I had a conflict with a student about my private lesson teaching style the other day. From my point of view, his lack of progress was mostly due to not being able to stay empty. From his point of view, I was teaching right on the edge of what he could grasp and then quickly moving on to another lesson.
The way Chinese martial arts are taught has always been contentious. I am a reformer intent on both preserving authenticity and improving transmission. Talking through the conflict was constructive for both of us.
We agreed that I should review with him all the material for self-cultivation of emptiness. Becoming empty takes a lot of practice. It requires unusual conceptual comprehension. It is something one must do on their own. I can teach it, I can re-teach it, I can test it, I can create new ways to bring it about, but ultimately it is something deeply individual which requires self-experimentation.
He wrote to me a few days later to say the review material I constructed on the spot made a lot of sense and he now has a better idea of what to work on, and how to work on it. So I am sharing it with you.
Becoming empty is an infinite game. There are many ways to play, and no limit to the subtlety with which you can play. In his book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chögyam Trungpa, described the outer edge of emptiness as a feeling of warmth. My Daoist teacher Liu Ming described emptiness experiences as a form of trance; not meditation in the strict sense, but a confluence between meditation technique and ritual performance. Needless to say, pursuit-of-emptiness is a weird path, but it is a walkable path, and one that has tangible fruition.
Emptiness is a pre-requisite for all internal martial arts. If you’re not doing it empty, you’re not doing it.
The three types of emptiness practice which I am about to describe are always practiced simultaneously. That is, you can play one game, or emphasize one game, but the other two are always operating in the background. They are not truly separate. This division of emptiness practices into three types comes from my own direct experience of learning. It is not arbitrary, and it is not fixed.
Ringing the bell
If you slap your forearm (or any skin) hard enough to make it “sting,” the feeling of the surface of your arm floats off. Sometimes there is heat radiating outward too. It is a bit like ringing a bell, sharp at first then diminishing as the vibration returns to stillness. Or perhaps more like a complex Chinese opera gong, where the sound created by the vibration changes states several times before diminishing into silence. In any event, everyone knows this “sting” feeling. The idea here is to create a similar feeling all over the surface of the body, which becomes a constant feeling, a cloud-like radiance.
I do not know exactly how this happens but it has many triggers and is not particularly unusual or unfamiliar to most people.
Some drugs create a similar effect, but we usually call it numbness or body disorientation.
The aftershock of being in ice water is a similar effect.
Likewise, intense exercise can trigger it.
It happens spontaneously in states of profound stillness, which is why it is closely associated with meditation.
Anatomically speaking, this type of emptiness involves the differentiation of sensory and motor nerves; as well as differentiation in the rates of transmission along the nerves do to variations in myelination. The effect is triggered by having no intent in the body.
It feels a bit like you are releasing a gas through your skin, in the language of Chinese alchemy, Qi is distilling from Jing.
In the beginning it is usually associated with relaxing, releasing, and letting go. As you become familiar with it, you can also do it in states of intensity, resistance, high muscle tone, and explosive movement.
The most difficult part of this exercise is getting the whole torso to release. Why? Because unconscious compression of the torso is tied to established breathing patterns. And breathing patterns are tied to normal states of self-repression, anxiety, fear, and defensiveness.
Tip: Practice bucket bathing with a scrub brush, first thing, in the morning, through the winter months. Scrubbing with a stiff brush can help develop conscious control of releasing the surface. Use hot water for scrubbing and finish with cold. Visualize the five colors (silver, red, purple, green, gold) radiating out of your organs, consecutively with a series of five breaths. [link]
Circulating the fluids
The term for this in Chinese is tong 通, which means through. Think of it as a stable state of being in which all fluids can move freely throughout your body like ocean currents without restrictions.
The method for attaining this state is called opening the gates. The main gates being the shoulders and the hips. But there are lots of gates, usually I start people working on opening the elbow gate. With your arm at your side, begin moving the fingers up until they are above the wrist, then above the elbow, then above the shoulder. At each stage, allow the feeling of fluid passing through the joint towards the torso to happen on its own. Don’t add any tension that might restricts the flow.
With a little practice, it feels like the arm is emptying into the torso. Then, normally, as you let the arm down, it will feel like the arm is filling up again. That is fine at the beginning, but as you practice you want to figure out how to lower the arm without filling it up. This is what it means to open a gate. The circulation back towards the torso remains open.
Simply relaxing will not result in tong.
Improvise whole-body movement using the sensation of open gates as a measure of correctness (a “constraint” in physical-education language). Use this method to explore new ways of moving.
Each of these three emptiness methods must be integrated with the other two to bear fruition.
I like to say, “Your body makes the rules.” You cannot impose them, you must listen. You must notice, and track, the results of your experiments. It is easy, but it takes time.
The gates open and close without effort or much sensation (at first) and this is a normal part of everything we do. People just don’t normally track these subtle (at first) sensations.
Tip: With normal walking, the gates of the hips are closed and the legs are full, not empty.
Tip: Controlled movements of the arms, like bringing food and drink to a table, or driving a car, normally require the gates of the arms to be closed, not open.
Warning: The ability to freely move fluid through the body can be used to generate force for a strike. Many martial artists get stuck here. They become enamored with the feeling of power. Those trapped in this hell realm can never achieve emptiness (in this lifetime).
Mind outside the body
Many meditations schools teach some version of this. Focus the mind on space, not on our own body. A traditional way to do this is to visualize detailed and infinite attributes of a deity (eg. skin as deep and dark as the night sky, or continuously flowing robes). Similarly one can visualize multiple deities in some sort of spatial arrangement, one in each of the four directions for example, or distributed around a tree. The word “visualizing” is not exactly right, to visualize (cun) also means to feel, manifest, or actualize. Focus is also not the right word. “Focus” is a temporary “head-fake” to get you out of your body, the mind should become capacious not focused.
George Xu explained this type of emptiness by describing Romeo staring at Juliet on the balcony while it is snowing. Romeo hardly notices it is snowing because all of his attention is on Juliet.
This emptiness practice is sometimes mis-labeled as a dissociative state of consciousness precisely because one experiences one’s own body as “gone.”
I sometimes think of this type of emptiness as a form of acquired synesthesia because I am mixing my tactile, spatial and visual perception into a single sense. Entering this sort of emptiness “trance” I imagine feeling the weight of objects in my visual field, rocks, trees, flowers, clouds, even mountains. One of my favorite tricks is standing about six feet from a tree while looking closely at the texture of the bark and imagining what it feels like. Not the feeling of the bark on my fingers—the texture of the bark, as if I could feel the bark with my whole being. I know it sounds strange. It is at first. By the way, if you are going to try this trick, the objects do not have to be natural, it can be done with cups, cars, and wall paper.
The goal here is simple, get your mind completely outside of your body and leave it there. When you first get this, it is normal to feel like you cannot move. (Or rather that you cannot move without putting your mind back inside your body.)
The method is not the goal. The goal is not the fruition. The fruition is ziran, our spontaneously arising, original nature. Zen Buddhist popularization of this vocabulary leads some people to think of original nature as a revelation of the mind. If you have already traveled that road, it is better to think of your mind as the space, and the space as your body. Anyway, it doesn’t matter much how I describe it because it is spontaneously arising. The reason most people miss it is because they are stuck in a method or focused on a goal. The reason most people miss it is not because the fruition is too subtle or obscure.
The mind-outside the body type of emptiness is close to what happens when we are fully engaged in a sport. If you are playing American football and you leap into the air to catch the ball while trying not to get tackled by the huge guy right next to you, trust me, your mind is going to stay outside your body. Same thing if you are skiing down a steep slope carving a pathway ahead of you with your mind. Moving fast is generally triggered by attention to something outside the body, like dodging a spear. But doing this in combination with the other two types of emptiness is the tricky part. Doing it slowly is tricky too.
This is one of the meanings of wuwei, usually translated non-aggression. Any aggressive intent which enters your body will cause you to be full, not empty. You can think of emptiness as abandoning self-control. Or you can think of it as transferring self-control to the space outside your body.
If you get this type of emptiness while you are still, it will feel like you cannot move. It will feel like any impulse to move would destroy your emptiness. This is an important stage, hang out with it for a while when it happens.
Movement arises not from a plan, but from letting it happen. Wobbles, leaning, involuntary stepping, spontaneous balancing, wiggles, stuff like that. Use that stuff to re-invent movement from the ground up. If you do a Tai Chi form, or something like that, re-build it, re-imagine it. From the ground up. From scratch. Return to the source.
I have been teaching a class in Daoist Meditation on Zoom for three years, and I am now starting a new class October 10th, 2021. It will have a rolling enrollment for the first year, if you are interested in joining contact me directly. The class is based on the teachings of my mentor Liu Ming. Once each month we study a chapter of the Daodejing and some of its many traditional commentaries together for two hours on a Sunday. We then recite the chapter each morning before practicing Zuowang (sitting-forgetting) meditation. Zuowang is the basis for all Daoist practices. The class also explores Daoist history and practice. Studying with me is a commitment, not something one can dip in and out of. After the first year I will begin giving transmissions for the practice of Jindan, or The Golden Elixir, which is the basis for all internal martial arts and is a key part of Daoist ritual.
Email me at: gongfuguy@gmail.com