Where are we going?

It is as if the closer we come to the perfection of movement the clearer the IDEA becomes.

Hey guy’s,

I hope you are all at least thinking about Wing Chun, in between Mince Pies of course, if the excess sugar that is Christmas has not eaten your brains here is something to engage your little grey cells.

As we are all well aware Wing Chun is a ‘Concept Driven’ Martial Art.

But what concept is doing the driving?

As you all know, I believe that if we are focusing on simply perfecting the physical actions of Wing Chun we are at odds with the intentions of its founder, Dr Leung Jan of Foshan, who was simply trying to improve his shit at a very bad time in Chinese history.

But how does that help us today?

My Sifu would say that we learn Wing Chun in three steps, or waves, or perhaps cycles.

1. Copy the moves of your teacher.
2. Once copied, make these movements your own.
3. Once the moments are your own, let the mind do the work.

As ‘Out there’ as this approach sounds, and for quite a while I thought it to be nothing more than Kung Fu Mumbo Jumbo, it hooked me deep, and trying to understand what he meant has been central to all of my personal work.

While he was with us, my Sifu would help with my search, but his suggestions and hints were as mysterious as the original three-step IDEA.

For instance, I would be standing doing S.L.T. Form and he would ask me what my ankles were doing.

On another occasion, he told me that ‘Wing Chun operates in the spaces before contact and after contact’.

But one thing he did tell me that has proved to be of great value, at least to me anyway, was that the Forms are how we look for the IDEA.

The Forms ‘ARE’ the ‘Concept’ if we can just realise it.

In my ongoing search to find this Concept or perhaps even Concepts, I have discovered several ways to engage with the training so that we can almost ‘feel’ the IDEA.

As I have said, I do not think that the physical actions are the point of the training, but I also think that it is only once we can replicate the movements seamlessly, effortlessly, and correctly, all of our movements, not just the Forms, that we can get the scent of the IDEA.

As if the closer we come to the perfection of movement the clearer the IDEA becomes.

It appears to be almost essential that we hold a decent understanding of  Wing Chun from the perspective of how a body performs it, i.e. ‘how we actually, physically do it’, before we can unlock Wing Chun as a mind.

And let it do the work.

But this can cause some confusion because Concepts only exist in the mind.

This reminds me of a quote from Brian Clough, the at the time manager of Nottingham Forest F.C…

   … “On paper, we should have won this game, but unfortunately it was played on grass”.

Can we transfer the training in our mind to the street?

I believe we can.

I realise that the following statement may sound ridiculous, but, we must find a way to take Wing Chun out of the work.

Yet again we find ourselves in the territory of the ‘Finger pointing at the moon’.

When Dr. Leung Jan began the work that became Wing Chun, his intention was to refine and simplify his existing skill set, which was more than likely a Shaolin style.

He was not aiming at inventing a new way to fight, he could already do that.

Wing Chun, it appears, is about how we use a trained skill set, and how we use the way we fight.

This is why firstly we learn the physical fighting stuff, it is only once we have this in the bag that we begin the work that is Wing Chun.

Most of us are seniors and have a good grasp of the fighting stuff, so this letting the mind do the work is where we need to be looking.

For those of you who may think you lack something in the fighting stuff area, I will fast-track you so that you can at least connect to the mind stuff.

If you think back to an earlier post I pointed out that all that is needed to win a fight is to sidestep and then poke the Bad Guy in the eye, I can teach that in 2 minutes.

Let’s dig deep in 2024.

As a bit of a heads-up for next year answer me this…

… is a Stance a SHAPE, or an IDEA?

I WOULDN’T TELL YOU IF IT WASN’T TRUE.

THE ‘D’ MAN.