Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are You Ready? Activity Patterns

The title of this series is: Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are you Ready? When I was asked this question twenty years ago, I responded with an emphatic “Yes!” As the years went by and I discovered the amount of work involved in mastering this art, I slowly came to realize that, no, I was not ready. Sure, I was willing to give it a try but I was not appropriately prepared to learn.

This realization then shined a light on the question asked by many internal gongfu practitioners, “Why does it take so long to get it?” To this, the typical response is, “If getting it were that easy, then everyone would be a master.” Well, we need a better answer than that! This series of posts is an attempt to provide a more thoughtful response to this question.

In the Introduction to this series, I explored the meaning of preparation versus readiness from the context of an internal gongfu practice. I also explored two different views of my practice; a compartmentalized view versus an interrelated component view (depicted as a puzzle). In this post, I begin filling in the puzzle pieces by first exploring my daily patterns of activity.

Reviewing for a moment, in my compartmentalized way of looking at my life (as illustrated in the Introduction), I divided my life by activity types: family, career, internal gongfu practice, etc. I had never even remotely considered that the way my body moved or didn’t move during or between these various activities would have any influence or impact on my formal training; my practice.

As I pondered how I might be “training” my body when I was not formally training, I began thinking in terms of daily patterns of movement (activity patterns) that I used across the various compartmentalized types of activities. I started by looking at a typical 24-hour day. To facilitate calculations, I disregarded the eight-hour block of time devoted to sleep and only considered the predominant activity of the remaining sixteen hours of waking experience. Here is how my typical week looks:

Hours Training	Hours Other	Percentages
1 hour per day	15 hours sitting (Monday through Friday): eating meals, commuting, driving, working at my desk job, visiting friends/family, watching TV, writing projects, etc.	Almost 94% of my day is reinforcing a single physical pattern (sitting) and 6% of my day is training internal gong-fu
1 hour per day	15 hours various activities (Saturday and Sunday): standing, reaching, squatting, kneeling, sitting, climbing, lifting, carrying, twisting, looking up, down, all around, walking, etc.,	Almost 94% of my day is not reinforcing a single physical pattern and 6% of my day is training internal gong-fu

When I looked at a typical week this way, I realized that the majority of my day (and week!) is spent sitting! I was spending 15 hours a day, five days a week effectively training tight hips, slouched shoulders, etc, and only one hour a day formally training the principles of internal gongfu. My entire day was training the exact opposite of my formal training! And then once a week I’d go to Wujifa class and expect to make progress. In hindsight, this expectation strikes me as delusional!

Granted, the adjustments gained during Wujifa class gave me absolutely valuable guidance. However, attending class and practicing was like taking one step forward and then the rest of my week was like taking two steps backward! At the time, I was totally unaware of this due to the way I had compartmentalized my life.

I have now come to the conclusion that:

1. Daily activity patterns that contradict the principles of practice are not congruent with practice and therefore hinder my training.
2. Daily activity patterns that do not contradict the principles of practice are congruent with practice and therefore support my training.

Imagine if I could spend 15 hours a day or 94% of my day engaged in activities that reinforced and supported the principle I train in my formal practice. Imagine if I could spend only one hour or 6% of my day doing just the opposite. (Would that even be possible?) I now believe that until the day when I can have more activity that does not hinder practice and more activity that supports practice, and preferably, have time throughout the day to formally practice, then my progress will be mediocre at best.

In Closing
This component of Activity Patterns is probably the clearest example of the influence of daily life on practice. However, for me to see this I needed to shift my perspective out of a compartmentalized view of my life. After I was able to make this shift, then this pattern was easily identified and I was able to understand how my activity pattern supported or hindered my practice. Noticing this pattern also presents me with an opportunity to change it.

This series will continue with each article filling in one of the puzzle pieces until the entire puzzle is complete. We’ll wrap up by considering how this puzzle can be interpreted in an Internal Gongfu Progress Matrix and finally we’ll look at the role of the Source and Level of Instruction.


Previous post in this series: Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are You Ready? Introduction

Next post in this series: Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are You Ready? Cognitive Bias

Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are You Ready? Introduction

The title of this series is: Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are you Ready? When I was asked this question twenty years ago, I responded with an emphatic “Yes!” As the years went by and I discovered the amount of work involved in mastering this art, I slowly came to realize that, no, I was not ready. Sure, I was willing to give it a try but I was not appropriately prepared to acquire new skills.

This realization then shined a light on the question asked by many internal gongfu practitioners, “Why does it take so long to get it?” To this, the typical response is, “If getting it were that easy, then everyone would be a master.” Well, we need a better answer than that! This series of posts is an attempt to provide a more thoughtful response to this question.

Preparedness vs Readiness
The title of this series asks, Are you ready? To be ready means to be in condition for or to be completely prepared for something. For example, I prepare for vacation by selecting a location, scheduling travel, packing clothes, etc. On the first day of vacation, I’m ready to go. That is to say, I’m not ready unless I am prepared. These concepts are also applicable to an internal gongfu practice. Simply showing up to class or seminar does not necessarily mean I am prepared or conditioned and hence ready.

In the context of internal gongfu, some people are ready and some are not. Those who are ready will exhibit the proverbial empty cup, the uncarved block, the cognitive and kinesthetic tabula rasa. These people are either naturally this way or have achieved this state through the effort of conditioning, preparing. They are cognitively and kinesthetically ready to fill the cup anew, carve the block anew, write on the slate anew.

For those who are not ready, the time-consuming work of preparation and conditioning to become ready involves unlearning misunderstood concepts, correcting misperceptions, and changing incongruous kinesthetic habits. For these practitioners, training is a practice of emptying the proverbial cup, uncarving the block, or erasing the slate.

Unfortunately, this preparatory effort gives the false impression that “getting it” is hard to learn. Actually, learning it is easy. As I've seen with others, “getting it” can be achieved with a few years of dedicated practice given a functional combination of:

• a practitioner who is ready or needs minimal preparation and guidance,
• a system that uses a mutually understandable paradigm and instructional methods, and
• a teacher who embodies the movement principle and is able to impart the principle.

I now think of preparing and conditioning as the first phase of training (emptying the cup of old wine) and then when I am ready, I can begin the second phase of training (filling the cup with new wine).

How I used to view my practice
Let’s begin with a point we probably all share in common; our various activities of daily life. Let me introduce how I used to perceive my daily life and how my internal gongfu training fit into this picture.

For the past thirty years of training, I considered my internal gongfu practices as one of several compartmentalized activities that filled my life. Each activity required its own skill set. Each activity was isolated from and not influenced by any other. The image below provides a depiction of this compartmentalization.

Even after I began experiencing how changes brought about in Wujifa class were showing up in my other activities, I continued holding onto my habitual way of compartmentalizing my life. It never occurred to me that internal gongfu practice was not just another isolated activity like my other activities.

A New Model
While reflecting on the question, “Why am I taking so long to get it?” I had the insight that the internal gongfu curriculum (the various training methods e.g., zhan zhuang) is either supported by or hindered by a variety of components that are outside of this formal training curriculum.

Although I had been aware of these various components for years under their various guises and pseudonyms, I never really understood how they influenced my training and progress. As I sat with this insight, these various disparate components slowly formed a cohesive set.

I also knew from experience that these so-called “components” are so interconnected and so intertwined and in such complex and seemingly unfathomable ways that to call them components is actually a misnomer. The beauty of being able to distill the whole into parts is that the resultant model provides an opportunity to discover how each so-called component directly influences my practice and progress.

The model that best illustrates this concept is a jigsaw puzzle as depicted below.

Whereas the previous model of “My Life” included various activities that also included my practice, in this model, my practice is at the center of my life and the surrounding puzzle pieces are the various components of my life that both influence my practice and are influenced by my practice. These surrounding components will be introduced one at a time in forthcoming posts.

Take a moment and consider how you would graphically represent your life and your practice. Would your practice look more like the first model where it is one of a variety of unrelated, compartmentalized activities or would it look more like the second model of interrelated components where each component influences each other? And what are these components for you?

In Closing
In this series of ten posts over the next ten weeks (July to September 2020), I will explore an insight into the preparing or conditioning phase of training.

If you’ve been practicing awhile and wonder why it’s taking so long to get it, then maybe my insights can help explain why it's taking so long as well as provide ideas to alter the path you are on.

And if you’re just starting and want to understand why it can take so long and get some ideas into how to shorten that time, then maybe my insights can help here too.

This series will continue with each article filling in one of the puzzle pieces until the entire puzzle is complete. We’ll wrap up by considering how this puzzle can be interpreted in an Internal Gongfu Progress Matrix and finally we’ll look at the role of the Source and Level of Instruction.

Next article in this series: Mastering Internal Gongfu: Are You Ready? Activity Patterns