Fajing

Erle Montaigue once sent me free of charge his DVD about Fajing. Now the exchange rate in my country for  pounds wasn't to sneeze at (today, it's pretty much the same); he gave me quite an expensive gift, out of the goodness of his heart. It turns out that he's been doing that for others, never being secretive about what he knew.

Through the years I've watched the video he gave me and read his books to get that magical skill. You can watch an excerpt of it below:

There's much that I gained from Erle. Sadly, after all those years I only really was able to practice two things from him: standing and punching. I was so fixated on punching back then, to gain the power that made his hand snap so loudly - the sound of one hand clapping, as he put it. I practiced the Taiji snap punch a lot - you do it by turning the palm over. I punched the air a lot, then switched to paper targets and hitting the wall. I once punched the wall so hard my middle knuckle felt like a small piece of it had separated and the shard was stuck just below the skin.

It's funny, thinking about it now, because of how much the journey getting to here from there really hurt. If I'd known what I was doing back then was completely against the principles of internal martial arts (and in fact, could be cancer-causing)... I should have done the standing practice more.

The standing practice I did then was the one in Erle's book - the Embracing a Tree posture, but I knew it as Wuji stance. The book itself recommended I do the practice for at least fifteen minutes, and this I did for a while. The thing was, standing still and keeping the arms up was so much harder than the punching practice. I eventually just went with practicing the punching.

Before I go further, for the benefit of the uninitiated I'm supplying a link to an article from the man himself on the subject of Fajing. I am not going to attempt to explain it because frankly speaking I am not at that level yet - more on this in a bit.

The standing practice, or Zhan zhuang, was instrumental in gaining the fajing power. It is a qigong that builds up health and enables the body to perform the correct movement. Erle emphasized being Sung, a concept that I now take to mean relaxed, yet full of potential. You are loose like a drawn bow, or an avalanche moments before it breaks. There is no unnecessary tension but at any moment you can explode.

Erle's book noted that the movement for his fajing was an explosive waist shake, in some cases causing the waist to turn opposite the movement of the arm or in other cases in the same direction as the arm (to wit, the Single Whip Posture). My mistake was in thinking that I needed to train this waist shake, that I needed to work for the power. As a result I ended up training incorrect movement, completely different from what Erle had intended. That's the trouble with taking things too literally.

With my current practice, I'm coming more and more to the realization that power isn't about exerting effort. It's about properly aligning your body and engaging the correct muscles to move with efficiency. There's a psychological dimension as well; the knots in the muscles are not the only things standing dissolves, the knot in the mind also gets identified and hopefully treated. For example, you produce more force leaning against a wall than when pushing against it. Yet, if you were in a pushing contest with someone often it will be hard to retain the same mind as when leaning against something. The drive is to make something go away, make something not reach you, to push something; without the drive, you're free to move your body in a manner that generates the maximum effect.

Using that power in a split second is one way of thinking about fajing, I think. It's about moving in a natural, spontaneous way that does not sacrifice defence or one's body. It was never a technique.

Many of the teachings I am getting now line up quite well with what Erle said. I now do standing practice two to three times a day, taking at least twenty minutes at a time; hopefully I'll be able to reach an hour soon. It's a bit more difficult as I am required to perform different postures and hold different visualizations, and all this somehow makes the training more tiring even though I'm just standing. For anyone interested, here's a pretty good instructional series I found on the Internet:

http://www.youtube.com/user/StandStillBeFit?feature=watch