Chansigong : Twining silk exercises, Part 1

Once you begin to centre your balance in dantian, the chansi exercises in Part 1 show you how to unfurl from the core, moving your whole body in spirals, every part linked seamlessly.

Through constant repetition of these apparently simple movements you develop cohesiveness throughout your body.

These exercises are fundamental for understanding the Chen techniques : the elaboration of spiralling energy centred in dantian, the movement flowing out from centre to periphery, the furthest point that the hand reaches maintaining its resilient connection to dantian.

As you train more and more precisely, you begin to recognise the place to be reached before you can initiate a centred weight shift, how to unfurl fully, how to complete the qi circuit and return to dantian.  And one day you will reach the stage where the changes happen on a minute scale, and the preparation for sending forth power is invisible and instantaneous.

The Chansigong could equally be called the YinYang exercises.  Although points along the trajectory are designated, it is the entire body moving as a unified whole, its inner aspect changing to its outer, spinning slow or fast but always in equilibrium.

After many years of practising these exercises, I am awestruck seeing Master Chen absorbed in twining silk.  I watch like the newcomers who are spellbound in this cycle of simple and essential movements.  He is bathing in Qi, the universe "a pool of energetic fluid".  [ p. 18 of Chuang-Tzu : The Inner Chapters, A.C. Graham]

As Chen XiaoWang says, "Like shower inside".