The Somatic benefits of martial arts

Photo by Craig Adderley: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-a-man-and-woman-doing-martial-arts-1543932/

I recently started learning Kung Fu at a local studio. I had been interested in studying Martial Arts for a long time and had gotten into Qi Gong because of that interest. While I continue to practice Qi Gong and appreciative the meditative and energetic aspects of the practice, I also wanted to branch out to a more martial form in order to better understand the differences, but also see how one practice might comment on the other.

While I definitely have gotten that benefit from starting to study Kung Fu, what I also came to appreciate about Kung Fu were the somatic benefits of the practice. As I learn a given move and enmesh it within my body memory, what stands out to me is how the practice engages me on multiple levels of knowing and consciousness. My body consciousness is engaged when I learn how to step or move a part of my body, but my memory is also engaged, both in learning the move, but also considering how I might have applied it in different situations in my life. My emotional consciousness is also engaged and I am able to work through and release emotions with the practice.

Somatic work has become a kind of buzz phrase of late in the holistic sphere of activities, but somatic studies have been around for a long time, and whenever I learn a new form of body work I look at how I can integrate it into the existing body practices I already practice. For example with Kung Fu, one of the experiences I’ve been paying more attention to is the angle of a movement. I first learned about the angle of a movement by studying the dance disciplines of Laban, who broke movements of the body into the platonic geometric shapes and showed how a given movement could be performed with these geometries in mind.

Purification as a magical process

I've been sick recently, which has provided an interesting opportunity to recognize how sickness can be a purifying process for the body. When I think about that and then purification as a magical process, I come up with the following video:

A definition of embodiment magic

Understanding the relationship of the body with the communication with the subconscious is important to realizing how the body can be worked with successfully. Learning how to embody an emotion or concept can be a useful way to understand the effect the emotion or concept has on your life.

Meditation and the relationship to the body

I've been doing a lot of research and practical applications of meditation from various spiritual systems, and the one thing I find consistent is that for meditation to really work, there must be some interaction with the body. The body is the gateway to experiencing meditation, which makes sense as a meditation is really an altered state of physiological consciousness. I put it that way, because it seems to me that there is a tendency to discuss and conceptualize meditation as a state of mind or consciousness that is separate from the experience of the body. But you really can't separate the body from meditation, because you are rooting yourself in the experience of changing your physiology to accomplish an altered state of consciousness. This is why breath plays such a role in meditation. Breath is the key to accessing the body and bringing it into a state of physiological receptivity for an altered state of consciousness. By focusing awareness on the breath a person becomes aware of the body and can slow it down enough to enter into an altered state. Or alternately a person can do some kind of excitatory activity to achieve the same level of awareness. In either case, the body is the foundational core by which meditation is achieved. It's worth remembering that if you want to make meditation a part of your tool set.

Update on Laban work

I've been doing the first set of dance stretches in the Laban book for a little while now and discovered in the process an awareness of my body and its muscles I previously lacked. It's quite an intriguing feeling and it's translated out into the dance floor in terms of some moves I've been doing that previously I wouldn't have thought of. I also have used it as part of my paratheatrical work and one of my next paratheatrical works is going to involve using excitatory work to get in touch with my body consciousness, per the suggestion of a reader of this blog. I find that Laban combines very nicely with paratheatrical work in terms of getting the body revved up, but this will a further experiment of actually using Laban to work with my body consciousness directly.

On a different note, I did take a different tact with the body work, in terms of inhibitory meditation and found that focusing just on one cell led to better results in terms of working with the consciousness of the cell and getting another possible direction I can take my time work as a result.