Category Archives: Principles

Palm, Fist, Hook

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In Yang-22 our open palm typically either holds a Small Chi Sphere, holding a Chi Ring (Shoulder Ring or Kua Ring), or momentarily is not holding anything.

To ensure a smooth learning of the 22-form an exercise we do is to practice forming a fist from an open palm and vice versa. To begin the exercise you can have your open palm facing down, gently holding a Small Chi Sphere.

Now imagine that the Small Chi Sphere is shrinking in size. As it does so, your fingers curl to follow the shrinking. You stop when the Small Chi Sphere has shrunk to a size such that your fingers have curled to form an empty fist. At this point, squeeze the Small Chi Sphere and it will fit the space between your fingers snugly.

To reverse the process, begin to open up your semi clenched fist into a palm. Imagine that the Small Chi Sphere is expanding to a bigger size, with the expansion causing your fingers to begin to uncurl.

This continues until the growing Small Chi Sphere causes your fingers to extend until your fingers and the hollow of your palm forms a concave shape, as if your palm is suctioned to the Small Chi Sphere.

If you practice this exercise a lot at a point in time, down the road you will feel as if your strength has reached the tips of your fingers when you are hand is in open palm. If your hand is forming the semi-hollowed fist, you will feel that the structure of the hollowed fist is energized, such that you can hit a target without clenching your fist and the force generated will be just as powerful, if not greater than when you clench your fist firmly on impact.

Note – don’t try this until you have put in sufficient practice otherwise your wrist may buckle and your curled fingers collapse inwards on impact, breaking the power line of your punch.

Next, you can practice changing from an open palm to a hook. From an open palm bring your five fingers together as if picking up a small marble. Once the marble is picked up, imagine that there is a smaller Chi Sphere in the space between the fingers and the hollow of the palm. This Chi Sphere will aid in giving rise to the Elongated Wrist. Your hook hand should feel energized with power.

Finally, you can combine both exercises by changing from palm to fist, back to palm, then to hook. From hook, change back to fist, then to palm, and begin again.

Form & Application

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If you look at videos of Grandmaster Wei Shuren performing the same technique in the 22-form and the 108-form you would notice that there are slight differences.

An example is the transition at the beginning of Brush Knee, Twist Step. The 108-form video of GM Wei shows him doing this transition differently from his video of the 22-form.

The 22-form transition is easier for a beginner to learn, however, from an application point of view the transition from the 108-form makes more sense.

Ignoring the point about application, you can perform the 22-form differently and still be correct as long as you follow the principles.

But if you are interested to use the 22-form for push hands then the question would be what is the application for the 22-form transition in this case. Is it an effective application? Does it make sense?

For training I follow the approach of the form should follow the application. If not, then while your form performance can look good and adhere to the principles, when you try to apply the technique in push hands you would discover that you could not use it without having to modify the movements.

Even if you practice to follow the applications right off, it does not mean that you can use the techniques straight away. You still need to go through a period practice, testing and refining before you can use the technique properly.

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.

Strength Source

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Related to the principles of Elongated Wrist, Small Chi Sphere and Opening-Closing is that of Strength Source.

In Yang-22 there are two Strength Source which I shall term as Strength Source (Back) and Strength Source (Palm).

Beginners learn to use the Strength Source (Back) until such time when their proficiency in the control of the Small Chi Sphere enables them to use the Strength Source (Palm) instead.

For combative applications the Strength Source (Palm) is used because it resides in the hand and thus can be used to impart a force into the opponent’s body in the fastest time, given the shorter distance from hand to target.

By comparison, the use of Strength Source (Back) would take a longer time to move the power from the back to target. This is why the Strength Source (Back) is for training the power rather than for combative applications.

In the study of Strength Source you must first achieve the Elongated Wrist without which your power cannot pass through the Wrist Pearl to the hand.

You then need to practice the control of the Small Chi Sphere a lot, in particular the action of inserting the Small Chi Sphere into the Shoulder Chi Ring. Later you should learn to dissipate the Small Chi Sphere across space to an imaginary dot in space.

To train the Strength Source (Back) pay attention to the practice of the principle of Opening-Closing. The opening and closing of your back is like a bellows expanding and contracting to pump air.

9 Bend Pearls

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The 9 Bend Pearls is a principle that is taught after one is able to perform the other principles that come before it.

In particular, the practitioner must have achieved the requirements of Song, San, Tong, Kong. These four keys are taught on the first day so one must assiduously cultivate them over the years until a breakthrough is achieved.

At this stage you will then have a physical understanding of what Song, San, Tong, Kong actually mean and feel like when practicing the 22-form. The next step would be to slowly transfer this skill to the practice of push hands.

When Song, San, Tong, Kong is activated together with whole body expansion (like a balloon that is being filled with air) that’s when you add in the 9 Bend Pearls.

To train the 9 Bend Pearls you imagine this energy line moving through your body from the ground up right to your wrist. As you can well imagine there are nine points to channel the energy through, namely from the ground up through the ankle, the knee, the crotch, waist, centre pearl, source strength point, shoulder, elbow and wrist, then out into the target.

In practice you activate the 9 Bend Pearls right at the end of a technique. When you do so you can feel the entire body filling up with energy, expanding out, and using the Small Chi Sphere you can issue the force out (one example of fajing) and into the opponent’s body.

At the end of the power generation you relax and grasp back the Small Chi Sphere. You perform this internally so someone looking at you will not be able to see you doing fajing and then loosening the body after that.

In the beginning you might train to move the ankle pearl first, and then the knee pearl and so on until the wrist pearl. However, this is not correct.

You actually activate all nine pearls at the same time. You do this by activating the process from the centre pearl (that’s the 5th pearl). Think of it as a water hose being filled out quickly with water, which will cause the limp hose to do a whip-like motion in response to being filled out with water.

When you activate the 9 Bend Pearls the energy line running through your body will act in a similar manner. If you place your palm on your training partner’s body he will feel as if you are a balloon inflating very rapidly.

Carrying a Scepter

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In Yang-22 our hand holds a Small Chi Sphere. To add to the difficulty of practice, we also must cradle a Chinese scepter (aka ruyi) in our arm.

Seventh century scroll showing
Emperor Xuan of Chen holding a scepter

We learn to carry the scepter in the 2nd technique of the 22-form, Wild Horse Parts Mane. Even though this is the only technique where this principle is taught, we carry over this practice to the other techniques as well.

Carrying a scepter is important because it helps us to keep our arm stable, sink the elbow properly to the Waist Chi Ring and balance the rooting down of the arm with a counter upward force.