At Home in the Crane

When I last tested with MSDC, I noted a big deficiency in myself.  When exhausted, dehydrated and hungry standing in a crane / flamingo stance was not easy.  I was shaky and those testing me not only noticed but made a point of telling me so, loudly and repeatedly.  So, nearly comatose on the way home to Montreal I resolved to improve this aspect (among many others) of my Kempo.  Eventually, I began to ask myself why do we train such a stance…I mean we tend not to fight much on one leg, right?  So, what about this stance is important.  Balance is the long and short of it.  It trains balance standing on one leg and more precisely the training forces you to find your center and go there whenever necessary.  The basic crane stance teaches us to sink into the ground and bring everything to our center(our limbs, our breathing , our thoughts)  while maintaining spinal alignment.  Before and after kicks we crane in order to return to our center and from there have a choice of where to move next.  Falling after an air kick happens frequently in forms and we always correct it because we know that such a habit will serve an attacker well when we attempt to hit something solid with crappy body mechanics and little control over ourselves.  What happened to me in the test is that,  instead of using the crane stance to find my balance I used muscle strength and tension to hold me in place.  Fatigue killed my balance and this should not be.  The tiredness that can happen in a fight against one attacker or many needs to be minimized as an enemy.  Now, I practice relaxing into each stance and especially the crane.  I sink and center, finding my balance within myself allowing gravity to hold me up.  Repetition has even made this stance a trigger for me to relax and center almost instantly, even with closed eyes.  Now, I can conserve my energy better, move more smoothly and give myself more options than before in any given situation, using this tool.  I am more at home in my crane stance than ever before and whenver I am ‘lost’ / misaligned it is a quick and easy way to return to center.  My kempo teachers always taught the crane as do I, now I just have a more detailed thinking as to the ‘why’ of it.