More About the 8 Core Skills - Pt. 2 Open-Close

More About the Eight Core Skills 

Part 2 - Open - Close

 

Open and Close is one of the often misunderstood Core Skills. The idea of opening and closing the joints and cavities or Kai/He in Chinese, has to do with the ability to control changes in pressure. This changing of pressure is both a physical and energetic action.

Physically we learn to alter the pressure and eventually even the amount of Synovial fluid in the joints. Synovial fluid is what ‘pads’ the joints, giving them their springlike quality. It is important to note that Open and Close is often intimately linked with the third Core Skill - Expand and Compress or Condense, especially for the novice. 

In terms of the Cavities - Abdominal, Solar plexus and Chest - physically, pressure regulation largely involves the third Core Skill - Expand & Compress. But energetically it’s a different story. Once one has control of the low Dan Tien, that is, the ability to expand and condense it, thus regulating the concurrent volume of Qi, then, using spherical breathing, one is able to inflate and condense the cavities energetically as well as physically.

The actual manifestation of Opening and Closing is rather small and often difficult to see - although the experienced practitioner can feel a clear pressure differentiation. In addition to the center of each joint, Close and Open utilizes the attachments of the related muscles, tendons and ligaments to condense the joint (Closing) and then expand it. (Opening) By attachments I mean the places where the Sinews join or attach to the various related bones.

To get a feel for this, try squeezing (tightening) all the muscles around your elbow. This of course is a gross over-simplification, but it will give you the general idea. To get this to work, you must also contract the upper forearm muscles toward the elbow while simultaneously doing the same with the lower part of the upper arm muscles. This will give a basic feel of closing the joint. In order to Open, simply reverse the procedure and stretch (lengthen and expand) the same muscles away from the joint. For other training methods and a more detailed explanation, check out the book Inside Zhan Zhuang, Pg. 278-283.

What happens with new learners is that at first they must use the bellies of the muscles in addition to the attachments. In a sense this is actually a combination of Close-Open and Compress-Expand. Although this is many times how these skills are used in application, for experienced hands, Closing and Opening by itself is mostly an internal process of changing Qi pressures. For this advanced method to work, the dedicated practitioner must have fully ‘Hardwired’ all the joints and cavities to the spherical expansion and condensation of the low Dan Tien. 

In order to apply the second Core Skill to your Taiji movements, try this: choose the endpoint or finish of any posture. This will be your ‘Open’ position. Let’s take Double Hand Peng for example. Stand at the finish of the posture, then in order to ‘Close,’ while slowly exhaling, contract or condense each of the joints and cavities from the extremities into the low Dan Tien. This will cause the posture to very slightly ‘shrink,’ but with all the alignments still intact. From there, simply inhale from the low Dan Tien out to the extremities. This will cause the posture to ‘Open.’ This method is known as ‘Pulsing the Joints’ and is usually mastered by using many individual repetitions similar to a Qigong exercise. Of course you will need to train this with every posture as well as each transition. After enough experience one is able to Close and Open all the joints and cavities simultaneously, in concert with the condensation and expansion of the low Dan Tien. Also, it is important to remember that Open and Close as well as the other Core Skills, Expand and Compress and Twist and Release are actually already ‘embedded’ within each of the Taiji movements.

In the next installment we will examine the third Core Skill - Expand and Compress which, along with Open and Close will provide a concrete method of expressing powerful Jing as well as generating a vastly increased degree of circulation which tremendously benefits one’s health.