Death Point Striking For Peace
I feel safe in the presence of stress and aggression. I speak bravely and hold a confident attitude because I can kill with my bare hands. What silly rules of etiquette, scary social norms, or sadistic corporate policies stand in my way? What deviant criminal or sadistic fool can harm my good will? None. I remain calm and watchful in the midst of aggression and chaos.
I won’t need to compromise my principles. I protect those close to me (including myself), my family, my friends, and anyone who stands nearby. And I cannot be provoked, with pushing or screaming, into chaotic scenarios. Taijiquan — the system of martial-art training methods including martial pushing hands and death point strike training — lets me live so well.
Martial Stillness
I remain calm and present — often achieving more quiet, more calm, and more presence — when confronted with aggression or chaos. I trust that my reflexive responses will be appropriate to any aggressor, situation, and level of violence; I just turn on my senses and wake up. It’s nice. It’s good for everyone’s safety.
You could attend varieties of seminars that teach deadly point strikes. But it’s not enough to know the points and the angles of attack. You must be able to touch those points on aggressors: in the midst of chaos. While we must build some intellectual knowledge of the acu-points, we must also develop real methods to hit them.
To emulate chaos and forces generated by attackers, we train the martial art aspects of Taijiquan these ways…
- Qigong and natural motion studies instill stillness and an ability to see and hear more clearly.
- Strike things the Taiji martial art way! Strike mitts and pads using elastic, waist-generated, fast, fierce fight-power — Fa-jing!
- Practice Tai Chi Chuan Forms. This way, if done right and well, we program our bodies to strike at particular points at peculiar angles. It’s a perfect, subconscious training device!
- Push-hands using pressure develops a capacity to cope with real force; change speeds and levels of force to learn to accept and divert whatever force presses on us.
- Study acupuncture points from Traditional Chinese Medicine. Learn to touch one another’s points (lightly, never with Fa-jing) to see and sense proper angles, distance, and timing, with varieties of opponents.
Deep-quiet responses may provoke quiet and calm in an aggressor, settling a hot situation rather than heating it. Real stillness further allows for unpredictable actions. Using heart sounds and stillness as a guide, not using common, fearful defensiveness, actions and choices take on a clearer, cleaner resonance; heart sounds bring calm into wild scenarios. Inner confidence overwhelms, projects outward, and soothes others.
Fighting for Peace
Learning to fight, to maim, and to kill expands available choices in every scenario. Widening a spectrum of choices — from backing away peacefully to attacking ruthlessly — creates a vast and powerful array of options. Allowing stillness to enter mental, emotional, and physical bodies, one can allow the heart to guide, choosing proper and necessary actions.
The real challenge: maintain calm under pressure. Too often, I’ve seen soft-stylists tense when they feel real forces approach. It’s difficult indeed and it requires work to teach one’s body to maintain calm even as the pressure cooker of martial-arts training increases. Real stillness, deep calm, and true quiet, however, require these early, preemptive pressures. Increasing pressures reveal natural abilities and uncover subtle skills to cope with stress and tension while under duress.
Begin soft and end soft but allow for a crescendo of struggle, of force, and of real work inside Taiji martial-arts training drills. Use repetitive actions, not random hand-pushing, to create patterns that gain amperage as the pattern develops. A tight, pressurized push-hands drills, for example, may uncover and flush out fears and anxieties. In such a controlled scenario, one releases emotion and realizes more and more competence and confidence. At some point, the acu-points on the opponent’s body can be seen.
The internal, systematic, martial-art of Taijiquan, permits studies of aggression and fighting practices that can begin softly and increase in pressure, duress, and intensity as experience grows. Such martial methods explore and release personal stress and tension in safe ways, so that, when (or if) the real pressure is on, options do not diminish, but expand.
Peace of Fighting
Studying fighting, maiming, and killing methods expands awareness about the fragility of human beings, about being alive. I am fragile. I see that others are too. Everyone — even the apparently toughest loudmouth — is vulnerable and fragile.
Because I see and empathize with this vulnerability, I can show my vulnerabilities. By showing it, paradoxically, I am safer.
The calm that one can exude in stressful scenarios has, at its root, an acceptance of vulnerability of life, the tedious nature of existence. And we all have it, somewhere, inside. It’s that little something that one can tune to in others, to let them release their angst and terror, their defensiveness and aggression, and let them calm down.
But it take guts. It requires the tender heart of a warrior. And to get that: learn to fight. No one can be invulnerable, but everyone can feel safe. Everyone can tap the sensitivity and vulnerability at the heart of us all.
Study Death Point Striking. It’s a fragile art of war and a hearty study of peace.
[This was from...17 September 2008.]
When I study and practice Taiji, especailly striking, I do feel safer in my life. I know I can prevent bad stuff from happening. When I fall behind in my practice I don’t feel as safe, therefore less confident in my abilities. Keeping up the practice, keeps up my strength.
Thanks Steven for helping me with that insight. Great post!
Good post Steven. Learning and practicing striking, and healing, make us all safer. When our egos are kept in check we can walk away from insults delivered from insecurity as winners, knowing we’ve kept the other safe from their own inability to control themselves. When we can defend ourselves effectively, we have more options.
This has been my favorite article since I first set eyes on it over a year ago.
Since that time I have studied in the ways mentioned above through Steven Smith and the WTBA system. This article still says it perfect for me.
“Study Death Point Striking. It’s a fragile art of war and a hearty study of peace.”
If you hit somebody hard enough to kill him, does that count as a death touch?
Maybe a death smash
Yep. You bet. Smash sounds scarier than the razor precision of dim-mak finesse.
In the late eighties, late one night, I tried to break up a beach party fight. I took one accidental punch right on the tip of my jaw, and that was it… I woke up a few minutes later, bitching that “I’ll get that guy!”
He didn’t know point striking on purpose, but he got it right: straight in and slightly downward on CV 24.
Death Points is dramatic, eh? Pressure points or acu-points is more accurate, I suppose.
Those who train in softness must experience hardness. Those who train in hardness must experience softness!
Even though I am a karate stylist I try to utilize similar drills and modes of study as you describe because all of what you say is true. The methods of combat through Taiji, including death point striking and the focus on naturalness, are critically important to real self defense.
On the other hand I make sure to maintain the hardness of the real world and not lose grip of what its like to have a slobbering drunk trying to punch you in the face. Something like that can’t be talked about, and must be approached in training in the form of resistance, tightness, and a lack of boundaries during freestyle drills. If you don’t experience failure from time to time during your training then you are still too far inside of your box.
Matt, no doubt you utilize similar drills, philosophies, and methods to acquire good self-defense and good inner principles. I read your articles… good stuff. I dig your showing of Gojushiho.
In internal arts there’s a specific and peculiar way to combine hard and soft: soft on the outside, hard on the inside. Not hard on the outside: no knuckle hardening, for example. It’s as they say…iron wrapped in cotton. And it’s a close approximation to what you’d feel when you press on someone who has IT.
It’s like they’re really quite nice, soft people that feel as if their skeleton’s bolted into the earth.
Very strange, indeed.
Without naming them all, how many instant death points are there?
Ones that work quickly and effectively that is.
Not counting attacks to the throat or other well known weak spots that even dogs know about. (dogs go for the throat and the groin arteries)
Thanks!
Matt, your comments were highly interesting to me. I find that one of my largest flaws is I am not soft enough, I present far too much to my duifang to push on.
I’ve had drunk people, even friends, try to hit me in the face to see how I would react. I’ve yet to find a drunk who can make his fists arrive at my location before it has changed.
It’s a good question. But there’s a lot of accessible points. I thought about digging through some manuals to provide an answer, when the answer suddenly struck me: none. (And again: death points is a bit dramatic…)
All point strikes require either compliance or lack of awareness to work. There’s a whole lotta Youtube videos that show the “effectiveness” of point striking, but most use compliant fools. You will not be able to kill me by poking me in the throat, because I, like you, will move. (One can force compliance…but that’s another story.)
There’s lots of points. For my own part, most are far more accessible under duress than one would think. They can become visible to the eye and to the touch. How many? That I trust (including neck points)…
17.
Thank you kindly for your considerate reply.
One spoke well in a past post. We feel peace against hostility and passion for those in turmoil against their own spirit. It is against such conditions that the arts were first formed.
We deal in Aikedo of sorts and the true martial artist IS a healer and a fighter. A healer first in the way of common practice. We must deal first with the dis-ease of the client. For all are clients of our good work. Then as it is offered to us in some of the only forms others are able to express we accept the force and change the form to redirect the energy that has made dis-ease in the client.
The change in the offered force is accepted thereby leading to recovery or the force is redirected back in magnitude to that with which it is offerd for change. Destruction or death is the result of a non compliant client to the change offered in turn for the sickness being healed. The mind that accepts change is healed and those which do not are destined for disolution. It is of the true Practitioner of the Arts to understand self and know why one believes in their own frailty, then trust between the spirits is formed and healing can be accomplished.
The best martial art is accomplished through harmony and only against distressed spirit is the destructive force of the Dim mak ever needed or used.
Peace to you