Kung fu forms as moving meditation

I've always been aware that kung fu forms are very complex and dense in content and not just in terms of the variety and sequence of moves. In performing these forms, one works on breathing, strength, coordination, mental focus, balance, footwork, power…  As a beginner, I was overwhelmed just thinking about all this. So I took my teacher's advice and began to practice the forms over and over again, but focusing on a different aspect each time. And, that approach helped me make significant progress. But now I understand how interdependent these aspects of kung fu are… for example, power cannot be expressed without good balance and footing, nor can it be used effectively without fluidity and good structure. So, clearly, at some point, it's necessary to synthesize all the different lessons.

How can I practice my forms with speed, power, coordination, fluidity, balance etc all at once? I know what doesn't work… I cannot hope to achieve any success by using a linear, checklist-like thought process.  Tried it, found out just how miserably it fails. Rather than improving my kung fu, it left me scatterbrained and made my movement chaotic. And then it hit me that I should have seen it coming… I'd tried the checklist approach elsewhere and learned just how badly it fails. It had happened while sparring… I'd gotten so focused listing possibilities in my mind, I got clobbered.

Thinking about sparring, I realized I also already knew the right answer. On just a few occasions, I'd managed to be fully alert without being tense. I wasn't actually thinking at all in the usual way… I would simply observe my opponent and respond. When I say observe, I don't just mean visually either… it was an odd synthesis of sensory information. Did I know about the incoming punch because I saw the arm move or because I heard my opponent's foot shift or because his facial expression changed? I couldn't tell you. I just knew the punch was happening. And my response happened similarly too… I didn't really consider a number of options before selecting and employing one… my arms just sort of went where they needed to go. I should try to achieve the same mindset while practicing my forms. Attain a state of calm alertness where I'd be able to identify and correct my technique on the fly without getting bogged down. In fact, one could argue that a major objective of practicing forms is really to achieve such a mindset which can then be applied elsewhere whether it is combat or some other situation. In fact, done this way, even a pre-defined form would transcend to honest self-expression. In this sense, the practice of forms could very well be thought of as a moving meditation where one trains to settle the mind.

At the minimum, such practice of forms should be effective training for martial applications but going beyond that, such training obviates the need for physical conflict as a means of gaining insights.

Wu Wei: As Applied to Breathing

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from gung fu (and subsequently tai chi and yoga) is how to breathe effectively. I’ve learned that, for an effective inhalation, I must use my abdominal and intercostal muscles in sequence to expand the abdomen and the chest while maintaining a steady, even flow of air – like sipping tea as one of my teachers put it. And to exhale, the sequence is simply reversed, slowly and steadily collapsing first the chest and then the abdomen. This way, every breath is both effective and efficient.

Over the past year or so, a major focus of my gung fu practice has been to coordinate my breathing with my movements. I started out with the simple view that one exhales when exerting force. The first challenge to this view came during tai chi – I was simply told to breathe naturally and not worry about holding to one inhalation / exhalation per move. And yoga added to my confusion… suddenly I was learning to inhale while exerting force. This seemed to immensely benefit my flexibility and looseness. And, when I thought about it, it made sense too… one could inhale to expand and exhale to contract. So, now I thought there were two ‘right’ ways to breathe. I figured, to focus on power, which is hard, exhale when exerting force and to focus on flexibility, which is soft, inhale while expanding or exerting. But then I began to wonder how I might find both hard and soft within each move. If, say Hung Gar, as a style, combined both hard and soft, I reasoned that at some level, each technique had to have some components of both hard and soft as well. Indeed, when I attended a tai chi seminar in Salt Lake a few months ago, the teacher said as much and encouraged participants to work on finding various combinations of breath and action that flowed together. Then it began to dawn on me that there wasn’t going to be one or two simple correlations between breath and movement. For instance, how I breathe while using an overhead tigerclaw block would depend on how hard or soft I want the contact to be, how I want to bridge with the incoming strike. While this helped me understand the overall concept, it left me with one huge question. How exactly do I apply this in practice? And then, a few weeks ago, I started learning Wing Chun. While I’ve barely gotten started with the style, I nonetheless noticed immediately the emphasis on breathing naturally. 

This morning, as I was practicing my tai chi, I was focused on keeping my movements slow and smooth and forgot about my breathing. Part way through the form I noticed that I was breathing slow, deep and steady but not holding to any set pattern such as one breath per movement. Whatever I was doing, seemed to help me move better but I still don’t understand exactly what I was doing. So, now I have to try and repeat this in order to figure it out a bit better. But such is the way of gung fu I guess… I’ve found next question and once I have some sort of handle on this, I’ll have more questions still. It’s never going to get boring.