165. Genchitaofu Baguazhang's Bagua - 艮氣道福八卦掌の八卦

Sometimes life is grand. We are winning every fight and achieving every goal. These are the moments we want to remember and be remembered by. We are having our proverbial cake and eating it too, because we've figured out how to have both. And we wish it to go on forever. But forever is a very long time. And slowly but surely boredom creeps in. It usually masks itself as "being jaded" with one's lot in life even though that life looks like paradise to other people. It's kind of like the expat who's gone to live the white man's dream in Thailand and ultimately ends up spending his days in an English pub by the beach nursing a slow beer because he's been-there-done-that and is waiting for something to happen. What that 'happening' is, he doesn't know. Nobody knows. Because it wasn't in the plans. And I have come across this kind of situation many times through doing martial arts. But it is only now, after more than a decade of martial arts that I have come to appreciate the deeper significance of what is going on. Boredom is the sign a martial artist is about to go through a life and death transition between levels. We are bored because we are riding the elevator up a level. And for action orientated people, standing around waiting, counting numbers can get painful. But this not life and death in that somebody will die and get reborn (unless that is your life-path). This is about letting go of a level because it has ended and allowing oneself to begin anew on the next level above it. That new level may in spirit look the same as before, but there will be significant differences over the course of the adventure to let it be known that you are indeed seeing things from a higher perspective. If your journey happens to included an internally focused martial art like Baguazhang 八卦掌, then you are lucky because if you haven't noticed yet, by walking the circle, you are physically and symbolically repeating this situation again and again and again, everytime you do the circle walk. So how do we move up the levels? Speaking from the Baguazhang 八卦掌 perspective, to truly excel in the style, a practitioner must have a grasp of the I-Ching 易經 and the eight trigrams 八卦. It's a bit like driving a car. To drive a car, one must first know they are driving a car. You can't drive a car by treating it like a horse! Because every adventure, every situation is linked to a trigram. Know the trigram and know the sequential order of the trigrams, and one is able to know what came before and what is to come next. And this is true of every single Baguazhang 八卦掌 or Baguaquan 八卦拳 style out there.