We started with double positive circle.
We used a rubber cord to tie to elbow to the waist, so that the elbow does not move by itself.
That wasn’t too successful as people were still moving their hands.
Master Chen wanted to emphasize the use of kua and waist to move up and down. We then totally dropped our hands down and forgot about them, just focused on going up and down within a cyclinder.
We opened the right kua to turn left, and opened the left kua to turn right.
We could use the right shoulder to lead, or we could use the left shoulder to lead.
We then raised the hand but stuck the elbow to the waist.
We used the two kuas to go up and down to draw a square box, and later to draw a circle.
We could draw a positive circle, or a negative circle, which is simply going in the reversed direction.
This exercise was used to free our minds from preoccupied restrictions. For people that had been practicing for years, we knew of the restrictions, and so we would often not do what shifu instructed us to do on the spot as we couldn’t let go of the restrictions.
We had to exaggerate our movements.
Movements stay within the dantian, but power goes out to the extremities, e.g.
- electric current (movement) runs in the filament of a light bulb, but the heat (power) radiates out
- a wheel spinning on a rod, the power radiates out, i.e. another touch the spinning wheel will be thrown out.
In the old days, people are well trained, so if they hear a key point, they will be able to do it right away. This is why these key points were kept as secrets. Nowadays, we are not trained enough, knowing those points will be useful right away.
