Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

A few days ago, my daughter Shara would have celebrated her 39th birthday. She was born on September 12, 1980.

Six weeks later, on a chilly October morning, the morning after she broke into a big, toothless grin for the first time, causing me, her 3-year old sister Harmony and her mom to burst out laughing, we found her dead in her bed from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. 

Crib death came in the night and took our little red-haired baby girl.

We were devastated, shrouded for a couple of years in grief that felt like a weight vest. Over the years, the grief diminished to a manageable state; life went on, and after being knocked into an emotional hole in the ground, I managed to lift myself up and re-balance.

The philosophical Taoism and Zen thinking that I tried to adopt in the years before Shara's death had put down roots.

This philosophy is not about not feeling. It is not about being passive. It is about feeling fully, but not letting destructive emotions take control.

It is ab...

Chen Xiaowang says that peng jin is like revving the engine of a car. If you lift the car off the ground and rev the engine, the car goes nowhere. Put it down so that it connects to the ground and it has power.

I had a teacher who said "you can hold stances all day, but if you lose your structure the moment you begin moving, you fail."

Establishing the ground path is a skill I learned from a two or three people I respect in the internal arts -- Mike Sigman, and Jim and Angela Criscimagna. Sigman was one of the first to really drive these skills home, and as a thank-you, much of the tai chi community flamed him for it, because they hadn't been taught these skills (particularly the "softer" tai chi practitioners) so they couldn't imagine that their teachers hadn't taught them the Real Thing.

In Chen tai chi, the most important skill is to maintain peng at all times -- an outward expansiveness in your body structure and movement. Peng jin is part of every movement and each of the tai...

I met a wonderful group of people in East Lansing, Michigan yesterday. Sifu Doug Lawrence sponsored me for an Internal Strength workshop. For six hours, we drilled on what I've identified as six key skills for the internal arts -- the ground path, peng jin, whole-body movement, silk-reeling, dan t'ien rotation and opening/closing the kua.

Sifu Lawrence teaches Yang tai chi, Hsing-I and Bagua. He knows what he's doing. I was really happy to meet an instructor like Doug -- open-minded, constantly researching, trying to get better and searching for good information. I could tell within a few minutes that he is an outstanding teacher.

We started with standing stake and I corrected some posture issues. From there, we worked on the ground path, peng jin, and then silk-reeling exercises. All of the exercises we did can be found on my Internal Strength and Silk-Reeling DVDs.

The foundation of internal strength is the ground path and peng jin. Chen Xiaowang likes to describe this in autom...

I spent the morning yesterday studying the energies and directions of Tai Chi. I have had some good teachers who have touched on these topics in class, but they've never really been organized in a way that brings it all together in a systematic approach to learning.

After a few hours of study and reflection, and getting up to practice some movements for even more insight into the physical mechanics, I had crystallized my thoughts -- and some outstanding information -- into five pages of a document that I'll put on the online school tomorrow, along with a video that I plan to shoot this evening with my students, demonstrating each of the 13 energies and the five moving directions of Tai Chi.

There are six main physical skills you need for good Tai Chi (and Hsing-I and Bagua). Along with the 13 energies and five moving directions, this makes up the core of an amazing martial art.

The Six Main Physical Skills:

1. Establish and maintain the ground path

2. Maintain peng jin at all tim...

Jieh Jin is translated from Chinese as "borrowing energy." It's one of the many concepts that are abstractly described as "energies" in the internal arts.

As with each of these "energies," borrowing energy doesn't mean you're sucking the energy out of your opponent literally -- it isn't mystical, it's physical just like all the other skills of Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Bagua.

 These three photos show an exercise you can do to practice and demonstrate borrowing energy.

In photo 1, my partner is rushing at me to push me off my ground. He will push hard into my folded arms, using his momentum and weight. I'm establishing the ground path, maintaining peng, and setting up the body structure that I need for good internal mechanics.

In photo 2, he makes contact with his force, or energy. I ground it and give it no place to go but back at him. It actually feels as if it bounces back at him.

In photo 3, you can see him bouncing back slightly. All of the internal mechanics are coming into ...

"Jin" means "energy," although that has been misinterpreted by some literal-minded folks who believe it is an actual scientifically real "energy" in the body. It has also been called "power" by some.

I tend to think of jin as "skill" or "method."

The term "energy" is an abstract way of describing the skill that you develop with practice. Liu jin, for example, is "roll back" energy. It's a physical skill that combines reflexes and sensitivity when someone pushes or punches or attacks in another way. The skilled fighter who uses liu can deflect the attack, rolling it away and often causing the attacker to go off-balance. Naturally, this takes a lot of practice. It's impossible to develop this skill just by doing a form. It is a method of dealing with force coming in.

The most important of all the so-called "energies" of tai chi and the internal arts is peng jin. It MUST be present in all of your movements, even when you walk. If it isn't, you're not doing tai chi (or hsing-i or bagu...

I can't tell you how many internal artists I've met during the last decade or so who look at me with blank stares when I ask if they have been taught about the ground path.

I know how they feel. I first heard about it around 1997, when I started reading a network listserve, where Mike Sigman and others talked about it. I had studied martial arts for many years at that point, and had practiced the internal arts for a decade, and this concept was new to me.

I began studying Sigman's material and attended a workshop he held in Minneapolis. I began studying Chen tai chi with Jim and Angela Criscimagna, and learned body mechanics that were foreign to me. As I've seen during the past decade, these physical skills are still foreign to a lot of internal artists. Simply put, there is a LOT of bad instruction happening in the internal arts, particularly tai chi.

When Sigman began telling tai chi teachers and students about the ground path, he was flamed by many of them because they had devel...

Last night at practice, some students and I went over basic ground strength exercises from the Internal Strength DVD. These are among the first things that my students learn, both in my classes and in the online school.

It was good to revisit these exercises. If you're doing the internal arts such as Tai Chi, Bagua, or Hsing-I, and you haven't been taught how to establish and maintain the ground path and peng jin throughout all of your movements--even while walking--then you're not really doing the internal arts, you're just moving in a way that looks like the internal arts. Unfortunately, most of the tai chi folks I meet around the country are just moving around. When you push on them they collapse. It's easy to see that there is no peng, no ground, no silk-reeling going on in their movement.

The development of internal strength gives you the iron inside the cotton, but it takes practice and someone to show you how it's done.

In the photos here, I show one of the exercises that we ...

One of my kung-fu friends, Eric Jones, came over last week to practice pole shaking.

Pole-shaking is a great exercise for the internal arts. I first heard about it from Mike Sigman, then learned it first-hand from Jim and Angela Criscimagna. Chen Zhenglei occasionally does a pole-shaking workshop and I've always wanted to attend one.

For this exercise, you can use a waxwood pole or an 8 or 9-foot section of PVC pipe. I even have a rattan staff--only 6 feet long--that I can do it with, although you don't get as much of a shake at the end of the staff.

The intent is to use the body--opening and closing, whole-body movement, dan t'ien rotation and spiraling--to whip the pole and cause the end to shake when the energy reaches it. And when I say energy, I mean nothing mystical--it's physics, and it works because you are relaxed and using good body mechanics.

Holding the pole as shown above, you hold it so that you don't use any arm and shoulder muscle. This photo shows me at the botto...

I get emails from people -- some of them starting out in the internal arts -- and they've been told that they do certain exercises such as standing or chi kung to "cultivate chi."  More than once, people have told me that when they do tai chi they don't "feel the chi," and they ask me what they're doing wrong.

My opinions on these matters tend to differ from the standard schpiel that you get in internal arts classes.

I tell them to stop worrying about feeling chi and worry about strengthening the legs, developing peng and silk-reeling and whole-body movement and the skills that will make their internal arts high quality.

Cultivating chi is a very interesting concept. In my opinion, cultivating chi means that you are growing stronger and more healthy, and learning to develop the body mechanics for good internal arts.

From a movement perspective, cultivating chi might mean practicing a tai chi form until you understand and can execute the movements with the relaxed strength that corr...