By Paul Cavel, Posted January 2009

Separate and combine is a Taoist principle for deep learning that has been used for millennia. The principle states that once a basic movement, set or form has been absorbed or established the practitioner seeks to tease out the individual components before moving on to study that movement, set or form as it is practised with all its other components. Taoists found that this was the most effective and efficient method for learning any new skill and stabilizing it in the body.

When practising qigong, bagua and tai chi the majority of people rarely, if ever, break down the material into component pieces and rebuild it. This creates a glass ceiling and prevents practitioners from reaching their full potential.

Your internal practice and, your body for that matter, run in much the same way as a high-quality car with attention to detail being paid to each one of the component pieces to create a cohesive, smooth running car.

Prototype and racing cars are repeatedly taken apart and put back together again in order to fix whatever breaks down while simultaneously upgrading any component to maximize performance. Many people take better care of their cars than their bodies.

Translating High-performance to Your Qigong Practice

Even if you are not interested in generating a high-performance body, most people would like a pain- and disease-free existence with more flexibility, an enhanced immune system, balanced emotions and a mind that can relax and let go. These goals are achieved through qigong practice (both bagua and tai chi are forms of qigong) by the same process of overhauling each component—and each body part—upgrading and integrating their function.

Tomorrow’s health is created today because, unlike a car, you can’t just buy a new body part off the shelf when something gives out or diminishes in its functioning and have your doctor replace it for you—not yet anyway.

The efficiency of your qigong depends upon two streams of integration. The first stream is all your body parts including the arms, legs, spine, torso, internal organs, neck and head; second is the neigong components, including your alignments, breathing, lengthening, twisting, pulsing and energetic flows. So, unless you separate out how each body part moves and how each neigong component operates individually, then practising in pairs, next in small groups and, finally, combining everything together into one seamless whole, your qigong practice will never give you the range and depth of potential benefits. When each piece is integrated with all others, each component is multiplied by the others 2x2x2x2 and down the chain. When the pieces are not integrated the maximum effect is addition, 2+2+2+2. You don’t have to do the math to know that the end result is vastly different.

The bulk of what people practise from various traditions lacks depth and integration. Both of these issues can be corrected by the principle of separate and combine. If you practise daily just doing your usual set most people will focus on their favourite aspect or the general flow; they do not have the capacity to focus on the many layers and components within a given set. If you find this happening to you, watch it for a bit—you can learn a lot by just watching. If you have not learnt and practised each individual layer adequately enough, you will not be able to achieve fine control and integration. You don’t have to know everything that is meant to be found within each component to explore it at a depth that will yield powerful health benefits.

When you receive traditional Taoist training in the Water method you learn each new skill piece by piece, building it up, looking at the whole, then deconstructing it and once again rebuilding it. When the whole starts to come together you can then take it apart to explore it at ever finer layers. The intent is to improve everything that is present and add more depth and complexity with the strong foundation you have established.

Three Stages of Separate and Combine

Stage One: Broken Practice
First you take a piece of the body, for example, an arm, and work it into a given form. Next you work the other arm, then both together. Then the body’s torso motion is added and finally with legs active. Or take a neigong component, such as lengthening, and work on it with a) the arm b) the torso and arm, and c) the legs, torso and arm. Finally you integrate lengthening into your form. This all comes under the heading of broken practice until it is all integrated into one whole.

Stage Two: Continuous Practice
Stage two arrives when you have enough experience with a specific component within a given form. Now you practise the repetitive movements of qigong continuously, keeping most of the material on autopilot. The mind focuses on one aspect of the work—either a particular body part or a neigong component—or both at any given time. Once this piece of work is stabilised deeply within you, move on to the next component until you find that everything is running smoothly and staying connected. This is under the hat of continuous practice.

If you don’t stay with practising stage two for long enough, the foundation is not strong enough to hold it and the whole process becomes diluted and diminishes the degree of benefits you will reap from your practice. You oscillate between stage one and two—back and forth and back again—refining and deepening your practice as you go along. Each time you repeat stage two make a mental note of what doesn’t flow and integrate. The next time you practice start with that component using stage one and finishing with the continuous practice of stage two.

Stage Three: Awareness
With enough practice you will eventually reach the third stage. There’s no need to rush it. Up until now everything has been directed by the intent, which focuses on a particular component or process. Your intent is capable of focusing on between one and nine data points at any moment in time. Since you will conceivably be focusing on many more components than nine, your awareness must become activated because of the sheer quantity of the material for which your attention is required.

The object here is that the awareness of the mind scans everything at the same time in a similar way to a security guard scanning many screens in a secured building. If the system suddenly detects that any component is offline or not operating at its optimum capacity, then the awareness sends its intent to fix that piece. Once the component is fixed and integrated your intent hands back the job to the awareness.

Another metaphor can be found in your vision. When you stand in a room and stare hard at a particular object, everything else goes out of focus—almost as if it disappears. When you subsequently relax your eyes and don’t focus on any particular object, everything in the room suddenly comes into soft focus. Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.

Keep Upgrading

Working with the three stages of separate and combine will help you to improve your qigong at a steady pace. You can feel your body come alive and your chi will really start to flow and grow. The benefits you get from each practice session increase dramatically and you enter into a deeper space within yourself. This naturally elongates your practice and eliminates effort and strain.

This is the moment that you become intimately aware of the benefits you are receiving from your practice—not because you read about them in a book or someone tells you about them, but because you feel positive change flowing and growing within your body, mind and chi directly.

These experiences create a strong drive to continue practising and the cycle of separate-combine-separate-combine. The most experienced practitioners do not worry about how long it takes because they know this method yields profound and multi-layered results. Once you come to the realisation that there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, no trophy to obtain, you can simply relax and be in the moment—be at one with your practice.

Acceptance and being content naturally emerges as everything inside you becomes more balanced and harmonised with all other parts. This is the path on which a Taoist walks, the road he travels—not to any particular destination, but to a deeper and more profound knowledge and understanding of himself, the world in which he lives and the universe through direct experience.

Happy practising,
Paul

© 2009 Paul Cavel—All rights reserved.
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