Random Dao De Jing quote

We desire to understand the world by giving names to the things we see,
but these things are only the effects of something subtle.
When we see beyond the desire to use names,
we can sense the nameless cause of these effects.

Pushing legs

From a taijiquan perspective, I need to start thinking about bjj as pushing legs. Sure, you, random reader who studies taijiquan, say “pushing hands is not meant to be literally pushing hands”, and you, random reader who studies bjj, say “huh?”. Suffice it to say there is a similarity. However, when I try rolling, almost immediately [...]

Some China Earthquake and Myanmar Cyclone links

American Red Cross
Salvation Army
Donate via Amazon.com
Donate via Ebay.com

Too weak

Last week, jiu jitsu did me in. The novelty of the types of strength required was definitely a good workout. E.g., repetitions of upa against resistance from a live human are just hard. jiujitsu365 has a good post on just that topic. All fine and good. The problem was, after that I could barely do [...]

Internal hip rotation

There is usually a lot of blah blah blah on whole body power and spiraling energy on neijia forums, as if most sports don’t make use of this kind of power. I’m not big into golf, but people also make frequent comparisons of taijiquan and golf - the relaxation, whole body rotational power, focus, mind/body [...]

Recent YouTube Yiquan vids

Wow Pipes is just great. A series of videos called Yiquan Training Reloaded that I have to go back and watch later. One of them:

from http://youtube.com/user/YiquanAcademy

Recent youtube bagua videos

These videos from this guy’s channel crossed my Yahoo pipes, an amazingly good web 2.0 mashup service to aggregate feeds and much more. You can not only combine feeds, but parse searches for feeds, do things like combine them, truncate, search for specific terms, block various elements, and more. Essentially check in with a cache [...]

MA cults of personality

I’ve personally seen, heard and read some shocking behavior and expression that I see as evidence of a cult of personality around some “master” whose students follow him with totally blind adulation. The blind worship almost always goes beyond appreciation for great skills to extend to some kind of attributed leadership of virtue, heroism, or [...]

Obvious in hindsight

I keep finding once I write something down, it almost suddenly seems so obvious, why didn’t I think of it before? However, before, it just wasn’t obvious to me, sometimes even right before I thought of the sentence. A good, unexpected side benefit of blogging. What is the name of that phenomenon? Epiphany is too [...]

An Wu Shu

There is a series of videos recently posted on YouTube called “An Wu Shu”. Here is one below on xingyiquan:

They all seem excellent and worth checking out multiple times. The teacher is apparently a sanda and forms champion in various internal arts.