What is Cheng Hsin?

The words Cheng Hsin are Chinese. Cheng translates as true, genuine or authentic. Hsin translates as heart, mind or being. Cheng Hsin could translate as “authentic being” or “true nature”. Cheng Hsin is the truth of what being is, it is us, but not how we think we are. It is the truth.

"By its very nature, Cheng Hsin will always remain elusive and ungraspable. We must look past the words and even past our thoughts and feelings to comprehend it, but not past the source of our present experience"
Peter Ralston

Cheng Hsin is about questioning and insight rather than believing an answer. In our culture, we are used to asking questions to seek information. However some questions don’t have an answer! Cheng Hsin is an experience, it is in a different domain than whatever we formulate in our minds from reading words. You have to discover what Cheng Hsin is yourself.

Created by Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin practice is an open and grounded inquiry into the nature of being. We use martial arts, body awareness and contemplative practices as the main vehicles to aid our inquiry. The journey is towards becoming a master.

“I would like to see martial arts turned into a place for the development of human beings, and of honesty. A place where we can see what it is we do in life that really makes us suffer and hurt, or be ineffective and incomplete. Martial arts is an excellent place to see that, if it is done right. Otherwise – and 99% of the time it is otherwise – it is done like everything else, just to add to our survival and protection, our “rightness”, and this ends up increasing resistance and separation – it’s the same approach we have to everything else. I’d like to see it become as functional as it can be. A valuable tool, the way of a Warrior, not the way of pretence and struggle. Really use it as a tool for growth, not self-deceit”
Peter Ralston

Martial
Martial arts are a fantastic opportunity to train getting real. It is like having your own personal Zen Master hit you with a stick the instant you stop being real if the training is real and honest and includes freeplay. The art must be designed to awaken intelligence and trained in a spirit of openness and questioning. It must be effective. The Cheng Hsin martial art is such a practice. It a serious training and investigation into being effortlessly effective in a martial context, created by Peter Ralston, a true martial arts Master and the first non-Asian ever to win the World Championship full-contact martial arts tournament held in the republic of China. We train internal martial arts, deriving effortless power by aligning with the natural principles of relaxing, grounding and moving the whole body from the center. We consciously retrain our nervous system to use intrinsic strength, freeing us to produce power while remaining sensitive, balanced, graceful and mobile. We train the strategies, principles and dispositions which create an effective relationship. We investigate what we get up to that makes us ineffective so we can stop doing that. Cheng Hsin is practised in a relaxed, enjoyable and safe environment to allow real learning and transformation to occur.

Body Being
Along with our body, we have a perception of our bodies and interpretations which determine how we relate in the world. In Cheng Hsin, an investigation of our bodies includes mind, perception and our relationship with ground and space. We investigate our body being. Our intent is to create an effortlessly effective relationship with the world. By training our feeling awareness, we start to sense the world differently. Using our bodies in alignment with its functional design, we can use the ground for power and become more physically adept and powerful.  

Consciousness
Cheng Hsin consciousness work is grounded in martial arts, body being, and two other disciplines: ontological inquiry and Zen like contemplation. On the road to mastery, it is necessary to look at ineffective patterns of behaviour, habits and ultimately how we hold ourselves and the world around us. Staying grounded in authentic experience whilst opening up to not knowing leads to powerful questioning. Getting honest with ourselves enough to let go of beliefs and sit in a position of not knowing, yet letting things be exactly as they are is hard and courageous work. The good news is that it is a very freeing practice, and can transform our experience. When we become more conscious, things are already different.