WE BEGIN THINKING IT IS A TELESCOPE, BUT WHEN WE FINALLY SEE ‘THAT STAR AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE ‘, IT TURNS INTO A MICROSCOPE.
AND SO IT BEGINS…
At some time or other, I have mentioned to everyone that they would benefit from doing more work on one or other of the FORMS, depending where they are in their training.
This brings up two questions.
Firstly, why did I make this suggestion?
Secondly, exactly what does it mean to ‘work on a FORM’
What I saw, and this is not in any way a criticism, was a gap between thinking and acting,
or as I put it in the WhatsApp note…
… The compression of decision and action into one thing, until the gap between seeing and doing disappears entirely, and what is left is a kind of quiet inevitability that other people watching it cannot immediately name, but recognise.
When we watch somebody, in any act or discipline, who has exquisite movement, we do not really understand the difference between what they do and what we do, but we clearly see it.
At this level of capability, movements are not decisions any more; they are just what the body does, and to achieve this we need a deeper understanding of how and why we move.
The answer to the second question is how we get there.
Working on a FORM does not mean simply physically ‘doing‘ the FORM.
I think there is a third question trying to squeeze through… ‘what is a FORM’?
I have been doing the S.L.T. for well over 30 years, so there is an outside chance that I would know what the FORM is, and there have been times when I thought I did, but the FORM is the gift that keeps on giving, or as I have said before, we begin by thinking it is a telescope, but when we finally see that ‘star at the end of the universe ‘, it goes and turns into a microscope.
Believe it or not, this is the good news.
There is a reason for doing the complete physical set, but this has more to do with remembering the movements; plus, they help us understand the ZONE of our ‘range of movement’, and of course, recognise the shape of the Pyramid.
But there is little, if any, benefit to doing the whole sequence over individual movements, here is a ‘no shit Sherlock’ moment, it is harder to concentrate on 108 movements performed one after another than it is on one particular movement, per-FORM-ed repeatedly.
This does not mean that doing the complete FORM is of no value, but we can learn more, faster, by isolating a single movement.
But either way, the process of understanding is OBSERVATION.
Observe what we are doing, and measure this observation against the theory of how, and WHY this movement should be done.
Another Sherlock moment, if it has no use, it is, quite literally, USELESS, I wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t true.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 