A Journey Through the Jins – Coiling, Drilling, Wrapping, and Silk Reeling

In some ways, we have left the most advanced till last on this tour of some of the innumerable Jins that constitute the fluid dynamics of an encounter with an opponent if you practice any of the Chinese Internal Martial Arts. While it would be impossible to do any kind of simplified Tai Chi forms of any style, even if only for health-related purposes, without having some idea of how to ward-off, roll-back, press or push, and it would be equally impossible to participate in a friendly bout of push hands if you had no concept of warding off, sensing and neutralising, there are, as you have seen in this series, so many different subtle types of Jin within these seemingly basic processes that it’s incredibly difficult to list them all. In fact, it would be counter-productive to try to remember even half of them in any real-life encounter that could take place in less than a second and lead to “game over” before you have time to blink. 

No matter how much you slow down your training in order to identify and understand these various forces and energies, and no matter how much you study the meridians and how to direct the flow of your Qi, in the end it comes down to what you are being rather than anything you are doing. In this case, as well as being like an inflated ball that can roll or bounce things in any direction, you can be like a snake that can writhe and coil in a dynamic manner to overturn, embroil and perplex your opponent.  Also sometimes likened to water flowing through a pressure hose, these qualities are generated not by hard, physical, muscular strength but by the synchronised use of every part of your body including your bones, ligaments, muscles, tendons and, especially, the connective tissues (fascia) that hold them all together.  

Whatever metaphor appeals to you, your hosepipes need to be flexible, kink-free and connected to a tap, your power drills need to be charged or plugged in, and your snakes need to be actually alive and free and full of energy. 

When you feel like this, and have your fascia working within you like the string within your “string of pearls”, you can experience the whole-body connectedness and flow within your forms and partner work that makes it difficult for an opponent to get hold of you, and leaves them unable to escape when your tidal wave of An Jin engulfs them, your snake spits poison through your fingers, your pressure hose blasts them and knocks them over, or your bagua whirlwind wraps them up and spits them out. 

This may sound a bit over-poetic, but in terms of your forms, these are ideas that can lead to the grace and fluidity that Tai Chi is famous for. In a fight, this feeling of springy resilience and coiling, reeling, drilling, spiralling energy can let your body respond to incoming forces very naturally, without the slowness of having to spend any time deliberately thinking things through. This is what brings you to what the grand masters of the internal arts refer to as the spontaneous state, where thought becomes unnecessary and you are one with the Tao. 

In a practical sense, you can study the effectiveness of these coiling, spiralling, drilling qualities by looking at a few examples. 

If you were in the unfortunate position of needing to apply a finger-jab to a very hostile person’s neck (a so-called “Dim Mak strike” or Dian Xue) you could just lift up your hand, stretch your arm out to poke your opponent in their neck and then stop to congratulate yourself on hitting them in the right place to cause them some discomfort, but then it might not be too surprising to find that, before you can think about pulling your hand away from said neck, they have already grabbed you by the wrist and begun to retaliate in ways you are unlikely to enjoy. If, however, your strike arises from the coiling energy within your entire body and spirals through your arm towards its target, you will find that the arm is already on its way back to you with the recoiling energy of a stretched spring. Coiling out and recoiling in occur as one smooth, continuous movement. In physics, this is called a harmonic oscillator. 

Your arm can also coil inwards or outwards to free itself from an opponent’s intended grip, while wrapping itself around their arm to control it, repel it or reel them in, just as, when you are using a Tai Chi straight sword (Jian), your sword can wrap around your opponent’s blade to control it and keep it at bay. 

As your arms snake around, you can pull in energy to store in your dantien and release it as a punch, push, palm strike, elbow strike or whatever else feels appropriate in that situation. A one-inch punch can be even more devastating if it twists like a drill bit as it is delivered. 

In your push hands, you are aware of the ways in which your arms can circle, such as outwards, inwards or both in the same direction, vertically, horizontally, diagonally or any way you choose, as long as you remember that this is not the arms alone doing their own thing. All these circles are generated from the circling energies within your whole body. You might be able to use one hand alone to whisk an egg, but you would need your whole body to turn a handle winding up a steel hawser. 

These elastic spiralling qualities are present in all the Chinese Internal Martial Arts, and are the very essence of Tai Chi Chuan and, especially, Bagua Zhang where it is very visible in the innumerable palm changes such as the triple palm change in Lion Plays with Ball. Even when your momentum is directed straight forward in your practice of Xing Yi Chuan, with your Qi rising from your dantien like steam from a kettle and your Jins allowing you to propel yourself explosively through your opponent, you can still feel the twisting, spiralling energy through your waist and limbs. 

Once you have this whole-body awareness and connectedness, in whatever art or style you practice, all your Jins can work together very naturally, in harmony with your breathing, and you will be well on your way to mastery of that art.