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Join #Fun4theDisabled and #BayAreaOutreachandRecreationProgram #BORP for a seated #TaiChi class with Ralph Somack! All #FitnesswithFriends videos are #OpenCaptioned and #ASL interpreted to bring you the most #accessible content.

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VOICE: For more information and a full transcript of this video, check out fun4thedisabled.com. When joining us for this video, you need to take some precautions, as your health and safety are the most important. To avoid any injury or harm, you need to check your health with your doctor before exercising. By performing any fitness exercises without supervision, like with this video, you are performing them at your own risk. See a fitness professional to give you advice on your exercise form. Strategy for Access Foundation NFP, Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program (BORP), and Ralph Somack will not be responsible or liable for any injury or harm you sustain as a result of this video. 

RALPH SOMACK: So let’s begin with the opening breath, raising the arms up, outstretched, palms up. Take a deep breath, overhead. And push down, exhaling. Bring the hands up. Outstretched. Turn the palms facing up and push. Relax the shoulders, come up. Turn the palms facing in and pull. Inhale. This is a stretch. Turn the palms facing out, push, exhale. Open the palms up facing each other. Expand. Stretch out to the back. Arms stretched out straight and then collapse, arms straight. Forward, holding the energy bowl, and just continue this motion. In, inhale. Push, exhale. Stretch. Relax. And come down and relax. 

Remember to relax your shoulders and actually fold your shoulders forward, or tilt your shoulders forward to hollow the chest. That imparts a contracted, a compact, contracted isn’t the right word, a more compact posture or body structure. At the same time, we don’t wanna, as we roll the shoulders forward, we don’t wanna roll the head forward. We wanna try to roll the shoulders forward and raise the crown at the same time. Sitting up straight. Come up. Open and close. Roll the hands in opposite directions. So you’re turning the hands in opposite directions. Spinning the left hand clockwise, the right hand counterclockwise. And at the same time, start turning to the right, blocking down with the left hand, looking over at the right palm, about eight inches from your right ear. Rotating the hands back to holding a ball. 

And let’s go the other way now. Block down, turn and look. As we turn, we’re stretching, so we’re gonna inhale. We relax at the center, we exhale. Keep your arms bent. Kinda like you’re holding a barrel. This is a movement called peng. It’s also known as ward-off. Okay, good. Hold the hands over and come up. Closing breath and down. So here we have a chance to practice in slow motion, the correct body posture for ward-off. Which is peng, P-E-N-G, peng, in Chinese, ward-off. And it’s actually probably, of the eight energies. They’re called energies, but they’re ways of using your hands for self defense, the eight energies, I think we went over the eight energies last week. The first one is peng and it’s probably, it’s number one, because it’s the primary move in Tai Chi. Almost many, many, many moves, most moves in Tai Chi, we talk about martial applications, involve a warding off or a deflection rather than an attack. And so a deflection will be followed with another movement. And so this is important. And so this is an important exercise to get that feeling of peng. All right. It’s also described as an upward motion. And so you’ve got an upward motion, a pulling back motion, a pushing straight motion, a pulling down motion. And a coming up motion. So those are the different phases of all the moves in the eight energies. 

All right, so let’s move to the next exercise. Open and close. And we’re gonna turn the ball around, and pull to one side. Rotating back to center, holding the ball, turning and pulling to the other side. Just keep going. This lower hand, as it moves across, you should feel a pushing motion. Pushing feel. You’re turning the ball over, and pushing to the other side. Try to imagine that your waist is driving the movement, which means that your waist initiates the movement, moments before the hands turn, the waist is already started to move in the other direction. If you think about it, it imparts a whipping action to the move. So if we did it fast, you’ll get this spiraling sensation initiated by the, actually from the dantian, to the waist, and then to the arms and the hands. 

So here again, we have that analogy of the arms and the hands similar to the wheels on a cart, and the waist is the axle. So the waist, the axle actually controls the movement of the wheels. All right? And now let’s push. To one side. Push to the other side, both fingers pointing forward. We initiate this move by turning the hands, facing the other direction. We push out and across with one hand. We pull in and back with the other hand, pushing the shoulder straight back. So this is a very, this is a movement that’s all along this horizontal plane. All along this horizontal plane. It’s very similar to an exercise that we did, and which is one of the 32 ways of spinning your hands in (speaking Mandarin). We studied, we did a little bit of this moving the hands in different directions, in different planes. And so all of the movements in Tai Chi are related to one of those spinning motifs. And there are eight ways of spinning two hands and each in three directions, which is the horizontal plane, the planes, horizontal plane, the frontal plane, and the sagittal plane. So here we’re working across the horizontal plane. Again, letting the waist lead the movement. And if we slow it down, it becomes a Qi Gong exercise. Relax your shoulders. Okay, good. 

Now if you think about it, everything we’ve done so far pretty much involves twisting and turning around the spine. Well, obviously that’s terrific exercise for the spine. But at the same time, the kidneys are back here. And by twisting and turning, you’re squishing blood in and out of your kidneys, and energizing your kidneys, you’re exercising the internal organs. Okay. Now let’s rotate from the ball, up and down, push. Coming back. So this turning and twisting in one direction and then the other direction, these are mirror images of each other. Is another feature of Tai Chi, which is based on the yin yang theory, of opposites being complementary. So what we have here is moving in opposite directions symmetrically. Following those principles. Balance, harmony. Good. Come back and open and close. Come down. 

Now bringing your arms up, making a fist, both hands, drawing the fist back, heart of the fist up at your waistline. I’m gonna turn for this. Draw your shoulders down, tuck your chin in. And we’re gonna jab out, rotating the fist over 180 degrees from heart up to heart down. At the same time, we’re gonna kick with the other leg. Kick out as far as you can, either using a toe kick, which is an extension of the foot with the toe pointed up. Just contralateral. The opposite hand and foot. Or you can go with a heel kick. Bringing the thigh up, flexing the heel out, kicking with the heel and punching at the same time. And let’s do this as slow as possible, turn it into an isometric, stretching the tendons. Flexing the muscles in our thighs, quadriceps. Just kick as high as you can. Two more. Come back. Starting position. Starting ready position. Overhead and down. Excellent. 

And now to go down to your toes, and I don’t know if you can see my toes, probably not, ’cause the table is here. You put one foot down, left or right. Pick up the heel and swing the heel back and forth, rotating on the toes. And side to side. Okay, now the other foot. Rocking the heel back and forth. And side to side. Okay, let’s see if I have room for this exercise. How many people are sitting in chairs without armrests? Let me put it this way. How many people are sitting in chairs with armrests? Can I get a verbal… Yeah, just, Why don’t you text me? Why don’t you chat me up and tell me, yes or no. Arm chairs, yes? 

PARTICIPANT: No. 

RALPH: Any… Any arm chairs? No, I take that as no arm chairs. Okay, that means we can do this exercise. Now this is a really good exercise that I learned from a… A Taoist monk in Oakland. And you need to have a little bit of room to do this. And if you can stand up, it’s actually easier. But I’m gonna do it sitting down. So what we’re gonna do is put your arms at your side. Sit up straight. And you’re gonna rotate so that your chest is turning to the left. At the same time, you’re gonna bring your hands up, up that side. So you’re rotating the hands. The chest to the left and the hands come up. Now bring them overhead, and bring them, and now turn with your hands overhead to the other side, and bring them down on the right side. All right? Turn to the left. Come up on the left, turn overhead, come down on the right. Turn, up on the left. Turn, down on the right. And let’s just keep going with that. Go easy. Since this is a sitting class, I’m doing this sitting down. If you do it standing up, you have more rotation in your hips. That’s all. So you can move and you can turn a little bit further. Now this is really good exercise for your hips. It’ll increase your range of motion. 

All right, now let’s do the opposite. Let’s come up. I’m on the right side here with my hands down. So we were coming up on the left and down on the right. Now I’m gonna come up on the right, turn, and down on the left. Up on the right, over, down on the left. Turn, face the right, overhead, turn to the left, face the left down. All right, now we’re going to, there are two more. We’re going to come up the sides facing forward. Turn to the left and come down. Face forward, come up. Come down on the right. Face forward, come up, the sides, turn to the left, come down on the left. Turn forward, the hands down, come up, turn to the right, come down on the right. And so on and so forth. So you’re coming down on both sides and coming up when you’re facing straight. And there’s one more, which is instead of coming up and turning and coming down, it’s coming down and turning and coming up. So facing forward, come down, turn, come up. Facing forward, come down, turn, come up. Okay. 

So this is an exercise that’s popular on people practicing Shaolin in the Shaolin temples, that’s where it’s from. It’s from the Hunan province. It’s a very common exercise for people practicing Shaolin, which is a very athletic form of Chinese internal martial art. So, if you like that, let me know. We’ll do some more of it. All right, so. Let’s move into the sun style system. And as a prelude to it, I wanna talk a little bit about feelings and intentions. These are very important concepts in Tai Chi, feelings and intentions. And so if you look it up, I just did this a few minutes before the class. Feelings, the definition of feelings: “Strong mental agitation or excitement” is one definition. Another one is, “an emotion such as joy or sorrow.” Intention. Definition of intention. One example is an aim or attitude that drives action and objective. It is also defined as what one plans to achieve. So these are different, but they’re very, very closely related. They’re both mental, mental functions. But if you think about it. 

I thought a lot about this this morning. That’s why I wanna talk about it. Is feelings come first. This is all taking place in the mind. But feelings come first. You have a feeling. Either it could be a positive feeling or negative feeling, good feeling or bad feeling. Then that initiates an intention, whose objective it is to do something with that feeling, to materialize something. Or you might look at it as work of some sort, to get something done and with respect to Tai Chi and really anything for that matter. Without having the right feeling. In Buddhism, they talk about right action. Right this and right that, it’s a really important part of Buddhism. Is without the right feeling, your chances of making an appropriate action are slimmer. Or putting it the other way around, if you have the right feeling, then the action will be appropriate. And you will achieve what it is you intend to do. 

All right, so what I thought we’d do as an exercise is go through each of the movements in the sun style, and this is a good way we’re gonna be able to review each of the movements. But this time we’re going to try and be aware of what we’re feeling. And I won’t talk about the objective, because the objective can be many different things. Okay, so the feeling is the same, but the objective can be a martial intention. The result of a martial intention, to protect yourself, or to deal with a hostile situation. It could be, it could involve the intention of relaxing the mind. And it can also be intended to improve your health. So those are the three benefits. Those are the major benefits or uses of Tai Chi. Martial, for health purposes, and for relaxation. And so we’ll leave that part out. What it is you plan to achieve, because that can be a variety of things. But the intention, interestingly enough, is really the same. Without that intention, which we’re gonna go through for each of the steps, the likelihood of achieving any one of those things, either health benefits, martial prowess or application, or mental relaxation, is gonna be difficult to do. 

All right, so let’s start with that. I hope we’re all on the same wavelength with respect to this. These are, in a sense they’re very simple. But most people don’t really think about this. What we wanna do is we want to increase our awareness about what we’re doing so that we get as much out of it as we can. All right. So let’s just take the opening move. Now I haven’t done this before. This is new for me too. So you guys are gonna be guinea pigs. We’re gonna come up, the hands pointing down. And the feeling, we won’t talk about the intentions, the feeling I have is drawing up energy. Now bringing the hands in and down, the feeling I have is kind of winding up using a circular motion to do something. The next move in the commencement is to push. So the feeling I have here obviously is applying a force in the sagittal direction. The hands slightly open. And then when I bring my hands in and open and close, I’m feeling like I’m getting ready to do something else. And in the sun style, this open and closing is a way of kind of revitalizing the chi. And it happens if you’re standing, just before you change directions. So it’s a signal before you change directions, which usually involves doing another application. This is very unique to sun style, which you don’t see in other styles. It’s kind of a holding place, or open to close. And the feeling here is pulling against the general resistance and pushing. Like you’re letting a ball expand and letting it close. 

As we turn the hands open for single whip, we feel like we’re pushing out and extending as we lean to the right. And what I feel or imagine is pulling something across with my right hand and pushing something away with my left, which is what we’d be doing if we were using this in application. But this is the feeling of pushing and pulling in opposite direction. And then when I set up for cloud hands, bringing my right hand down, over, setting up underneath the left elbow, I have this circular feeling, getting ready to do something, getting ready to do something as I switch and pull across. And when you pull across, you want to feel like you’re driving these hands across from left to right by sinking down into your left buttock. If you were standing, you’d be sinking down. Closing this quad and sinking down, and pushing off that foot and transferring the weight to the right side. And then shifting up, settling down, pushing off that foot, and pulling to the left. Since we’re sitting, not standing, we have to use our other parts of our body. And we’re gonna use our butts, one cheek or the other, to feel like we’re pulling, pushing across until we’d get to the other side. 

We then reverse it, change the feeling into pushing down on the right side, as we switch and pull to the left. With the hands, this is a complicated move. With the hands we feel like we’re pulling across. Sometimes the intent here isn’t obvious. It’s more of a feeling. It comes from this feeling of what’s going on in your body. So you have to apply these pressures into your chair, using your bum. Now, in my mind, this is more sophisticated and more complicated to do sitting down. So a lot of people view, oh, well, sitting down doing Tai Chi, that’s not as cool as standing up and doing Tai Chi. But once you’re sitting down, it requires you to really focus on those principles in order to get that feeling, to make something happen. And so we have to be more imaginative and more intuitive doing it sitting down than we actually do it sitting up. So it’s harder in a sense to do it right sitting down than it is doing right sitting up. So here you guys have an advantage if you wanna do it sitting down that people standing up don’t have. So in my mind, you can get to higher level in Tai Chi, actually practicing sitting down than you can standing up. 

This is akin to these, you’ve seen these movies and read stories about the blind Tai Chi master who throws people around at will. He relies on his senses rather than his sight. And his level of expertise and skill is much higher. Because he doesn’t have the use of certain other parts of his body. Okay, so we do cloud hands. We kind of get tired of doing that. Pushing and pulling and pushing and pulling, down and over to the side, we bring the one hand up in an arc, and over and open and close. So here I have this feeling of changing directions using a circular motion. Coming out, symmetrically holding this ball and again, opening and closing. 

Okay, now we’re going to do the next move, as you recall, is brush knee. And to do brush knee, we set up like so. So we’re going to turn the hands to the right. There’s this movement. It’s a beautiful movement. Turning both hands in the same direction. At the same time, turning and placing the left fingers on or near the right elbow. And so, as we turn, the feeling you have is that of winding up, of your body turning into a spring, a rotational move to, you wanna have this feeling of coiling. That’s the word I’m looking for. It’s a feeling of coiling. Getting ready to do something. And that something is going to be driving this hand through the shoulder line, which is a strike. At the same time, pulling across, the thumb down, and blocking either a kick or another punch coming at you, and then bring that hand right in. And these motions happen together. You can use this in many different ways. You can imagine somebody punching me. I can come across and block across like this, and then strike forward like this. Or even grab that hand and pull it in and back as I strike forward. Pull the person into me and striking forward, using that person’s momentum to drive this hand forward into their body. This is a very powerful, brush knee is a very powerful move that has different applications. But the feeling you want to have is one of force, of pushing and blocking. Striking and pulling. Or pushing and pulling. Or striking and blocking. You can use it to, you can look at it as either pushing and pulling back, or blocking and striking, depending on your intent, again. All right? 

Next move. Play the lute. Play the lute, we bring the front hand down, the upper hand up in a kind of like a circular motion, like we’re turning a wheel to the right on a car. And from here to here, you wanna have this feeling of scribing an elliptoid shape, of moving your hands around in an elliptoid shape, imagining that you’re holding something, and turning that something over. So that’s the feeling of grabbing something and turning it over. And what you’re doing really is you’re grabbing a wrist and pulling it and turning the wrist over as you take this hand and come down on top of this joint. And now the other person’s in this situation, and you have total control over them. You can pull, you can push, you can break an arm that way. Like applying an upward downward motion, or pulling in or back. This is one of the forces we talked about. We talked about peng. Li is pulling back, L-I. Chi is pushing on, it’s pulling down. And so you can see here, if you tease apart what you’re doing, is you’re applying a rotating motion and grabbing an arm and an elbow and turning it around. Pulling up and pulling down or pushing up and down for a break or pulling back or pushing forward, depending on the circumstance and what you wanted to do. But anyway, you wanna have this round feeling. Now the intent can be martial, or it could just be this beautiful feeling of bringing one hand down symmetrically bringing the other hand up. This feeling like this. So you can do what you want with it. 

And then what we’re gonna do is turn the hands over, and we’re going to deflect, deflect, parry and punch. We can do this forever if we want, just practice this deflection. Again, beautiful symmetrical movement that calms the mind, exercises the hands. And if we want to use this for something. I’m gonna grab an elbow. I’m sorry, I’m gonna grab a wrist and pull it in. And then I’m gonna bring this hand in and around, underneath an armpit. Step around and back of that in front of that person and push them over. Or come in under an armpit, bring the arm down and bring the arm up under the armpit and cause damage to an arm. Okay, so I’m just mentioning these things, some of you may not like to hear the martial side of things, others of you do, and that’s why I’m giving you a choice here. So the choice here is just go with the flow and the feeling. Or imagine you’re grabbing, coming under an armpit and then doing something else. 

All right, so we come to the right, to the left. We’re on the right side here. I’m going to ask you to leave the front hand open because I prefer this, which is going to be a parry and a punch. I prefer this rather than grabbing a wrist and pulling it over. It’s slapping a strike coming at you aside, and punching over here. Or if you prefer, same move, parrying across, blocking a punch and punching under to the short ribs or to the heart. 

PARTICIPANT CHAD: Sifu, that slap is called a pak. P-A-K. Pak, the slap across is a pak, P-A-K, it’s a pak move. 

RALPH: Pak, P-A-K? 

CHAD: P-A-K. It’s just in Wing Chun, but it’s the same Chinese word. It’s a palm move, it’s a palm slap block. 

RALPH: Oh okay, pak. How is that spelled? 

CHAD: P-A-K. 

RALPH: Oh, okay. All right. Well, thanks. I didn’t know that. It’s really important, it’s really an important move. And it’s very effective because you’ve got a lot of real estate here and the chances of missing are almost nil. Okay, well thank you for that, Chad. So Chad is saying this is called a pak. It’s a deflection or a parry if you will, followed by some other move. Could be followed by a punch, it could be followed by coming up using the palm of the hand. It could be followed by this kind of move, which is more of a, I don’t know, it could be a Wing Chun move, but this is from, this is actually from, there’s an exercise, you can do it this way. It’s not Tai Chi, it’s Shaolin. When you’re blocking down, and then coming up like this. And this is kind of a nice exercise to do. But we’re kind of getting off on a tangent here. 

So once we accomplish that. So the feeling is pushing something aside and striking up over it, or under it. Of applying a force across and applying a force straight. So applying a force over to the right at the same time that we’re pushing forward with a fist. And then we’re opening the hands up, this is a symmetrical move, and the feeling here is one of opening up and splitting back. This is a splitting force. So it looks like this, open the hands up. And come back. Now this is not done this way. A lot of people do this. That puts your elbows into vulnerable positions. Actually to use this effectively, if you imagine someone coming at you this way, is you have to deflect the force, those hands, past you by doing this, and that allows, that forces the force, that forces the other person’s hands to deflect just a few inches past their target, which is all you wanna do. So it requires, by splitting, it’s a very soft and gentle force that has a lot behind it. And so you have the splitting feeling. 

And now you’re gonna bring the hands down. Feeling of rotation, down, and pushing forward and up. So this is a circular motion. You’ll see it done this way, but the correct way of doing it is bringing the hands in and elbows down, bringing the hands down in an arc and pushing forward and up. And turning and open and closing. Well, I hope I haven’t bored you with that. So we did a lot of talking about feeling. I just kind of wanted to instill in you a kind of sense of where you should be going with this, and then let you decide how you want to use it. So any questions so far? All right, good. 

So now let’s go through the second part of it, which is the mirror image of the first 12 movements. And we won’t talk about feelings and intent. We’ll just let you go ahead and do the exercise of your own as you wish. So sitting up straight, tucking the chin in, bringing the hands up out straights, fingers pointing down and in and down. Breathing in and pushing out. Exhaling. Bringing the hands up and in, and open and close. We did commencement. We’re doing it again here, normally going in the other direction, we would just go right into single whip, which is what we’re gonna do now. And this time it’s the opposite. So as we push out, we’re gonna shift to the left. Imagine pulling to the left and striking with the right as we do this. And then come up to the right, set up the cloud hands left. Switching the hands, moving across. Follow your upper fingers as they move across in front of your face. The lower hand moves across, fingers pointing in the direction they’re moving, at about the level of the waist, dantian. 

And let’s come back to the left again. Bringing the left hand, scooping up. And as we turn across, we go right in as we turn, without stopping, we’re gonna open and close. So let’s try to meld these movements one into the other without stopping, but do it slowly. Single whip, open and close, setting up for brush knee on the left. Turning to the left. Brush knee. Play the lute. This time right hand up, left hand down. Turn the hands over, facing each other, lower hand up. Deflect one, deflect two. Make a fist with the lower hand, bring the right hand across, and punch. Open the hands up. Shift back, elbows down, pulling block, push down and out, push. And we open and close. One more brush knee in that direction. Same type of brush knee. 

Okay, now we’re set up, after that brush knee. We’re lifting our right palm down at the waist, to do leisurely tie the coat. We’re gonna bring the hands, rotate the palms so they’re facing each other, bring the first palm up and out past the left. So the palms are sliding past each other until the left palm is a few inches, about a hand’s length in from the right palm, And you touch the fingers of the left palm to the inside of the right wrist. As soon as that happens, you open or unfold the wrists. Bring the palms in under the chin and out, striking out, guiding the strike with the left hand. Fingers still attached. Swing over to the right, turn as far as you can, look in the direction you’re going. Swivel up the right palm around under the chin, palm face up like you’re holding a tray. Don’t lose the connection, just swivel it around like a joint, the left fingers still attached to the right wrist. And now you’re in a position to push. And again, you can imagine you’re pushing down and up. Open the palms up, facing each other, bring them in. With that, take a deep breath and open and close. 

So when you open and close, just open just inside shoulder line. And close, just about, just past the shoulder line. You don’t wanna get it too close or too far open. You wanna keep that energy flowing in your body. And if you’re too far open, you’re gonna lose it, or too far close, you’re constricted. So we do one more single whip to set up for the next move, which is punch under elbow. And you’ll see why we do the single whip. So there’s a reason for the, in most cases, there’s a reason for the order of these movements, because one leads into the other. So eventually what we want to do is be in this position. And to get in that position, we have to get the hands. Okay, we wanna get the hands in the right position in order to be able to do this. And so if we do our single whip, now we can bring this right hand down in an arc from this position. Making a fist, we bring it down in an arc and around. So this is a circular motion. And it really looks like this. 

Practice this feeling. This left hand is moving around clockwise. Right hand is moving around clockwise. And that gets you in a position, that gets the hand moving in a whip-like action. So that when you do this, you can apply more force. And then you’re bringing this hand in around and through. So this feeling is bringing it around, in the back, through. And this one here is turning and pushing across. So we single whip. Get that whip-like action going. Block and strike. And now I’m gonna strike under. And remember the last two times we struck, we struck over, or under. And here as I come around, I’m gonna strike, I’m gonna come up and block this way. I’m gonna block higher. So I’m gonna block higher. And I’m going to punch lower under this elbow. Accomplishing the same thing. Blocking the strike aside, but punching down into the stomach or the solar plexus or the heart. Under the elbow. This is very short, it’s not like this. So we get into that position like this. Turning, making a fist, bringing this around in an arc, like we’re grabbing something. And then turning our waist and punching through using the waist. So it’s actually a… It looks simple, but it’s actually kind of a complex move when it’s done right. 

And now there are two moves that we’re gonna do now that look a lot like, I’m sorry, look a lot like brush knee. But instead of blocking and pushing, we’re gonna be grabbing and pulling. And so the feeling we have here, instead of blocking across and pushing forward, is one of grabbing and pulling forward. So that’s the feeling, but it looks very much the same. And so we’re gonna open and close. Normally this is done to the left, to the right, but that’s very hard to do sitting down. So we’re gonna do both moves forward, on the right side and the left side, which makes just as much sense. If we wanna grab something in the back and pull it forward from the right side or the left side. And so this isn’t, you know, this stuff we’re doing, isn’t some kind of, well, I don’t wanna use that word. It’s not kind of one of these sissy kind of Tai Chi derivatives. This is the real thing. We’re just doing it sitting down. 

So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna open and close and we’re gonna do this forward. And this is gonna be, this is called, this is called retreat the monkey. So we’re gonna turn to the right, just like we’re doing brush knee. The feeling like we’re grabbing something with this back right hand and grabbing something, a wrist, grabbing a joint, an elbow with the right hand, grabbing a wrist with the forehand, but we leave the hands open, the intent is there. And we’re just gonna do brush knee. We’re pulling something forward and letting it go by us. And we just go to the other side to set up, like you’re setting up for brush knee on the other side. And do the same movement, with the feeling of pulling rather than pushing. All right. So basically again, we open and close. Repulse the monkey. Turn to the side, like brush knee. Turn to the side, grab and pull, like brush knee. All right? 

So now we’re here. We got one more thing to do. So we went one, two. We’ve gotta get back in position to get this hand down here, to do the reverse of leisurely tying the coat, which is bringing the left hand up. So that forces us to do one more brush knee. And so this is why I’m saying. Sun Lutang, when he made this up, he didn’t just say, oh, I’m gonna do another brush knee. You have to do another brush knee to get into that position, unless you stop doing everything and just go to that position. But we don’t wanna do this. We wanna maintain the integrity of the system. All right, so we did one, we did two repulse the monkeys. And now we’re gonna set up and we’re gonna do one more brush knee with the intent of blocking and pushing. 

And now we’re in a position to do the mirror image of leisurely tying the coat, and doing it on the left side rather than the right side. Everyone with me? Good. One of the few times that I’ve actually been able to end session on time. All right. So I’m here like this. Remember left hand down, palm down, right hand out. It’s exactly the same, but on the other side, we turn the palms over, so they’re facing each other. It’s as if you’re pulling a gun out of a holster. And pushing it forward, as you pull the right hand back, touching the right fingers to the inside of the left wrist, just like before. Now, the hands are out here and we’re gonna turn the palms over and bringing up. This time, the right fingers are touching the inside of the left wrist rather than the other way around. We strike out. And now just turn all the way, arms outstretched. Don’t lock your joints. Little bit of flex in the arms. You want to strike across or pull across, an expansive feeling of pulling across. It’s almost like this. Coming back under, as we turn the body with the hands forward and push, pushing down and out. Pull in and open and close. 

Now that’s 34, 35 movements, I don’t know, I never really added ’em up. And that’s basically the course. And we can go on and learn more movements, or we can just practice these and talk about applications and do other things. But anyway, at this point, we’re gonna end. And remember, if you recall, the opening move or commencement was bringing the hands up, the fingers pointing down and in. And here we’re here. Wanna bring the arms out. It’s exactly the opposite of the commencement. Bring the palms down, fingers pointing down. And we end. We kind of hang out there for a while and just take a few deep breaths. And I like to end it with a closed breath. Good. So all of these arts have closing movements. And they’re all similar.

(participant laughing) 

Look at the Chen style. This is Chen style now. C-H-E-N, it’s the original style. And at the end. Let’s see if I can do this here. I’m gonna come back, step back, and I’m going to sweep back. And now here’s the ending. So there’s a flourish. There’s always a flourish. And that’s the end of the Chen style sword. And all the weapons forms that I recall anyway, have these sort of flourishing ending movements, which impart a finality and at the same time allows the energy to dissipate, because you’ve worked yourself up. There’s a lot of energy moving around your body. We don’t wanna leave that energy there. I guess some people might argue that it cannot actually do damage. We want to let it go so that we can totally relax. And so as we start up, we’re bringing energy up and we end, coming down, we let the energy go. And then I like to end it with this kind of closing breath. Take a nice deep breath, and so that’s my sort of addition to this. You don’t need to do that, all right?

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