Review of Ray Carbullido Sacred Movements/Efficiency of Humanity Seminar

greytowhite

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Ray Carbullido is here in Phoenix, Arizona this week and I had the opportunity to train with him in a private session earlier today. Having touched the man he has obviously embodied certain things within himself that many do not have. On Thursday evening he had a free intro class open to the public. We went over some basics of the foot, how running and walking with feet in certain positions is more efficient than others, and some basic movement assessment. Then he demonstrated his ability to completely neutralize MASSIVE incoming forces without moving himself or the pusher. I had my hands on his body, it was completely soft while he was neutralizing. Then he showed how he has freedom to use his other limbs without moving from where he was standing and still process the force. The person pushing on him had a good foot of height, maybe an additional 80lbs and decades of martial arts experience.

In the past I've met up with some members of the Han family Yiquan group in Sacramento, California and over the past year I've had the privilege to train bagua neigong locally with one of Ray's gong fu brothers. I was looking forward to this private session from friends reviews of training with him in the past. I told him I was looking to work on balancing my body out. Ray taught me a method of training the Han family Yiquan swings and cross body movement. He said that the movements are nothing he created, just the structure and progression into walking integration are his contribution.

We focused first on making sure that I moved from my waist to power the swings. Next we went through some static variations and how to open and close the shoulders in combination with the waist turning. Then we worked on coordinating the swings with walking. We did lower and upper planes. The waist movement, cross body coordination, and torque are all derived from normal walking. The progressions he took me through were very helpful and the logical continuation of the path for the drills were quite easy to see. He also gave me some really basic examples of how to transfer from a swing into the bagua Heaven Palm posture.

I have a LOT of work to do to iron out these basics so that I can then apply it effortlessly to my xingyiquan and baguazhang under pressure. What Ray shows are some of the first steps and most important steps along the path that is universal to every human being and martial art. Training with Ray is very pleasant and fun. You can tell he lights up when he talks about this. I look forward to training with Ray in the future and hope to see him again soon.
 
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greytowhite

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Indeed, it was awesome. Please feel free to reach out to me to meet up. I met up with someone from the Red Jade school via Facebook who had trained with Neil Ripski a couple of weeks ago.

Ray inquired if I had met Andy Plack, Glenn (his lineage brothers), or Master Han. I lamented that I had not yet met those individuals but was quite impressed by and grateful toward Nick and William in Sacramento.

I've added the Han 8 Zhuang postures back into my bagua neigong practice again as a seque into the Dragongate Sanctuary San Jiao qigong. Then I do some of the Open Door Push Moon set, and then swings before I get into Heaven and Shooting Palm. The swings taught this way (as if in a narrow corridor and the elbows have to pass the ribs in the lower plane portion of exercises) have really helped me get better coordination with my hips in the bagua and I've felt my torso start to loosen up as well. The upper plane swings are still more difficult for me but I feel my clavicular girdle and neck loosening up so that's a good thing.
 

Monkey Turned Wolf

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The trick is to keep practicing what you went over, and start soon before your body forgets it. That's always the tough part
 
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greytowhite

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Yeah I've been working on this stuff in my normal practices since the seminar a little over a week ago. The upper plane one is harder for me and I'll probably ask for a Skype session if Ray has some free time soon. This stuff is starting to feed into my Gong xingyi work as well.
 

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