The Fourth Essential

[Bob Ashmore]

OK,
Had some time to think about this, practice a bit and try to figure out how best to state things.
Don't know if I will make sense, but I will try.

Until a few months ago I viewed seperating empty and full really only in terms of "weight" and had not really considered energy as being part of the equation.
Then I began to, dimly, understand that energy was equally important to this endeavor.
As I mentioned earlier, Yang Jun put me on the beginnings of that path at the seminar here.
Since then, and at the advice of both Bill and Carl, I've begun to work more on the energy than the weight aspect. "Practice the energies!" has become a new mantra to me.
Not that they haven't been telling me that for years now! They have, I just wasn't able to hear it yet.
So I began to think more about the energy of what I was doing. Slowly it dawned on me that the energy was much, much more vital to what I was trying to do than the weight.
The funny thing about that it, once I realized that the weight was secondary to the energy, I found that the energy follows the same path as the weight in terms of how I think about it.
Sending commands of "full, full, full" to the side I wanted to fill with energy worked even better than concentrating on the weight. All the same things happened, but more clearly.
Then Bill mentioned something during a class that paid of for me pretty largely.
He was talking about the physical aspects of TCC but it came over quite seamlessly into my new concentration about "full/empty".
He said, "one side pushes, one side pulls" when speaking of the waist.
I had a tremendous "Aha" moment from that. I immediately began to use "Push/Pull" as a mental command to my waist instead of "full/empty" and the benefits were tremendous and immediate.
A much clearer seperation of full and empty in the energies AND the weight distributions happened immediately.
I asked Bill about this and he didn't seem surprised that just changing the word I used to think about it would change the result. He said something about the word changing the action to make it more accurate.

That has been my latest "Aha", there is another one more related to the physical side of this wonderful essential.
Alas, I am out of time for the day and must come back to this tommorow.

Tommorow, "Bob's Belly Dancing School" will commence!
I know, it sounds weird, but it worked for me.
More when I can.

[yslim]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Bob Ashmore:
<B>OK,
Had some time to think about this, practice a bit and try to figure out how best to state things.
Don't know if I will make sense, but I will try.

Until a few months ago I viewed seperating empty and full really only in terms of "weight" and had not really considered energy as being part of the equation.
Then I began to, dimly, understand that energy was equally important to this endeavor.
As I mentioned earlier, Yang Jun put me on the beginnings of that path at the seminar here.
Since then, and at the advice of both Bill and Carl, I've begun to work more on the energy than the weight aspect. "Practice the energies!" has become a new mantra to me.
Not that they haven't been telling me that for years now! They have, I just wasn't able to hear it yet.
So I began to think more about the energy of what I was doing. Slowly it dawned on me that the energy was much, much more vital to what I was trying to do than the weight.
The funny thing about that it, once I realized that the weight was secondary to the energy, I found that the energy follows the same path as the weight in terms of how I think about it.
Sending commands of "full, full, full" to the side I wanted to fill with energy worked even better than concentrating on the weight. All the same things happened, but more clearly.
Then Bill mentioned something during a class that paid of for me pretty largely.
He was talking about the physical aspects of TCC but it came over quite seamlessly into my new concentration about "full/empty".
He said, "one side pushes, one side pulls" when speaking of the waist.
I had a tremendous "Aha" moment from that. I immediately began to use "Push/Pull" as a mental command to my waist instead of "full/empty" and the benefits were tremendous and immediate.
A much clearer seperation of full and empty in the energies AND the weight distributions happened immediately.
I asked Bill about this and he didn't seem surprised that just changing the word I used to think about it would change the result. He said something about the word changing the action to make it more accurate.

That has been my latest "Aha", there is another one more related to the physical side of this wonderful essential.
Alas, I am out of time for the day and must come back to this tommorow.

Tommorow, "Bob's Belly Dancing School" will commence!
I know, it sounds weird, but it worked for me.
More when I can.

</B></font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hi Bob,

I am happy to see that you are now also 'see' how the energies at work. Welcome aboard!

To able to fang song/ relax with-something-in-it, that will give your chi more space to travel in the First Class. It may give your "physical body" a different twist of sensation. Wait until you able to see your mind fang song at work. it may give your "chi body" a visualization.

Dancing and Taiji have something in common.
A well trained dancer or Taiji-ist will move their "chi body" ahead where they are going or where to place their traveling foot with their mind. Then push their torso to move their the foot and not the foot leading the body. Then the "chi body" where the mind had displaced ahead act as "pull" the "physical body" to where it should be ( giving a
physical body catching up with the chi body feeling) And the waist/dan tien will act as the center of the push and pull counter-balance point.

Your belly dancing is not weird at all. We are all eye on your dan tien...fang song your
hip..loosen your waist...open your kua..
Drum up the belly chi and roll the taiji ball
.. do I miss any thing. Go for it and "fa jin" if you must, if not you can call it a "Belly dance send off"

You have fun and I go do my reeling silk hula
hands and see how the dim-mak work or not..

Aloha,
yslim

[Bob Ashmore]

Sorry, I actually had to work at work yesterday and so was not able to get back here to complete my posting.
That particular silliness is over now and I can continue.

Yslim,
Funny you should mention Hula Hands...
That's one of the things I was going to talk about.

OK. Belly dancing.
One of the ladies at our Saturday morning class is a belly dancer. She has an incredible amount of flexibility and coordination and I have often envied her ability to move in ways that I would have thought the human body was not capable of doing.
My instructor made mention of the stiffness that I carry in my body from having so much hard muscle mass (under a thicker layer of body fat than I care to have, but that's a different issue). He mentioned that this lady would be able to loosen me up if I'd listen to her.
So she began to take ten minutes each week to teach me different stretches and exercises that belly dancers use to get and stay limber.
She started out showing me various stretches which allowed me to loosen up parts of my body that I didn't even think could move.
After I gained some flexibility from these stretches she began to teach me some belly dancing moves.
She started out showing me what she called "Crescent Moons" with my hips. This consists of standing in very much what looks like empty stance, toe down, and moving only the hip muscles around the hip joint.
When the ladies do it, it looks very relaxed, loose and (dare I say it?) sexy.
When I do it...
Well...
Let's just say I'm learning and we'll leave it at that.
However after a time I began to get some accumen in this movement. At least to the point where if you look at what I'm doing it has started to look like a Crescent Moon and not me trying to struggle my way out of a gunny sack...
At first I just went back and forth with each hip in, funnily enough, crescent moon shaped arcs, first up and around and then down and around. I would do these a bunch of times each day, equally in both directions, equally up then down, with each hip seperately.
Once I was doing that in at least a reasonable facsimile of what she wanted, she then taught me to do the same thing, only with both feet firmly planted on the ground. The big difference was that instead of using crescent moon shapes for each hip, I did the same motion but completed a circle with each hip. First going in one direction, then the other. Both hips moving at once.
At first this was the same total disaster that doing the Crescent Moons was. I looked like I was trying to wiggle out of that gunny sack again, only this time it was my whole body and not just one hip. I had a heck of a time isolating just my hips and the surrounding muscles and at first I got some very funny looks when I tried to do this.
Eventually, after much practice and a lot of Chi Kung to relax, I started to be able to do this silly thing.
Once I started to use only the hip area in this endeavor I began to feel a real looseness in my waist, hips and legs.
This "hip wiggling", as I've since begun to call it, has shown me the light on just how intensly stiff my hips were. I mean, it took me over a month just to be able to do the simplest version of this.
I do believe that anyone in the world would call that stiff.

From this loosening of my hips, waist, and upper legs, I have since found out how much darned EASIER it is to do TCC.
I can now use my waist as I described before on this thread to fire muscles that had previously been nearly frozen around my hip joints, which enables me to move much more freely and easily.
I have connected with muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints that I didn't even know I had and use them all together to move more correctly than I ever have before.
It's opened my eyes to a lot of what I didn't understand before in terms of hip, waist and leg coordination, which is quickly becoming whole body integration as I work on figuring all of this out.

I have since started working on loosening my shoulders and chest using the same method, Crescent Moons, with my shoulders joints instead of my hips.
Also have learned the Hula Hands that Yslim mentioned above and now my arms are beginning to articulate more clearly than I have been able to do in the past.

The major side effect of this, beyond becoming more proficient at TCC, is that I can now dance fairly well.
I've always been told that when I dance I looked very "stiff". Well...
I did and now I know why.

This has been a big eye opener for me.
One thing has lead to another with this progression for me. I began just trying to work out the meaning of the fourth essential, and ended up doing belly dances.
Weird.

[yslim]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Bob Ashmore:
<B>Sorry, I actually had to work at work yesterday and so was not able to get back here to complete my posting.
That particular silliness is over now and I can continue.

Yslim,
Funny you should mention Hula Hands...
That's one of the things I was going to talk about.

OK. Belly dancing.
One of the ladies at our Saturday morning class is a belly dancer. She has an incredible amount of flexibility and coordination and I have often envied her ability to move in ways that I would have thought the human body was not capable of doing.
My instructor made mention of the stiffness that I carry in my body from having so much hard muscle mass (under a thicker layer of body fat than I care to have, but that's a different issue). He mentioned that this lady would be able to loosen me up if I'd listen to her.
So she began to take ten minutes each week to teach me different stretches and exercises that belly dancers use to get and stay limber.
She started out showing me various stretches which allowed me to loosen up parts of my body that I didn't even think could move.
After I gained some flexibility from these stretches she began to teach me some belly dancing moves.
She started out showing me what she called "Crescent Moons" with my hips. This consists of standing in very much what looks like empty stance, toe down, and moving only the hip muscles around the hip joint.
When the ladies do it, it looks very relaxed, loose and (dare I say it?) sexy.
When I do it...
Well...
Let's just say I'm learning and we'll leave it at that.
However after a time I began to get some accumen in this movement. At least to the point where if you look at what I'm doing it has started to look like a Crescent Moon and not me trying to struggle my way out of a gunny sack...
At first I just went back and forth with each hip in, funnily enough, crescent moon shaped arcs, first up and around and then down and around. I would do these a bunch of times each day, equally in both directions, equally up then down, with each hip seperately.
Once I was doing that in at least a reasonable facsimile of what she wanted, she then taught me to do the same thing, only with both feet firmly planted on the ground. The big difference was that instead of using crescent moon shapes for each hip, I did the same motion but completed a circle with each hip. First going in one direction, then the other. Both hips moving at once.
At first this was the same total disaster that doing the Crescent Moons was. I looked like I was trying to wiggle out of that gunny sack again, only this time it was my whole body and not just one hip. I had a heck of a time isolating just my hips and the surrounding muscles and at first I got some very funny looks when I tried to do this.
Eventually, after much practice and a lot of Chi Kung to relax, I started to be able to do this silly thing.
Once I started to use only the hip area in this endeavor I began to feel a real looseness in my waist, hips and legs.
This "hip wiggling", as I've since begun to call it, has shown me the light on just how intensly stiff my hips were. I mean, it took me over a month just to be able to do the simplest version of this.
I do believe that anyone in the world would call that stiff.

From this loosening of my hips, waist, and upper legs, I have since found out how much darned EASIER it is to do TCC.
I can now use my waist as I described before on this thread to fire muscles that had previously been nearly frozen around my hip joints, which enables me to move much more freely and easily.
I have connected with muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints that I didn't even know I had and use them all together to move more correctly than I ever have before.
It's opened my eyes to a lot of what I didn't understand before in terms of hip, waist and leg coordination, which is quickly becoming whole body integration as I work on figuring all of this out.

I have since started working on loosening my shoulders and chest using the same method, Crescent Moons, with my shoulders joints instead of my hips.
Also have learned the Hula Hands that Yslim mentioned above and now my arms are beginning to articulate more clearly than I have been able to do in the past.

The major side effect of this, beyond becoming more proficient at TCC, is that I can now dance fairly well.
I've always been told that when I dance I looked very "stiff". Well...
I did and now I know why.

This has been a big eye opener for me.
One thing has lead to another with this progression for me. I began just trying to work out the meaning of the fourth essential, and ended up doing belly dances.
Weird.</B></font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hi Bob,

I think you have just discover a lost hunting treasure map with a partial operating instruction, without realizing it. This treasure is the "KUA"
If you can connecting it with your reeling silk hula hand you're talking about and soak it all in a bath of 'fang song' until you are so "relax" and "empty" and see what happen...
Wonders of Taiji realized? Maybe,

Sorry got to go find my magic wand...Practice

Ciao,
yslim