Swimming In Air

Cheng Man-Ching used this phrase to describe a way of doing one's Form. The body should be relaxed, sunk but light. One way to encourage this lightness is to imagine the air thick and heavy so that it feels more like a liquid (the amniotic fluid?). Your waist must then work quite hard to move you through its viscous resistance. Many of the martial arts imagine a resistance to movement to stimulate more effort from the muscles and more determination from the mind. I don't think this was what Cheng Man-Ching was after. He had great contempt for too much physical effort ("smothering the mind with sweat", was his famous phrase). I think he was trying to get across a less blockish notion of body-as-one-unit; one in which all the body parts are loosely coordinated rather than rigidly in unison. There should be a natural, subtle lag between the waist (which moves first), the torso (each vertebra in fact), the arms, the hands, the fingers. So, for example, the waist moves forwards in Press posture and then withdraws to separate the hands ready for Push, which involves another moving forwards. If you watch Cheng Man-Ching in the videos you will see that his waist is ahead of his arms: his body starts to withdraw before his Press has finished pressing forwards, and then his body starts to move forwards into Push whilst his arms are still moving back to separate. Working in this way will encourage energy to flow elastically through your body, like a whip. Remember that whenever you work on energy rather than technique you should make sure your eyes don't attach you to the objects in your environment: don't look at things. Dr Chi used to recommend hooding the eyes. John recommends concentrating on the peripheral vision. The Swimming In Air image can be extended so that you try to feel the swirling currents your movements set up in the air reaching out into your environment. When working on visualizations remember that it is the feeling that counts. If you work properly (not too rigid, not too visual) you will quickly get beyond its literal interpretation and begin to touch its internal aspect. The downside to technique is a loss of spontenaity. Humour retrieves it.

John once said, "When doing the Form imagine it is raining". The idea here is that the falling water, the image of gravity, pulls down on your body, encouraging a relaxed sinking. In aikido they talk about "weight on underside". So when in Ward-Off the arm should feel so relaxed that the weight of the arm feels concentrated on its underside (almost like the flesh is beginning to drip off the bones).