Baguazhang means “Palm Changing Martial Art.”

That’s the basic idea. Let’s look at it a little more…

Baguazhang Is An Internal Art

It’s grouped among a few unique martial arts that make the bold assertion that their powers are derived from inside. Inside the body, inside the mind, or inside the universe, internal martial artists will cycle through different versions of exactly what inside refers to…Cool?  Crazy? You decide. (I’ll go with both cool and crazy.)

Wait a minute…there’s more. Internal artists also claim that they can heal. Because they use internal and universal principles of energies, these same attacking ideas can be used to heal oneself and heal others. Cool? Crazy? Oh, yeah.

Baguazhang Connects To The Yi-Jing

While its history is mysterious at best, Baguazhang draws inspiration from the magnificent Book of Changes…the I-Ching or Yi-Jing (depending on how you might spell it). This fantastic volume spells out universal principles of change. It takes eight natural phenonmena—Sky, Cloud, Fire, Thunder, Wind, Water, Mountain, Earth—and multiplies it by the same 8 phenomena to figure 64 different ways that Changes happen.

They call the phenomena the 8 gua or 8 trigrams. It gets used in I-Ching (Yi-Jing) readings, Feng Shui arrangements, and Baguazhang (or Pa Kua Chang).

Baguazhang Sinks Into Nature

Baguazhang is unique in its use of circles and its connections to shamanistic magics. The obvious connection is circle-walking using fire-palms. The practitioner of Baguazhang gets a feel for it by walking around a circle and practicing martial arts forms that whirl around a central location. The center often suggests a fire or an enemy.

The more suggestive connections? One is that Baguazhang is unique because it’s the only martial art that looks at the hands; dream counsel also recommends looking at the hands to refine dreaming abilities. The second is that Baguazhang walks a circle…it seems probable that this art can be practiced more easily at night, around a fire, deep in the wilderness.

The Bottom Line…

Universal Baguazhang is a martial & healing art centered around principles of change that become activated through outdoor practice.

Give it a try…

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