Craig Mallett

1. How would you define your personal practice?

My personal practice tends to go in phases, both long and short. Sometimes these phases are bound by a particular system, ideology or approach, and other times it is entirely explorative. Whatever I’m doing, at the heart of my practice is the idea of ‘ceasing my argument with reality’. This is tied up with 2 specific qualities.

The first is linked to the question ‘what is reality?’ Whatever else is going on, my direct reality is everything I’m experiencing currently, and the very obvious sense that ‘there’s almost certainly a bunch of hidden things happening as well, or at the very least something unexpected about to happen’. The quality needed to explore this is an opening, a discovery of the new and hidden. Internally, this looks like discovering parts of the body, emotional and mental landscapes that were previously unavailable to me. Externally, it’s opening to the world around me to discover more and more overt and covert happenings that were previously missed.

The second quality is linked to the question ‘how do I cease my argument with this reality?’ If it’s appeared in my field of perceptions, there’s no use pretending that it hasn’t. This is a question of relationship and reactivity. The quality associated is a releasing, of expectations, of holding patterns, of inhibitory tension, and of certainty that things are as I think they are or they appear to be. In practice, I have 4 major categories through which I explore these two qualities: Physical (basic athletic capacity and pragmatic functionality), Internal (using methods of qigong, neigong and neidan), Mental (using various meditations and magical practices), and non-dual.

The overall framework I use is also steeped deeply in Daoist theory, particularly Yin Yang concepts. The primary idea is that Yin is not more important than Yang, Yang not more important than Yin, and the balanced meeting of the two is not more important than the unbalanced expression of one extreme or the other. This creates quite a system of paradoxes, which is inherent in everything I’m doing as well.

2. What turning points have you encountered on your movement journey?

I would say my journey has had a few critical turning points. The first was the end of my time with my first Chinese Martial Arts teacher, Dapeng Wang. When he stopped teaching his classes, I was hungry for more and this pushed me to explore other systems and modes of practice. I got involved for some time with Gymnastic Bodies, then as an instructor for MovNat, training Stretch Therapy with Kit Laughlin, investigating the Ido Portal method, teaching alongside and learning from Simon Thakur (Ancestral Movement), as well as Emmet Louis (Modern Methods of Mobility).

At some point I ran into Dave Wardman and Physical Alchemy, and it was during my time hanging out with Dave and experimenting with his methods that another critical junction occurred – this one is far less easy to explain and I recommend checking out Dave’s book when it comes out for more details about this change. In short it was a dramatic change in the way I perceived the world and what was perceived, almost like emerging from the haze of a daydream.

The third turning point kind of happened in tandem with the second one mentioned above. It was my introduction to a particular Daoist school, and I fell completely in love with the Daoist approaches to things, particularly the internal work. I remember one day when I did 4 or 5 hours of strength, flexibility and movement work and I just felt like I hadn’t really done my training for the day until I went and did my Daoist practice.

The most recent turning point has been my departure from the Daoist school I joined, as my own path began to coagulate and necessitated its own individual framework and orientations. It is still heavily informed by basic Daoist concepts and frameworks, but I have departed almost entirely from the approach used by the school.

3. What role has injury played in cultivating your current niche?

After spending a great deal of time pursuing certain movement capacities, I kept running into the fact that my body, regardless of its skill level and strength and flexibility, was permanently locked in a struggle against itself and fighting every step of the way. This was highlighted on several occasions where known tensions produced injuries of increasing severity. The last was an injury of the deep tissues of my lower back and sacrum which left me unable to walk, stand up, or do much at all for a full week. This was the final nail in the coffin so to speak and lead to me dropping the great majority of physical practices I was doing in favour of pursuing the Daoist practices which were clearly resolving these issues (as well as doing other amazing things!).

4. Do you consider yourself a teacher? Why or why not?

Yes, I teach my tradition as a full time profession. I have taught workshops in more than 20 countries across the world, as well as guiding a cohort of online students through various systems of physical and spiritual development.

5. What has been your experience with physical education, both in the schooling system and sought out knowledge/ know-how elsewhere?

The physical education in the schooling system and in general in Australia is quite terrible to be honest. We are a sports centric nation but the great majority of sporting and other physical performance is done at heavy cost to the physical (let alone the emotional and mental!). Therapeutic treatments are also incredibly poor in general – many people have ongoing appointments with physiotherapists and the likes with little to no results because a complete change in framework is needed. Oddly enough, all things in the universe seem to have their equal and opposite force and Australia seems to have produced some of the best minds in the world in the territory of good physical development. They have not really burst into the scene that is known by the general public yet, but it seems inevitable that it will occur at some point, once the old systems have come to a boiling point of obviously not producing useful results.

It has been interesting for me too to bring the Chinese/Daoist approaches of physical training to people in the west. While not everyone wants to dive head first into a big Daoist practice (fair enough!), I still find it very useful to share these very different approaches to learning and to physical training to use as supplementary and sometimes therapeutic practices to help them continue doing what they love, or occasionally give them a new perspective on their existing practice!

6. How do you involve your mind/ emotions into your physical routines?

From day one, I teach my students how to begin releasing the mind into the body. This has a number of effects, but the most notable are:

Whatever the conscious mind soaks into tends to get ‘fueled’ and the cycles turn. As we drain the conscious mind from the mental structures, they are severed from their fuel and tend to
quieten automatically.
As the conscious mind then releases into the bodily structures, they also become fueled and start to organically reorganize themselves, unwinding and aligning, finishing any stuck cycles.
The body is also very closely linked to the unconscious, so this release of Mind into the bodily structures tends to both confront us to, and if practiced appropriately, reconnects and harmonizes
us with the deeper parts of the subconscious and unconscious. This necessarily also requires an acceptance of these dark and sticky parts of ourselves, many of which are heavily emotionally charged.

I also explore the concepts of non-duality through various contemplative and meditative practices, along with understanding intent and the releasing of intent to allow the unconscious/body to organize itself organically rather than always being micro managed by the conscious mind.

7. What are your personal aspirations regarding movement? How do you hope to find purpose and use in the skills you have built?

This was actually one of the questions that prompted my move from general movement practices to the specific practices of my daoist tradition. I remember one day quite clearly: I had just completed my first ever muscle up and was walking to the shops to meet some friends for lunch and considered what use having learned that skill served me during my walk and social times. I had this idea that everything would be better once I could do a muscle up (or insert any other flexibility, strength or movement feat here). The reality was that nothing really changed, my walk to the shops was much the same. Besides the general strength increase, which I get from training the Daoist way too, it didn’t seem to me that it was a particularly useful skill to have. Since stopping this kind of training the amount of times I’ve needed a muscle up or any specific calisthenics in my life is precisely zero (unless I’ve specifically wanted to go do something for fun, which is a wonderful motivation if that’s what you’re into! I just realised that for the most part I wasn’t into it).

On the other hand the removal of excessive tension and the freeing of my body, the opening of the breath and circulation, and the calming of the mind, have all made mundane moments like walking around and chatting to my friends increasingly more vibrant and alive. I feel stronger, with less effort required to express that strength, my joints feel more open, my body (and mind and emotions) feels less and less like it’s in a constant battle with itself and so instead it talks and sings to me with a wonderful spectrum of sensations that were muted by tension even when I was capable of difficult acrobatics. And still it improves, still I find more tensions to drop, more opening and ever deepening freedom and big circulation in a way that I couldn’t conceive of in the past. I’m very much looking forward to what else might be possible that I can’t conceive of today and what other wonderful things might become a normal part of my everyday life.

8. How can people find/ contact you? Do you have a site or social media handle to share?
I have all of those things! Here’s a list:

www.craigmallett.com

https://community.craigmallett.com

https://www.facebook.com/CraigMallettDX/

https://www.instagram.com/craigmallettdx/

https://www.youtube.com/c/CraigMallett

I’m also happy for people to contact me directly by email if they want to chat or ask questions: contact@craigmallett.com