There’s no two ways about it; internal cultivation requires effort. It’s not just any kind of effort either, there is a particular flavour of effort needed, particularly when using the methods of the Chinese internal systems (which I draw on heavily). The term they use is ‘Gong Fu’ (or more commonly written as ‘Kung Fu’ – it’s the same word), which points to a skill that is derived from an effort.
There is a TV show called Marco Polo, and in it one of the characters is a blind martial artist named 100 eyes. In one of my favourite scenes, he is explaining the concept of Gong Fu to the main character:
If you one day you make it back to the West, what will you tell men of
this strange word, “Gong Fu?” Will you tell them that it means to fight? Or will you say, like a monk from Shaolin; to summon
the spirit of the crane and the tiger?Gong fu. It means, “supreme skill from hard work.” A great poet has
reached gong fu. The painter, the calligrapher, they can be said to have gong fu. Even the cook, the one who sweeps steps or a masterful servant can have gong fu. Practice. Preparation. Endless repetition. Until your mind is weary, and your bones ache. Until you’re too tired to sweat, too wasted to breathe. That is the way, the only way, one acquires gong fu.
The image conjured by his speech is powerful for sure. The main ingredient I want to draw attention to is the ‘endless repetition’. When we start practicing, very quickly we run into a particular phenomena – the habituation of the unconscious. There are tension patterns that are held, reactions driven deep into the system that are difficult to notice and even more difficult to release, and various other habits that the unconscious will continue to repeat even when you consciously know a better way.
The issue with the unconscious is it does not really deal in concepts. You can change your conscious mind quite easily – a well explained concept framed in an agreeable way, and suddenly and quickly you can have a totally different opinion on a matter. The unconscious does not at all respond with speed like this. It is much more closely linked to the body rather than the thoughts, to the material world rather than the conceptual world. To change the unconscious, then, is a matter almost entirely of action and not of concepts. Of course you need the concepts to frame and orient the actions you take, but it is the actions themselves that will transform you.
Endless repetition.
To do it once successfully is not enough. Habits are driven into the unconscious in the same way as water creates a groove in a rock: by running over the same path. Taking that water out of the groove and give it a new path once will not suffice. If the new path is going to be readily accessible, it needs to have a groove of at least equal measure, if not deeper, than the existing habits. The only way to do this is repetition and LOTS of it.
The Chinese systems are clearly marked by this concept. Practices in almost every system are designed to be repeated every day, and within the practice session work is done continuously without break. You generally have 2 phases, the learning of the method, where you stuff around until you get the form or qualities right, and then the repetition of the method, which is typically where all the actual transformation comes in. The western mind is so used to learning how to do something and once learnt dropping it to move onto the more advanced methods. When this happens the Gong (that’s the work of the endless repetition) is lost. In the eastern methods, it’s common to do single exercises for an hour or more without stopping and have continuous training year round. This isn’t even advanced stuff, this is what beginners were expected to do. It’s a phenomenal way to provoke transformation.
But…
In my approach I like to also look to the underlying motivations. So often the amount of practice one does is motivated by a feeling of not being good enough or whole enough, or a feeling of guilt for not having practiced enough, or some other variety of fear of imperfection. The western mind is very much charged by this drive away from the imperfect and towards the utopian ideal. This drive on its own it is a serious imbalance, and from the bigger picture it needs to be balanced with an acceptance of the imperfect nature of manifest reality. This balanced mode of practice still requires discipline (I still practice every day) but it also requires a light heartedness that comes from a dropping of expectations and release of mental adhesions. This is only fully possible when you make present reality your closest ally – and reality will freely shape itself into every and any form, including forms of you not being quite accomplished in your practice, and not practicing in the ideal that you wished you could.
When you are using your practice as an aid for connecting to reality, then there’s no longer a need to be anywhere other than where you currently are. Practice in this frame becomes an expression of reality, rather than a pathway to it. It just so happens to be an expression of reality that facilitates a deepening of the connection to reality, but should reality also shape itself as a busy day with lots of mundane tasks and responsibilities, that is a perfectly fine shape for it to take too.
How long it takes someone to find this genuine orientation is hard to say. Some people can step right into it from day 1 and others need many years to discover what has been there the whole time. A well oriented and disciplined practice can help facilitate this; very often the discipline is needed to provoke a release of the mental habit causing the issue.
So if you’ve been watching from the sidelines or just dipping your toes in, it might be time to crank it up a notch and bring in the discipline – you’d be surprised just how fast some of these transformations are with consistency in training. Just remember to make it all about connecting to things as they are now, rather than getting lost in the guilt of the projected utopia and burning yourself out on practicing like a madman.
[Feature Photo by Gabriel Ramos on Unsplash.]