Robert Smith - Journey to the Center of the Physiological Universe

Robert Smith, Dantian Breathing, and the Physiological Center

Robert Smith was a sophisticated yet earthy man, brilliant, funny as hell, ingratiating, and never off-putting. He was an amazing dude that just happened to live in my neighborhood.

In Zen training, Kongo Langlois Roshi wrote about tanden, or hara, as the bodily center of gravity and the foundation of abdominal breathing. We in the West tend to become top-heavy: “Shoulders back! Chest out! Stomach in!” The tanden concept asks the practitioner to live, breathe and move from a lower center. In Chinese internal martial arts, Robert Smith taught us to think in terms of dantian.

Tanden, Hara, and Dantian

Since 1970 I have been pondering this odd Eastern concept of “the body’s singular point of gravity.” Why was this concept so important in meditation and certain martial arts? This exact center of balance even has a name. It is called the hara, or tanden in Japan. In Chinese medicine and Taoist martial arts, the same general idea is called the dantian.

Conceptually, the idea was to initiate the breath from that epicenter of balance. This center of gravity exists within every human body at all times. Whether we are aware of it, attuned to it, or able to use it is another matter entirely.

Traditional martial arts and meditation language is not the same thing as modern anatomy. I use dantian, hara, and tanden the way Robert Smith used them with us: as training terms, images and internal cues that help a student breathe lower, relax deeper, root harder, and move better.

How I Met Robert W. Smith

I got some high-level schooling from an elite martial master very early on. I was first trained in dantian breathing when, as a 20-year-old, I began five years of study under America’s foremost expert on the Chinese “internal” martial arts, Robert W. Smith.

Bob was, at the time, 50ish, a famed author, a hardcore judo man, a former CIA intelligence officer posted to Taiwan, a sophisticated yet earthy man with Chinese, Russian, and Japanese language skills, brilliant, funny as hell, ingratiating, and never off-putting. He was an amazing dude that just happened to live in my neighborhood.

I trained with him twice a week for many years. After each session I took home what he taught me and worked on it in lone solo sessions. On Thursday night and Saturday morning he taught me the three interrelated internal martial arts of Pa Kua, Hsing I, and Tai Chi. Robert Smith was singlehandedly bringing attention and Western scholarship to these obscure fighting styles.

Pa Kua, Hsing I, and Tai Chi

During our training sessions he would talk endlessly and incessantly about the concepts of “rooting” and “sinking,” and “breathing deep and low from the dantian.” He preferred the Taoist phrase and would place his hands on his own lower abdominal area and make it throb to demonstrate that his “chi” breathing originated at his exact center of balance.

Even during the execution of lightning-fast, highly exertive Hsing I katas, he expected the athletes to attain, maintain and retain deep abdominal breathing. Nose breathing went out the window with the fast and intense stuff because we could not pull in enough oxygen through the nose to forestall oxygen debt and the resultant burn. Though we had to breathe through our mouths, we were still expected to use diaphragm breathing, though no one called it that back then.

Linking concentrated breathing with form and movement was far easier to successfully attain when engaging in slow-motion Tai Chi.

While I preferred the dynamic and circular Pa Kua, also rendered Bagua, and the slashing and linear Hsing I, also rendered Xingyi, I found it far easier to get “into the zone” and successfully sync deep, concentrated breathing with precision glide-path Tai Chi. I would practice alone in my basement and repeat the first third of the 36-posture sequence endlessly. I would really get lost in the whole thing and eventually I “got it.” I knew I had gotten it when one day, a year in, he looked at me and did a double-take. He laughed, “Hey, you got it!”

Robert Smith was a famed writer, a great writer in fact, and a huge influence on my emerging writing style. He was a fabulous alpha male role model: smart, a genuine bad ass, simultaneously erudite, and streetwise. He was formidable but approachable. He put me in mind of a soldier-of-fortune character out of a John le Carré novel set in Hong Kong.

He was getting a kick out of teaching earnest locals right in his own backyard, and he had the writer’s ability to communicate verbal concepts with crystal clarity. Vladimir Nabokov once marveled, “To me, spontaneous eloquence is miraculous.” When Robert Smith instructed you, it seemed miraculous.

Quiet Standing Before Movement

I learned all about rooting my feet, sinking and relaxing. I learned to breathe in such a way as to expand my “orb of chi.” Regardless if we were walking the circle in Pa Kua, throwing the five fists in Hsing I, or floating across the landscape using his sublime Tai Chi style, we were always expected to be breathing from the expanding and contracting dantian.

Before each training session, as a group, we would stand at relaxed attention, performing “quiet standing” with our heels together, sinking down into the soles of the feet. We focused on the mechanics of breath. He would speak to us as we stood in mute, relaxed, erect, alert attention.

“When Cheng Man-Ch’ing accepted Ben Lo as a student he made the youngster do quiet standing — and nothing else — for one hour each day, seven days a week, for one year. Why? This is a rhetorical question, so please allow me to answer: the Master was teaching the neophyte about root and about how to truly relax and really sink and how to access dantian breathing. At the end of the year Cheng taught Ben the actual forms and Lo mastered all of them effortlessly and quickly. When asked how this was possible Cheng said, ‘Because all the hard and important work was done that first year.’”

Robert Smith was an expert explainer of the concepts that prefigured technique.

The Chrome Orb in the Center of the Body

“Imagine a steel rod running through your body at hip level. One end of the rod starts at the absolute center of your right hip joint. A thin chrome rod runs through your abdomen and ends in the exact center of your left hip joint. Now imagine that at the absolute epicenter of this thin steel rod that runs right through the middle of your body, there is a round chrome orb, a ball the size of a golf ball. As you inhale this orb swells to the size of a tennis ball. As you slowly exhale, the tennis-ball-sized orb shrinks back down to the size of a golf ball. This is your dantian powering the breath process.”

I loved that image. It enabled me to conceptualize what was being asked of me. I could attain low breathing via the dantian because I now understood it and could mimic the image using his imaging.

Robert Smith would pace between our rows, talking to us as he inspected our quiet-standing posture. He would stop to make minute adjustments to our shoulder or arm position. I remember him always adjusting my elbows. His voice sounded like Charlton Heston playing God.

“Expand the waistline outward in a level and even fashion. Push the bottom of the belly downward. Actually, you create a vacuum effect, similar to the downstroke of a piston drawing fuel into the cylinder of an internal combustion engine. Pull the breath into the body with mouth closed. Pull air in through the nostrils. Listen to the sound, the noise the air makes around the nostrils. This requires close attention.”

You could hear a pin drop as he talked us into breathing just right. Unbeknownst to us, he was also maneuvering us into a placid headspace.

“Contemplate the breath with the care and attention it deserves. Observe it with complete focus on both inhalation and exhalation. No need for thinking or thoughts. Breathe deep and low from the dantian. Relax. Sink. Stay focused please. No passengers, everyone is a participant.”

Breath Turnarounds and the Gaps Where Thought Enters

He was the personification of Nabokov’s spontaneous eloquence. He said things that I have never heard said before or since.

“Pay particularly close attention to the breath at the turnarounds, the little dead space that appears in the short gap at the end of each breath, that transitory instant when inhalation becomes exhalation and again when exhalation becomes inhalation. Stray thoughts love to slip into these crevices and attach and germinate and take root inside these tiny gaps of inattention. Every breath has four parts: inhalation, turnaround, exhalation, turnaround. Draw the breath from down deep, using an expanding and contracting dantian to power everything.”

He could tell when a person had lost focus just by looking at their posture.

“If you engage in internal conversation, you ruin the quiet-standing effort. If a stray thought arises, note it and let it pass by. Just because a thought drops by doesn’t mean you have to invite it in for a cup of coffee.”

When he was satisfied that we as a group had the requisite focus, he would set us in motion, guiding us through the circles and palm changes of Pa Kua, the straight-line power slams of Hsing I, or his unique and stylized brand of Tai Chi, with its combination of grace, power, flow, and relaxation. He had specific techniques for each posture and every transition. He was a superstar in that world.

Mindfulness Before Mindfulness Was Hip

Diaphragm breathing is a relatively popular topic, deservedly, in the world of high-level fitness. This strategy has deep roots in meditation and martial arts. In formal Taoist, Zen or Hindu meditation, deep breathing, low breathing, is often a foundational technique and core principle. Breath and mind always seem to walk hand in hand. Where there is meditative breathing, mindfulness invariably appears.

There is tremendous interest in the subject of mindfulness. Almost without exception, mindfulness books, articles, strategies, and tactics emphasize some type of focused attention on the mechanics of breathing. To be able to concentrate fully and completely on breath for an extended period is one path toward true mindfulness.

But there are pitfalls. As someone noted, “Mindfulness has become the new folk religion of the secular elite.” It seems everyone everywhere has leapt on the mindfulness bandwagon.

For those of us who have been on the mindfulness bandwagon for decades, our initial amusement at its newfound popularity has been replaced with successive emotional phases of puzzlement, befuddlement, and repulsion. The repulsion comes from the awareness that money and financial gain have successfully corrupted and diluted the effectiveness of true mindfulness. Mindfulness-lite is watered down, user-friendly, anemic, and ineffectual. But the ease of the method and the wildly exaggerated promised results makes faux mindfulness eternally popular.

We were mindful before mindful was hip. We achieved our mindfulness without striving for it. It was a by-product of what we were after: improved performance in the martial arts. Our mindfulness was attained by focusing 100% of our attention on the mechanics of breath. In our meditational sitting, during quiet standing, or while performing martial katas, we focused on breath with every fiber of our being. In doing so we became mindfulness personified.

Breath Before Everything

A smart trainee expropriates the Robert Smith concept of the physiological epicenter and the expanding and shrinking dantian orb. Use this image to find your physiological center of balance. Sync breath with posture and simultaneously acquire the mindfulness mindset.

How appropriate that the Robert Smith ancient martial strategy of “breath before everything” turns out to be the perfect gateway into modern mindfulness. The fact that his forgotten lessons are still relevant and important seems weirdly appropriate. I am happy to pass along even a sliver of his iconic wisdom.

Equipment Notes for Quiet Standing, Meditation, and Floor Practice

Quiet standing, breath practice and internal martial arts require very little equipment. That is part of their appeal. The practitioner needs space, consistency, attention, and a surface that encourages stable footing.

For meditation, standing practice, stretching and martial arts warm-ups, facilities, and home practitioners can compare foam exercise mats and a simple floor option such as the Aeromat Deluxe workout mat with eyelets. Balance and proprioceptive work may also be supported by foam rollers and balance training tools or an Aeromat Elite foam balance block, when used appropriately.

The equipment does not create breath, root, or focus. The practitioner does that.

Safety Note for Breathing Practice, Meditation, and Martial Movement

Dantian breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, quiet standing, meditation, Tai Chi, Pa Kua and Hsing I should be approached progressively. Do not force breathing, hold the breath excessively, hyperventilate, or continue if dizziness, panic, chest pain, faintness, or unusual distress appears.

People with balance limitations, neurological issues, cardiovascular concerns, panic symptoms, trauma history, pregnancy, major medical conditions, or significant pain should seek qualified guidance when needed. Meditation and breathing practices can be useful, but they should not replace medical or mental-health care.

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s firsthand experience with Robert W. Smith and traditional martial breathing. It is not individualized medical, mental-health, rehabilitation, or martial arts instruction.

Related Meditation and Brain Train Reading

For a deeper Marty Gallagher introduction to meditation practice, read Meditation - Meditational Fundamentals. For another companion piece on the method behind meditation, read The Technology of Meditation.

Robert W. Smith Biographical Note

Mr. Smith joined the U.S. Marine Corps at age 17, served in the Pacific, and received his first taste of Judo during that period. He graduated with highest honors from the University of Illinois and received a master’s degree from the University of Washington. In 1955, he joined the CIA as an intelligence analyst and was sent to Taiwan in 1959. While there he studied Asian martial arts, became the first Western Tai Chi Chuan student of Cheng Man-Ch’ing, and later earned his third-degree Judo black belt in Tokyo. After returning to Bethesda, Maryland, he taught Tai Chi, Pa-kua and Hsing-i for decades.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast