Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Even in group dynamics, where most of the time is spent talking, the whole body is involved, as in everything human beings do.
In this episode, Shinichi Yoakoga, an expert of internal arts of Taoism, gives an insight into the profound world of bhutto dance and dragon Dao Yin. Shinichi Yovakoga and I, Roland Schuster, explore ways to balance the body during or after group dynamic training.
Enjoy the exploration. Dear Shinichi Yovakoga, I'm very happy to have you with me today and to be able to talk to you a little bit.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: I'm delighted as well. Roland.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Shinichi, I met you when I participated at one of your workshops.
And what I learned there was that there is a dancing art called bhutto, which you are practicing and teaching, and you also teach a sort of bodywork which is called dragon tao yin.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: That is correct, dragon tao yin. And the dragon part is a way of getting more specific about dao yin. So Tao yin is a little bit more the term that you would use. And then Dragon Tao Yin says it's this specific tao yan ah.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: All right. Okay. Okay.
And what, what really was stunning for me is when I joined your workshop, I realized how many muscles can be tense in my body, even if I do not feel anything, as long as I have a teacher like you. And then you guide me. And suddenly I realize all the tensions. And what I also realized and what I also was able to, was that I got rid of the tensions during the practices we did.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: That's great news.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that was really great for me, and that's what really brought me to you. I'm out of the field of group dynamics, and we are doing a group dynamic podcast here.
And one of the things I learned over the years in doing group dynamic teaching and group dynamic, so called training groups and group dynamic courses was that I realized when you sit together in a circle, which is the usual setting, when you do group dynamics, so you sit in chairs, the chairs are set up in a circle. There are a maximum of twelve people sitting on the chairs, and the whole thing lasts for one week, and one session of talking lasts for 90 minutes. And especially when I began with that thing of group dynamics, I realized that a lot of tension in my shoulders started. Sometimes a lot of tension in my back started, and sometimes tension in my body elsewhere.
It got a little less over the years when I was able to reflect on emotions. But still, if there is dense discussion, if there is intensive discussion, I realize that the muscle tension always is connected to that. And in doing a workshop like you provided last year in Vienna, I realized that is a perfect thing to balance the body again. And so I said to myself, I need to do, if I'm able to a podcast and talk with you about this body phenomenon of muscle tension. And I want to really hear about what your school of thought has a concept about this and how you think the whole thing is impacting the body, because I think that's a perfect thing to have as a tool for a group dynamic person to be able to balance all that emotional stress and emotional tension that shows up. So my question would be, what's the approach of Bhutto or dragon Dow Jin?
Regarding tension, regarding muscles, what's the approach? What are the thoughts behind that? Is there a sort of philosophy behind it? So this would be what I'm interesting in.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll start by saying that one reason that I enjoy to teach both the dragon Dao Yin and Bhutto dance is that the two of them are very, very different from each other. I mean, they can complement each other, they can be very good complements with each other, but they are very different in their approach. So the dragon Dao Yin is very specific.
And most of the release that you might do in the Dragon Dao Yin or any Dao Yin, honestly, is that you don't really everything. You create a frame with the body, and the frame requires some amount of strength or some amount of.
We can say there's some amount of tension, but there's. We can also say there's some amount of strength that holds the body up, that keeps the frame together. And then from that frame, then the rest of the body does its release. So that release from the frame.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Also.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Makes sure that there's a little bit of stretch happening between the frame and the rest of the tissues. So by the frame staying strong, if I might say, it allows the rest of the muscles or the tissues to. To not quite fall off, but to stretch off of that frame. And then you create a stretch and you create openings inside the body, so the body becomes more open on the inside.
And that can happen between the joints of the spine, for example. It could be in the very how the flesh is adhered to, or we could say even stuck to, maybe even to each other or to the bone, for example. So we oftentimes think of the bone structure as being the frame and then all the flesh dropping off of that. And there's a saying in basic chinese internal arts, which is flesh down, bones up. You could reverse that as well. But the main point is that you've got the frame staying up and then everything else going down. So then the stretch creates opening, and the opening creates more possibilities, certainly more possibilities for movement, certainly more possibilities for the way energy or information even we can just say how information travels through the body. So most people have a concept of, for example, the nervous system. And the nervous system has something like electrical impulses that go out and move through and deliver information. So we can just say that we create a little bit more space for that information to be delivered. In the process, certain groups of muscles, especially the larger muscle groups, relax.
If I say the bones are up and the flesh is down, of course, it's not 100% true. This is just a way to deliver information as a teacher, for example. But of course, there are the stabilizer muscles, which are closer to the bone, and that's keeping the bones up. And there's the large movement muscles. And those are the ones that we can release down. So it's, you know, the things that are said are oftentimes much more simple than the reality. The reality has a MUch more complex and nuanced relationship of elements.
So that's.
I mean, I can say that about Dragon Dao Yin, but I can also say that about Dao Yin's in general. And maybe before I move on to Butu, I'll just note that Dao Yin, the meaning of dao yin is to lead and to guide. And so the dao yuns that we were doing are for partly for opening the body, but also partly for creating. Or maybe we can put it this way, that the body naturally has its way of getting rid of pathogens. So when we sleep, the pores open up and the body just gets rid of. And it cleans itself out, so to speak. So oftentimes, by doing the Tao Yin's, you help support this natural functioning of the body to clean itself out. And that's a very simple way, and maybe not complete, but maybe the easiest to understand version or way to describe what Dao Yin's are now. Just moving on. Since you introduced it to Bhutto dance, Bhutto dance is quite free.
Doing the Dao Yin is very specific, very precise, and it has almost a step by step process that you should go through.
With Bhutto dance, there's a lot of freedom in the movement.
And at the same time, it's informed by other practices. So buto dance is informed, for example, by noguchi taiso. So noguchi was a fellow Michizo noguchi. Or if you say it in, you know, japanese, oftentimes say the last name first and then. And then the first name. So noguchi Michizo, he developed this noguchi taiso. And taiso itself means, like, movement practices. So he developed these movement practices that involve a huge amount of release of the body. And he actually was probably quite influenced by a lot of these chinese and japanese arts that also involve such things as what the tao Yin does. But he took it in a maybe more modern direction, or he had his modern interpretation of it, let's put it that way.
And that release in his work creates movement. So he wasn't having the same aim, for example, as Dao Yin's. But by releasing and letting go of his, we can just say general tension in the body, you create movement. Because if I'm holding myself in tension and then I release something, there is movement in that release. And then when there's movement in that release, there's movement in the body, and then that can become the beginning of a movement in a dance, for example. But Noguchi, he did not create Noguchi taiso just for dance. He created it for athletes or for anyone who moves or for dancers. And it just so happens that Bhutodance got very.
Got a lot of influence from Noguchi's work and incorporated his ideas. And so there's ideas, for example, that the body is a water bag, and that within this water bag, that there's a lot of mobility. If you have a water bag, you've got a skin on the outside, and you've got all this moving water on the inside.
I believe that this idea was one of the contributing factors to some of the ways in which we see butoh manifest.
And maybe I'll just say this, that Bhutto has a lot of different manifestations. So the influence of noguchi taiso affects some people's butoh dance. But there are many ideas of what Bhutto dance is almost as many ideas as there are dancers. And so there's some main lines and some main tendencies. But there's also some people with very different ideas from each other. Some of it looks very jagged and fast and broken and could be filled with tension, even. And some of it is very soft and very loose and very flowing. So these two very opposite seeming things could appear in a single dancer, or maybe this dancer has a general tendency towards one, and another dancer has a tendency towards the other.
So there my way to frame both the dao yin's and bhutto. So in your practice, Roland, and your experience of the workshops, how did any of that, if I might ask you the question, how did any of that land in your body? I understand that it released things a little bit more, but as you hear that, does it, I don't know, do some particular things of the Bhutto dance or some particular things of the dao yin stand in more contrast or more similarity for you?
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Well, what I didn't know, for example, was that there were such different formats, because as far as I have seen it, in your workshop, at least in the workshop, you do more the smooth, slow Bhutto style.
And I was thinking that this is Bhutto as such. So that's smooth and slow. I didn't know that there are so many different styles, but for me, there was a very, very big aha in doing that smooth movements in connection to gravity, and in doing it very, very focused. So being in the body, doing that slow movements, trying to sense tension, trying to get into the flow, it really, really helped me to calm down and settle into the here and now.
And especially when I think on my teaching and when I think on group dynamics, especially when I think on the role of the trainer or the teacher who trains group dynamics, you are confronted with a lot of emotion, openly emotion that's transported via voice, for example, and tone. You know, angry people, happy people, sad people, people talking about touching moments, people talking about their situation in the moment, and so forth. And the goal of group dynamics is to become enlightened. So you always want to become conscious of the things going on. And since consciousness is a process and never ends, it's not possible to become conscious. And then you are conscious. So it's like you become conscious, and once you're conscious, then you are conscious in your life. But that's not true. Consciousness is a process.
And for me, the whole process involves. Well, it's not only for me, biologically, the whole process involves the whole body.
And for me, for example, doing the Bhutto moves we did in the workshop, so they rather slow moves. That gives you the time to really sense your body, that gives you the time to really sense whether there are tensions or to really sense gravity and so forth. It really helped me to do what I would call rebalancing my own body.
And I think that, especially in group dynamics, if you are a teacher, because if you are a teacher, you are in a sort of position that gives you a lot of attention. It's like if you are the leader of a workshop, if you are the facilitator of a workshop, all the attention of all the workshop participants is probably on your person. So this situation always gives the body a lot to do to digest. You know, there are a lot of things approaching your body. It's sound of people that talk to you. It's the movement of the people, it's the gestures, it's the facial expression and so forth.
All those things are working on a. On a conscious and subconscious way. And I think that there is practically no chance to stay balanced. So what I searched for, and I found it inter Alaya in Bhutto that I'm able to really rebalance my body and to. Well, if you will get rid of pathogens, well, I mean, for example, adrenaline is not a pathogen as such. But if you have adrenaline in your body and do not have the chance to get rid of it by running or doing whatever exercise, so that adrenaline is burned up, then the adrenaline will be not very healthy. It will impact your body in a bad way. And for me, the whole thing is to balance the energy of the body.
And I think it's even important. And I, in the last years, I started to even do in pauses of such courses, or when I have a pause with the students, I try to include some easy, easy, easy body movements just to relax a little bit, to restore the body's balance. And as far as it is up to me, this slow sort of bhutto you did in your workshop gave me a lot of possibility to rebalance my body.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Well, one word you mentioned earlier was the word process.
And so, for me, both Bhutto and Tao Yin, and Tao Yin's is just a small part of a larger internal arts category, I might say. But both of them have as their core, and it's connected to Taoism and taoist internal arts. And both of them have this view, I might say, or. Yeah, point of view. That is all that exists. All that exists is process.
There's nothing that comes to completion. So from maybe a taoist internal arts point of view, that life is a process of creating or always creating, that we are not created. Nothing is created. There's no finishing point, but that everything is in a constant and unending process of change. And part of that is that nothing, let's just say, practically speaking, nothing reaches balance. Everything is in a process of balancing so that we're never able to rest in balance. Right? So the process of balancing is always there. With Bhutto dance, the slow movement is also connected to some basic martial arts sayings in that the basic martial art saying is that this, to go slow. If you go slow, you find out how to go smooth. But interestingly, when you figure out how to go smoothly, you start to understand how to go very quickly. So the slow promotes the smooth, and the smooth promotes the fast. And for me, that's a very good pathway to go through. Because then by going slow, I I do invest a lot more into all the small details of the movement. And then if I practice in this kind of way, moving without awareness and such, and maybe, for example, if it was martial arts, I might practice a movement again and again and again, very, very slowly. But then I start to feel like I can pick up some speed and my body has understood it a little bit more. Then I can move more quickly. Also with dance like dances that have moves that you might repeat those moves. Similarly, as the body starts to understand them, then it starts to become more efficient. We can just say it becomes more efficient, and then it can move also more quickly.
The quick or the speed comes from the smoothness, and the smoothness comes from, in a kind of way, also removing blockages. Maybe there's mental blockages, maybe there's physical blockages in the sense that maybe the muscles are not all working in the proper harmony. Or we can say balance as well, or relationship is maybe even better. I like that word better. They're not working always in the best relationship with each other. But with more time and smoothing out, then the relationship improves. And with that improvement of the relationship, things become more efficient. And have the potential then to move even slower or even faster somehow.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Ah, very interesting. And I also did not know that Dao Jin was influencing the Bhutto. This is also new for me. That's an interesting thing. And that it's a part of.
You said it's a part of Tao as such.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Well, yeah.
Taoism has many different manifestations. There's a religious Taoism, and then there's the Taoism that is more a practice. And so I have no connection to religious Taoism as such. But I do have connection to the. These. These practices. And. And usually it's under the name of Taoist in internal arts. And so, you know, all of these, in a kind of way have a. There's a part or there's a component. So Taoist internal arts is a very, very big umbrella that includes chinese medicine. It includes qigong. It includes tai chi, bagua, Xin Yi, and Daoyins. And many, many, many things. And so these are all many different practices under one roof. And they're different from each other, but they have a relationship to each other. And so daojans did not directly influence or did not directly influence Bhutto, but a lot of the ideas from Noguchi, because I have. I would say Noguchi was probably more influenced from tai chi, which can share some of the principles, a few of the principles from Taoyin's. But taiji has also. It's a different goals, has different objectives within it. And so maybe sometimes the objective of dao yin or the objective of qigong or the objective of taiji, you could do even some similar exercises, but by having different objectives, you do those exercises differently. And then I feel, from having studied Noguchi taiso, that, yeah, there's some principles in Noguchi taiso that I feel very clearly myself, know so much about how he formulated his ideas. But it feels very clear to me from doing both of them that Noguchi definitely had some influence. And then Noguchi himself is just one of many influences upon buto dance. Right? So buto dance, like many things, can be almost a collage or the influences on the butoh, or quite a collage. Anything from western modern dance, which I would say bhuto kind of went, is influenced in the sense that it almost went opposite from it. And then, you know, there's a lot of traditional japanese dances in which Bhuto is influenced, but also went opposite from them. You know, sometimes it just made rebellion and did something very, very different. But sometimes there's something at the core of some of the traditional things that Bhutto dance took and really stayed with it. It's hard to rebel against something and be separate from it. To rebel against something means you're in relationship to that thing that you're rebelling against. And so buto dance was born out of rebellion. But the rebellion against anything that it rebelled against means that it's in a really close relationship with those things it.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Was rebelling against grabbed my attention.
You mentioned internal arts, and internal means that the. Or what. Let me phrase it the other way. What does internal mean? What is meant by internal?
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Yeah, internal is oftentimes, like in those arts, they talk about having a.
There's the physical body, and then there's the energetic system, and then there's things that start to touch on or relate to spirit or spirituality. And so in the taoist internal arts, the starting point is always the body, because that's the thing that is concrete. We can touch it. We can understand about gravity, muscles, you know, and we can. We can feel. You know, we can feel into our bodies. And so we can understand our bodies through that feeling. But the problem is, I suppose, with. With feeling or anything that we endeavor to do as human beings is that we also have a certain level of. Level of distortion. Our previous experiences in life make a distortion. And that distortion isn't always negative, but it is a distortion. How we see ourselves, how we see our bodies, how we see the world has some amount of distortion to it. Sometimes extreme, sometimes not so extreme.
And in the processes of these internal arts, it's also a process of reducing or trying to clear away some of that distortion. To really see reality, if I might put it that way, for what it is and less about what we think it is.
But that's also a process.
It's hard to suddenly really see things as they are. I think that would be very shocking, honestly, for some people.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, this brings me back to group dynamics, and I think because group dynamics, as many other things, is also developing. Okay.
And so far, bodywork is partly integrated, because I know group dynamic workshops, trainings that really use, within the setting, they use bodywork for recreation, but I think it's still underdeveloped or not in the focus enough. And when you mentioned this sort of internal work and that it's also a process, I think that one of the near future changes in group dynamics will be that the body will also become more in the focus of it. Because it's not possible to have thought processes in a way that you become conscious about whatever there is, as you said, to come closer to the thing that we might call reality.
I think you also need to think about the, let's say the situation or not the situation would be the wrong word, but the shape of your body, or not the shape, but what's going on in your body. So I think it's not only enough to sit in a chair and become conscious by thinking. I think it's also important, and I like this word of internal art. I think it's also important to integrate the body in group dynamics work, for example, with certain time spans in between. Do a little bit of Tao jin for relaxation or to process the body, whatever is going on in the body, because of this intense discussion that's happening. And so it's interesting that, like you call it, this internal arts seems to have close idea, close to group dynamics idea, because group dynamics want to become conscious or want to teach people to become more conscious about what's going on. And as far as I understood it, with this Internal Art, it has the same goal.
Well, you might not say, well, it's becoming more conscious because the body is part of consciousness. The body. The consciousness is produced out of the body. It's a product of the body. So I think it's important if you want to achieve consciousness, that you also think about the situation your body is in the here and now, in the moment, you are doing whatever you're doing.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And as we talk about body and consciousness and different approaches, there's so many traditions. So, for example, Buddhism tends to go actually straight for the, if I might put it this Way, straight for the consciousness. And the consciousness then changes the energy body from this point of view. And then the energy body changes the physical body. Right. So that's the relationship that might appear in Buddhism. For example, Taoism goes exactly opposite. Taoism tends to go for, like, change the body first and then the physical body, and then that changes the energetic body, which changes the consciousness. And it's also possible to do both. Right. It's like, oh, keep changing everything, but go from both ends of it. But there are some traditions that specialize much more one direction or the other. So I know a little bit about that from Buddhism, and I know a little bit about the other way with Taoism.
And then yet again, if you think about yoga or yogic practices, I don't know so much about it. So it's, you know, so I'm not a practitioner of that at all. But it also has some similar ideas, maybe with Taoism, in the sense that there's a lot of focus on, okay, let's get the vessel or the container of the body in really good shape. And then other things then can be built upon that, including elevation, if you might say, or deepening or sparking or clarifying of consciousness.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: And what is actually the application of Tao genes, for example? So is it like, I mean, Tao genes has the goal, or you can learn it for yourself and then do it as an everyday practice, or. What is the idea of Tao genes, for example?
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah, the daojins. Like, if I were to make a kind of list for what we want to do with Tao yin, it would be something like, we want to open the body. And the opening, again, is on. Sometimes it's on a very, very subtle level of the body, and sometimes it's just the spaces in the joints, very oftentimes in the spine. And the spine sometimes gets in a lot of people a little too tight, a little too collapsed. And so just want to open up those spaces. Obviously not extremely. They want to do it in a very healthy way. We don't want a bunch of people who are falling over and loose or something like that.
But it's to open things up so that there's, again, a good flow of information through the body. So that's part of it is for Tao yin is to open things up. And then the other part is that through opening it up, you make it much more possible to move pathogens out. Part of the process of moving the pathogens out is essentially like a pressurization system. It's almost like flooding your pipes with water. And so that water flooding through the pipes then helps push out things that are pathogens.
Pathogens can be really interpreted in many different ways, but fundamentally, pathogens could be created through mental processes. I can create pathogens through my mental processes. Or maybe the pathogens come from outside. It's very cold outside, and that coldness might invade my body and then cause some problems. For example, you know, wind is a very usual thing that is pointed to in chinese medicine. And wind is also metaphorical. It's not always wind like we experience, you know, in the air. But wind is also, generally, in chinese medicine, a metaphor for change. So the ability of the body to adapt to change in the environment. So if the environment's changing and I am not in a good condition, and it starts to turn cold or starts to turn hot, then I might get sick because my body isn't adapting well enough to the change of the environment.
Maybe the last thing to say is that this pressurization system within the Dao Yin's also requires qigong. So qigong is to build up.
And now this is where we get a little esoteric, right? Because what is qi? And qi is such an unknown name, but it's also sometimes complex to describe it. But let's just say that there's a certain amount of storage of energy that can happen in the body, and that storage of energy is what can help pressurize the system, that this open system to help move pathogens outwards.
Maybe I'll just leave it there. Because even within Chinese, qi has actually many different definitions. In English, it oftentimes gets translated as energy, which is sometimes true, but it's not always true that it translates as energy, or it gets translated also sometimes as life energy, which is also sometimes true, but it's not always true. So the definition changes with what we're talking about and what the context of things are.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: Okay, all right. But as far as I understood you, Daojin would be a practice you should do on an everyday basis, or at least on a basis, on a very regular basis, if you wanna improve your health, or if you at least wanna keep your health.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: They're definitely good to do and they're definitely good to do regularly. Here's one quality of dalliance. They tire you out. You get tired doing the dao Yin.
So the dao Yin need something to balance them out. So in the internal arts, you have qigong as a way to sort of, if we might want to call it, replenish yourself or nourish yourself. So qigong is like when you eat the food, right? So if I make it that kind of analogy is youre, you're eating the food so that your body can process the food, and then you have energy for your life, but then, of course, you need to defecate. You need to move that food out of the body after it's been used. And so Tao Yin's are a little bit like that process. So the dao Yin's are the moving things out, but you need always something to bring in. You need the food or the air, right? Or the energy that the body converts the air, the body converts the food into usable energy for the body. And so this relationship is important and it depends also on how is it going in your life. If you are really exhausted already, it's not such a good idea to do too many Dao Yin's. It might be good to do something that's replenishing, and then in combination, you do the, the dao Yin's and somehow with that you get a system that works well.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: That's interesting. So might there be a mistake if I see Dao Yin, for example, as an interesting technique? If you do a group dynamic session?
Might I be wrong with that? Maybe it's too exhausting. Or is it good because there are a lot of pathogens because of the intense discussions and you sit on the chair, so you don't have a lot of body movement. So the body might already store up a lot of not healthy things because of that circumstance.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it can also depend on which Dao Yin and how long you do it and how much you do it. I would say that there are some, some dao yin practices where if you, if you do certain ones for a certain amount of time, it can just be helpful for clearing out, but won't make you so tired. Right. And the dao yin's, but if you practice them very long and.
Yeah, if you practice them for a long time and if you practice them properly, like if you do them very well, actually, and for very long, you will get tired. But it's also the case that you need to empty out in order to bring something in. So the emptying out, or the, if I put it in those terms, all these terms are convenient phrases that I'm using that are not always 100% true, but convenient for our discussion. And so if I empty out a little bit, it also can invite something else to come in. And so that's its role or that's its play. But then you also need to allow something in, you know, so it's everything again in this kind of process and balancing. So if I am simple and I say, okay, the dao yuns and the qigong balance each other out. And so when I was, if I might go to the dragon Tao yin, the dragon dao Yin that I was teaching at in Vienna at impostance, they have, they have built into them already a little bit of qigong in that form as well as the dao yin. So it's already trying to make some kind of balancing process within it.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: Ah, okay, that's interesting. Yeah, that might be an interesting way, because then, as you say, you would have the balance and you wouldn't have to be worried that you are emptying yourself too much out and become too much too tired, for example. Yeah.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: And then if you do become tired, then just notice it, right? Oh, I'm getting tired. Okay, maybe that's enough.
Can be. I mean, it's also good to sometimes to tire yourself out, but then after you've tired yourself out to take some time to rest or to replenish or just eat some food, for example, you know, or do things that you feel that can you bring you back your energy.
If you go jogging, for example, or you do some kind of other physical exercise, it has the interesting characteristic during physical exercise where you can tire yourself out, but you can also create energy through that process and also make it more efficient for the body to generate the energy. So again, there's these relationships, and to keep the process of balancing these relationships is very much a part of the internal arts. Something is strong and other something is strong in order so that something can release. So release requires some amount of strength, you know, something to release against sometimes.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: Ah, that's interesting. Yeah. And, and what I figured out when I was listening, I wondered, because I was bringing in the terms emotions, but I realized maybe it's a better idea to ask you whether this concept of emotions is something you have in this internal arts concept. Is there something like emotions? Or would you call this in another way? Or do you have another concept of that within this Tao yin or the.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Dragon Tao yin emotions are definitely well addressed in a lot of these Chinese. The taoist internal arts and the emotions, on one hand, they make life rather interesting, doesn't it, that we have emotions. So why not have an interesting life? Why not? And oftentimes when emotions are problematic is because something has become one. Emotion, perhaps has become far too strong, you know, so then we find ourselves moving, perhaps a bit out of balance in some fashion, and then we need to rebalance. And so that's one way of looking at emotions from, you know, from taoist internal arts.
And, and then when these emotions come and it's maybe too strong in one direction, sometimes that's maybe coming from a situation. It can be, but it can also be coming from what is going on on the physical level, what's happening with the physical body. And so chinese medicine, for example, associates certain emotions with certain organ systems in the body.
And the organ systems are just ways of naming relationships, again, within the body, that if you talk about the kidney system, for example, inside the body, it's not just your kidneys, not just these two small little things on your back, but instead it's referring to, yes, the kidneys, but also to your bone marrow inside. It's also referring to your brain.
It's referring to something that, again, is existing in relationship. So the chinese arts in general really like to have poetic names, right? Or concrete names, or to say dragon, for example. Dragon dao yin is a somewhat poetic name.
The poetry are coded words that stand for or mean or indicate something very concrete in the body. So dragon is generally indicating the spine. So if I say dragon, Tao yin, it really is an indicator that I'm working with the spine from a perspective of doing tao yin work. So I'm opening up the spine and I'm making the spine also nothing necessarily more flexible, although that could be as well. But to have maybe what we call strength and elasticity, the ability to open and to move with some amount of support and some amount of strength on.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: One level and another concept, what came to my focus lastly was also fascia.
Do you work with that also? Is this integrated in this concept?
[00:50:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
Fascia isn't named directly in a lot of these chinese internal arts. They tend to have a more general term, which includes the fascia, and they tend to say sinews or connective tissues.
And so these sinews or these connective tissues within the body are separate from the muscles.
It's actually the case with these arts that it is the fascia and these connective tissues, which are almost much more. They are much more the focus than the muscles. The muscles are necessary, the muscles are useful, and they serve their role. But these connective tissues are oftentimes developed in these arts for many different reasons.
If I keep it on a much more, again, maybe avoiding any kind of esoteric thing having to do with chi and such, but more like by doing some of these processes, like I mentioned at the beginning, where I might be allowing my tissues to relax, but I'm keeping my body frame, or the bones and the support muscles for the bones. If I'm keeping that strong, then that pull between then strengthens, ends up strengthening the connective tissues, including the fascia. And it creates stress or creates constructive stress for the body, in the same way that doing any exercise is stress for the body that is constructive and helps make it stronger. That process also makes the fascia and other elements that already have a lot of connection, but it strengthens those connections so the body becomes stronger, not through muscle, but through the connections between things becoming stronger.
[00:52:23] Speaker A: So, again, it's sort of a really complex, interconnected thing that, well, that's like communicating, like the bones communicating with certain muscles and this connective tissues, you said, and so forth. And this is connected also to thoughts and emotions.
[00:52:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Everything has its role in the relationship somehow.
And then things are problematic only when one thing becomes too weak or one thing becomes too strong, or two things become too weak and two things become too strong. It doesn't matter the number, but that the relative strength or weakness or excess or deficiency. To use more chinese medicine terms, when you have something become too deficient or something become too excessive, perhaps then other parts of the system suffer because of that. And then it's the same with the emotions too strong in some emotion, even joy. Right.
Can become problematic if it goes too far.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: Let me ask you. So I think this was really a very interesting journey into this concept of Tao yin and of bhutou. And now we talked a lot about Tao yin and came a little bit away from Bhutto. But I think this, this does make sense, because when I got you, right, is that Bhutto is a sort of dance that is done by different artists and maybe done also by amateurs, just for fun. But it seems that the concept of Dao yin, and especially also your concept of the dragon daojin, is more related to a sort of consciousness about body, about balance, as you said, you even balanced daojins in the dragon daojins with qigong aspects because you wanted to balance this sort of tiring taojins with some more relaxing or recovering qigong concept.
Is that right?
[00:55:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And all those things that I'm mentioning about the Dao Yin and qigong and such, certainly not.
I'm really not inventing anything. These are classical.
You know, these are classical teachings. And after centuries and centuries and centuries of work on these things, it's really good to follow.
Yeah. To follow in the. If you might say, to follow in the footsteps of those.
Of those. Of those teachings. And Bhutto, on the other hand, is this very.
There's a lot of room for creativity, and I think I appreciate, just in my own life, that I have room for one thing that has, like, you must be pretty exact in step by step in this process, and then another thing where, like, oh, I have this idea. Oh, this is something I'd like to try. Oh, maybe this. So Bhutto becomes also a format for experimentation, if I might say. Bhutto is an experimental form and should remain so, because if Bhutto becomes fixed, then, okay, then it stops becoming an experimental form. And maybe that is the destiny of all forms. Maybe everything started off experimental and then eventually gets fixed. But then I feel like, yeah, okay, maybe Bhutto, at some point in the future gets fixed, and it's like, okay, this is exactly what Bhutto is. And there's not so much experimentation, but then, of course, something else must arise to fulfill that kind of process of experimentation.
[00:56:44] Speaker A: That's interesting. Yeah, that's like, a colleague of mine called this unfinished business. Like life is always unfinished business. You inherit something, but you also need to invent it on your own, sort of, and keep on the heritage and do create something new within your lifespan and so forth.
[00:57:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I would agree. And finish business. It's a nice term.
[00:57:21] Speaker A: Well, let me ask you a question as a sort of interesting ending point. Maybe if you think on the setting of group dynamics. So people are sitting in a circle of chairs and talking with each other rather intensely. So very connected most of the time. Also very devoted. So you as a.
As a person in dancing arts and Taojin's internal art, what would you suggest for that setting to be balanced by?
[00:58:13] Speaker B: Well, I mean, so I have not experienced it. So whatever I say comes from a complete lack of experience of the process that you are involved in. So I haven't witnessed it, but if I'm imagining just the process of people in a circle speaking and sitting in chairs, then perhaps it would be useful to have maybe a time period or some kind of, you know, okay, let's say 20 minutes of talking and then there's some kind of physical exercise. It doesn't need to be complex, but something to just re connect to something of the body. And it could be doing something like Dao Yin's or yoga or some kind of exercises that you learned in high school. It doesn't matter. It's like something, I mean, it does matter. It does. You know, they're different things, but it's something that re engages the body and gets us out of just the purely intellectual process.
And then I can also wonder with the sitting itself, like, how are people sitting right? And what kind of chairs are people sitting in? That can also make a big difference. If I'm sitting in such a way so that my body's kind of bent over and slumped or something like that, it can be very different than if I'm sitting up and my, my back is straight. And that can make a difference in how I feel, and I can also make a difference in how information is received and expressed. So that would be another like, possibility, you know, again, not knowing or not having seen the process, but just imagining people in chairs in a circle and talking that to balance the intellectual process with a more physical process, I think would be of great benefit.
[01:00:11] Speaker A: Dear Sinichi, I'm very happy to have you here with me today and to be able to have talked to you. So it was a great pleasure for me. Thank you very much for joining me in our podcast.
[01:00:27] Speaker B: Thank you, Roland. I really appreciate the invitation and the conversation. Thank you so much.
[01:00:32] Speaker A: This was an episode about group dynamics and the body.
Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Stay tuned to the group Dynamics podcast.
