Needle in Cotton (NiC) or Meen Loy Jum
This is what I know of the NiC, it is suppose to be the highest art form of the White Crane style, taught only to advanced students. Yes it is an important part of FWC, certainly for our school, and a few other FWC schools I know who have te purer traditions. Our Ngor Chor Kun (NCK, 5 Ancestor) also has a NiC form, also at advanced level, pprobably inherited from its WC component. The fact that Lama Pai has this certainly lends credit to the shared-ancestry or corss-fertilization arguments above ;-).
For us, the NiC is practised to develop Qi, and in practice, it is slow, flowing and accompanied by coordinated breathing. This is quite different from our other WC forms, which emphasize rapid, vibrating movements - more representative of training/applying fa-Jing. I see its also done slow in Lama Pai.
As for its theory and meaning, well I'm not expert enough, but it has pretty deep implications. One way to look at it is as a Yin/Yang thing, Yin - being the soft, yielding, cotton-ish component, and the yang being the hard, forceful opposite. One interpretation is of course that presented by Charles in a previous post, but I think it goes far more than that.
Charles,
About Jan, don't know so much about the kick-boxing part, but I do know they have a group that is still hard-core into traditional MA. I don't mean that Jan does white crane, but our NCK has a heavy WC influence, you can see from our forms. Whereas other NCK tend to have more of a TaiZu/LoaHan influence.
WC spelling, well Fujian pronounciation is 'Peh Hok', and the Mandarin is 'BaiHe'. Yes I have heard of the Northern Crane, but have not seen it. Also the way they use the hands, fingers together, other than Feeding Crane, I don't think the other FWC use it, certainly not our school, but I may be mistaken.