Opening the Chest 2

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.

Empty Armpits

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.