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What is “peng”?
It didn’t occur to me that other languages also have onomatopoeia (of course they do) until Tom Bailor explained it to me like this: “Boing!” Master George Xu explained it like this: “Too hard — furniture gets tipped over. Too soft — tofu gets squished.” Other teachers have explained it by likening the body to…
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What is “zhong ding”?
Often literally translated as “central equilibrium” or “center of balance,” for our purposes zhong ding refers to the vertical axis that runs through the body’s center of gravity. Clear perception of this axis and the physical structures that surround it are an essential component of early training. When two bodies are joined together, as in…
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What is “qi”?
For our purposes the terms ‘qi’ and ‘qi flow’ are interchangeable and refer to the cultivation of a state in the body that maximizes the movement and suffusion of energy- and information- carrying media (i.e. air, electricity, lymph, blood, hormones, etc), especially around the joints and organs. While attending one of a few most excellent…
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What are “Internal” Martial Arts?
I’ve come to understand internal martial arts as a mode of practice where refinements are based primarily, if not exclusively, on signals coming from inside the body, rather than achieving a certain posture or creating a specific outcome outside of the body. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is especially true when encountering an external force. This sounds…