Xingyi: The Song Of Six Unifications

From the classics; 'Xingyiquan" by Liang and Yang-
"The body forms the six postures;

Rooster (chicken) legs, and
Dragon body,

Bear shoulders,

And Eagle claws,

Embrace like a Tiger,

...And sound like the Thunder

Meditation Cuts Risk Of Heart Attack By Half

A while back I was watching someone do a Karate kata, Sanchin I believe. Every change in posture was accompanied by loud hissing of breath, dynamic tension and intense straining of arms, legs and torso. You could see the veins pop out in his forehead.
And this is healthy? I think not.
Again, we see the Taoist philosophy of not harming the body during exercise as being a superior path. No pain no gain is pretty much bullshit for longevity, which is why practitioners of the internal or "soft" martial arts reach their peak in their fifties.
With all the stress of daily life, why would someone hiss and strain in a kata that is ment for health and self-defense? Even in self-defense we have to cultivate a calm mind. While I find seated meditation difficult and a little boring, the moving meditation of Tai Chi Chuan, Bagua and Xingyi really helps me focus and center. The difference from Trancendental Meditation is that instead of trancending the body to a seperate state, we strive to have full and complete mind-body integration.
Here's a great article from The Telegraph.UK that cites medical studies showing that meditation cuts heart attack risk by half. Here's some quotes:

"The researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, calculated heart attacks, strokes and deaths as one result and found a 47 per cent reduction in meditating patients.
They also had lower blood pressure and significant reductions in their stress levels, the researchers said.
Dr Robert Schneider, lead author and director of the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention, said: "Previous research on Transcendental Meditation has shown reductions in blood pressure, psychological stress, and other risk factors for heart disease, irrespective of ethnicity.
"But this is the first controlled clinical trial to show that long-term practice of this particular stress reduction program reduces the incidence of clinical cardiovascular events, that is heart attacks, strokes and mortality."
Dr Schneider said that the effect of Transcendental Meditation in the trial was like a newly discovered medicine for the prevention of heart disease.
"In this case, the new medications are derived from the body's own internal pharmacy stimulated by the Transcendental Meditation practice," he said".

I gotta go practice my Tai Chi Chuan now...

Homage To Master Hong Yi Xiang

A very, very nice performance by Abi Moriya, in honor of his late teacher:

"In memory to my teacher, the late master Hong Yi-Xiang : martial artist, doctor & painter, founder of the Tang shou Tao school, Taiwan. www.abimoriya.com"

And here is Moriya at a seminar in Israel, demonstrating some nice techniques, including some chin na locking:

Pat Parker: "Psy-Ki-Do"

Anybody else seen the movie "The Men Who Stare At Goats"?
While I have read the book, Pat Parker from Mokuren Dojo saw the movie last week, so he wanted to team up and do a little guest posting here on Dojo Rat.
Here's my last post on the book, reposted on Zimbo (I don't understand why, but the previous Blogger post only comes up in some kind of html).
--So here's Pat Parker from Mokuren Dojo:

Psy-ki-do - Inciting Blind Rage

Pat Parker here from Mokuren Dojo. Dojo Rat has been kind enough to agree to let me pollute his blog with my crazy ideas. Today, inspired by the movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats, I have an interesting little experiment in psychological violence for you.

Have you ever noticed that blog comments that contain direct quotes more often seem like an attack? When someone quotes what you say (or write) but slightly twists the inflection or connotation or meaning of of your words, you tend to perceive that more negatively and you tend to respond more vigorously to that sort of blog comment? You can use this phenomenon to your advantage.
Have you ever noticed that the scariest, most troublesome attackers are the calm, cool, collected, ruthless, careful ones - the ones that carefully dissect you? The ones that leap at you in a blind rage are relatively easy to deal with. You can use this phenomenon to your advantage.
If a conflict is imminent and you want the attacker to have greater energy and commitment (perhaps even to the point of blind rage), then repeat whatever they say to you verbatim, but change the tone or inflection of 1-2 words at random. Perhaps rephrase everything they say as a question. It works like this:
Them: "Hey, jerk!"
You: "Hey _jerk_?"
Them:" Yeah, you! I'm gonna kick your ass!"
You: "_You're_ gonna kick _my_ ass?"
Them: "You'd better kiss your ass goodbye!"
You: "You want _me_ to kiss my ass goodbye?"
If you practice this a few times on your buddies then you should be able to see the tension level in them rising after 1-2 of these exchanges and you can probably have them literally hopping mad after about 3-4 exchanges. Even if you hope to never get into a fight and you know for certain you'd never do this to anyone, it can be fun and instructive to try this with your buddies. If you don't learn anything else from it, it will make you more aware of this funny glitch in your wiring so that you don't explode on someone next time they throw some direct quotes at you.

Disclaimer - Don't get into fights - nobody ever really wins them. But if you do get into a fight you might be better off if the guy is in a blind, unthinking rage. If you make that decision then this technique might work for you. But if you try it, don't blame me if you get your ass handed to you. When you sew the wind, you may reap the whirlwind!

(D.R.)-- Aw Pat, don't get into fights? Nobody can see it when you hit them with your mind!

Be sure and swing over to Mokuren Dojo for some of the best Aikido and Judo analysis on the net!

Team Seattle Tears It Up At No-Gi Championship

Brian Johnson Kicks Ass

Hey!
Some of the local boys Did quite well at the recent No-Gi World Championship grappling tournament held in Irvine California.
Watching Brian Johnson go to work on these guys is truely seeing a grappling master in the creative process.
Now, aside from High School wrestling (which had quite different rules) I really have no working knowledge of how BJJ-type systems operate.
With that in mind, I got quite a lot out of hearing Brian coaching Jake Burroughs (fight below) from the side of the ring. You can hear Brian helping Jake with strategy and brings him along to a successful win.
As Jake says on his Blog; Respect the wristlock, Bitches!

Jake's Wristlock

Congratulations to Brian Johnson, Jake Burroughs and David Meyer!

For more of the matches, go to Jake's Blog "The Ground Never Misses" at THIS LINK

You can find out more about The Northwest Jiu Jitsu Academy at THIS LINK

The Lies They Told

What a Dick; The most Dangerous man in the world

Well, well...
Years have now gone by since the terrible morning on September 11th when our country suffered the most significant terrorist attack in history. Just as with the failed cover-up known as the Warren Commission after the assassination of President Kennedy, the cover story dreamed up by the 911 Commission is beginning to fall apart.
In his new book "The Ground Truth", Senior council to the 911 Commission John Farmer unravels the Bullshit that was spoon-fed to the public during and after the official investigation. Farmer is no slouch, he is the former attorney general of New Jersey and the Dean of Rutgers school of law.
Remember; the Bush (Cheney) administration did not want to have any investigation at all, and initially inserted fixer Henry Kissinger into the lead roll. Kissinger backed out when he failed to disclose his close ties to the very elements that were accused of the attack.
Now, in his book, Farmer carefully deconstructs the lies that compromised the commissions investigation- From the review in the New York Times:

"Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed. Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad rec­ords to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”
(snip)
"Farmer’s verdict: “History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”


So we see that Farmer, as well as other commission members view the investigation as hopelessly compromised and we may never fully understand what really happened.
But here's where Farmer falls short: he faults the Bush Cabal for lying to cover their inept response to the attack, ignoring their foreknowledge that the attack was about to occur.
You see, the head of an empire can be brought down for having received a blowjob from an attractive staffer, but to acknowledge that the empire itself is so deeply corrupt that it would slash it's own wrists in an attempt to lure a sympathetic public into endless war for resources; well, that shakes the foundation of faith that binds the country together. It simply cannot be allowed, hence the cover-up.

Want to go down the rabbit hole?

Read this, and be sure to click on some of the embedded links to verify sources.

Fear The Mongols!

Over at "The Ground Never Misses" my friend, Xingyi instructor and general Big-Bald-Badass Jake Burroughs is running This series on Mongolian wrestling. (Also Here).
This brings up a story that old Mr. Choi, my Korean Tae Kwon Do master told me about his childhood;
As I remember, he grew up in North Korea and his family fled to the South when war broke out. His family had a farm, and every day he would take a large potato to school with him. All the kids would put their potatoes on the woodstove to heat them for lunch. They had a pack of farm dogs that they would let loose once a week which probably killed every living bird, rabbit or rodent they could catch.
Once, when Mr. Choi was still quite young, his family took a trip to see a Mongol festival, much like the one depicted in the video above.
They arrived at a village or camp, tents and yurts everywhere. Mongol horsemen swung from their mounts at full gallop. That night, his family entered one of the largest of the tents. Mr. Choi's eyes lit up as he described the scene, which was etched on his memory;
The interior of the tent had cooking fires and torchlight. Huge Mongolian wrestlers were competing for the crowd. The spits on the cooking fires held entire animal bodies that were being turned and roasted. Compared to his Korean family, the Mongols were giants, and he remembers some of them in full-Mongol party-mode eating entire rams legs, the grease dripping and coating the rough garb they were wearing.
It was a spectacle that Mr. Choi never forgot, and some of the roughest and most powerful warriors he would ever meet.
Check out Jake's posts on Mongolian wrestling at the links highlighted above.

My friend and instructor, the late Tae Hong Choi