Cheap (but important) Tricks
There is a series of body skills that ought to develop automatically as a function of correct martial, performance or qigong training. They really are not good for much else other than checking your level of internal physical coordination and a lot of people seem to make much of these relatively minor achievements. The paradox is that if these skills are not surfacing, there is likely something fundamentally wrong with your training and practice.
This list is by no means definitive, but it is representative:
The ability to roll the abdominal muscles, creating the illusion that a grapefruit-sized ball is rolling around in the belly. This appeared in me after about 5 years of training.
The ability to create wave-like motions in the spine and joints, giving the impression of physical fluidity and flexibility. I got this after about 6 months.
The ability to open and close the viscera, making powerful gurgling sounds and vibrations in the belly. I still can’t do this repeatably, but it is related to the rolling the ball around one.
The ability to sing harmonic overtones by parsing a single note into a 13-note scale. I noticed I could do this after about 2 years of training, and spent some time practicing to perfect it.
The ability to take an expected punch to the abdomen, either by expanding the belly to create muscular armour or by ventilating air rapidly out of the mouth while deflating the belly in front of the punch. I learned that I could do this while attending one of David Mott’s Uechi Ryu classes, and later also worked on it with Scott Sonnon.
Project heat from the hands and fingers that another person can feel from a meter away. This showed up about 6 months in to learning Wu style Taiji and was greatly enhanced by qigong practice.
Slap or lightly strike a person’s skin and imprint the shape of one’s hand or fingers upon them. Can’t do this at all. (Edit July 1, 2009: my training partner Adriaan and I played with this a little yesterday – we can do a pretty convincing job, but clearly this is a stunt that practice will improve)
The ability to voluntarily shift one’s skull plates. The movement is quite small, but I figured out how to do it after both Sam Masich and Chen Zhonghua let me squeeze their heads!
The ability to ‘inflate’ or expand any part of the body on demand. This one is the same as the skull-plate one, applied to the rest of the body.
The ability to extinguish a lit candle by punching the air in front of it. You can already do this!
The ability to find areas of tension and congestion in another person’s musculature and massage them away. This is probably the most useful trick on the list.
So, why are these cheap? Because they are not the skill of keeping one point still while moving another point in a circle, which is the impossible task of Taijiquan. These cheap tricks all involve some aspect of developing this skill and appear along the way towards it, but they are, ultimately, beside the point…
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