15 July : for the Double Hands ‘looking for furniture’ :

I feel CXW’s ‘qi roads’ like tubes inside my body. Yesterday, picking up again on zz after a few weeks of little practice, I found them somewhat deflated. The longitudinal ones were more apparent. I began by re-filling them, and afterwards, little by little, the transverse smaller paths criss-crossing the body began to manifest themselves. It occurs in droplets, then a trickling ... until there is the sense of a pathway forged.

“Looking for qi roads” is a contemplative undertaking, a journey in awaring. It can be likened to observing the passing of the attention through the body in vipassana. Chansijin is a cyclical process, like breathing, and it takes many passings, scores of sweeps of attention following the movement millimetrically, before the tubes begin to plump up. The sensation is visual : I once watched a moth emerge from its cocoon, saw how the limp wings expanded with emolinfa : an image of the sensations of a force coursing through my limbs.

In the Double Hands exercise, as in zhanzhuang, the taking up of the position is the setting of attention's frame. Intent is to stay within this frame, and with so much happening, my mind naturally stays absorbed in the moment.

Chen XiaoWang's chansijin exercises are ingeniously constructed, and in Double Hands the complexities are deceptively simplified. Qi threads like a shuttle, looping in and out from one side of the body to the other. One part notches into another.

[Viewing each cycle as divided into four segments gives us a handle on what is happening.]

The points of transformation are critical junctures, turning silk twining jin.

For getting into position that is conducive to connectedness, Chen XiaoWang says, "Sit down chair!".  If only it was that simple!  where is the chair?  So, first to find chair in Double Hands.

Sensing my left hip(sacro-iliac)/leg not aligned enough to do Double Hands productively, I realized that I had to practise first with the left leg in the forward position.  Double Hands requires a powerfully seated position where well-notched hip-joints direct the twining rising up the legs, and in my experience, the hind leg in this stance has the tougher job.

Why would this be so? Let's have a look.

With the right leg behind as it is here, I am more able to hook in the right hip when the weight is on that side. Then when it comes time to shift the weight forwards into the left, my stronger right side is able to twine all the way up from foot-calf-thigh to where it slots into the hip-joint.  Can you see this here? When there is a clean chansi up the back leg, it gives clear support to the hip, and that hip then comes along with the other hip instead of being left behind splat.  This is what is meant in the direction, "stay centred in motion".  Compact.

Shifting weight over and over, back and forth from leg to leg, I began to gather together the two hips enough to stay more intact in the centre – dantian supported equally by the two sides throughout the weight shifts – and from this point on, I feel my lower back firming up.  It begins to give active support as the back wall of dantian.  After some five to ten minutes of Double Hands with the left leg in the forward position, it is sufficiently conditioned to take up position at the tougher hind part of the circuit.

This kind of attentive practice is what develops chansi of the leg. It is subtle, a directed tautness minutely controlled, little releases and little retrievals dovetailing every millisecond, each millimeter of the way.

I believe there is some confusion over the idea of inward and outward rotation of the leg. Students ask, in this position, is the leg twining in or out?  There is no black and white in chansi. Each inward winding must be held firm by an outward twining. Chansi is a progressive action, a twisting action winding along the limbs.  There should be no segment moving as a fixed block. I see "figure 8" circlings of legs that look like sticks stirring a soup-pot.  And soup sloshing out of the pot.

Arms are legs, they are the culmination of the legs; they express all that has happened further in towards the core of the body.  Foot and hand are two ends of one rope, and as such, a change at one end changes the other.  Yet they are both at the periphery; it is centre that directs every change.

So we come to talk about the change that happens in the centre. "Dantian change, whole body follows", as CXW directs. This is a very tricky subject, a field of contention, there is much confusion. I will say straight away that the main stumbling block is the idea of power. When we are seeking it, most of us mortals are blocked inside. The stumbling on the path towards an appreciation of what CXW means becomes a literal block in the body. The worst place to block is probably in the belly. If one is pushing from this part of the body, directing from this place, the slippage of qi bringing forth jin and jing is at best a sluggish process. What we are seeking (without pushing) happens in a millisecond, with the lightest of control, almost as if simply being aware is sufficient to ignite the process along the myriad pathways. In fact, there is no way to control what happens in the usual way we control our limbs.

Having said this, what does happen, what should take place?

One aspect of the desired process is entirely physical. We have looked at the importance of stance, the support coming from twining legs towards the core of the body. At the joining of leg to pelvis, a looping takes place that one can experience clearly, yet be unable to describe. The buttocks do play a part - I am touching on them because only the other day, a student asked how much the buttock muscles should be involved, both in maintaining stance and en route in the movements.

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