Photo by Bangin

Either this is fitness training or torture, take your pick. The effect is much different than any normal kind of training. If you follow the principles of the practice, new things happen gradually. Energy starts flowing in weird ways and you get new strengths, maybe even odd abilities. If you've read the old books about the internal energies of martial arts, you start to get the things they talk about. But, you'll probably quit before the energies get strong enough to use. It takes years, and it hurts a lot.

Start out with a very light weight, one that's laughably small (I'm using 25 lbs which I'm sure is laughable to many people). If you've not done this before, the posture can be painful even without weights. Old books talk about it in terms of different types of pain that make the different stages of training. The last stages press energy into the bones, or so the books say, and that's where the pain goes, into the marrow.

Use a weight you can hold securely. Press it up above your head and hold it with your arms slightly bend and palms facing upwards. Bend your knees slightly and keep your feet about shoulder width apart. Concentrate on your breathing and focus your mind in the pit of your stomach, the area called the dantien. Drop the weight and it falls on your head, so be conservative. If you feel your grip slipping, lower the weight. Rest a few seconds and try again. The goal is to be able to hold the weight overhead effortlessly, for long periods of time, and eventually to reach an ecstatic state in which wonderful things happen. For me at present, five minutes and 25 pounds is a long time. It'll grow.

Follow up:

If you have back trouble you'll probably not want to do this. Holding the weight above your head concentrates force in your lower back if you don't use the proper posture, the C-curve of Tai Chi Chuan. Don't be a hotshot.

I'm relating all that because to me this is a very important exercise and one which I'm enjoying very much, in a strange way. It's a daily five minute battle and I haven't won it yet, using a weight I've trained with before and seldom managed to hold for the full five minutes. I did reach the ecstatic point some years ago, without the weight, and I'm curious about what happens if I intensify the process with weights. It's an old Tai Chi system not many people know about, since the teeth were pulled from that old combat training and everybody started to talk about it as a healthful exercise which has nothing to do with fighting. Unless you learn the old stuff, you don't get what the old masters did. The response I get when I say such things is that "you are your own worst enemy and Tai Chi isn't for fighting." Screw that, you aren't your own worst enemy and the old Tai Chi was for combat.

Some days I'm strong. Some days I'm not. As I experience this exercise now, I feel good for about half of it, and then suddenly it's a struggle. Pulses of heat flow up my arms, pain builds to intense levels, and I lower the weight just before my hands are too weak to hold it. Then I try again. Sometimes I'm only ten seconds short of going the distance. I get closer, but in a pattern that rises and falls.

We do a short chi kung routine called Flying Tiger first, it's one from a book called the Tao of Tai Chi Chuan by Jou, Tsung Hwa. Jou wrote a lot of good books about all of this and had interesting things to say about meditation, time travel and all sorts of weird stuff. Three times in my life I lived within twenty miles of Jou for years at a stretch and I never met the guy. Eventually he started a Tai Chi training center near the sacred ground of my tribe in New York state. Then he got killed in a traffic accident. That happens to the best of us, you train and you train and then you get eaten by a tiger.

Afterwards we do a cool down by meditating. I always sit in full lotus even if it takes me a few minutes to get into it. There's something about full lotus posture that does things, makes energies move and focus without having to think about them. It's worth learning.

And then we Dream about weird things and places we've never been. Sometimes it turns out to be real.

Happy Halloween.