When All Falls Away

 

When All Falls Away

When all things fall away,
and no one remains,
I return to the breath.

The body remembers
what the heart forgets —
discipline,
silence,
the pulse between worlds.

The dragon coils within me,
its fire now water,
its motion the whisper of wind.

Each cell opens and closes —
a gate of Heaven,
a rhythm of the Way.

Even in my foolishness,
the form continues.
Even in shame,
the current flows.

Kung fu is my temple,
my sutra of motion.
In its stillness,
I vanish —
and am carried
into the endless flow.

---

The Microcosmic Orbit and the Future of Tai Chi

 

After years of studying the esoteric aspects of the microcosmic orbit and Taoist internal alchemy, I often felt like I was chasing a mirage. Books spoke of luminous energy cycles and celestial alignments, but my own experience never quite reached those heights. So I stopped worrying about it. I simply practiced Tai Chi for what it gave me—clarity, coordination, balance, and calm.

Then something changed.

When I began cutting wood and practicing two-handed sword cuts (shomenuchi) in Kenjutsu, a bulb flipped on, I realized the microcosmic orbit wasn’t just a mystical energy loop; it was a very real, physical rotation of the torso that generates power. You see it in deadlifts, kettlebell swings, the right cross in boxing, and in the rhythmic fall of the axe. It’s everywhere power and grace meet. 

As I kept training, I saw that the rotation could shrink until it was almost invisible. That’s where the Tai Chi ruler revealed everything, the subtle, continuous cycling of the body’s center, the true orbit underlying all movement.

Modern Tai Chi and much of Chinese martial arts seem trapped in mimicry. Western practitioners talk about going to China as if that’s where the secret still lives. But I think we’re in a long phase, from the 1950s to now, of trying to replicate something done hundreds of years ago. Copying photos and films of old masters isn’t preservation, it’s decay. Each reproduction loses a little more of the essence.

I used to believe the key was in lineage; if I could just trace back to someone who knew Yang Chengfu or another great name, maybe I’d finally touch real Tai Chi. But that’s an illusion. The masters are gone, and the path backward is a dead end. Every culture mythologizes its origins to preserve identity, and that has its beauty. But Tai Chi’s vitality depends on rediscovery, not reenactment.

For me, the microcosmic orbit is not an esoteric mystery, it’s the universal rotation of being alive on Earth. Every culture before industrialization tapped into it through daily movement: cutting wood, digging, hoeing, rowing, fighting. All of it expressed the same coordination between gravity and the human body.

Gravity is the true teacher. Every object, animal, and human is shaped by it. When we move in harmony with it, we are strong, balanced, and efficient. When we resist or ignore it, through disuse, poor movement, or metabolic imbalance, we suffer. Even obesity, joint pain, and heart strain are expressions of losing that relationship with gravity. Staying metabolically and mechanically aligned with Earth’s pull keeps us vital.

So the microcosmic orbit isn’t some magical energy loop, it’s the pattern by which we inhabit this planet effectively. It’s the spiraling, gravitational rotation that life itself depends on. Tai Chi, at its best, teaches this. The alchemy lies in reawakening what evolution already gave us, a body that knows how to rotate, yield, and return power without waste.

Maybe there is a more subtle layer, an energetic resonance that grows once the physical understanding is embodied. I sense it sometimes, but it’s not the point. What matters first is the clear, explicit connection between body and gravity.

When we move in tune with that orbit, we become stronger, faster, less injury-prone, and more aware of the living Earth beneath us.

That’s not mysticism. That’s Tai Chi returning to its roots.

The Shoulder: How Humans became The Most Lethal Animal on Earth

Before humans hurled spears, drew bows, or threw fastballs, our ancestors were tree-climbers. The freely rotating joint in the shoulder, which we take for granted every time we reach overhead or cast a stone, began as a brake system, not a weapon.

I’ve come to appreciate that more personally in recent months. A lingering shoulder injury pulled me into studying how this joint actually works — not just as a hinge of strength, but as a delicate instrument of balance and control. The more I learned, the more I realized that every ache or strain in my shoulder is a whisper from the past, reminding me that this joint carries the story of how we survived as a species.

According to research from Dartmouth College’s Department of Anthropology, our ancestors’ shoulders and elbows evolved to control descent from trees, not merely to climb up them. When an ape descends, gravity becomes the enemy. To lower a heavy body without falling, an animal needs tremendous rotational range, eccentric control, and flexible joints. The study showed that chimpanzees extend their shoulders and elbows far more when climbing down than monkeys do. Their joints act as shock absorbers, a living suspension system.

Once our ancestors left the forest, that same anatomy, shallow shoulder sockets, mobile scapulae, shortened elbow levers, was repurposed for something far more lethal: throwing.

The shoulder that once eased us down tree trunks became capable of storing and releasing explosive energy.

No other animal can generate such coordinated rotational torque across the torso, shoulder, and arm. When you throw, you’re using a 2-million-year-old arboreal braking system in reverse: winding it up, loading elastic energy through the fascia, and snapping it forward with devastating speed.

That shift from climbing to throwing was the beginning of distance killing.

A shoulder adapted for controlled descent made humans the first primates able to strike from afar. Spears, stones, and projectiles allowed early hunters to kill without risking close contact. That changed everything.

For the first time, food could be obtained and enemies neutralized from a distance. The survival advantage was enormous. Evolution didn’t need claws or fangs; it had found something subtler: precision and power through motion.

Every time a baseball player throws a pitch, a boxer throws a straight right, or a child hurls a rock into a lake, they’re channeling that same lineage. Even in Tai Chi or weight training, in the controlled rise and fall of the shoulder, the spiral through the elbow, you’re engaging an ancient system designed to modulate gravity.

To move well is to respect that ancestry. When you train the shoulder through full range, not just pressing up, but lowering down, stabilizing, and rotating, you awaken the ghost of the climber who once learned to descend, without falling to its death.

Our shoulders made us what we are: a species defined not by tooth or claw, but by motion. It is the joint that lets us descend safely, hunt effectively, and eventually shape the world.

What began as a brake became a weapon.
And it remains, to this day, the most adaptable and dangerous articulation in nature, the point where balance, force, and intelligence meet.