I started these ‘musings’ to offer up my take on how kung fu training and the ‘deep’ esoteric philosophies surrounding them are just as valuable and relevant to one’s everyday life experiences and situations. I’ve touched lightly already on places where one might see the parallels between what is done within the kwoon (training hall) and what is done in the rest of our everyday, mundane and routine lives. I’m being slightly facetious here, of course, saying such only to poke some fun at how people can sometimes create an unnecessary difference in how they view ‘parts’ of their lives, making them separate, not allowing for the harmony of all the facets of their lifestyes to make them ‘whole’ and unified.

It was interesting to find, while I was thinking of adding some of the other martial arts terms for a ‘training hall’ to the sentence above to make it more universal and not just aimed at students of Chinese martial arts, a term that really hits the nail on the head. The Japanese term for a martial arts training hall is called a dojo, a term I’m sure many of you have heard before. Even my own students will refer to the classroom sometimes with the Japanese term, “dojo”, and not the “kwoon”, its use in common language is now so familiar.

When I Googled  “dojo” , I was taken to Wikipedia’s site where I found this definition: A dojo (道場 dōjō^?) is a Japanese term which literally means “place of the way“. I never knew that before, and I’m sure a lot of people both within the martial arts and without would probably say the same.

But doesn’t that definition help us to understand that all of this mysticism and holistic references we often put forth in philosophic discussions of our training ‘leading us to higher places or levels of consciousness’ might just be getting in the way of us getting to those ‘higher places’?

The term “kung fu” (功夫) actually means “hard work” or “skill/achievement”; the inference being that one cannot attain any levels of proficiency in martial arts (or in anything else) without putting in the time and sweat  – “the hard yards”. By consistently putting in time and effort to learn things that are often difficult and challenging, we make ourselves more ‘complete’ through the process. As Han, the evil character in Bruce Lee’s epic film, Enter the Dragon, said, “We forge our bodies in the fire of our will…”

Our pursuit of physical skill and excellence has a by-product of producing mental, spiritual and emotional excellence as well, because the body will only do what the mind tells it. That is the reason so many come to a martial arts school like ours, or sign up with personal trainers, etc; it’s because the trainer or the sifu or sensei will make you do what you want to achieve. So many of us want to do more than we currently seem able, but can’t; yet put us into the capable hands of a good instructor, trainer or coach and the results often always astound both those around us and ourselves. Look at shows like The Biggest Loser, where contestants tell us how they lack self-esteem or fell into habits that lead me to give up, etc, etc. Three months later, miracles occur for even the contestants that don’t win the big prize, and virtually all have lost at least three people’s bodyweight in the process, and yet, for the last x number of years…”I just couldn’t get the weight off… I just couldn’t do it.”

How do these ‘miracles’ happen? They happen because that trainer, that coach, that sensei, that sifu was able to push the contestant/student/client mentally and emotionally to do more than the person was previously willing to do for him/herself. The body was always shown to be capable of making the change, but it only ever comes when it engages with the mind and spirit. The ‘hidden talent’ or ‘latent ability’ is only revealed when all the rowers are steering the boat in the same direction, the one direction… the Tao…

Whether or not the stimulus for the mind, body and spirit to combine together happens through an external source like a trainer or coach, or from within oneself doesn’t matter; what does matter is that it must happen, if one is to move to a ‘higher’ place.

Again, our kung fu training helps teach us that it IS within our powers and abilities to reach those goals we set for ourselves, whether they be self-defense skills, job advancement skills or being a better husband or wife. Struggling to work out how to neutralise that combination attack from your training partner can also help you work out how to get around the difficulties of an unfair boss or the struggles of trying to learn material for an upcoming economics exam for your uni degree. It’s all the same, when you boil it down. Struggles and obstacles are necessary for achievement and success; pain is necessary for happiness; Yin must be part of Yang… it’s all the same.

What we do in the classroom IS the same as what we do outside. Like Wing Chun, the art itself teaches us; make your training (=life) less complicated, less cluttered – more economical. Take the excess off, like the sculptor. The work of art that is Y-O-U will come from stripping away all the non-essentials and of getting to the core – the hidden talent (qian li 潜力) – that lies within.

Musings by Sifu Dana P Wong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve often said that what we do in the classroom is the same as we do outside of the classroom; in other words, that every aspect of our lives, no matter how different they might seem to each other, are all parts of the same thing. They are all parts of the One, or the Tao, if we want to make it all mystical and esoteric.

But part of what I’m trying to convey to my students through their Wing Chun training is that it is not just about fighting and self-defence. Their training is also about dealing with life; it’s about dealing with change and how such changes can and will shape the course of their lives. Whether they are for better or for worse can again, often be judged by what perspectives we choose to look at the consequences of those changes.  By looking at one’s martial arts training more as a lifestyle, and not just another “part” of what one does, a person can begin to look at all aspects of his/her life as a unified whole, and not just as pieces to be held together in a basket to be sorted out individually as one’s attention gets drawn to each piece.

By drawing parallels with what you train and learn in your Wing Chun class to what you experience in other aspects of your life, you can create a unified way from which you deal with Life’s ups and downs, a way that doesn’t create unnecessary distinctions that can distract you from the important and necessary elements of your life.

For example, a typical class situation might have you learning a concept for dealing with a person throwing a straight punch to your face. Once you’ve learned the core basics of successfully defending that, the progression moves to the attacker then faking that first punch, then following it with a real punch, like a rear cross or a lead hook. When the student first learns the core concept of dealing with that first straight punch, the introduction of a fake, followed by a second punch will usually cause a moment of hesitation and of ‘freezing’ – what I call the “Oh S*** Factor, or from now on, OSF. It is that moment of hesitation that provides the opening for the opponent’s second, and real, attack to strike true, causing one’s anticipation of the situation to become a self-fulfilling reality. The pain in your face can lead to one of two choices; either you cringe in fear thereafter whenever a punch is thrown at you and hope that luck will pull you through or you backtrack, slow things down and reverse-engineer the encounter so as to learn where the adjustments need to be made, so that the proper skill sets can be learned. From there, you have taken the step of using an obstacle or a hazard to move you to the next rung up the ladder of kung fu achievement. In essence, you’ve taken a “bad” thing (getting faked out and then punched in the face) and turned it into a “good” thing (becoming better at successfully neutralising combination attacks).

Viewed in this light, how can you say the “bad” thing was really bad? It led you to take actions to better yourself and move to a higher evolution. Being so, wouldn’t you now say that that “bad” thing was actually a “good” thing? Or could it be that they are both just parts of the continuum that is your life – the flow of your Tao?

Experiences such as those occur all the time in one’s kung fu training, teaching one to accept such challenges and progressions as part and parcel of the learning and development of one’s skills and of one’s being. Acceptance of those challenges, through repeated and progressive physical encounters leads to a lessening of OSF, and therefore a lessening of attempts to stop the ever-flowing current of one’s life, of one’s Tao, which is an impossible thing to do. This is where much of the conflict in our lives comes in, when we mentally or emotionally try to stop moments in our lives. Sometimes we try to stop our life because we’re so happy, we’re in love, or we’ve travelled to a place that has thoroughly enchanted us and we never want our life to change because of that. More often, though, we want to stop our lives because of a tragedy or a perceived failure of some sort – the breakup of a relationship, losing one’s job after twenty years, or coming home one day to find your house burnt down.

In such situations, many can only see the “bad” and OSF sets in, leading to denial, a mental breakdown, depression, possibly a turn to drugs and/or alcohol to escape the reality of the change that occurred in their life. Our news, TV programs and other media are filled with such life tragedies everyday. But could they be lessened?

I believe so, and encourage you to think of these situations this way. To go back to the beginning of this musing, remember how I asked if any thought of the benefits of something “bad” happening to them, and of how most people don’t think about “bad” situations that way. For most of us, we tend not to think at all when our lives are “good” and all is well. But then when something happens and our life turns “bad”, we try to fix it, often thinking in all directions, envisioning the worst and often over-reacting, causing panic. Panic leads to a freezing of thought, of action, of decision-making and can make our solutions a hit-or-miss proposition.

Our Wing Chun training can help us learn to become more mentally composed, more emotionally neutral when a ‘disaster’ occurs in our everyday life, because we can see it as we do an opponent’s fake and combination attempt in class. Both are, in essence, only changes that are part of what we should expect to come. The repetitions and progression of training stimuli we face in daily training can help us translate the benefits of that environment into the other areas of our lives. Being more composed and emotionally neutral allows us to see more clearly the situation(s) we find ourselves in and the options available to us. This allows us to accept what is happening in such a way that we can look for the appropriate steps to take from there and to continue to move with the flow. Physically, we remain more relaxed, being more able to respond appropriately to the fake and the next move; emotionally we are not stuck in the mud and are thus able to work out options and a game plan to take us to the next phase. Our training is as mental and emotional as we think it to be physical; or at least, I think it should be.

If you can see the parallel tracks I’ve laid down here, perhaps there’s something of value for you when the next ‘disaster’ strikes, in whatever arena of your life it happens. I’ll touch on some concrete ways that our training does give us a well-rounded ability to cope with adversities in my next instalment. Until next time –  Happy Training!

“Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth” – Franklin D Roosevelt

Musings by Sifu Dana P Wong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Ever pondered the benefits of a computer virus crashing your computer? Have you ever considered the value of burning your hand on the hot stove, or weighed up the merits of losing your last job? What did the punch in the nose that you copped last night in training do to enhance your life?

If the gist of my train of thought here is coming through, you’d say, well, they all are telling me I will learn or should learn from my mistakes. I should have updated my anti-virus software (or put some on in the first place); I shouldn’t have reached over that open flame to grab that pot; I should have kept up with the trends happening at work; I should have parried that punch instead of tried to slip mine in first. But HOW do we learn from our mistakes?

What often happens in such instances is that we get caught up in ourselves, without a thought for what else goes on around us, usually until something “drastic” or “terrible” or “wrong” happens and then we panic and try to fix it. Our pre-occupation with ourselves causes us to work in a vacuum until such times that the rest of the world, of which we are an integral part, says “look, we are a part of you, and you are a part of us,” and does something to remind us of that fact and brings us back to the fold.

Is there a place in today’s society for philosophy and how it can impact on your life? I believe so, even more so than ever before. With so much technology, progress and “advancement” (look at how I can communicate with so many of you, around the world, right now) in today’s environment, we’re provided with so much convenience meant to free us up “to do the things we want to do.” With all that free time available, how much of it do you spend looking for the balance? And if you are looking for the balance, are you looking in the right places or are you looking for it with the appropriate means?

Too often, we cruise along through life, not really thinking about what’s happening around us, feeling that everything is alright, because nothing has gone ‘wrong.’ And then when it does go pear-shaped, we panic and often over-react doing things that have no rhyme or reason, in an attempt to set things ‘right’ again. Later, if the consequences of our action/reaction aren’t too drastic or severe, we settle back down again and continue just like before, because we’re comfortable and it feels familiar that way.

Feeling familiar and being comfortable sounds good; yet it doesn’t allow for much growth and real understanding of our lives and the experiences to be had therein. Comfort and familiarity can often be viewed as narcotics, numbing us to the possibilities of better things and greater achievements.

I watch students in my classes, and have even seen it in myself at times, only doing partner drills or practicing forms and techniques that they are ‘good’ at, that they feel comfortable doing and ones that they know will provide a ‘successful’ outcome for them. Yet, true development and real growth often come from when something goes wrong.

For that is when we take some time to examine what has happened or back-track to feel what has occurred, reverse-engineering the situation so that we can come up with a good and viable solution to the problem; hence the meaning of the first paragraph of this entry – getting it ‘wrong’ often gives us the stimulus to take some action for changes we need for our continued evolution.

For Wing Chun practitioners, this often comes during chi sao (contact reflex) training, when one gets trapped and then hit by one’s partner. Too often have we seen an over-reaction that allows the trap to be set more securely, accompanied by the over-commitment of force and energy that leads to fighting a greater force with force, and we get popped instead of borrowing the opponent’s energy and going with it to find the natural release and neutralisation of an attack.

Philosophy enters into the picture here for me, because too often in such cases, we zero in on ‘what happened to me’ and ‘what’s wrong with my response or reflexes’ when we get caught out in training. To do so is only half of the picture, because the focus is squarely on what you did or didn’t do. That’s not to say you shouldn’t ask such questions. But maybe you should ask them in conjunction with some others that give you the other half of the picture – that of your partner/opponent. ‘What did X do to make me react that way’ or ‘what did it feel like when X trapped me like that’ are a couple of questions that I run through both my mind and through my body, so that I can learn to accept what has happened when I got trapped or caught out.

I’ll ask my partner to trap me again, not only so I can try to figure out how he/she did it, but also so that I can feel what it’s like to get caught, or in other words, to lose. Too often we only think of training as winning and losing, yet no one ever says that they want to lose. Wing Chun is great, because it makes you learn to train to lose, so that you can accept what comes along with losing, so that you can learn how it can lead you to the next step in your development, to find out what it feels like in order to give you the key to neutralise the trap. By accepting the feelings and energies expended by both your partner and you, you can find the place where the release should come from, and when it does, it is often a natural reaction that offers seemingly a minimal amount of energy and resistance – certainly far less that what you probably expended when you panicked and got caught.

A few things are often bandied about when martial artists talk about philosophy, and the deeper meanings of our training and existence: Yin and Yang, Zen,  and Taoism amongst others. Thousands of books have been written about them, people clamour to participate in seminars and workshops regarding these concepts, and a million conversations have sprung up over the merits and values of such ‘deep’ philosophies.

We get to experience them all, when we practice our Wing Chun, and we need no books nor do we have to sit and meditate. How? Think about it a little over this long Easter weekend, and then I’ll give you my take on it all and maybe we can all find better ways to train, not only our kung fu skills but also our overall life experience.

Musings by Sifu Dana P Wong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.