the chest properly, you can actually do a simple test to check if you have opened up the internal pathway to allow the energy to go down all the way to the ground. So it’s not a “trust me, believe me; it is true” sort of thing.

This is something that another person can feel when they use their hand to press on your chest. Should I tell you what this is?

Perhaps I should not because you may think that you have it when you don’t once you know what it should be like. Better that your teacher do the test, then he will know if you got it right.

Opening the chest leads to the relaxing of your shoulders. This act also affects your back and your elbows, as well the other parts of the body that is downstream of the process of configuring the Yang-22 body structure.

I have mentioned about the process of opening the chest in this post Ancient Bell Body Part 2.

However, let me repeat it again. To open your chest imagine that there is a stone sitting on top of your chest. The weight of the stone causes your chest to open up like two doors separating, allowing the stone to descend to your tailbone.

As the stone descends from the chest, it will pass by your elbows, then your wrists, waist, hip, back, crotch before rising up the back to continue the rest of the body structure creating process.

Since this post is about opening the chest I will touch on the others in separate posts.

The Elbow-Waist Connection

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When we play the 22-form the movement of the arms must be coordinated with the movement of the body.

You do this by imagining that the elbow is dropping downwards to connect to the Waist Chi Ring.

Then when you move, whether by moving the elbow first or the Waist Chi Ring first the movement of the arm will be coordinated with that of the waist, and hence the entire body.

This applies whether your elbow is kept low or when it is in a high position when your arm is raised.

If you have a problem keeping the elbow constantly connected to the Waist Chi Ring then each time you complete a technique, pause for a second. Then after checking the Chest Cross, check the elbow-waist connection before continuing the next technique.

Empty Armpits

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In Yang-22 we relax the shoulders and sink the elbows. However, we need to be aware of over-sinking the elbows and end up looking like a Southern Shaolin practitioner.

Similarly, we want to avoid under-sinking the elbows and end up with stiff, resisting arms as a result of opening the elbows too widely. This can cause us to have a propensity to resist.

To achieve the correct elbow placement we have to imagine that we are trying to clamp a hot bun between our upper arm and body. If you hold an actual hot bun you will realize that if you hold the bun too tight you will burn your fingers. Too loosely, you will drop the bun.

So the correct way to hold a hot bun is not too firmly nor too loose. If you experiment with this, you will find that your elbows will not sink too much nor flare overly open.

The end result is a principle that is known in Yang-22 as empty armpits. By emptying the armpits you will resist the tendency to resist when being pressured. You will become responsive, without having to purposely response – that is, you yield naturally.

The Eyes

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In Yang-22 we train our eyes to see without seeing.

This is achieved through the practice of looking inward even as you are seeing the outside. As you do so, you relax your eyes by practicing Song, San.

In practice this means that the bottom part of your eyes look out even as the top part looks inward. At the same time both sides of the eye relaxes sideways.

In the beginning the practice of seeing this way is easy to forget. You might have to wait until you get the other principles under your belt before you come to the practice of the eyes.

Once you get to the practice of the eyes and begin to see this way, that’s when you will discover how to integrate the inside to the outside. That’s when you begin to have a glimmer of what it feels like to breakthrough to Song, San, Tong, Kong.

Elongated Wrist 2

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Place a long hose on the ground. The hose is curled.

Next, connect the long hose to a tap. Now turn on the tap a little. The water comes out through the hose which is still curled.

If you turn on the tap to the maximum, the water will surge out strongly, straightening the hose. This is basically what the training of the Elongated Wrist does. It turns on the energy from your body out through the wrist, onwards to the hand and towards the target area.

Sometimes people ask me how does one do a palm strike with a straightened wrist. You can’t. When you strike with an open palm, your wrist will naturally bend. But the energy is still flowing through the wrist.

This is why a palm strike may look like a light slap but the struck opponent seems to be hit by a disproportionate larger force. Without the Elongated Wrist training a light slap is just a light slap.

Train the Elongated Wrist until you feel as if you no longer have a wrist. Then keep training until even if you bend your wrist the energy flow is still there.