The Sleeper Must Awaken

心平氣和

A stable heart for harmonised vapours

擊敵有用形，用氣，用神之遲速*
The speeds of one's body, vapours and spirit, all have to be considered when fighting an opponent 

故每一勢之操縱手法，心先，命門為次，頭又次之，手足之次而又次之**

Therefore, when executing each posture technique(s), the heart comes first, the Life Gate (Mingmen) second, then, after, the head, hands and feet being even more ancillary

If one's body speed issues seem complex, the internal part, organs, vitality, mind and their relation to the body is even more challenging in internal arts. Before explaining the impact of the different training speeds on the internal side, it may be useful to first explain, or recall, how the mind and the vitality can influence speed. Indeed, speed is not only a question of going fast in martial arts, it is also a question of having swift reactions. Hence, mind, through its clarity, improves one's reflexes while vitality makes someone more reactive.

Mind and the Clarity

Old internal practices insist on trying to become thoughtless and emotionless in order to have a clear mind. For those, thoughts and emotions disturb the senses by adding useless information. One's mind should be like a blank page. Indeed, on a white page, the smallest little dot can be immediately spotted while on a written one it may be hard to even find a sentence. Thoughts and emotions blur one's senses, reducing one's reflexes and ability to swiftly react, hence the necessity to reduce them as much as possible.

The question is then, of course, how to become thoughtless and emotionless. For old practices thoughts can come from two different processes, pondering or having an emotion. The first one, most often an active process, can be stopped at will. The second one is harder, because it comes either from a reaction to a sensation (a stimulus of one of our senses) or from an organ imbalance (what is often seen as a personality trait). As it was described previously in the paragraph Emotions in Foggy Heart, cleaning through sweat and balancing the organs through heavy stretching to keep them in place were the techniques used to reduce one's emotive state. For emotions coming from sensations or desires, it was mainly relaxation through breathing techniques.

Emotionless and thoughtless, a clear mind was enabling swifter reflexes, vitality was also a means to become more reactive.

Vitality and the Ball Effect

The relation between vitality and strength, and its inflated ball effect, as previously described in Vitality and Strength, can be applied in the exact same way for speed. Indeed, more vitality or a stronger flow will also enhance one's capacity to react quickly.

To understand the process, one has just to compare how he/she is reacting when sleepy or in the middle of a training, sick or in perfect shape, a day after a wild night or totally rested, right after work or after a relaxing day, just after a big lunch or with an empty stomach, when having the hangover depression or the full of energy of a sugar rush... All those things have a general impact on one's vitality, feeling in shape or not, and/or, one's capacity to tap more into it, which is being more or less awake***. Internal practices, by keeping the organs, the source of vitality, in a very good shape, even improving them, also aimed in this way at keeping one very awake at all times. Their techniques to "mobilise the organs" through relaxation gave them the capacity to become super reactive, a state often called frenzy, 狂.

If vitality and the quasi-absence of emotions would allow someone to gain speed or react more swiftly while fighting, when training, the different speeds had different impacts on one's organs and his/her vitality, which will be developed in the next post.

*Divine Motion Canons, Left (Upper) Second Paragraph, Talking about the Divine Motion Body 神運經右（上）第二章，言神運之體
**Discourse on Training Vapours 練氣論

***Like slapping or hitting one's face will do, a technique used sometimes by boxers before a match. Showers or water on one's face, especially if cold, have also the same kind of effect.