“In and Out of Circle” Mini Lesson

This video helps to clarify the concept of the hand never “self-moving” and always being “in gear”. We have to break one of our strongest and most “natural” tendencies that human beings have, that of using our direct (heavily conditioned) neurological connections to the hand to move it. Instead we must develop a new relationship with our hands where they are always powered by other body parts, like a dead object like a hammer. This requires a lot of disassociation from it, by heavily emphasizing training of other body parts that we have virtually no neurological connections to in terms of coordination, like lower lumbar spine and kua. Like the example of the car Master Chen often utilizes, the car tire never moves itself. It is powered by along chain of gears and shafts through the drive train to cause it to rotate. Vertical (up down) actions of pistons are converted to linear force through a spiral shaped crank shaft, which turns a fly wheel (a big gear that stores the rotational energy) and transfers it to smaller gears, which in turn engage a drive shaft that carries the force back to a differential (more gears, except this time they create a yin yang split, sending varying amounts of power to each wheel depending on which way the car is turning) finally all that action causes the tire to rotate. So we can say each up/down action of the pistons (2 on 1 concept) translates to the tire rotating maybe a fraction of an inch, through a long chain of gears (joints) and shafts (bones) that are always engaged. Even when we let off the gas to go down hill, the whole system must remain engaged (or downshifted), as anyone who has driven down a steep mountain road knows, without shifting into a lower gear to absorb the forces of gravity and momentum, we will quickly burn up our brakes.

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