Finding Calm and Power in a Chaotic World: The Art of Yiquan

Modern life asks a lot of us. It asks for speed, resilience and constant output. But what if real strength has less to do with pushing harder and more to do with how we hold ourselves under pressure?

In this episode of The Wellness Algorithm, I’m joined by Yiquan practitioner, trauma specialist and strategist Andrew Markell. He is co-founder of Heresy and The Dawn Collective, where his work focuses on next level sense-making, high performance and trauma healing. Together, we explore how Yiquan can help us find calm, clarity and real power in a chaotic world. 

His perspective feels especially relevant today, not only because it speaks to the pressures so many of us are living with, but because he works with high-performing individuals to help them stay clear, steady and effective under intense pressure. 

To learn more, reach out to Andrew at andrew@thedawncollective.org. 

🎧 Tune in for a thoughtful conversation on inner strength, presence and a more centred way to live.

For a transcript of this show, go to https://wellnesscurated.life/finding-calm-and-power-in-a-chaotic-world-the-art-of-yiquan-2/

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Transcript

Anshu Bahanda: Why do some of us look calm on the outside, but inside we feel like we're really holding ourselves together? And, why does one sharp email or one tense conversation, one small disappointing conversation throw us off completely? What is going on? And why, in a world that talks so much about wellbeing, do so many of us still feel scattered, reactive and strangely far from our own centre? There is a reason this feels so familiar. Harvard researchers found that when the mind drifts away from what is happening right now, people tend to feel worse, which makes modern life feel a little less mysterious. We're not just tired, we're pulled in too many directions all at once. So what would it mean to find a steadier kind of power? Not force or performance, or just pretending to be calm, but a way of being in the body that makes you less easily thrown by life, by a life where there is so much chaos around at the moment, there's wars everywhere. What would it take to make you feel calm through all this? This is what makes this conversation on Yiquan feel so relevant now. I am Anshu Bahanda from Wellness Curated, and today we're exploring Finding Calm and Power in a Chaotic World: The Art of Yiquan. 

Welcome to Wellness Algorithm, where wellness is not fixed. It evolves as we do and with every new experience in every season of our lives. And if I told you there may be a way to make your Mondays more tolerable after the chaotic week that you might have had, not by escaping your life, but by changing how you feel about it. Because this episode on Yiquan is not really about martial arts in the niche sense. It's about what happens when the week that barely began and you already feel tight, you feel scattered, you feel irritable, you feel overstimulated and slightly cut off from yourself. It's about how to find calm without going passive and power without becoming hard. Joining me is Andrew Markell. He's a Yiquan practitioner, trauma specialist, and he's the co-founder of The Dawn Collective. He has trained many investors, entrepreneurs, veterans, CEOs to stay clear and composed under pressure. And today he's bringing these insights to our conversation. And I have a feeling these insights will really help many of us see our lives more clearly and calmly.

Before we begin, a small request. Please subscribe to the podcast. It's free and it helps us bring you conversations like this about wellbeing. And if this episode resonates, do share it with someone who might need a calmer way through the week. Thank you Andrew for making the time to be here with us today. Now tell me, for someone who's never heard of Yiquan, can you tell me, what is this? Explain it from scratch to us. 

Andrew Markell: Scratch? Yeah. Perfect. So Yiquan is a fighting and healing art that was a concentration of a multiple of arts and fighting techniques that Wang Xiangzhai brought together in China in the 20th century. And so in a somewhat traditional fighting arts, martial arts tradition, he went and studied with lots of different fighters and masters. And then his special art was to bring them all into one very concise and simplified form. And then he took his art and then he, as it would be in the old days, then tested it throughout China, invited all fighters from all the lands to come and challenge him, and he fought off all challengers and thus became Yiquan. But it has an older tradition than simply China. Somewhere 5-6 centuries ago, the many of the patriarchs in China sent their best fighters to Tibet, to the Himalaya to train, because the Himalayan monks and nuns were renowned for their tremendous fighting capabilities, which is a little known part of those monastic traditions.

And so they traveled there and they brought, this was the piece that they brought back, which was mostly the fighting art. But what's really powerful about Yiquan is not only does it perform as a rather extraordinary fighting art. But it has this deep, deep lineage in the wisdom and training traditions of the Himalaya which opens it for this unique combination of healing and fighting together. 

AB: And is that like a lot of martial arts, correct? 

AM: Not that I know of. One of the unique characteristics of the Yiquan is that we train through the nervous system, we train to expand through the nervous system, and we train specifically to recruit connective tissue, tendons, ligaments and fascia. Most martial arts tend to train with a focus on muscles, big muscle groups and that kind of movement. And they also, another really important distinction is that in the Yiquan, what makes it so powerful as a foundational practice for trauma healing, as well as for different kinds of training, leadership training and other kinds of healing modalities, is that you can train very heavy without adrenaline. And that is a unique characteristic because most arts, most things require a tremendous surge of adrenaline. But that has, particularly in the modern sense, a lot of, complications. We already run plenty of adrenaline. 

AB: So tell me, Andrew, how would you compare this? I'm just trying to put it into context. How would you compare this, maybe, to something like yoga? 

AM: Well, I mean, yoga obviously is not a fighting art. But in the deeper traditions of the yoga, you find not dissimilar practices of recruitment. So where they connect on the deeper tantrica levels, like as India brought its arts to, to the Himalaya, the yoga. I'm not so sure how this is like, translated now into the gazillions of yoga studios, but yoga in its original forms was all about building capacity and power through neurophysiology, through the nervous system. So that part of yoga is very central, but of course, it's deeply buried in here. 

AB: And you also said that you're training your fascia here. 

AM: Yeah. 

AB: And fascia, as you know, in the last two or three years has been like the hot word. It's the word everyone's talking about. It's trending. So talk to me more about the fascia training because here, you know, it was being done centuries ago, while, you know, today people are saying it's because we've been ignoring the fascia in our body, that, you know, we haven't fully understood how the system functions and all that. So explain fascia. 

AM: Yeah, no, that's exciting. It's exciting. I just recently, in the last, like 12 months, did a whole bunch of scientific research. It's fun to, like, do something, know something, and then find modern science limping behind and confirming it. But essentially, fascia, as people are starting to understand, is this connective tissue that holds all the other pieces of the body together. And it's tremendously powerful. So it's like a spider's web with its sheer capability to deliver force, move force. It's conductive and it's elastic. So my hypothesis around the fascia is if you can recruit the fascia, it also has a rather significant impact on mitochondrial function. And almost everyone has mitochondrial dysfunction these days. So this is a way to really stimulate mitochondrial functionality from a fighting perspective and a movement perspective. The speed and power that one generates when one has access to their fascia and all the connective tissue, it's just not fascia isolated is a very different kind of movement than the kind that is developed with muscle alone. 

So that is why, in my understanding, modern sports science, the real cutting-edge, has been looking at how do I recruit ligament, tendon, fascia. And so you do so through what they call in modern parlance, isometric loading, which essentially put the body under sustained pressure in a sustained posture. And that will deliver a level of recruitment into the body. And so there's just beginning to scratch the surface of what we have known in the Yiquan for centuries, and then before that, much deeper in the powerful traditions that go deep into India and into Tibet, is the recruitment of this connective tissue is essential for the deeper arts because it generates a different kind of energy and capability in the body.

AB: Okay, thank you, Andrew. Now, getting it back to my listeners, and to put it into context for them again. Now, most people who are listening to this are not martial artists. These are busy, stretched, overstimulated people. So how do you feel Yiquan can help them? These aren't people living in the Himalayas. These are just people going about their everyday tasks. 

AM: Yeah, well, for the last three decades, what I've been doing is taking this foundational set of tools and practices into some of the most diverse and austere environments on Earth. So, in the 90s and 2000s, my real focus was on working with hardcore young people, gangsters on the West Coast of the United States and the families, those institutions, and all those leaders and all those different organizations. And then I transitioned to doing the work with top leaders in privately-held companies, publicly-traded companies, billion dollar companies, startups, and using, and then I was a professor for many years, so using the foundational set of practices that come from the Yiquan that gets infused into all these different environments. It's very foundational for trauma healing, which is a huge part of our work right now. It's how we train special operators in the US and Special Forces, SAS in the UK, those that are going through our trauma healing programming and training program.

So it has a direct application to our lives. Now how and why? And it's particularly now because what most people are going to find out there in the world is a way to regulate your parasympathetic nervous system. So there's a myriad of breathing techniques, mindfulness techniques, therapeutic techniques for soothing the nervous system. What makes Yiquan special and particularly relevant in this time of mayhem and chaos, both what people are feeling in their bodies and then in their world, is that the Yiquan we train through our sympathetic nervous system. 

AB: Okay. 

AM: So we look to develop mastery in our sympathetic nervous system. And in my view, all these years, what has made the teaching and the training so powerful is that in the morning we can get regulated, in the evening we can get regulated. But during the day, we have a heavy life. We have families, we have jobs. It can feel like a battlefield all day long. I think most people relate to that really well. Now, for that, we need our sympathetic nervous system. For that, we have to develop antifragility in our neurophysiology, we have to be able to expand under pressure, when we're being attacked, when hard things are happening to us. So that's how it works for the ordinary person. And in many ways for ordinary people, it's even more relevant than for fighters, because fighters are fighters and fighters are good. I mean, MMA guys are good, they're good fighters. This would give them many edges, but, but where the ordinary person is left for the most part, with these parasympathetic training for soothing the nervous system, relaxing, coming into a state of happiness and bliss, et cetera. For most people, that isn't working today. And they need something more rigorous, more powerful, more just that is ready to take on this current moment. 

AB: So you're saying to me that by regulating our sympathetic nervous systems, morning and evening using Yiquan, we manage to help our parasympathetic nervous systems as well, is that right?

AM: If we're moving towards mastery with our sympathetic nervous system, if we're building recruitment through our fascia, and ligaments and tendons, we have a different kind of energy. So, it just so happens that that just de facto soothes us and our parasympathetic nervous system is regulated. And then we can move from that into a place of the development of a kind of power. So the parasympathetic allows us to be calm in the face of chaos. It allows us to be resilient in the face of chaos. Sympathetic mastery allows us to be antifragile in the face of chaos, to expand into it. So it's not that one is better than the other, but it depends on the circumstances that you find yourself in. 

AB: Okay, so now tell me, Andrew, I have a couple of questions. You've mentioned the environment today. So the internal chaos and the external chaos that's happening in the world. Now tell me, how does chaos first show up in the body before people realise that they're stressed or overwhelmed? Is there a way of them saying, “okay, there's chaos showing up in my body, that means I'm heading towards something”?

AM: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people have some basic tools now because so much has been exposed to them. You can sense into your body and recognise changes in tension, changes in breathing, heart palpations, and of course, I think one of the most important places to begin to learn to look is when your thoughts become negative and self-defeating and self- destructive. And you start to be filled with a certain subtle form of doubt and confusion. So introspection into the body and the obvious tension signals, but almost more decisively and more important now is to recognise how am I talking to myself. Because I think in this kind of chaos that we're in, we can move, without even realising it, into a place of self-doubt, despair, lack of confidence. And that's why I'm really big on a fighting and healing heart combined.

Because we need confidence. Not just talking, you know, positive thoughts to ourselves in the mirror, but feeling like I can walk into any space that I'm in and I can own the centre line. So negativity and all of that will not derail me. So I think when people pay attention to themselves and when we're honest with ourselves, it is very difficult to move through the day without a lot of that internal negativity going on. And so I'm all about just striking that out of my mind to the best of my ability and moving into a more assured place, which I'm not saying is easy, particularly now, but that's where we gotta be.

AB: And Andrew, I want to talk to you about something that you and I have discussed, you know, when we were chatting. You talk a lot about what is missing from how we think about resilience and you challenge the idea of just bouncing back. Talk to our listeners more about this. 

AM: Yeah, that's a great question. So resilience is very popular right now. Building companies, building our bodies. It's really the edge of special operations training, elite military training as well. But it has a lot of hidden inadequacies because resiliency speaks to the ability of the body or an organization, let's say a company, to bounce back after being attacked, bounce back in the face of overwhelming complexity. The thing is, it takes a ton of energy to bounce back. And worse still, you bounce back to your previous baseline. So your company is in a certain place. You are in a certain place. The world is coming at us with such ferocity that our baseline five minutes ago may not be adequate for what we need in 10 minutes. So resiliency is not really, if you're going to train for something, I just would not recommend training for resiliency. If we're going to transform our companies to be resilient, it's, it's, we're going to, it's not really the best use of our time and resources. Instead, what we ought to be training for is antifragility. And in an antifragile system, when I get attacked, when I get shook, I grow stronger. 

AB: Interesting. 

AM: So every time I get shook, every time I get attacked, I learn and I evolve and I grow. And from a fascia perspective, if I have enough background, I actually recruit more capacity. So in modern science it's called progressive challenge. So we're putting progressive challenges on the system and we learn to work with that without adrenaline. That's the key. So antifragility, in order to be an anti-fragile system as a being, I need to learn how to work with that level of intensity and attack and just challenge without adrenaline. And this is the thing that is so crucial for leaders and elite operators and athletes because you can only run on adrenaline for so long. 

And most of these elite operators, whether you're a leader or you're an actual fighter, or you're a military person, or just a mom with kids and trying to navigate the world, you're literally running adrenaline all day long. And then you get into your nice mindfulness practice to try to soothe yourself down. But all of that takes a ton of energy. And there's no recruitment going on, there's no active evolution happening in the body. So your speed and power and capability is not getting where it needs to be.

Then there's the whole other question of the mind and how we can see and anticipate reality, right? Indeed that's the next deeper, deeper level that has a deep roots in the Himalaya and in the yoga traditions. That's more secret. But that's why we have to train for antifragility right now. 

AB: So when you're talking about antifragility, just to put it again to explain to everyone, you're saying that it's not necessarily creating adrenaline in your body. So you're still in fight or flight without adrenaline, is that right?

AM: No, we're avoiding the fight or flight. 

AB: So you're not in fight or flight. So you're not in your sympathetic nervous system or you are? 

AM: As you move, this is sort of the, the, the, the unknown parts, right? But it's well-known in the traditions. We tend to think that if I'm in my sympathetic nervous system, I'm out of control, I'm in fight or flight, I'm in trauma. That's actually not really true. So when we have a certain level of mastery within our sympathetic nervous system, then I'm not in a trauma response. I'm actually in a state of higher focus, concentration, movement, power. It's a different, and that's the Yi. The Yi and Yiquan is mind, Quan is boxing. So mind boxing and so yi. So what it looks like when I have mastery in my sympathetic nervous system is I'm, there's a really powerful terminology in this training that when we apply it, say to our lives, to our companies, to our investment strategies, it's called owning the centre line. And we all know what this means. When you go into a room, only one person gets to own the center line, right. And that's either going to be through a negative way or a positive way. 

AB: Yes. 

AM: And so the life of our daily life and the world coming at us, it's demanding to own the centre line. All this madness, right? And so we want to own the centre line. We want to be the one that moves the energy and moves the reality. That's a sympathetic nervous system activity. And if you've ever been around people that know how to do that in a positive way, perhaps you can recall a moment where you were, it makes everyone in the room resonate at a higher frequency. And that's what we want. Particularly if you're a leader, it's not so much what you say, it's how your body shows up in time and space. That's what everyone's responding to, not your words.

AB: So Andrew, give me an example of this. 

AM: I am going to flip it back to you for a moment. Tell me when the last time you've been in a space where you've been around someone or you did it yourself, where they just were existing at that very high level and it, you could just sense it, feel it and see it in your body. 

AB: So you're saying, to tell you when I was lost in a space where we managed to raise the frequency. 

AM: You did, or someone that you were with, or.

AB: Or someone managed to raise the frequency. Yeah. So yeah, so that's interesting because I do these workshops with people on how to live their best life and how to be in touch with the light inside them. And at the end of the three hours, it's a three hour workshop, you can see the frequency in the room has changed. 

AM: So that's what we would call owning the centre line. You're like owning all that other stuff that would get in the way. You are the one that is calling the shots essentially, right?

AB: So in that kind of situation, when you do what you say is called owning the centre line, what you're saying is you reach this particular sense of calm where when little, little things happen around you or even bigger things, it doesn't rattle you. Because the adrenaline has not been created continuously? 

AM: Exactly. Not only that, but you can anticipate events before they happen. You can move things. You can see subtle markers in people's bodies. I'm sure you see this all the time in those workshops. You can see where they are in their body, you can see where they are in their mind. So you can continue to project that out. So if you're owning the centre line in a room, you're noticing all these details because you're not activated, because you have this kind of calm. But it's not a passive calm, it's a very active kind of calm. And then, so if you're, if you're trying to survey the landscape, let's say, of making a business decision from this place of active calm, you can look at the world on multiple scales simultaneously. You can see complexity differently than if you're charged and you're stressed. Even if it's a subtle amount of stress, you see less, right? So this is all about being in a certain way, but then seeing in a certain way. And those being and seeing is a form of action. 

That is what the older traditions always train the practitioners to be able to do. And then you can influence reality in ways that other people just simply can't. And it's not mystical, it just comes through training, which I'm sure you've done a lot of in order to be able to get those outcomes.

AB: So Andrew, I want to ask you another question very relevant to where we are today. So what you're explaining to me about Yiquan and about creating reality, we talk a lot about it, as you know, in the Vedic traditions. But given where we are today, where there's wars all over the place. How can Yiquan help with something like this? I mean, what would you say people can do to help? 

AM: Yeah, that's a powerful question, right? Because it's real. 

AB: It's where we are today in the world. Yeah. 

AM: Yeah, yeah. And there's madness afoot. Like it doesn't make any sense. So Yiquan first and foremost helps us to enter into life, so to speak, as a dojo. Like, okay, I'm entering into this sort of ritualistic space every day, whether I like it or not. And I'm gonna make the decision that I'm not gonna retreat, I'm not going to put my head in the sand and I'm not going to freak out and I'm going to try to see what's really happening. Not necessarily by listening to the news, which of course is often just a PSYOP and making us even more stressed out and confused, but actually penetrate in and ask deeper, more fundamental questions. So the Yiquan having that level of capability in the body allows us to view just the world through these three crucial lenses that we have to see it, we have to see what's happening now through the mythical, the historical and the biological lenses all at once.

And that takes energy to do that. And then we gotta be really in the centre line to support ourselves and our families, our kids, our co-workers. Because in any given moment any of us can be derailed because it's so heavy and it's so intense. And this all demands a very high level of sympathetic mastery. Whether we like it or not, we don't have a choice. And so we gotta step up or else we're just gonna get suffocated in it. And on a deeper level, we need people to step up to end it, because this madness can't hold and we cannot send our children into this kind of a world. I'm very strong on this, so retreat is not an option. We must go forth. And I think collectively the saying among us, we got to take back the centre line of this reality, you know, because this is not okay and we all know it. And so this allows us to resist the seduction of passivity, despair, you know, and, and instead say “uhhuh, This is my life, my reality, my world, my descendants, my ancestors. I'm going to own the centre line”.

So it's like you taking your training into the whole world, right? We're not playing this way. It's like the mama talking to the boy who's out of control, like we're done, we're done here, right? It's time to get it together. 

AB: So can you give us some sort of a tool, you think, when people feel very nervous or very worried, that will help them? 

AM: Yeah, I mean, I, I would say, I mean it comes through the training. So we'd have to be actively using the training as a part of this. But assuming we have the training, some part of the training behind us, then I would work with people to turn their gaze directly into the mayhem to see it. One of the things about fear is fear feeds on formlessness, right? Most of us, if the lion is coming at us, we're actually not afraid in that same way we are moving to action. But when we're worried about the lion coming at us from any direction, that fear can consume us. So we train. And I would, I would. If I'm working with people, which I am a lot now, we train so that we can just literally face it. 

AB: Right, Interesting. Be it for what it is. Yeah. Okay, so basically you're moving from being worried about the future into the now into the present and facing your fear in the present rather than worried about the fear, you know, where would it come from, given your example? Is that right? 

AM: Yeah. And I would suggest as well, a subtle distinction is it's not necessarily my own fear, it's a legitimate, real fear that is being created in the world. And I want to look at the monster under the bed because typically, once we look the monster in the bed under the, in the eye, the monster's power over us lessens. I'm not talking about some kind of inner therapeutic work. I'm talking like literally eyes, wide open look at the world. If you're an investor, if you're a leader, if you're a parent, look at it, see it. 

AB: Now tell me, just coming back to Yiquan a little bit, how is it different from, say, relaxation or fitness? It seems to be a combination of both, correct? Yeah. It's not a better or worse thing. It can infuse itself and, and bring more into both. So there's relaxation through the parasympathetic nervous system, as we talked about. That's one kind of relaxation. But then there's the other kind of relaxation, which is through the sympathetic nervous system, which is a more active relaxation. So that's for most people that I work with who are just high-functioning, high-capability people, no matter what domain that is, typically these relaxation exercises are inadequate. I mean, I've seen this for decades. This is not, and then people feel defeated and they feel like it's their fault. It's not true. They just haven't been introduced to the right set of practices. So the Yiquan becomes a much more, in my view, active and relevant form of relaxation. Because it's active relaxation. 

You're relaxing, but you're still running 2,000 RPMs in your body. And then from a fitness standpoint, the Yiquan, there's only so much. We can build a lot of big muscle, right? As my teacher used to say, calls that stupid muscle. It leads to injury, it leads to contraction. It's what we call two by four power. From a fitness perspective, we want to build bullet power, which is circular power. That's the kind of power that comes from going from 2000 RPMs to 5000 RPMs with total explosion without carrying tension. So that's the key and makes fitness different, doesn't replace all these other fitness things are amazing, but it intensifies them and makes them, I would say, more antifragile, more, less vulnerable to injury and more capable of making rapid gains.

AB: So Andrew, you just said something which is the key of why I've been asking you the same sort of questions from different sides you just said of functioning at great focus without carrying tension. Because I think humanity has forgotten how to do that. We all have forgotten how to function, you know, be high functioning individuals without carrying tension. That was exactly, you know, what I wanted you to get to. So thank you for that. So can you also show us maybe a simple Yiquan practice or some sort of reset that our audience can try?

AM: Well, I don't know if you can try it at home, but I can just show you sort of, kind of. Sort of. It will. Might look a little bit weird, right? 

AB: Also talk us through it, Andrew, because we also have audio podcasts. We have video and audio both. Oh, right.

AM: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So we're all used to sitting meditation, right? 

AB: Yes. 

AM: And so we're used to that form of sitting meditation where we sit, we relax, we watch our thoughts. Maybe if we have a really good teacher, that teacher makes some physiological, structural changes to us. So this is this, the foundational practice, Zhan zhuang is called standing meditation. So here's where the, where the sim. Where the isometric loading part comes in. So it might look a little strange to your viewers that have never seen anything like this, but this is sort of what there's, there's in the house training and then there's out of the house training. So in house training, whether it's in the kung fu traditions, the yoga traditions, or the wisdom traditions, is what's only shared with the family, with the, with the community, this tiny community of practitioners. Everyone else gets something else. So I was first introduced to these more intense practices when I lived in Nepal when I was 20 and 21.

And I watched as they were training outsiders real differently than they were training and training me. So the standing meditation is designed, the first thing we need is, we need to be able to put the right structure in our body. One of the things you notice right away when you look at people meditating most of the time, sitting meditation, they're collapsed, you know, their head's down, their shoulders are slumped. The body is not really considered all that vital in meditative practice. Sitting meditation. I correct a lot of long term meditators and I give them these basic adjustments to their sitting meditation and then like their whole meditation. Like I've been training for 30 years and like bam. Now this is so different, right? So standing meditation is essentially the most beginner, beginner thing. And then it ends up being the most advanced thing. So what I'm doing first is, I'm taking my feet and I'm putting them at hip, shoulder width apart. Okay. And the toes are pretty much pointed forward. 

AB: So Andrew, we can't see your feet. Is that okay? We can't see your feet on the. 

AM: So I have. So most people when they stand, they stand with wide. They stand all kinds of structural incorrect. So you cannot have antifragility or resiliency if your structure's all off, right? If you build a building from the ground up with the wrong structure, it's going to collapse under any form of pressure. Same with our bodies. So the first thing we want to do is set up, absolute right anatomical structure. So that is our feet, the outside edge of our feet. Right at shoulder, under hips, right at shoulder. So we set that up and then what we want to do, we want to have weight directly over the ball of our feet. And we're gently pushing out the knees, gently pushing out the inner thigh. Gently tucking in, not, not severely the tailbone. So that we can feel really planted in the earth. Like we're gonna, we could, we could jump off the floor at any moment. So now I've got my, my bottom set up. And now I set up the upper body. So now I have the bottom all set up and anchored. You know, the ground. Right structure. And now I'm taking, I'm essentially the idea here is that I want to be holding a 50lb barrel.

Now I'm in Montana. So like our Chas cans are like 50 pounds because they're bare barrels. So the grizzly can't eat all your food and muck it all up. So our barrels are big and heavy. So we're standing in this way. And what I'm doing is I'm literally putting in my mind holding up a 50 pound barrel. So I would start here when I'm working with people and I call this gunslinger. 

AB: So you'd start with your hands down by your side. 

AM: Yeah. And it's guns. I call it gunslinger because I want the yi, the mind that literally 30ft away from you is the bandito that wants to kill you.

AB: Okay. 

AM: Because that's a, that's a particular kind of focus when it's life or death. Right. We want that focus. So I get that focus in my body. This takes time, but so I got that focus. It's as if my hands are pushing through sand. That level of resistance six inches away from your body on each side, Correct? Yeah. And I want my thumbs because a lot of people do this right. My thumbs are basically at the back of my pocket on my pants. Okay. We'll feel a little bit tight at first in the chest, but this is the wrong posture. We want the chest open, the shoulders open and then relaxed and expanded. So I go from gunslinger, I have my opponent, I have that yi. And then I'm picking up the 50 pound barrel by sliding down the wall. So that the back of my head, my tailbone and my heels are all touching the wall behind me. And so I pick up the barrel and I hold the barrel. And I'm holding the barrel right here, like right under my shoulder.

My elbows are just under your shoulders. So you pick up a barrel, a pretend barrel. Then I'm holding. Yeah. And I'm holding the handle here, not this way, the handle's right here. Okay. So I have that. 

AB: You're holding the handle between your index finger and your thumb.

AM: Yeah. So you imagine that it's like a heavy barrel. So you're holding it up. So my fingers by definition are pointed up just a little bit. And now all I'm asked to do with my mind is run through these basic requirements. I want my knees gently pushed out, I want my weight over my feet, I want my inner thighs gently pushed out, my tailbone tucked, my chest relaxed, my head up. So you've got a vase on your head like your really 3000 year old Ming dynasty vase on your head. They don't want that to go somewhere. And then we put resistance in. So we put up a resistance. So I have rubber bands between my fingers, rubber bands between my knees, rubber bands between my elbows. Now this is how we recruit connective tissue and fascia. We're putting resistance in the body with our minds. It's very real. It's not weird visualisation because I'm actually doing it. And then this is the progressive challenge. And as this happens, inevitably I'm going to fall out of the right structure into what feels comfortable. So then with the right teacher, you get corrected back in the right structure. So that challenge in order for neuroplasticity to happen, I have to be under pressure and I have to put my mind in it. That's why so many things don't develop neuroplasticity, because there isn't this challenge and this weight, this pressure on the body. So then I'm standing. And while this may seem really simple, it's not. And even sort of really highly trained special ops guys within like one or two minutes are really grumbling.

It's difficult, it's challenging to hold it. And so we'll hold this for a period of time depending on your level and how you know what kind of where you're at. And we hold it and then what happens is that that's the isometric loading. I am loading the structure of my body. Now what the modern science, they get the loading, the downward trajectory. The Yiquan genius is that the skeletal structure is going down. The connective tissue is pulling up.

AB: I see. 

AM: That's the key. And that creates the conductivity and the elasticity and the fascia ligaments. It creates a lot of energy in the body. And lastly, because we're not training with adrenaline, unlike most exercise where we get this rush and then with the Yiquan, almost everybody reports that after standing their energy just gradually moves nicely upward throughout the day.

AB: And do you think this is a nice, simple daily practice that someone who has no idea about Yiquan but just wants to help themselves build antifragility, help their nervous system, this is a good daily practice for them to try?

AM: Yeah, I mean I've trained thousands of people from all walks of life, young people, older people all over the world, you know, Gung Ho, top athletes, operators, leaders, parents. And it has an application for anybody really over these years. And even if someone is challenged, let's say from a, from a physical standpoint, there's ways to adjust the training to get that kind of loading and that kind of basic core principles in the body. 

AB: Andrew, now we're going to move on to, to this fun rapid fire round section where I will give you a scenario and you can talk us through a quick reset using Yiquan. Racing mind? 

AM: Ground back in your structure and in your body.

AB: Tight chest? 

AM: Expand through your shoulders, expand through your elbows and your arms expand as opposed to relax.

AB: Scattered focus, which we all seem to have. 

AM: Yeah. Scattered focus train. Even if it's for 30 seconds, bring it back. 

AB: How? 

AM: There's a couple tools and techniques to be able to do it, right. But it's. I mean, we do this all the time. Like I was just talking to someone I trained yesterday. Boom. They just bring it right back. Oh, they're overwhelmed. Boom. They do a couple things. It's right back. 

AB: Okay. And brain fog. 

AM: Brain fog? First of all, see it and know that it is not your brain. It's fog that's really important. And then again, expand with exercises. But also another thing is like, just tell that negativity, that fog to go. Like, just make yourself a fog bank machine that blows it out. 

AB: Lovely. Thank you, Andrew, for this great, great chat. And I hope it will help people a little bit just coping with what is happening in the world today. 

AM: Well, not just coping, but like owning it, moving into it, feeling very powerful despite how big and overwhelming the world can feel right now. 

AB: What a thoughtful and genuinely useful conversation with Andrew Markell. Today's episode reminded us that calm is not a weakness and power is not a force. It's about learning how to stay with ourselves a little better when life feels noisy, pressured, or too much. And perhaps that is what makes a practice like Yiquan so, so relevant. It brings us back to our body, back to the attention, and back to a steadier way of meeting our lives. If something in this episode resonated with you, or if it gave you a new way of understanding your own stress reactions or search for steadiness, please share it with someone who might need it too. And don't forget to subscribe. It's free and it helps us continue bringing you a space for conversations that make well-being clearer, more human, and more possible. I'm Anshu Bahanda. Take care of yourself. Be patient with your own process. And remember that steadiness is something we can practise one moment at a time. Thank you.