Tree Wrestling is an immersive, interactive diagnostic drill rooted in the ancient principles of Zhan Zhuang and validated by modern biotensegrity. Because the Discover, Develop, and Apply (DDA) learning cycle is a continuous loop, this drill is an incredibly versatile tool capable of enhancing every aspect of your practice. This specific program, however, focuses strictly on the Discover and Develop phases. You will use live, imaginary resistance to aggressively explore and

You will learn to use your imagination to vividly "feel" a massive, heavy tree squeezed between your arms, fingers digging into the bark, pulling it tightly against your chest, belly, and knees. By tricking your nervous system into believing this heavy load is real, your body will intuitively activate its innate tensegrity network without triggering your fight-or-flight response.

If you have spent any significant amount of time practicing traditional Zhan Zhuang (Standing the State) or internal martial arts, you have likely hit a wall of frustration. You memorize the forms, you constantly correct your posture, and you analyze the biomechanics, yet you still feel heavy and disconnected.

The first step in Tree Wrestling is making our tree. We want to imagine that we are hugging a tree that is custom fitted to us.

Feelization by its very nature is going to introduce tension into our posture/shape. Some of this tension will serve the Integrated State..

Applying vectors of strength is how we put the wrestling in Tree Wrestling. Into the feeling of our tree we are going to try our strength

We want to pay close attention to the feelings we induce while exploring the fundamental vectors in the fundamental shapes.

Anything we Memory Banked in creating our Tree Feeling is fair game. Think of it as rebuilding our tree with Recall instead of the.........

Uniting Vectors of Strength is where are diligence and achievements in the previous aspect/stages of Tree Wrestling really starts to pay off

The next step is to begin exploring our vectors, recalling them one at a time within our Tree Feeling.

This One Feeling can be expressed in many ways, lets call them lifting, pressing, pushing, pulling, shifting, twisting, turning, splitting,

I guess my point is take away the take away's. Take them away from a limited focus on fighting and apply them in the other activities......

What you think you should feel is not necessarily what you will feel by following this procedure, it certainly was not for me.

Tree Wrestling aims to align our intellectual insights with the experiences we generate during the practice. It is designed to help us overcome our own obstacles.

Tree Wrestling was born out of my frustration with Standing the State. For many years now, folks have reached out to me that having spent significant amounts of time practicing standing, with very little to show for it.