I get it, I do, I was there once, as were Sam, George, and Costas, and we felt and acted just as you guys are feeling and acting.
Hey Guy’s…
…The posts are coming thick and fast… just like me…
…In last night’s training, Thursday, Jan 30th, there was a noticeable change in enthusiasm between when we were working on the Form and when we started exploring technical ways of dealing with strikes and hitting people.
This is not a surprise, it is more fun playing at being a “Bad Ass” than it is training to become one, but deep down, we know violence is serious, so if shit got real, why would our nervous system choose to play when we need to get serious?
NEWS FLASH… it won’t!
What does that mean in regards to developing capability in Self-defence?
Are we wasting our time?
Like so many questions that arise through training, the answer is…. It depends.
It depends on how closely our playing echos our Forms.
And the inverse is also true, how closely our Forms echo our playing.
To navigate a violent situation, our body will, as if by magic, echo moves from Sil Lim Tao, Chum Kiu and Biu Gee, even when we do not know these Forms, this is part and parcel of the whole “Wing Chun is based on normal human body mechanics”.
Forms do not teach us these moves, shapes and postures; they simply allow us to isolate, practice, observe, and understand them in a non-threatening, non-dynamic situation.
And they help us to trust them.
The obvious next step is to take this knowledge into Chi Sau and free play, both of which are still non-threatening but present escalating levels of dynamism.
We do this at any and every time of our training journey, even when we get it.
This is very easy to understand and trust when like myself, Sam, George, and Costas you have been training for decades but is understandably ‘dead suss’ when what you want is the ability to defend yourself today and not the ability to accurately perform Sil Lim Tao.
I get it, I do, I was there once, as were Sam, George, and Costas, and we felt and acted just as you guys are feeling and acting.
This is why the non-physical side of the work is much more important and valuable than the technical side.
We did not believe that either.
There is not one move that any of you guys performed last night that you do not use somewhere in your everyday life, even punching.
The punching action, when done slowly with very little effort, is how you open doors, call elevators or do push-ups.
The first and perhaps the most challenging task is to accept that you can already do all the moves you need to effectively defend yourself, even before you began training, before you had even heard the name Wing Chun you had this knowledge and ability.
If we can accept this premise then everything becomes about improving what we already possess and not about learning something new and challenging.
Because you do not have the information to identify all of the Wing Chun Forms you cannot see that last night you were using aspects of Sil Lim Tao, Chum Kiu, Biu Gee, and even the Dummy, Knives and Pole.
The linear way that we present the Forms is just to make as smooth a learning curve as we possibly can, there are no laws in Wing Chun that state because you are at the beginning of training, you cannot work on Biu Gee, it would just be extremely challenging because Biu Gee contains all of Chum Kiu, and Chum Kiu contains all of Sil Lim Tao.
But it certainly does not hurt to look ahead.
The stats of this site tell me that almost nobody explores the other sections of the Blog, and when you consider that there is information here for students of all levels, all the way to Master level, everything you wish to know is here somewhere, why wait for me to point it out?
Here is a video from the Isolation Training Advice page, sometimes, finding something you want and realising you do not know how to do it is all the motivation you need to dig into the work
WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.
WHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE.
Zen parable, or perhaps Mind Boxing basics.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 