The Cross and the Six Directions

沉肩墜肘，含胸拔背

Sink the shoulders and drop the elbows; contain the chest and pull up the back

鬆腰坐胯，開襠膝撐

Relax the waist and sit the hips; open the crotch and have the knee brace

Once the evolutive principles behind the figure of the bow are understood, one has to expand the connectivity of the fascias by connecting different lines together, and their elasticity by going beyond lines into surfaces and volumes.
To do so, the principle of the cross has to be applied, not only to learn to connect vertical and horizontal lines in order to keep whole sections of one's body connected together, but also as a key to understand how to work from line elasticity to whole surfaces and even volumes, the six directions.

A Cross To Connect

Let us build from the example of the previous post, "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II".

Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II

What was described through the principle of the bow was mainly line stretching, going from the fingers of one hand to the other through the chest, horizontally in this case. In this posture, one actually also simultaneously stretches the lines going from the feet all the way up to the head through proper alignment. Let us take, again, the chest as an example. Containing the chest, which is at least aligning the sternum with the shoulders, reconnects not only the lines of fascias from a shoulder to another but the ones from the stomach to the neck. If one then slightly has his/her chin pulled in and his/her occiput pulled up while his/her stomach is "swallowed", the vertical lines from the hips to the top of the head will be reconnected. At this point the sternum becomes the centre of the cross made by the vertical lines from the hips to to the head and the horizontal ones from one hand to the other. Doing so not only improves the general elasticity of the fascias by literally quartering the sternum, but it is also a means to connect the arms and the chest to the head and the stomach. This means that any move on one part will have some repercussion on the others, a step towards the whole body force. To reach it, it is then a matter of finding the important crosses that allows to link all the lines of fascias together, more or less the chest, the waist and the hips.

Then, the training follows the three phases described in the previous post. Indeed once one's chest has become flexible enough, he/she has to train how to recreate the process actively and go from straightness to roundness, the cross becoming more a groin vault, the round back being both a vertical and an horizontal transformation.

Once the cross is understood, by changing the process from passive to active (see The Bow, Cornerstone of Elasticity), one can actually apply it to any part of the body and extend it to six directions.

From Two to Six Directions

The bow, as described in the previous post, is a matter of stretching lines, but our body is three dimensional, which means connectives tissues extend in the body in all directions, hence the idea of the six directions, up and down, left and right and front and back, to characterise them. Fascias being then a three dimension net, one should be able to stretch them in all directions, left and right, up and down and front and back.

In order to do so, one has to go step by step, the first one being two dimensions and the cross described earlier. Indeed, by training the cross to connect vertical and horizontal lines of fascias in "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II", one can, by going from a passive process to an active one, slowly understand how to quarter any part of the fascias in the body. If such quartering is two dimensional in the beginning, up and down and left and right, one can extend it to three dimensions by finding the front to back lines. The easiest part of the body to start training is the upper arm, where changes are easy to see or touch. For the sake of the demonstration, let's again consider "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II"  where the arms are hold horizontally. First one has to learn to extend the fascia lines of the upper arm in length from the shoulder to the elbow. Then, through the cross, one shall try to extend them in height, towards the upper part and down part of the upper arm. When able to simultaneously stretch in length and in height, one will finally start to learn to stretch the lines thickness, from front to back part of the arm. Done properly, one can extend his/her upper arm in all six directions, making it tense everywhere, the internal application of such principle.

Furthermore, such training goes beyond just generating force, it is a means to slow down the ageing process which makes connective tissues loose their elasticity, the flesh lose firmness, going from the fullness of a baby to skinny and sagging for old people.

It is also interesting to notice that the first way to generate power through connective tissues extension will sort of result in trying to inflate the arm by extending it in all directions while muscle contraction works by contracting, hence reducing the volume of the muscle mass, quite in opposite ways.

The bow, the cross and the six directions describe how to generate force according to internal practices by first extending all and any connective tissues, because stretching and then extension are the first and easiest way to understand how to work with fascias elasticity. Once understood, one has to work on springiness, following the same principles but while retracting the connective tissues towards the centre of the cross or of the six directions. When the two phases of movement, extending and retracting, 伸縮, or curling up into a ball and straightening up, 團挺, are understood, one will be on his/her way to the whole body force. Still, force is just force and it is just a part of power in internal practices because the latter also includes the notion of vitality, an even more crucial part to be trained for those practices