Bagua Zhang’s most salient feature is its Circle Walking practice. However, before you start to walk the circle, there are a few other “steps” to take first.
Just like any other sport, order and progression matters. Compared to cooking, the sequence of events matter. Gorden Ramsay can give me the exact same ingredients he uses to make a meal, and I will not be able to replicate his work.
Even if Gordon Ramsay told me the exact details of each step, I still won’t be able to make food taste good. For example (I am making this up, don’t know how Gordon preps his salmon, go take his Master Class):
- Thaw frozen salmon
- Marinate with salt and pepper for 30 minutes
- Heat oven to 350F
- Put salmon in oven for 20 minutes
Sounds simple right? What if I mixed up the order?
- Put salmon in oven for 20 minutes
- Marinate salmon with salt and pepper for 30 minutes
- Heat oven to 350F
- Thaw frozen salmon
Exact same details with each instruction. However, doesn’t it sound ridiculous? The results would be ridiculous, too. Everybody wants to skip to the end without doing the prep work.
Can you take calculus and trigonometry without passing 3rd grade math? 5th grade math?
So the WHY do Bagua people always skip right to circle walking?!
Anyway, for our Cheng Style Bagua practice, we have 4 basic building blocks to get to prep us for circle walking. Order matters. Different Bagua styles do it slightly different, and that’s ok. As long as you understand why you are doing what.
Our 4 step progression is:
- Stance Work a.k.a post training
- Small Steps
- Mud Steps
- Circle Walk
I will be linking posts to the above 4 points as I finish writing them.
The progression is just like a baby learning how to run.
- The baby learns to stand
- The baby learns to take baby steps
- The baby walks regularly
- The baby can now run and turn and go nuts
We don’t expect a baby to run and jump before doing all the previous steps. So we should treat our Bagua progression with the same expectations and seriousness.
