It has been, I see,some time ago that I wrote about this so-called “internal work”on this blog in an attempt to get my thoughts on it in order. Now that I find myself in sickbay for a while (disabled by severe pain and limitation in the pelvic area) I might as well take the opportunity to pick it up again.
Since I have completely lost the thread ( if it may be found at all) from the earlier posts on the subject I will just give you my view on the so-called principles. Hoping that will not result in too much of a redo of what went before.
In almost all of the internal martial arts generally a lot of emphasis is placed on the so-called principles. These principles are then understood in the literal sense of that which came first, or a starting point or principle.
They were also discussed in this series as the principles of ki-aikido according to Tohei:
– Keep one point
– Relax completely
– Keep weight underside / Have a light feeling
– Extend Ki
Peter Ralston, another master in the field of internal power, sums up the following list of the Cheng Hsin principles of an effortlessly effective body-being in his book “The Principles of Effortless Power“:
1. Being calm
2. Relaxing
3. Centering
4. Grounding
5. Being whole and total
And there will likely be a quitte a number of others that will be emphasized and hammer on in various artd and styles. Practitioners from different disciplines will undoubtedly recognize them immediately.
In that earlier piece about yoga I wrote that such principles always go together and reinforce or support each other. But you may easily tend to forget when you focus heavily on one of them that there were some more. For example, I once remarked to Jaro that I tended to lose track or awareness of one principle when I focused on the next one, whereupon Jaro asked me to focus on them in turn and he let me feel experientially that the others were actually also in place.
Such principles thus act as a kind of internal attunement protocol or a manual for the self to get into a certain state of being.
Let’s take another one that seem to suggest a more discrete manual or checklist in the sense of do this first and then that. Here is the acronym of the principles of Prana Dynamics by Howard Wang. RABIS is the acronym and it stands for:
– Root
– Align
– Bypass
– Inflate/deflate
– Synchronize
The order seems to matter here, but Howard points out that they all have to be there at almost the same instant. He says that the desired state can actually best be described as a certain feeling and that the trick is to remember this feeling, to make it your own and to be able to evoke it at will.
For people, like me, who can’t match the level of Tohei, Ralston or Wang by far but still want to play the game, it is often a bit of a struggle to get into the ballpark and play to begin with.
For that you have to learn to play and practice with the principles. The master and the advanced players may install the principles as a starting point to start the game, for the student and the beginner they can serve as entry-points to get into this internals game in the first place.
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