The Way through Baguazhang - 八卦掌道

My own experience is firstly like most people. As we get older, we become more and more in contact with people with dementia. Either through friends and family and others we know. While it is a terrible disease to be witness to, it is also a growing sign of getting older. The second way I have been a party to people with dementia is by way of volunteering my Qigong services at my local community c...

Generally speaking Baguazhang makes no claims to be good for reversing the effects of dementia. As a martial art style, it has only been around for about 160 to 180 years. So most of Baguazhang study revolves around the fighting arts for most practitioners. Any higher levels of learning usually involve the spiritual, esoteric and with the understanding that at some point a practitioner may start d...

Recently my wife asked me if I would be interested in doing a piece around Qigong or Baguazhang and Alzheimer's Disease, and in association with dementia in general. I pointedly refused to get involved because I am not a qualified medical practitioner nor did I have any interest in the field. Now to be fair on myself, I do have a passionate interest in neuroscience, psychology and whether or not a...

The life of a Baguazhang master is a varied experience depending on where the master is living. And while we all try to follow the same success path, the experiential truth is that for each person success is different. The first three differences are based on where the baguazhang master is living. These differences are history, cultural influences and the natural environment. To give some examples...

Nineteen by nineteen is the grid. Followed by 361 points of connection. After being told yet again how great and powerful artificial intelligence is at winning over human competition, I have been tempted to give up the game. But the thing is, for me the game of Go or Weiqi is more than just a game. It is a multidimensional window into the workings of the human mind. And more specifically my oppone...

Even though I am a master of Qigong, I still have to deal with the everyday like everybody else. And sometimes during heights of euphoria over achievements and successes, I can just as easily find myself in the ditch again. Unless I decide to go live somewhere without other people around, that's just the way life will have to be played out from time to time. To give an example, just the other day...

There was a time once, in the Western world that if you worked hard, it would get you somewhere in life. Then the rules and systems changed and working hard wasn't enough. In America, the doctrine of working hard got reworked as hustling for a living. While in Australia, some people try to persist with footy slogans like 'Go hard or Go home!' As an energy worker by way of Qigong, I find myself que...

In this moment I chose to delve deeper into the mysteries of war. And to understand that, which is not easily understood. A lot of things to do with war is an admission that those who are fighting it, have lost control of that thing we call reality. In peacetime, reality is the ability to hold sway over one's surroundings to the degree that what we hold to be true is a reflection of what we want....

I've heard that someone is claiming that Sun Tzu' classic The Art of War is a book about peace and avoiding war. I have mixed emotions about the claim. It makes me wonder if that person has actually read the book - all 13 chapters. Because it is only in the first chapter that Sun Tzu cautions a ruler to reconsider. And that caution is based on the damage it could do to a king's country and people....

☳ The funny thing about the Art of War, in a not very funny way, is that when you are in it, you tend to learn it very fast and things have a way of changing perspectives very quickly. ☵ You learn strategies and then you try out strategies. Sometimes they work and at other times they don't. But through all that pain and violence we learn who we are. ☶ We gain an affinity with the poetries of wa...

☳ The Art of War. Military strategies. Or Bingfa 兵法 in Chinese, is a topic that will come up eventually in martial arts training. And for an internally focused martial artist, it is required study. Especially if your path, your Tao 道 is the Way of Martial Arts. ☵ I have been challenged by many practitioners that it is just all theory and not required to be a good fighter. ☶ But I always poin...

They say sometimes losing is a form of winning. Who they are, I don't know. But experience has shown me many times that it's not the losing that is winning but that we sometimes have to lose first in order to win second. Now to be clear, I do not recommend this strategy unless you know what you are doing and have a clear goal that justifies the means. Otherwise you are liable to get labelled a los...

Sometimes life is grand. We are winning every fight and achieving every goal. These are the moments we want to remember and be remembered by. We are having our proverbial cake and eating it too, because we've figured out how to have both. And we wish it to go on forever. But forever is a very long time. And slowly but surely boredom creeps in. It usually masks itself as "being jaded" with one's lo...

Life is neither black nor white. It isn't even shades of grey. Although, you may not believe this but grey is the highest vibrational frequency we humans can see in terms of colour. At least some of us can. It's a shade of pastel grey that resides just above violet. So now you must be wondering, if grey is above violet, what's below red? The answer is brown. In fact the full colour spectrum I can...

Because I am a practitioner of Baguazhang, I always love it when I see it displayed or used in martial art stories and artwork. I like other styles too, but I am only human. Sometimes a little too cocky and sometimes a little too timid in the martial ways but always seeking the truth. Even if it is biased towards Baguazhang. So it comes as no surprise to those who enjoy what I profess, when I tell...

Recently I came across a manga titled "The Way of the Househusband" or Gokushufudou 極主夫道 by Oono Kousuke. It is a comic serialisation about a fictional Yakuza named Tatsu, who for reasons that are not spelled out but are inferred to, is now a househusband 主夫. It is a lively read, that a growing community of male martial artists can in their private way relate to. Well, maybe not the Yakuza p...

Compared to the hopes and dreams of wannabe martial artists living off a constant diet of martial art movies and books, my Baguazhang life is plain vanilla. I have the same good and bad times like most people. And just to illustrate how run-of-the-mill my life can be, recently my online tea business has been going through tough times. Tough times brought on by what's happening between America and...

You know... A funny thing about people that say martial arts is all bullshit, is that they are some of the biggest consumers of martial arts literature and artwork. After having been told countless times about all the fantasy stuff and how it's not real, it amazes me that afterward I still get asked if any of it is actually real? I usually answer that a lot of it is written by people who don't do...

☳ Because Baguazhang 八卦掌 is a martial art that utilises physical palm changes and sudden circular directional turns, it can be difficult to make sense of what's what in the cyclonic tornado that marks the style. ☵ Staying focused on the target is not always easy to achieve when confronted by multiple moving distractions. And therefore something needs to help the brain process information fast...

☳ Originally the divide between internal and external martial arts was socio-political. "Internal" meant it came from homegrown Taoism, while "external" meant it's origins were Buddhist, which originally came from the Indian subcontinent. Later as the Qing Dynasty was coming to an end, many of the internal masters were actively involved directly or indirectly with the Qing government. ☴ This inv...

There are people, who despite their efforts in staying grounded with their martial art, are in fact standing on shaky ground. They give the veneer of being tough, solid, but even a lonely butterfly has the ability to set them off. They get into the most popular martial art styles going around and do their darn'dest to make sure everybody's on board and toeing the line. Anything else is heresy. So...

Every now and then I wonder if I had gone off the deep end with Baguazhang? And when I think that I have, I am pleasantly reminded that despite my weirdness I am still quite grounded. Everything I have tried to express has been an attempt to make it easier for the ordinary person to grasp this style, provided that they are doing martial arts and are willing to transcend the levels up. The levels h...

""Empty your tea cup. Allow your life to be fill’d. Cha Zen: Stillness found."" When I created the Genchitaofu Baguazhang form I was aiming to achieve a number of goals through one system that was easy to do everyday and would by itself lead me up the mountain. Now, I had mentioned before that by becoming the mountain I would not need to go visit the mountain - something of which, a lot of neijia...

The funny thing about living your own brand of truth, is that you get to a place where what we perceive as the ordinary collective reality we all share with each other, may in-fact seem to be a collective delusion we hold up to avoid seeing what is really going on. I use the conditional word ‘seem’, because for each and every one of us doing Baguazhang, whether by ourselves or in a group, we are a...

While recently I have been adventuring around the fringes of qigong, regarding pendants and how to use them to facilitate the acceleration of qi cultivation, I kept as always my baguazhang practice going alongside my i-ching. To me, baguazhang, i-ching, qigong, chazen, weiqi and bingfa or the Art of War, are all just pretty much one thing. Just like seeing with the eyes different objects but knowi...