Shaolinmonkmark sent in an alternate version of Combination 31 (DM31 in his neck of the woods) and it didn’t make it into the site (fell off my ‘to-do’ radar). It’s from the West Coast / Cerio lineage. He happened to mention it, and I was able to retrieve it from when he sent it to me last year. (Yikes!). If you do send something in and don’t hear from me / see it up, please remind me, as I have not ignored you intentionally.
Thanks and apologies to Mark.
I realize that this is a bit of an ironic followup to Marlon’s previous post on the Crane stance, but that’s why I recruited him to broaden the intellectual offerings of this blog. This month’s issue of Classical Fighting Arts was a real winner for me. Besides a nice article about Choki Motobu by his son Motobu Chosei, (with an uncredited translation by Kiko Ferreira) with recollections of his father, there was an article by Mario McKenna entitled Stances. In the article, the precepts of Nakasone Genwa are mentioned, highlighting the 17th,
“Fixed postures are for beginners; as you advance use natural postures.”
Sometimes I think that I’m forward thinking in my attempts to ‘clean up’ my kempo, my thirst for cross training, and my goals of eliminating wasted movement and bad body mechanics. Perhaps I’m just ‘old school’ and don’t know it.
When I explain stances, I usually refer to them as ‘snapshots’ of a position you will be in if structured properly in a movement. My favorite example is in combination 15, the twist stance. I always found twist stances to be disaster waiting to happen. As luck would have it, many years ago a friend invited me to a seminar when Tat Mau Wong was visiting to teach the Siu Moy Fat Kuen (small plum blossom fist) to the Choy Li Fut school where he was studying. He sent me a tape to learn the choreography, and over the course of the day working with master Wong, I learned a passable version of the form. What was really useful however, was a chance to see and feel the body mechanics that he used to transition his stances and generate power in his strikes. I couldn’t do that form to save my life today. In case you are wondering, this is what it looks like, done by Tat Mau Wong no less. Note the twist stance transition at about the 0:47 second mark in the video.
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What I did walk away with was a great perspective on the twist stance (among other things) and how he used it as a split-second transition while changing direction. It totally made sense after that, and it has affected how I teach any technique involving a twist stance. Sometimes you have to go outside your art to understand the tools you already have in your toolbox.
I think of stances as examples of structure that crop up moment to moment, and evaluate every technique on posture. Throughout, I maintain good posture, and a constant goal is to disrupt the posture of my opponent to diminish his ability to attack or defend. A good cross block starts in the feet, but you can’t stay in any one stance and admire your work in combat.
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.
