I remember being younger and seeing those guys that could punch through stacks of concrete blocks on television. You talk about it with your friends, and usually somebody says something along the lines of "They can harness their chi!" Everyone is appropriately impressed by the display of mystic power and that is the end of that, except maybe for the private moments when you imagine you have phenomenal cosmic strength in your fist and can punch through anything! Bwap! These guys sure don't look huge so you accept it as further proof, along with mothers lifting cars off of their trapped children, of the mind's dominance over the body.
Ok. I'd like to speculate a little bit on the parts that get left out of that equation. For starters, the countless hours those guys spent punching through stacks of paper hung against a brick wall. In an earlier post I mentioned pain as an instigator of rapid body adaptation, and my understanding is that as you pursue this punching discipline, both musculature and bone growth adapt to the persistent presence of shock traveling like electricity through the arm all the way down to the feet. It is not my goal to de-mystify this process or to take away the agency involved in "focusing your chi." In fact it is exactly this mystification, the presence of a spiritual and philosophical framework integrated with physical feats, that matters to me.
You are taught, through study or as cultural heritage, the concept of chi-flow. Function and location in the body, sources of chi, history, literature by or about disciples of the concept, how the concept is otherwise related to Chinese belief, history, religion... I won't belabor the point that this idea about the body is an integrated element of an enduring cultural heritage. As you consider your body and explore your physical potentials, which everyone does with varying degrees of frequency and deliberateness, the idea may suggest new possibilities to improve physical strength or wellbeing. And so you begin to train. The body, too complex for any sort of perfection, will not match the idea, but you continue until you feel the alignment and discover the power of imagery, in this case chi-flow, which you understand deeply, to the point of belief. A framework which transforms the infinitely adaptable body. I don't care how many times you slam your fist into a wall--it's not until you understand why you are doing it, how exactly you do the slamming so stress runs consistently through musculature and skeleton, and where the movement and power come from, that you can begin the long process of change. These elements of understanding are accounted for and granted significance by the idea of chi-flow.
There's also an element of faith in the training, that the stresses you place on your body will lead you someplace, or will improve your quality of life, or will make you stronger and healthier, or will grant you peace in your days. And the boundary between the worldly, unreliable body and heady divine intent begins to blur. Because we have experience teaching us that our body is more than a house for the soul; that in actuality, it is involved in enacting our spirituality. For me, this experience happens most often while improvising, when the intent and necessity of movement becomes blindingly clear, underscored by an urgency to communicate. Or when the body is creative of its own accord, arranging itself surprisingly in a brand new way, and you get one of those sensations of body knowledge like I talked about in the previous post.
It's hard to stay away, at this point, from talking about drum circles or ecstatic dancing, but however important and enlightening these experiences may be, they alienate a lot of people and it's a big part of my goal to remain accessible, to present concepts of body and spirituality that feel integrate-able. Doable, not too serious or too ethereal.
Anywho, what was supposed to be a short, anecdotal post has now become an unsubstantiated preamble to other ideas.
To sum up, we have systems of belief, or imagery, or philosophy, that can be imposed on the body to achieve certain ends, be they physical, mental, or spiritual. But ultimately it is the body that becomes the teacher, enacting these concepts, living and enduring them and changing ever so slowly, so that eventually we construct a body knowledge we can listen to, an ongoing experience to reference and to make us present, alert, aware.
