1.4 Centres

We've taken some time to explore the use of genki to the body. Whilst I'd hope eventually understanding all of ki would be valuable for the dedicated student, appreciating that ki effectively carries a message around the body will suffice for now.

Let's go back to the scene of Pan and Bunny. The impression ki leaves on the senses is a holistic one, genki alone not differentiating between inside and outside the body. Based on my own experience though I'll break the image down into its components. Let's discuss the source of ki.

[ Figure 1 ]

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The density of ki within Pan and Bunny, highlighting their ki-centres.

I've subtracted the aura from the image to be clearer. Internally genki is densest in regions of flow and the areas that govern it, particularly the torso and to some extent the head. The densest region, represented as a richness in ki-sense, is the source and centre, residing in the lower part of the torso. Both Bunny and Pan have one. Genki can be thought of as radiating out from a central point; in the same way a fountain viewed from above has water flowing from the centre without a visible source (the water pipe hidden in the third spatial dimension), so your genki appears to flow from an invisible pipe outwards in all three dimensions. Despite the pipe not being observable, with enough time studying the water leaving the fountain one can infer something about the flow-rate of water, the pipe size from the water pressure and how large the reservoir of water is that serves the fountain. The same logic applies with the centre - by understanding the dynamics of the genki leaving one can infer an effective spherical size of the reservoir, flow rate and density. To talk of the centre having both size and capacity and not having a definitive edge in reality isn't contradictory in this sense. Thankfully, you personally can have some intuitive sense of your own centre's hidden parameters without performing the mathematics, just only your own.

[ Figure 2 ]

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Goten and the so-named Mr Paozusaurus. His centre is larger than Goten's, but unaffected by his missing tail. I confess I am the reason he is missing his tail; how Goten managed to be on friendly terms with him I'll never know.

As you may be able to tell from the images of both Pan and Bunny, and Goten and Mr Paozusaurus, there is a correlation between a being's size and the size of the centre. On average a larger animal will have a larger power level, as the more body mass an animal has the more genki will be needed to monitor homeostasis. For reasons I'll expand upon in a later section, the density of ki remains roughly consistent between subspecies. This means an animal twice the size of a family member will have twice the power level. This extends to zoomorphic and teratoidal people having centre sizes somewhere between their anthropoid equivalent and animal species. There are techniques able to change the size of the body and centre itself. A doubling in size directly leads to a doubling in energy output increase, too. In addition there are many factors that influence base power level other than the size of the centre, which clouds the otherwise tight correlation.

Here begins the first exercise. You are going to find your centre - after some preliminary preparations, of course. Don't panic if you cannot do this straight away, the technique does take practice. I've positioned this exercise early in the textbook to whet your appetite for the more practical elements to come, and to give you a chance to hone your skill whilst reading the next few sections.

Finding and understanding your exact centre is not something others can help with, either. I can sense where your centre may be given the density of ki within your body, but I am unable to give you direction; I cannot feel your centre in the same way you can. Still, there are ways to give guidance.

Capsule Corp Age 798, with my father, Goku (62) and Trunks and Bra's father Vegeta (66) discussing how to find your centre. My Dad and Vegeta were universally revered friendly rivals.

Goku: It's feeling hungry. But the other side of your belly button.

Vegeta: That's absurd. The centre matches the centre of gravity.

Goku: Vegeta, that's not true!

Vegeta: It's a more precise explanation than yours.

Goku: No because–

Vegeta: I'm not arguing.

Goku: –what if you bend over?

Vegeta: …Go on?

Goku: Well, if I lean –

Vegeta: Get off!

Goku: –where does your balance go? Outside your body, right?

Vegeta: …

Goku: But I'm still hungry in the same place. See?

Vegeta: Fine. When standing with good posture, which you are obviously incapable of, the centre of ki near-matches the centre of gravity. Otherwise, follow what nonsense you wish.

The first step to sensing your centre is maintaining correct posture. Standing is easiest, for me at least - I do most of my centring whilst upright in battle. It's a bad day indeed if I'm centring on the ground.

Not everyone will have the ability to follow the instructions in this guide to the letter due to personal circumstance and be reassured, that is fine. Even many of the techniques that come later, although seeming to need physical precision in the exercise, are constantly adapted for the situation in sparring. Modifying to your ability is the most important part lest you will make no progress trying the impossible. All I can ask is you try your best without over-exerting yourself. The guide is designed for a standard adult anthropoid body shape purely because that's my body type. Again feel free to adapt for zoomorphic or teratoidal body shapes.

Let's start from the ground up. Stand feet shoulder-width apart, toes facing forward, knees straight but not locked. This is to maintain balance. With that in mind then, keep your weight equally distributed across both left and right feet. We commonly lean on one foot when standing though this will be off-putting when searching for our centre. As Vegeta noted, with correct posture your ki-centre and centre of gravity greatly overlap - maintaining the line of symmetry in your balance then will help you locate your centre. Your weight should be spread across the balls and heels of your feet, too - lifting your heels or toes would cause you to move in both cases.

Draw in the base of the spine towards your front, ("tucking in your tail") and draw your navel towards your spine engaging (though not solidifying) your core muscles. If you find yourself with lower back-ache often when standing and have a sizeable gap between your thighs you may have anterior pelvic tilt. You'll find drawing in your navel to be difficult and this will engage core muscles you didn't know you had, but this tilt can be corrected over time.

Your shoulders should be relaxed - the tendency nowadays is to roll them forwards so pinch your shoulder blades together then release them to position them correctly. Do not lock them attempting to make your back straight as that requires muscle tension to maintain. We carry a lot of tension in our back and neck throughout the day, so give your shoulders a shake if you need to and rock your head to loosen your neck. After positioning, your palms should naturally face your mid-thigh, thumbs forward.

Remember to raise your head - your head is a heavy object and the weight needs to be above the spine to reduce strain on the neck. You may need to draw your chin back a little, too; drawing your head back may engage your core muscles further.

[ Figure 3 ]

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Standing upright and in a shallow horse stance

Double-check the weight distribution across your feet. The base of your neck, hip, knee and heel should all be in alignment. The back does not need to be ram-rod straight, just relaxed and balanced. It's a cliche but true; if you imagine a plumb-line extending along your spine and through the crown of the head into the sky, give that line a tug and it can help lift you. If your posture has been very poor then correct posture may be difficult for you, but despite the effort your chest will feel open.

A second standing position often taught in martial arts is the horse stance - so-called as it mimics the position when horse-riding. It is a rooted stance that lowers your centre of gravity, bringing your ki-centre with it, and therefore greatly increases your stability. In this case stand feet directly forward and twice shoulder-width apart. Bend the knees enough to maintain a straight back without falling off-balance. To the casual eye this may look like a squat but it is not - in a squat the knees track over the top of the feet, that is not necessarily the case in horse stance. Your knees can be bent as much as you like, but a deep stance performed correctly will be more stable. The feet traditionally point forward, although can point out a good forty-five degrees for comfort. Again the end goal is to find your centre rather than meticulously follow a form, though if you join a school they will have their own requirements for horse stance. Many of the techniques taught later naturally begin in this position so you may wish in particular to start practising finding your centre in this stance too.

You do not need to stand to locate your centre. Find a chair in which you can sit comfortably, lower back against the chair back for support, the edge of the chair away from the back of the knees. Your feet should be flat on the floor and the hips marginally higher than the knees if the chair allows it. Place your hands in your lap, on your thighs or resting on the chair by your thighs; somewhere they will not pull the shoulders forward. Engage the core, neck and the back in a similar way to standing, facing forwards, head upright.

[ Figure 4 ]

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Without a chair one can sit on the floor. In my part of the world sitting in "seiza" is popular, and is similar to the vajrasana pose in central regions. That is, kneeling with heels directly under the buttocks, tops of the feet flat on the floor, big toes touching or overlapping. The back and head is relaxed but upright. Traditionally women keep their knees together and men part them, but I'll risk the eyebrow raises by stating comfort over conformity is more important for this exercise. Again, the hands can be rested in the lap, on the thighs or on the floor. If this is new for you, you may experience pins and needles, in which case stop for a while. Seiza is not an overly comfortable position and there is evidence to suggest sitting in this and other poses for a long time can be damaging. It is however traditionally taught within martial art schools and so you may encounter it formally should you wish to pursue a discipline.

[ Figure 5 ]

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Sitting cross-legged (criss-cross) is more popular in the west. The buttocks are on the ground, thighs forward and angled to the sides with the knees bent, ankles either on top of each other or calves crossing with the ankle under the opposite thigh. The back is again upright and relaxed and head above the spine. Hands can be anywhere comfortable, although some keep the elbows close to the torso, forearms along thighs with palms facing up as an open pose. I keep my hands resting one on top of the other in my lap. A variant, lotus position, sees the ankle on top of the thighs rather than underneath, and is a fantastic test of flexibility.

Although usually more comfortable than seiza, for many pins and needles can still arise, and truthfully the sitting position one should default to is a matter of personal preference. I once had to sit for twenty hours straight for a ritual and I'm very glad I opted out of seiza, but that's just me.

It's one thing to have good posture when concentrating on form, another to maintain it throughout the day. The best way to track your progress is to enlist help. Relax into good posture and ask a good friend to apply tape along your spine to just past the nape of your neck. Then go about your day. Any time we bend the head forward, we're moving the whole weight of the head from balancing over the spine to dangling precariously over the chest, the neck and back muscles tensing to compensate. The tugging this causes on the tape will remind you to correct your posture. You'll be surprised at how often you slouch.

Growing up able to use ki from a young age, the kids never focussed on posture to find their centre. As such they would forget the importance of an open chest in drawing greater strength. My mother, Chichi, taught us posture through her early morning tai-chi routines to encourage us to sit and stand correctly throughout the day. This training was augmented by pokes in the back with her cooking chopsticks if we passed through the kitchen walking badly. Dad was not spared her wrath, either. As Goten got older my sweet brother became a natural slouch and usually received the brunt of the jabbing. He knows fifty ways to sit on a chair, none of which are remotely correct, though he has developed the most peculiar ability to sit correctly when and only when Mom is around. Mom's training not working entirely as intended, then.

I know for a fact Trunks and Bra had it worse under Vegeta's watchful eye. To this day Mom corrects the family whenever we're slouching; Vegeta would, for lack of a better word, destroy his children. Punishment varied from knocking them to the floor should they lean on one leg, to grabbing the forehead and holding their head back if he caught them slouching at a keyboard (Goten, a more than frequent visitor, had his head tied to the back of a chair once as a correctional measure. I have the photos still). Arguably, the worst was Vegeta snatching and confiscating their cell phones should they so much as nod their chin more than a few degrees. If you keep up with celebrity news you may have seen a series of photos published a few years ago of Trunks holding his cell phone high when out in public? I know the collage gained traction online. He wasn't taking bizarre photos or needing better glasses, he just knew better than to slouch whilst texting. And you should too.

Whichever posture you take, to begin to sense your centre you need to learn how to breathe correctly. Having a steady breath to work with will calm genki flow, allowing you to ignore the now suppressed turbulence and dig down to the source of your genki.

Place one hand on the upper chest, the other on the stomach. Breathe normally for a moment. What hand raises first, the chest or stomach? For most of us it is the upper chest that raises first. We don't need an entire lungful of oxygen for each breath and our time mostly sitting as part of modern life encourages this type of shallow breathing, known as clavicular breathing. This is a habit we must break to gain any mileage from ki. Even if you decide not to pursue the use of ki, this breathing is of benefit and so I would encourage you to learn to breathe deeper. If your lower hand rose first, congratulations - feel free to read this rest of this section with a smug grin.

Breathing involves the lungs yes, but they're passive balloons to fill. It is the ribcage expanding and the muscle below the lungs, the diaphragm, pulling downwards that causes the lungs to expand and draw in air. With clavicular breathing, the ribcage expands with the help of the intercostal muscles between the ribs and the shoulders and the clavicles (collar bones) move upwards. The ribs appear to expand outward. With a large clavicular breath the stomach seems to shrink in towards the spine. Whilst called shallow breathing the breath isn't necessarily small - the name is due to the breath appearing to only sit in the top part of the chest. Typically though the volume of air inhaled is smaller with clavicular breathing.

To get the fullest breath and engage with your centre you need to switch to diaphragmatic breathing, deep breathing. Lace your fingers and place them on your stomach, over or just below your navel. Take a standard clavicular breath in through the nose and note how your stomach barely moves. On the exhale through the mouth, note how long you can breathe out, as a measure of the volume of air you were able to breathe. On your next breath in, push out your stomach as far as you can, like inflating a balloon. Continue the breath, rolling through the stomach, being careful not to pull on the shoulders. When exhaling again notice the volume of air you have exhaled. For some people there will be a large difference, others not so much. Either way, the effort required to breathe deeply in a clavicular manner is much greater. Do you see how easy it is to get tired and lazy with this kind of shallow breath? Whilst we don't need full breaths much of the time (I know I'm not fully exerting myself writing this, for example) clavicular breathing is a poor habit, and one we can thankfully break.

Diaphragmatic breath is sometimes called a belly breath. Air does not reach into your stomach with these breaths. It's the diaphragm displacing the organs in your abdomen that causes the stomach to rise. Still, whilst air isn't leaving the lungs in the chest, the simple flowing movement of the diaphragm is reaching down into your centre and that's the flow we want to encourage and activate. It's a subtle distinction between the breath of air and the breath of the body but an important one nonetheless. By using the breath - the one flow we have very direct control over - to reach down to our centre, we are able to start sensing our centre and then move to manipulating it.

My family home (Pink House) in Satan City, Age 800 with Pan (21) discussing both her smaller, local informal ki-school and the online teaching course she inherited from her Grandfather, Mr Satan - the Pan Fighting Network.

Gohan: How many times have you taught finding your centre now?

Pan: Uh, good question. Thirty or so students in total? Properly I mean, otherwise thousands on the Fighting Network.

Gohan: You're not teaching correctly online?

Pan: You want my rant?

Gohan: You got me.

Pan: I've tried teaching centring fully online before; posture, breath, autoception, all of that, really I have. But the self-reflection needed is less important for some people I guess, they're on the PFN just for the moves. Most will tolerate learning posture and slower breathing but get vocally frustrated at the early focus on it and their impatience drives me crazy. Nowadays I won't spend a lot of time on centring because so many people hate it, and we're not using ki knowingly anyway so it's technically not essential. I just give guidance for those who want to learn more, and surprise surprise those students do better. I mean, not being interested in breathing is fine – I shouldn't rag on my remote learners like this…

Gohan: So some students think it's a waste of time, even with the benefits?

Pan: Yeah, which it is for some as they'd never practice it anyway. But for the local students learning ki manipulation it's essential and we'll spend weeks on centring if we have to. I've given one-on-one sessions before to help students catch up. Only had a few students leave.

Gohan: What's the most effective way to teach centring then, for the book?

Pan: I… this is going to sound silly. I really want to say it's the standard meditation practice with breathing and pretty candles but…Gohan: But…

Pan: I just tell people it's like feeling hungry, but on the other side of the belly button.

Pan's irritation with her remote students may seem a little unfair, though she's right, getting these basics to second-nature before jumping into trying to fly will be far faster in the end, so I urge patience. My family and friends are a bizarre exception to the rule that years of practice are required to master ki-use. I suspect their precociousness is because they grew up surrounded by ki-users and so could run (or in Pan's case, fly) before they could walk, and that has separate challenges. They and I still benefit from covering these basics from time-to-time, however. Still, let's give finding your centre, finally, a try.

1.3.1: Finding The Centre

Find a comfortable position with good posture. Close your eyes and start deep breathing. Closing your eyes allows your other senses to heighten to compensate and that includes your ki-sense. You want to be inhaling, holding, exhaling and holding for roughly the same amount of time, around five to ten seconds for each part of the breath. Don't force this timing, especially if you start feeling faint, but make the breaths longer than usual for you. When holding the breath it's an active hold - don't close the throat with the glottis (back of the tongue/throat) and sag - that builds pressure. Instead, keep the throat open. This motion of breath will reach down to your centre and, with the slower breath, calm turbulence.

Calming the mind will also help, but I appreciate telling some people to "calm down and relax" isn't much of an instruction. We have two main ways to focus our attention, within our mind and outside of it, and the mind switches between the two. Sometimes when attempting to concentrate the mind will wander to worry or imagination. Mind-wandering happens for some more than others. Don't feel frustrated if you're a frequent mind-wanderer or easily distracted by external stimuli, when you notice switch your attention back to your body and continue from where you left off. You will improve.

As my father taught you're searching for a feeling below the navel, a warm and taut sensation much like the first stages of hunger. The tightness is around the size of your fist, though the warm feeling dissipates outwards from there through your abdomen. It is not an uncomfortable or painful sensation (unlike hunger can be), if anything the tight pressure is comforting. Across the other senses it feels like a low buzz or soothing hum, far faster than the heartbeat. If you wish to visualise the centre, project a ball within that region and move it in your mind's eye until the position feels balanced. The ball should settle around your centre.

You are more likely to feel the effect of your centre on the inhale and transition to hold than the exhale. At this point genki is prompted to begin the process of monitoring the gaseous exchange within the lungs and throughout the body, moving away from the centre to do so. The warm sensation should move upwards slightly on the exhale, though don't expect to feel genki far from the centre on your first attempt. Try for five minutes or so, then successful or not, stop. Wait a while before trying again. Trying something new can very easily lead to frustration, but recall that this is a sense you never knew you had, and so deliberately taking a break from exercising this new metaphorical muscle will save you the mental anguish of repeated failure.

When you do start sensing this dense region of genki, try tracking the upwards component movement on the exhale, on average a steady movement with a little wandering. How the flow feels is subjective but a quick poll returned "warm, buzzing, tingly, fluid, rousing, fizzing, and bubbling". I'm sure you'll find your own perfect descriptor in time.

Go back to the dense region of ki and focus down onto the centre of that tightness. Feel the ebb and flow, the rhythm of genki and use the familiarity you're gaining with that pattern to ignore it. What you do next exactly is up to you and your own visualisation techniques, though I lightly "touch" that tightness in my mind's eye. The disturbance caused by my attention effectively opens my centre to me. It causes a shift in my perception, from a formless tightness to a bubble brimming with potential genki. Whilst I outwardly project this mental bubble onto myself across my centre, I know others keep their centre within their mind's eye as a bubble or even a lidded box in a kind of parallel imagined world, suiting their own visualisation better. The choice is yours. As you learn to manipulate genki, how full this reservoir is will change and I constantly have this check running on myself. No one else but me (and a few gifted individuals I've met) can see or manipulate this bubble, however, and the same will be true of your centre. Only you know the reserves remaining.

I'll be steering away from practical demonstrations for a while to give you a chance to practice posture, breath and finding your centre. Next we'll be discussing the purpose of aura, and then branching into some of the underlying science that governs the rules and limitations of ki-use before we begin manipulating genki in earnest. Happy hunting!