Bill Bodri - Internal Martial Arts Nei-gong: Cultivating Your Inner Energy to Raise Your Martial Arts to the Next Level

Internal Martial ArtsNei-gong

Cultivating Your Inner Energy to

Raise Your Martial Arts to the Next Level

By

Bill Bodri

John Newtson

Copyright

2011, William Bodri.

Fourth Edition

All Rights Reserved Worldwide in All Media.

ISBN 978-0-9721907-9-4

Library of Congress # 2011943858

Top Shape Publishing, LLC

1135 Terminal Way Suite 209

Reno, Nevada 89502

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, including but not limited to electronic, mechanical, digital copying, printing, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Thanks go to David Farmer for his helpful comments and quotes which weve included in the text. If you are a martial arts teacher or practitioner with similar insights or stories to share, please send them and well try to include them in the next edition.

I would also like to thank Jeremy Antbacke, and Clairemarie Levine, for their extensive assistance in editing this text. Without their sharp eyes to catch misspellings and their push to have me rewrite certain sections, the text would be far less than what it is.

For more titles like this, please see www.MeditationExpert.com. We particularly recommend Measuring Meditation (How to Measure and Deepen Your Spiritual Realization) for case studies of advanced cultivation practitioners at the level of Taoist Immortals.

The Little Book of Meditation, by William Bodri, gives detailed instructions for practicing anapana, pranayama, meditation and the white skeleton visualization technique. All of these techniques will be useful to martial artists.

You might also pick up the following on Amazon.com by William Bodri: The Little Book of Hercules, Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation, Spiritual Paths and Their Meditation Techniques, and Tao and Longevity by Nan Huai-Chin.

Table of Contents

Introduction . 3

Chapter 1: The Two Basic Approaches 13

Chapter 2: Core Practices for Developing Inner Power:

Anapana, Pranayama and Visualization Practice .... 36

Chapter 3: The Role of Sex in Chi Development:

Celibacy and Sex on the Path of Inner Gong-fu . 57

Chapter 4: The Mythical Martial Arts Are They Really Possible? 61

Chapter 5: Modern Training Secrets for Perfecting Ancient Skills . 68

Chapter 6: How to Speed Up the Process:

Detoxification Supplements for Cleansing the Body .. 84

Chapter 7: Final Questions and Answers . 89

Recently I had lunch with a man widely considered one of the top martial artists in China. Hes a drunken sword master who now teaches Kung Fu on Wudang Mountain, considered the birthplace of Taoist martial arts like Tai Chi.

I asked him, What are all the martial artists who failed to match your skill missing? What did youdo that they did not do? Obviously, everyone who dedicates his life to martial arts practices trainsreligiously, so it cannot just be that you practiced more than they did. He then went into an eye-opening hour long explanation of what really made him the drunken sword master in China, and explained why in recent years there has been a great decline in Kung Fu for modern martial artists.

He said the main reason martial artists fail to develop true skill, power and ability is because they approach martial arts like athletes. They just focus on developing the external physical skills and athletic abilities, such as stronger or faster muscles, similar to how you would train in a competitive sport. They never focus on inner energy.

The problem is, the high level martial arts, especially in China, are NOT founded on purely physical skill. When he was young he reasoned, How will I ever differentiate myself from this great crowd of highly talented and extremely athletic martial artists? If martial arts are based simply on the athletics of physical movements, then where is my chance to stand out? Early on in his training he therefore made the decision to cultivate his inner chi energy, and to therefore practice nei-gong as the foundation of his art. This involved hiding some of his practice from the prying eyes of Communist officials who forbid this type of internal cultivation practice within the martial arts schools. Nevertheless, he was lucky enough that his own teacher was able to help train him by teaching him the basics.

His approach to nei-gong included sitting meditation, Zhan zhuang or post-standing for hours at a time (a type of standing meditation), along with breathing exercises. He credited his great skill as a martial artist directly to focusing on meditation, breathing exercises and internal cultivation. He didnt just focus on the athletics of martial arts, but on his internal chi cultivation which many today approach through breath cultivation. Cultivating your breath, such as through special breathing exercises or pranayama, is the simplest (and lowest) way to enter into this.

The reason for this book on martial arts and inner gong-fu, also known as inner energies and inner power, is because most martial artists don't know anything about how to cultivate their inner energies past a superficial stage, and there are many deep levels possible to cultivating this inner energy. This is what the traditional path of martial arts entails, and if you cultivate these energies you can do incredible things past what people even consider as the normal level of martial arts.

Unfortunately, there is no clear explanation about how martial artists can do some of the amazing, almost supernatural feats that you read about in ancient books and see represented in the movies, 3

such as seeming to fly through the air, so I wanted to discuss why they become possible after you cultivate your energies to that deep level, and how you can cultivate those abilities yourself.

In martial arts, which are called wushu in Chinese, people usually start upon the path of perfecting various external forms of movement, and various postures and stances, through external exercises.

This is called wai-gong, meaning the external martial arts. It has to do with mastering the exterior form of the body with its positions, motions and movements such as strikes, chokes and blocks.

You are trying to develop body mechanics and coordination.

As people start practicing wai-gong they also learn how to stand motionless as well as stretch their bodies and move them in various ways, and they learn how to think in terms of strategies for attack and defense such as moving this or that way, or the positioning of the body for a certain strike or angle. The initial emphasis is on mechanics, and optimization or peak performance goals such as how to be stronger, move faster, last longer and the like.

Eventually, however, no matter how well you practice external martial arts to perfect your form, and no matter how amazing are the things you can end up doing, people usually reach some plateau for their level of skills and get stuck with this type of approach, and thus their progress eventually reaches a standstill.

To break through the plateau, many martial artists turn to breathing exercises that often deal with superficial energy streams in the body, and this type of practice is at first called qi-gong.

Qi-gong encompasses several different things. Primarily, qi-gong exercises are basically the pranayama breathing practices of India and dont extend to your internal cultivation. This is why they dont take you very far. The truest or best from of qi-gong practice is when you start to actually feel the chi ( qi) in your body because of your martial arts practice, perhaps in your palms, soles of your feet, skin, or even tendons and bones. This then eventually becomes internal chi cultivation, or