Following a Rolling the Pearl workshop a while back, we talked with Shifu Robert Castaldo about the purpose of the New Basics curriculum and the future direction of Jiulong Baguazhang training.  The interview offered some insights into the basics so we thought Jiulong Journal readers would find it interesting.

JJ: How does the New Basics curriculum change the way Jiulong Baguazhang is taught?

RC: The whole purpose of changing the curriculum is to make it more easily understood by everybody involved.  The teachers will have a clearer understanding of what the goals are and where the students need to go, and the students will have a clearer understanding of what’s expected of them and how all the pieces fit together.  So, it changes the way the Art is taught is to make it a more transparent process.  There’s less mystery involved…so that there is a clearer understanding, a more direct approach to our goal of being able to apply these principles in practical application.

JJ:  So what are the specific mysteries that you’re trying to clear away here?  What were the things that were getting in the students’ way?

RC: From my standpoint, the most complicated thing for students to grasp – not merely to understand intellectually and feed back to you in a question and answer session, but to understand in their daily practice – is the way that the process builds from the simplest skill, which is the Quiet Sitting — quieting the mind — through the standing, which has very specific skill sets and engrams that it begins to develop, and how to carry those into moving.  Students were not making all those connections all the way.  They were looking at each of these modules, these skill-sets as separate entities.  Eventually, somewhere farther down the line than we would like, the light bulb would go off, the epiphany would happen, and the pieces would come together. So, now we’re trying to make it as clear and simple and easy as possible for body and mind to come to understand how the standing translates into the walking and the walking translates into the circling.

JJ:  Are there other reasons beyond that for changing it?

RC: The main reason is clarity like I said, but it also became apparent as we started working with the material that it became easier for it to be taught.  We realized we could give the study groups and the study group leaders more efficient, effective tools to work with. For example, take the module of shifting.  Breaking it down in the systematic way that we have, it has become a more effective tool.  We start with the vertical shifting to show how the legs drive the spine.  Then we do a sideways shift – left-weighted to right-weighted – to demonstrate how one leg receives and the other leg initiates the drive.  Then we add the torso tying it in to the legs, making it one whole-body action.  Then we add the hands — which we also changed from the Heaven Palm to the Embrace the Pearl posture.
It makes it easy then to present the material so the student can follow along and understand exactly how each new piece fits into the previous one.  It also makes it easier for the study group leader to look at a students and identify where they are having problems.  Is the torso not moving with the legs?  Are the arms moving independently, or are they moving as a unit with the torso?  It’s easier to see where there are problems and go back to the exercise needed to fix the problems, to give the students homework or a little time in class to work on the problem.  It’s a more standard, step-by-step toolbox of materials and lessons that make it easier for the study groups rather than having every study group re-invent the wheel.

JJ: What was your inspiration as you went about redesigning the curriculum?

RC:  The process was really organic…

JJ: There wasn’t a moment of sudden enlightenment?

RC: Right…the moment it all came together was with the Rolling the Pearl posture.  Originally the goal was just to layout the curriculum as it was and standardize it so that a manual and DVD could be put together as a reference.  In order to do that we needed to have a standard methodology on paper.

JJ: So was the project originally going to be with Heaven Palm?

RC: Yes.  The project went through various incarnations over the course of years of breakfast meetings and talking about the possibilities.  And Heaven Palm was the way that we were heading.
Initially, when I first thought that changes needed to be made, I wanted to pull Heaven Palm and come up with a core curriculum into which all the palms could be plugged in.  That was our first change.  And simultaneously, I had been struggling with the place of Thunder Palm and Mountain Palm in our standing practice.  Most students didn’t know what these palms were – we were just calling them that.  Students in our other arts, in Taiji and Xingyi were doing the same standing exercises as Thunder and Mountain palm, and these meant nothing in their systems.  So one of the first changes was to look at the standing practice and deal with it in terms of imagery that could be accessible to beginning students right away.

Embrace the Pearl and the Move the Mountain were images that someone could feel right off without having to worry about the meaning of Thunder or Mountain Palm.  And then my concept for teaching all the rest of the material was to go to some sort of neutral palm.  I wanted to get away from the added complication of the nature of the individual palms – am I being Heaven, Earth, or whatever – before students could actually do the basic movements.  Since I was identifying standing with moving, I made the connection that I could just use those two postures from standing in the process of teaching shifting, walking, and circling; it would be simpler for the student to make the connection,  “Here I am, holding the posture that I used in standing, and I’m walking, so I understand the feelings that I’m supposed to have.” Then it was Shifu Painter who came down one day and said, “I got it! You combine the two postures: here’s your Push the Mountain and here’s your Embrace the Pearl.  Together they’re Rolling the Pearl.”  He wanted to make sure that students could experience the transition from one posture to another, from yin palm to yang palm, up movement to down movement, and Cross the Great River.

JJ: How is the new curriculum going to affect experienced Jiulong students?

RC: My concept has always been that if the student already understands the principles in the curriculum, there’s no reason for them to go back and learn the New Basics.  But if there are areas of confusion, gaps in understanding, then going back to the basic curriculum will help them identify those problems and fill those gaps.  Study group leaders who know the basics and are working with experienced students will be able to diagnose problems – is the torso coordinating with the legs? Are the arms moving independently?  You can still give these basic exercises as homework to advanced students.  Tell them, “Go home and shift for a week.  When you come back, we’ll see how you’re doing.” The quicker that they can make breakthroughs in these areas that are holding them back, the faster they’ll be able to move on to more advanced material, and the more fun they’ll have.  It’s frustrating trying to figure out, “why isn’t this working?  I can see other people doing it but I can’t.”  You may know Heaven Palm, but if you can’t deliver Heaven Palm with full-body power then you’re not doing Heaven Palm, you’re just moving and waving your hands in the air. As to instructors and whether you need to give advanced students the Rolling the Pearl exercise, that’s a judgment call as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t think it will hurt.  I think it’s easier, but certainly taiji Heaven Palm posture is just as good for shifting left and right as Rolling the Pearl.  You just shift the hands over in the other direction and you’ve got it.

JJ: I think it’s interesting to explore what you can do with taiji Heaven versus Rolling the Pearl and how they’re different.  You can push better in some directions than others with each posture…

RC: …Which is exactly my reason for not trying to spend lots of time trying to teach each palm as if it can do everything and just focusing on what each palm is best at.  Then, when you know them all, you can have intelligent discussions about those types of things – why moving one way with one palm works better than another.  If I need to project my opponent, Heaven Palm works great.  If I need to shock them, Heaven’s not so good but Thunder’s great.  In close proximity, infighting, Heaven doesn’t work well, but Fire’s great.  I think that for an advanced student that’s what’s interesting.

JJ: Are there more changes on the horizon?

RC: In Daoqiquan in general and in Jiulong in particular, our goal, Shifu Painter’s goal, has always been to present the material in the clearest possible way.  So there are always changes.  The underlying principles don’t change, and haven’t since Master Li conveyed them to Shifu Painter.  They’re still their in those reams of notebooks in his office.  What has changed is the methodology for presenting the material, presenting lessons in ways that those principles can be easily grasped.  That’s something that is not part of traditional martial arts training.  The traditional way is to learn a form and then explore that form and pull the principles out of it.  In essence, every student is re-inventing the wheel, discovering things that generations of martial artists had to learn on their own.  In part it’s because many teachers don’t know how to teach the material, they just figured it out for themselves and expect their student to do the same.  In the majority of martial arts you’re not learning principles, you’re learning form. We’re always concerned with how we teach the material.  Those three questions Shifu Painter always asks, “What’s it supposed to do?  How does it do it?  How do I practice it?” apply just as much to teaching, “How do I teach someone to do it?”  We make changes because we’re finding better answers to those questions.

We’re also adding new things that developed because of questions we never knew were there.  For example, the Dragon’s Gate stepping pattern and the Night Swallow step – these are things we took for granted.  We always thought people just did it.  But then we started to see that students were not doing this thing that we were taking for granted.  We had to break that habit of walking on the circle like a hamster on a train track and not getting off the circle for any reason.  They just didn’t realize that it’s allowable.  So we went back to that Dragon’s Gate pattern – it’s a traditional pattern, we didn’t make it up – to let the student know earlier on that the one circle is very basic; it’s kindergarten.  Now you’re going to first grade through this pattern, and there are other patterns later on that continually add circles eventually leading up to the Nine Palace pattern.  The circle is wherever you are.  I like that model better myself.  The circle is wherever I am, around me.  I just carry it with me. So our goal is always to refine what we’re doing, to make it more efficient and effective, to give the instructors better tools so that they become better teachers and better students. We want anybody who is involved in the Art, who makes the commitment to learn it, to have a better than average chance of succeeding it.

There will be changes to the basic curriculum down the pike, but they’re probably minor.  We’re very confident with the way it has come together, that this is a workable project, the best, most efficient teaching model in the thirty years that Shifu’s been teaching.
Now the next step will be not to linger on improving the basics but to move throughout the Art with that same goal: to developing a better, more efficient way to get students where they need to be – to use this stuff when they need it and when they want it in the most efficient way possible.
For new students, what is the most important thing to focus on, in order to make the most of the new curriculum?

If there is anyone particular concept that you must maintain, that is to be patient and focus on the lesson at hand and recognize that there is no advantage to getting to the more advanced material until you fully comprehend the skill you’re working on now.  Your progress will be very fast if you focus on what you’re doing now and get it down.  It goes very slowly if you’re always putting your thoughts into that “interesting stuff” that’s ahead and try to speed through what you’re currently doing.

That’s a general comment.  More specifically, you must always be sure to incorporate the skills that you are continually developing throughout your study in standing into whatever you’re doing, primarily the concept of whole-body, un-differentiated, non-localized feeling.  When you begin standing and exploring those things, they may be kind of nebulous concepts to you and you’ll move on to shifting or whatever, but you have to continually look to your standing and incorporate what you learn there into everything else.  That’s a key element.  When you can do it in standing, take it into shifting.  When you can do it shifting, take into walking.  That’s one of the things that in the past we didn’t have a good way to express.  We’re focusing on it now.  All the movements are merely physical shells if you don’t have that undifferentiated, whole-body feeling attached to them. So, when I wedge through you with my arm, if I have any feeling that it’s my arm pushing through you, I’m not doing it correctly.  I should feel like my whole body’s moving through you.  If I do it correctly, it’s effortless.  If I feel stress in my deltoids or my back, I’m not doing it correctly. If I’ve engaged all the muscles of my body, if my shifting has provided power and my waist turn has transmitted up through my torso, then where my arm makes contact is irrelevant.  I am just easily moving my 200 lb. mass through you, and that’s a key element for the basic program.

JJ: For experienced students, what should they take away from the new curriculum?

RC: Same thing.  Odds are they haven’t gotten it.  If we ask, “what is the goal of the basic curriculum?” it is to move balanced, with whole-body energy and interact with another human being.  That sounds very simple, but a lot of people don’t give enough weight to that whole-body concept.  We’re moving closer to that realm of spirit, of attitude, and it’s very hard to describe: the way Lao-t’zu says the Dao that can be explained is not the eternal Dao, and then he goes on to talk about it for 81 chapters.  We say the words, but it’s the experiential nature of what that thing is, the feeling that the student discovers either suddenly, in an epiphany, or gradually over time through the building of imagery that turns into feeling.  Whatever it is that gets them to that point where they really understand whole-body, that’s the key.  Until they have that, none of the other stuff, the Palms, none of that is relevant; it’s just waving your arms in the air.  The basics on its own could be a martial art in its own right, just like Heaven Palm or Water Palm or whatever.  You could come out of basics class ready to defend yourself, IF you have that whole-body skill.

One of my students once asked the following question:

“I have been reading about standing meditation practice and have come across two sources who say that the weight should be over the heels. In Bagua, we are taught that the weight should be over the balls of the feet. Which is correct?”  The answer was that in our Bagua martial practice the weight is over the ball of each foot, while in the health methods it is closer to the heels. Hopefully, his doubt about our practice has been alleviated.

This type of question comes up in various forms but always has the same flavor. Namely, “How do I know that this is the real stuff?” It is difficult to sort out the “real stuff” when so many practitioners claim their system is “the” way which has been handed down from time immemorial. I understand the feeling behind this question as I have found myself asking it over the years. It has created enough doubt about the situations I have been in to leave them for what appeared to be “more true”.    Generally I have found that there was something to learn from each experience but it also lead to shallow understanding of the art I was engaged in, rather than learning the deeper lessons that only time in one art can bring.

I suppose that, in the beginning, it is good the feel “this is the best art” in order to make the decision to learn a martial, health, or spiritual art in the first place. But it has become evident to me that remaining with this notion of “our way” leads to confinement within a specific orientation and really only adds to the divisions which plague humanity. It also creates a confusion of paths, styles, techniques, ideologies, and mythologies.

The existence of all these approaches presents a conundrum for students. Namely, “the choice of any one path instantly eliminates all the others. So I had better pick the right one.” The making of this choice can create the inner need to feel secure about it, hence the attitude of “our way is the best way”. But over time, exposure to other systems and approaches can lead to the feeling of “what if this way is not the best? Perhaps those others are more true and I am missing out, or learning incorrect information.” This is what leads to questions like the one I was asked about standing over the heels. It was motivated by a desire to find the “really real stuff”. Unfortunately this creates doubt about the choice one has made and doubts can dilute ones training motivation like nothing else. So the fundamental question one is faced with is how to know whether or not the correct path has been chosen.

Ultimately the student is the only one who can determine the appropriateness of the teaching that has been chosen. The most important question to answer is “how do I feel about being here?” Then one has to begin sorting out the various inner responses to the question. Without implying that there is a pre-defined yardstick to measure the authenticity and value of a martial, health or spiritual practice, I can offer these basic observations based in my own experiences.

1) MULTIPLE “WAYS” – At the risk of stating something obvious, the significance of there being many methods and schools needs to be mentioned. Since there is such a variety of approaches and styles it is evident that there are several authentic “ways” available. Many roads, one destination. You need to find one which resonates positively with you. Then you can explore techniques from different systems which may be complimentary to yours. See if they fit, but do this within the context of your own system. This way you can be open to other ideas while maintaining the integrity of your chosen path.

2) ASK QUESTIONS – The teacher and/or school environment should promote a feeling of acceptance and openness. i.e.: questions should be encouraged and answered. Uncertainties should be acknowledged and researched. (i.e.: if the teacher doesn’t know something, he/she should find out the answer and bring it to class)

3) DON’T RUSH – The learning should be paced individually as these arts are very personal. One should only be expected to move at your own pace, not pushed to achieve what you are not ready for.

4) SEEK JOY – There should be joy in class. This seems very basic, but sometimes there can too much seriousness in the arts. While the overall goals of internal practice such as health, self- defense, a peaceful mind, long life etc. are very serious, the road towards these goals should be fun. If for no other reason than to assist in the reduction of tension which is so crucial to success in the internal arts.

5) BE THE EXPERIMENT – Practice the exercises exactly as shown and be sure you understand the correct way to practice. Find out from the teacher what to expect from this practice, and be diligent about seeing if the desired results are actually taking place. On other words, be the experiment for the teachings. Find out for yourself.

6) GIVE THE ART A CHANCE – Once you are reasonably satisfied enough that the art you are considering is authentic, stay with it for an extended period of time in order to really see the effects. Internal arts affect different people at different rates. Give it a fair chance. Also, this will allow you to gain some depth of practice, rather than skipping over several arts quickly and not really getting much out of any one of them. Staying with one art is probably the best advice I can give you.

Always remember that this is an exploration. There is too much mystery shrouding the unfoldment of inner arts and one needs to adopt a attitude of scientific experimentation with regards to them. Answer the above questions as best you can. Look for commonalties with other arts. If you are fortunate, you will be with others (including your teacher) who share this approach. The “we are all discovering this together” attitude is most beneficial to all, including the teacher. I would sincerely question the claims of teachers who say they have all the answers and are at the highest levels attainable in their respective arts. There is always more to learn. Also, they need to survive the western economic reality like the rest of us. As such they are subject to similar stresses and demands and, as such, are constantly working out their lives like you and I. How does participation in your art assist you with coping? Hopefully, your teacher is finding the same value in his/her practice and can discuss why this is so. Beware of claims of perfect equanimity at all times. I believe the best teacher is one who can freely and confidently admit their shortcomings while continuing to practice and help you with your practice. This promotes and environment of friendly learning rather than imitating a teacher claiming to be all-knowledgeable.

The important thing is to feel some satisfaction that you are on the right track. In order to work towards this satisfaction I offer you this simple formula. Be the test tube in which you are examining an internal art, then commit yourself wholly to the practices involved in order to verify the choice for yourself.

As for the question I was asked about the body centering during standing meditation, it question was appropriate and valuable. It caused me to dig a little to find a answer and further clarify the differences in the various approaches while still holding to the value of practicing standing the way we have been shown. We now have better idea as to why we stand this way. So the choice to continue in this way is clearer and, subsequently, has more conviction within the practice. One needs conviction to continue anything for the long term. The novelty of newness wears off relatively quickly and one needs a long term reason to keep standing every day. The conviction of it being a correct practice for you, chosen from many, due to having asked direct questions and having direct experiences of the effects are among the best ways for the student to “keep on keeping on”.