Sigman Workshop San Francisco Apr 3-4

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[Mike Sigman]

When: April 3,4 2010 9am to 4pm (ish) each day

Where: HS Gymnasium at 693 Vermont St. San Francisco

Cost: $150 (for both days) $80 for single day.

email Vince Brownl: attitudeengineer@yahoo.com

Workshop will cover basic ki/kokyu/qi/jin skills with some basic applications of the kokyu/jin skills on Saturday. Sunday will be a heavy emphasis on breath/power training of the body and how it's done, although of course only a limited amount of this type of training can be done by someone who has not done breath training of this sort. (Not that there will be heavy physical exertion; breath training is harder than it appears).

The class size is limited.

[Janet Rosen]

OH COOL - gotta check my calendar when I get home & see if this will work.....

[BWells]

I'm sure planning to go. Just emailed Vince to let him know.

Janet hope to see you there!

Bruce Wells

[Janet Rosen]

Working on the factors now, Bruce, thinking 1 day may just work!

[Thomas Campbell]

Some thoughts here:

http://rumsoakedfist.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9145

[niall]

Looks like that link is broken Thomas.

[AllanF]

Is it this link?

http://rumsoakedfist.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9146

Allan

[Thomas Campbell]

Is it this link?

http://rumsoakedfist.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9146

Allan

That's it. Thanks Allan.

[DH]

Thanks for letting people know and keeping them aware of what's out there, Tom. Although he and I don't get along, I can appreciate his efforts for the community none-the-less.
Dan

[Mike Sigman]

Well, I mistakenly assumed that "Tom Campbell" at a SF workshop was just a coincidental occurrence. C'est la vie.

Many Asian arts refer a lot to "steal this technique" or asking "do you understand?", ideas indicating that a person has to be able to think or he won't really get very far with these kinds of skill. I try to set the workshops up almost like a rigorous mathematical proof, building one set of skills upon another while at the same time trying to make the overall logic clear enough so that a person who gets the two basic tenets of a workshop can not only go home and work on the basics, but can also extrapolate the next step, and so on. These skills are very logical; they are not haphazard phenomena that are unattached to physics or common sense. The beauty of the logic of these skills has a lot to do with where Yin-Yang, Heaven-Earth-Man, etc., come from. I.e., it's a very beautiful logic, once you get into the thread of it. Of course, some people can never see the logic: they're perhaps not smart enough or not enough in touch with their bodies, or they're so smart academically that they can't grasp the fact that this is not something easy to do, or they're already a "teacher" in some art and they look at these skills as just one more tangent to add to their already-excellent skills and credentials. And so on.

As Tom pointed out, there is only so much you can show in a 2-day workshop. Think about going to a workshop to learn some skill that you had no real previous experience in, for instance a newby to Aikido. How much of full Aikido can you teach at a 2-day workshop? Do you stick to basics or do you show sophisticated techniques that the newbies don't even have the foundations for? You see the point. I did show a couple of fairly advanced things, but those were really for the people who already had some skills and could see the point.

One comment I'd make is that I fairly carefully watch and feel people to see what their skill level already is. Sometimes I run into someone that already has some foundational skills and I'm quick to ask what they train and other relevant questions.

A lot of the few people that have some skills tend to have what I call "muscle-jin", a combination of some basic jin skills supported by arm/shoulder muscles and other habits. It's very difficult to pull them back toward hara-centered movement because they're already impressed with their own power. Yet, it's very easy to understand that if you mix local muscle with your i.s. skills, you dilute the power (and then add in muscle to compensate). For instance, power from the ground is no longer power from the ground if part of the initiating forces come from the shoulder, is it? I mentioned that on this forum some years ago. The point is that "basics" are paramount skills.

About a week ago I went to Phoenix to attend some workshops by Chen Bing, one of the better-known 20th-generation teachers. I have a fair amount of personal experience with Chen Xiaowang and others of the 19th generation, but I wanted to start meeting the various 20the generation teachers and I'll go on to visit workshops by Chen Youze, Chen Ziqiang, and others. And I'll learn things, also. The point I wanted to make was that I took a 2-hour private lesson with CB and the main thing I wanted to ask him about was what he considered the most important basic exercises (jibengong). During that private lesson and in the other 2 workshops I attended, I could see that Chen Bing had a focused logic that he was trying to explicate, using the basics. That's the important stuff. The people who go looking for the "secrets" are missing the point: you can never really get to the sophisticated stuff if you only have rudimentary-level basic skills.

Hence the focus on basic-level skills. Heck, I do 'basic' exercises every day. ;)

FWIW

Mike Sigman

[Blake Holtzen]

Well, I mistakenly assumed that "Tom Campbell" at a SF workshop was just a coincidental occurrence. C'est la vie.

Many Asian arts refer a lot to "steal this technique" or asking "do you understand?", ideas indicating that a person has to be able to think or he won't really get very far with these kinds of skill. I try to set the workshops up almost like a rigorous mathematical proof, building one set of skills upon another while at the same time trying to make the overall logic clear enough so that a person who gets the two basic tenets of a workshop can not only go home and work on the basics, but can also extrapolate the next step, and so on. These skills are very logical; they are not haphazard phenomena that are unattached to physics or common sense. The beauty of the logic of these skills has a lot to do with where Yin-Yang, Heaven-Earth-Man, etc., come from. I.e., it's a very beautiful logic, once you get into the thread of it. Of course, some people can never see the logic: they're perhaps not smart enough or not enough in touch with their bodies, or they're so smart academically that they can't grasp the fact that this is not something easy to do, or they're already a "teacher" in some art and they look at these skills as just one more tangent to add to their already-excellent skills and credentials. And so on.

As Tom pointed out, there is only so much you can show in a 2-day workshop. Think about going to a workshop to learn some skill that you had no real previous experience in, for instance a newby to Aikido. How much of full Aikido can you teach at a 2-day workshop? Do you stick to basics or do you show sophisticated techniques that the newbies don't even have the foundations for? You see the point. I did show a couple of fairly advanced things, but those were really for the people who already had some skills and could see the point.

One comment I'd make is that I fairly carefully watch and feel people to see what their skill level already is. Sometimes I run into someone that already has some foundational skills and I'm quick to ask what they train and other relevant questions.

A lot of the few people that have some skills tend to have what I call "muscle-jin", a combination of some basic jin skills supported by arm/shoulder muscles and other habits. It's very difficult to pull them back toward hara-centered movement because they're already impressed with their own power. Yet, it's very easy to understand that if you mix local muscle with your i.s. skills, you dilute the power (and then add in muscle to compensate). For instance, power from the ground is no longer power from the ground if part of the initiating forces come from the shoulder, is it? I mentioned that on this forum some years ago. The point is that "basics" are paramount skills.

About a week ago I went to Phoenix to attend some workshops by Chen Bing, one of the better-known 20th-generation teachers. I have a fair amount of personal experience with Chen Xiaowang and others of the 19th generation, but I wanted to start meeting the various 20the generation teachers and I'll go on to visit workshops by Chen Youze, Chen Ziqiang, and others. And I'll learn things, also. The point I wanted to make was that I took a 2-hour private lesson with CB and the main thing I wanted to ask him about was what he considered the most important basic exercises (jibengong). During that private lesson and in the other 2 workshops I attended, I could see that Chen Bing had a focused logic that he was trying to explicate, using the basics. That's the important stuff. The people who go looking for the "secrets" are missing the point: you can never really get to the sophisticated stuff if you only have rudimentary-level basic skills.

Hence the focus on basic-level skills. Heck, I do 'basic' exercises every day. ;)

FWIW

Mike Sigman

I'm curious to what Sifu Chen Bing's response was to your question about jibengong. What did he say?

I thought that I read somewhere that he was a big proponent of zhan zhuang to build awareness of chi. But, I may be remembering wrong.

Thanks Mike

-Blake

[Mike Sigman]

I'm curious to what Sifu Chen Bing's response was to your question about jibengong. What did he say?

I thought that I read somewhere that he was a big proponent of zhan zhuang to build awareness of chi. But, I may be remembering wrong.
Yes, of course standing-post exercise is *the* main jibengong, but my question was more or less to determine those other exercises which he considered the most important for someone who didn't do a "form". Most western people who 'do forms' really have spent so much time focusing on 'learning a form' that they forget that the secrets are in the movements and not in the form. It's very easy to spot someone doing a form who has no jin/qi skills and even easier to spot someone who is clueless about how to use the dantien for movements. And so on. So he showed me (starting with zhan zhuang) the series of exercises that he considered to be the most important.

Bear in mind that the basic exercises (jibengong) that he showed were Taiji-focused and that Taiji, while of course being based upon jin/qi, has it's own specific focuses. For instance the hallmark of Taiji is not "fajin" like so many people seem to think, but it is standing and moving with the body like a balance-scale (using jin/qi, of course). So the exercises were along those lines. Very good exercises. There's a discussion about some of those exercises on the QiJin forum, but it would be pointless to write them out here on an Aikido forum (admitted laziness: it would just take too long to write), even though the exercises are probably just as germane and helpful to an Aikido practitioner.

One of the exercises is one that I'd been taught a variant of in Uechi Ryu karate (on Okinawa) and then later also in Xingyi. In other words, some of the best exercises have spread, over the centuries, into being staples of a number of arts.

FWIW

Mike Sigman