Category: FIST LOGIC

Long story short, there is only the work. 

ASSERTIVE OR RESPONSIVE?

What do I mean by this?

Before we get into this conversation we must establish a shared understanding of the context, the place, and the environment that the subject of this post covers.

If at any point in this post, you are not sure what I mean, pick the absolute simplest thing that you can think of that fits the bill.

Wing Chun is essentially the search for simplicity in all things.

When I refer to the violent interaction between two people I am referring to the embryonic moment of violence.

There is no attacker or defender in this situation, no right or wrong, no good guy or bad guy.

Just the moment itself, that half-second, one second or two seconds between someone striking out and that strike landing on its target.

It is happening and all nuance is out of the window.

In this pre-moment someone is assertive,  they choose to kick it off and step in to land the first blow, everything that is happening is their agenda.

While the other person has no choice but to be responsive, and to deal with this action, in this instant, there is no agenda except response.

It makes zero difference what that response is, it is simply a response.

Even if the responder pulls a gun and shoots the other guy dead, at the simplest of levels it is just a response to the other guy’s act.

Quickly imagine which of these people you are most likely to be similar to, but perhaps leave out the shooting.

If in our mind we are the instigator, and again ignore such flotsam as cause or reason, we are the asserter.

If we did not instigate the event, if our imagined response is aggressive, neutral, or defensive they are all the same, and any perceived differences are all just unneeded nuance.

This can be made simpler by asking “Are we the type of person that would cast the first stone”?

Be honest, keep it simple, avoid bullshit.

Wing Chun, by its own claims, is a “Counter-Attacking Martial Style.

One important point that is usually side-stepped because it becomes an uncomfortable conversation is that in times of stress when our conscious mind is overwhelmed and we rely upon our subconscious mind to save the day, our subconscious mind always reverts to type.

What type are you?

Assertive or responsive?

Two questions to ask ourselves.

1. Is my training reflecting who I am?
2. Reflecting on the type I fall into, am I doing the most suitable Martial Art for my subconscious mind to make decisions based on what my conscious mind has been training?

Many students expect their training to “Kick in” in times of need.

Even if our body was at all capable of automatically, subconsciously, making our training “Kick in”, this is a responsive action. 

The vast majority of YouTube videos, sometimes in conflict with what they themselves claim to be selling, teach or at least suggest that Wing Chun steps into the fray, taking the initiative.

It promotes ASSERTIVE behaviour as the way to use a RESPONSIVE Martial Style.

In what universe does this work effectively?

Let’s expand this discussion to take a closer look at this.

TRAINING KICKING IN.

Way back before YouTube came into existence, Charlatan Martial Arts Businessmen would claim that their brand was better than others on the market because it trained your nervous system.

The nervous system does not have synapses so it cannot think.

If it cannot think it cannot be trained.

The ‘Home World’ for all charlatans is the world of almost truths and unverifiable factoids.

And let’s not leave out ‘Magical Thinking’.

On a level footing with “Internal Chi Power” is the claim that someone or some style can turn your training into a reflex action.

You cannot train a reflex.

We train reactions.

Reflexes are automatic, like the instinct to pull your hand off a burning stove in response to pain. 

Reactions are those conscious responses to various experiences that we make that aren’t necessarily instinctive.

While we can train to improve our reaction to an established reflex action, we have zero input to the reflex itself.

Here is a grab from a medical study paper on the role of the C.N.S. with regard to reflex…

Central Nervous System.

1. It consists of the spinal cord and brain.
2. The brain is the main organ that controls the major functioning of the whole body of organisms.
3. The spinal cord is a long tube-like structure enclosed by a vertebral column. It carries signals from the brain and transmits them to different body parts.

Reason for reflex actions to be controlled by the spinal cord and not the brain:

1. Reflex actions are involuntary actions that involve reflex arc.
2. The information through the reflex arc does not travel directly to the brain in most vertebrates.
3. Instead, it travels through the synapse and reaches the spinal cord, which acts as the leading centre for these actions and sends an appropriate response for the stimulus.

Sadly some people will point to the above paragraphs and find a way to make it be the Brain calling the shots.

Our Brain does not communicate with our Spinal Chord by sending messages or IDEAS, it does not use words or pictures, so unless we know how to translate Wing Chun knowledge into a chemical precursor the Brain is not involved in directing reflexes in a Martial manner.

Charlatans, and pretty much all of YouTube, is set up to hoodwink the ignorant, naive, and lazy, those amongst us who want the results without the work.

Long story short, there is only the work. 

But wait there is good news…

The work is simple.

YOUTUBE…

WHERE WING CHUN TRUTH GOES TO DIE.

THE ‘D’ MAN.

REALLY… OH COME ON.

It is not a simple binary choice such as this over that.

There are only two approaches to violent human interaction.

This is not about style, capability, conditioning or training, it is about how humans, in general, solve problems.

It is not a simple binary choice such as this over that.

Both approaches will allow us to reach our current potential, so in that respect they are equal.

All deliberate actions, such as using aspects of, or techniques from our training, are the product of our Conscious Mind.

 I think we all know this.

But what happens if we are not in an environment that allows us to make conscious decisions?

An environment where we are in a state of shock, even panic.

This is the very environment that most students expect their training to just ‘kick in’.

Let me repeat something…

“All deliberate actions such as using aspects of, or techniques from, our training, are the product of our Conscious Mind”.

What we are pinning our hopes on is that we can access our Conscious Mind in a situation where we do not have access to our Conscious Mind.

Praying that we can access our training when we cannot think.

Go over this as many times as it takes for you to make sense of what I am saying.

I will try to explain this in some depth in my next post, but first I want to clear our heads of misinformation.

Emptying the cup so that we can fill it.

Firstly we need to be able to take the 30,000 ft view by highlighting something that we are all immersed in without really paying attention to it.

YouTube.

This is a sore point with me so it may come over as a bit of a rant.

It is not meant to be but it is really difficult for me to talk about Wing Chun’s representation on YouTube without my true colours shining through.

Something I ask every potential student is “What type of fighter are you”?

You would be shocked by how many do not know how to answer this.

They tend to say something like “I am hoping to learn how to fight by learning Wing Chun”.

My answer is either the first real chance of personal growth they get, or it bursts their bubble and I never see them again.

‘Wing Chun does not teach people how to fight, it teaches people how to fight better”.

How do so many people get it so very, very mixed up?

To a certain extent, this has been amplified by COVID-19 but mostly I blame YouTube.

Since the Global lockdown more of us are using YouTube to seek out Wing Chun information.

But that is where it all goes pear-shaped.

YouTube is a shopping Channel.

And like all of us when we go shopping, people only buy what they believe suits them.

No one is actually looking for information, what they are looking for is validation.

They are looking for a YouTube influencer to tell them that while their thinking is a bit disorganised they are moving in the right direction.

If the YouTuber does not do this they look for one that does.

Why else would anyone listen to half of these guys?

Since COVID-19, YouTube has all but exploded with Wing Chun content, if that is the right word.

I do not blame the YouTubers, they are just trying to make a buck.

And I am not saying that they are wrong, if they get a sale, or a thumbs up, then it is mission accomplished, no foul there, only a fool would blame the salesman when they go out and pay good money by their own choice.

There is a very old maxim “Never buy a Pig in a Poke”, so this is no new occurrence.

But back to the question.

“What type of fighter are you”?

After all, there are only two types, and we all know which one we are.

We are either assertive or responsive.

But, just like someone who goes to town and buys the wrong shirt, we buy what we think can help us be the person we wish to be.

Instead of something that improves who we are.

Especially with Internet Shopping.

We have all got the equivalent of that pair of bright blue paisley happy pants that looked great at 4am after too much Scotch.

As I mentioned, there are only 2 types of fighters, this is an aspect of who we are and not what we hope our training will make us.

While it is possible to change which type of fighter we are over the medium term, we cannot change this to order, and we cannot be both.

YouTube is an Internet Shopping Channel that never has to face its customers, they know they will never need to answer to unhappy campers.

Unless they can get online after surgery that is.

Twp pairs of bright blue paisley happy pants for one cheap price.

Kevin Lee.

This is a continuation of the last post, which itself was just the beginning to an approach to isolating the “Little Idea”, and glimpsing what makes Wing Chun “tic”.

Something that may only happen when Westerners get involved in Kung Fu is that the work quickly gets conflated with some level of spirituality.

I believe, as did my Cantonese/Chinese teacher, that this is more about the way our Chinese forebears used language.

A by-product of the way our Kung Fu predecessors approached “The Way” to live life in general.

Wing Chun was always populated by the “Middle Class’ of Chinese society, educated men who would have approached their daily life as a journey to becoming what the Yi Ching referred to as junzi 君子.

I have spoken before about the significance of Yip Man’s Peach Wood Knives.

And about how the monks of the Shaolin and Wudang Mountain Monasteries were spiritual men living in violent times, and not violent men on a spiritual journey.

Although it is not necessary to keep this in mind when actively training as it has no influence on the physical side of the work, it can act as a Rosetta Stone when thinking about the historical information that is passed down to us, as we approach the non-physical side, the conceptual side of the work.

The IDEA.

The little Idea is Simplicity, but what do we mean by this?

We are better served if we transpose the word to simplify or simplification.

To treat Wing Chun as a moving verb and not as a static adjective.

A description of ‘what it does‘ as opposed to ‘what it is‘ or what it looks like.

Simplify as in to make something less complicated, easier to understand, to remove unnecessary extensions, to reduce to basic elements.

Understanding of what?

Extensions of what?

Reduce what?

An absolute prerequisite here is to accept that Dr Leung Jan was simplifying an already well-established, well-trained, well-understood skill set.

His own fighting skill-set.

However, learning the actual skill set is not the goal of the training, it can be any skill-set.

Wing Chun is a departure point and not a destination.

To a certain extent, this whole line of thought depends on what version of Wing Chun Genesis we adhere to.

On what camp we are in.

Do we choose to align ourselves with the passed down tale, the IDEA that Wing Chun was created by Ng Mui and Yim Wing Chun or do we choose, as is accepted by so many researchers as a historical fact, that Wing Chun was a refinement begun by Dr Leung Jan?

If you are unaware of this research start HERE.

To prevent pointless partisan argument we can phrase this as ‘Do we think Wing Chun was a creation or a refinement’?

This brings us to the heart of the split among Wing Chun thinkers.

A crossroad that leads in very different directions.

Is it a religion or is it a science?

If it is a religion, what was done and what was said by the Elders is as good as law, and to attempt to change it is blasphemy.

It was perfect in the beginning, it is perfect now and it will always be perfect.

As disciples, our job is to accept the “Kernel of What Is” and build a fortress around it, never question it, never doubt it.

On the other hand, if it is a science, we are required to engage with it on a completely different level, an antagonistic level, we must always question, and we must always doubt.

Our job as students, using the scientific method, is to take this same “Kernel of What Is” and stretch it to the breaking point, to try to prove it wrong. 

And when we cannot prove it wrong, accept that it is only right for today, tomorrow we try to prove it wrong again.

Obviously, this is a binary choice.

While we can at any time retrace our path to the crossroads and follow the opposite direction, we must commit to our choice, whatever that may be, and not look back. 

We can of course choose to turn again at any time, many times even, but once on either chosen path, we must hold strong with our IDEA.

But whichever road we choose, we should keep in mind the opening passage of the Chinese Philosophical classic the Dao De Jing, which all of our Wing Chun predecessors would have been more than familiar with, even lived by.

The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way.

Laozi.

Win a fight, get laid, lose a fight, get laid, it was a win-win situation.

This preamble to this post may appear out of place, even self-serving, but it is important if you wish to put your thoughts into the right context and understand what I am trying to say.

In a ‘Concept” driven Martial Art like Wing Chun, context is everything.

Context is usually the difference between understanding and confusion.

This post is a lead-in to a much larger body of work, that hopefully I will put into an E-book somewhere down the line.

I was 39 years of age in 1992 when I took up training in Wing Chun Kung Fu, and I came to the style with more than 35 years of experience in and around the Martial Arts scene.

This is quite relevant to my understanding and interpretation of the Sil Lim Tao.

Tune in to any newsroom in the Mainstream Media and they are full of dire economic predictions for the future, partly due to the fact that my generation, the ‘Baby Boomers’ are all entering or already at, retirement age.

Worldwide many millions of people are about to stop buying unneeded crap and stop paying taxes.

But if we step back 60 years we have that same many millions of children entering adolescence.

Unlike today, there was no internet, practically no Television, or at least none suitable for the growing youth of the growing countries, no video games, in short, no suitable and affordable way to fill the empty hours of growing up.

Even in a smallish city like Liverpool in England, there would be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bored teenagers in the same place at the same time.

All trying to impress a potential sexual partner.

The cheapest and most easily accessed method was to show off.

And the cheapest way to show off was to fight.

No generation before or since has been involved in so much random, unprovoked, unjustified, street violence.

In Europe and America, Friday night was “Fight Night”.

School playgrounds became nothing short of a Gladiatorial training grounds.

This is what fuelled the Boxing Boom in the U.K.  And then the advent of the Kung Fu craze worldwide.

To my generation, Martial Arts existed as a way to become a more capable fighter.

But the real madness was that we were not training to become fighters.

We were training to be lovers.

Win more fights, get more chicks.

Insanely you did not even need to win, just standing up for yourself, especially against bullies, would earn some serious ‘STREET CRED.’

The chicks of the day just loved guys who could handle themselves or were at least willing to try.

So the majority of teenage boys got into it.

Win a fight, get laid, lose a fight, get laid, it was a win-win situation.

Mindfulness did not rear its ugly head until sometime in the mid-1980s when most Martial Arts were hijacked by the health and fitness boom and the charlatans that populate it.

So, like all of my generation, my approach is always about capability, fighting capability.

If you do not align with this thinking that’s fine, it just means you grew up in better times, but it does not make me wrong.

Sil Lim Tao.

From the outset, it is essential to separate Sil Lim Tao from the Sil Lim Tao Form.

Sil Lim Tao, the “Little Idea”, is the central pillar of everything we do in Wing Chun, but the Sil Lim Tao FORM is just one of six movement sets that aid in understanding the “Little Idea”.

A convenient, but in no way essential, way to frame this is that the Sil Lim Tao is a set of books in which the Sil Lim Tao Form is just the first volume. 

When we consider that I have been reading this set of books, over and over, for 30 years what do I think?

The “Little Idea”, as we all know, is a CONCEPT.

And CONCEPTS change every time they encounter new information, this is why CONTEXT is paramount.

I cannot ignore that what I think today is not even close to what I thought 20 years ago, but I do know, beyond any doubt, that the “Little Idea” has not changed.

 I have changed, or rather my thinking has changed.

Saliently, what I think now is not what I thought 10 years ago, and I would be naive to expect my present mental position to be my Final Position.

I do however think that I am very close to the Final Position.

The “Little Idea”, the single overriding concept is SIMPLICITY.

The actual shape and content of the training we do, while important, is almost irrelevant.

We could use any style of Martial Art, after all, when Dr Leung Jan began this process of refinement and simplification the physical shape and content were based on his own skill set, more than likely Shaolin Kung Fu.

Many of you will disagree with this, and that’s fine, it was not and is not about the content.

It is about SIMPLIFYING the content.

What a vague and nebulous word SIMPLICITY is.

Especially when we consider that once we have simplified what we know and do and have this new approach, this new IDEA of what Wing Chun is, it means that what we knew previously, what we struggled with, what we argued over, was not, in fact, Wing Chun after all.

But even before our head stops spinning we realise that unless we now know all there is to know, we must SIMPLIFY our IDEA of Wing Chun even further.

Stick or twist?

Even more confusing, if we do choose to keep training this new IDEA of Wing Chun is also not Wing Chun.

If it was why would we work at changing it?

Back in the day at my Sifu’s school, one of my regular training partners was an ex-Turkish Paratrooper who had achieved a 5th Dan in Tae Kwon Dao, he had even represented Australia, and he was seriously talented.

A groin injury forced him out of the hyper-athletic T.K.D. And into Wing Chun.

He would get super frustrated when after working hard for months on removing unneeded strength and tension from his training, and succeeding admirably I must say, he would be told to remove more.

How do we SIMPLIFY something that we have already simplified?

With this in mind let’s look at the Forms.

When we first encounter the S.L.T. Form it has 108 moving parts.

Pretty much as soon as the smoke clears we are down to 54 moving parts that are played on both the left and right side of our body.

Once we realise that what we are doing is often the same moving part travelling on a different path, the Form gets even smaller. 

Even less content.

Even less important?

Where I am today, there is only one moving part.

Do you know which one it is?

A SMALL MOVEMENT IS BETTER THAN A LARGE MOVEMENT.

BUT NO MOVEMENT IS THE BEST OF ALL.

unknown.

There are no second goes or makeovers in a street situation.

Where or how does the non-physical interconnect or interact with the physical?

On many occasions, you guys have heard me say that training is just software.

To better draw this picture think of complex programs like Photoshop or Illustrator, they can take months to get the basics down and then every few years there comes along an upgrade {we could think of them as gradings or belts}, that require a whole new truck-load of effort to get back to competency.

Here is the thing, if we put all of our effort and capacity into understanding and internalising the program, the only thing we will know is the program, and the only thing we will be capable of doing is teaching other people how to use the program.

Hence the saying…

Those that can, do…

Those who can’t do… teach.

In a martial art like Wing Chun that has almost zero force-on-force training knowing how to navigate this conundrum is vital.

Humans are social creatures and Wing Chun schools are social places, cliques and friendly groups form as if by magic, and we always seem to train with the same handful of people.

 So much so that the first half hour of training is not really training at all, it is a form of socialising.

As I say, we humans are social creatures, training becomes a somewhat social event, and as such training becomes a form of social behavior.

Same time, same place, same people, and the same training.

You know the thinking, if it is Thursday, it must be Kung Fu.

Add to this that what we call the work is learned and practiced in a social environment.

It becomes a social event.

Violence is the antithesis of a social event.

It is anti-social in the extreme.

So the challenge we face is not how to excel at the training, but more how to use what have become ‘social mores’ { ‘mores’ are social norms that are widely observed within a particular society or culture} in an anti-social environment.

If we find ourselves in a violent situation, whatever we choose to do MUST work on the first time of calling it up.

There are no second goes or makeovers in a street situation.

This in itself causes a dilemma, how do we bridge this shortfall in our training without descending into a ‘Fight Club’?

The place to start the change is to place more importance on the result than the action, essentially know what you want to happen when you use a specific aspect of training and then ‘make it happen’.

Another good habit is to stop telling ourselves we got it right if it was our third attempt, if we are in a “REAL” situation that needs that specific aspect of our training we MUST get it right on the first attempt.

Training is software, we are the hardware and the shit we are in is simply a problem to be solved by the hardware using the software.

But like any computer.

G.I.G.O.

THE EDGE, TO BE HONEST, THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHERE IT IS HAVE ALREADY GONE OVER.

HUNTER. S. THOMPSON.

All of our knowledge, all of our training and pretty much our only hope is in the ZONE.

There is an obvious contradiction when we try to talk about what we could/should do in a dangerous, violent situation, and then use a safe, non-violent situation, i.e. training, to explore this.

As Sam said at the end of training “It is really just about composure”, and that is bang on the money.

But we must ask ourselves, ‘how can we practice regaining composure in a safe training environment where we are, if nothing else, composed’?

Even a style that uses full-contact sparring has this problem, we can always walk away if we are not having fun.

Believe me, being on the wrong end of a kicking is in no way fun.

Walking away is simply not on the table, running perhaps, but even then we need to engineer our escape.

And to do that we need as much composure as we can muster.

How do we develop composure?

How do we regain composure in a Shit-Fight?

Once regained how do we maintain composure?

No matter which style we train, it is just not possible to come close to the reality of this in training, there is no other choice but to imagine it, to set up scenarios where we can play-act what we think will go down.

This is not as bogus as it may first sound, reality only happens ‘in the moment’, and after that it is stored as memory.

Neuroscientists have shown us that the human brain sees memory and imagination as the same thing.

And all of the ancient wisdom traditions tell us that “We are what we think”.

Since the time of the Stoics in ancient Greece, the philosopher Epictetus told us that how we think changes how we feel, how we feel changes how we think, and that they both affect how we act/ behave.

In today’s psychology, this is the core of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy C.B.T.

As you know I am not a supporter of the notion of “Internal” Kung Fu, by which I refer to the act of generating a force from an unknown origin to power our attacks, to me, is just magical thinking.

But there is, beyond doubt, a non-physical side to training that should not be ignored.

Only a fool would say that fighting/violence is a purely physical experience.

There is a definite emotional aspect and a definite mental aspect, that we simply must find a way to accommodate.

For ease of explanation, I refer to this emotional/mental aspect as “Mind Boxing”

I do not use the term Mind Boxing because I can somehow box with my mind, that is just as bad as any other kind of magical thinking, I call it Mind Boxing because I believe we need to observe, understand, and train our minds as a separate, yet inclusive, part of our {Chinese} Boxing.

I believe this topic to be so important that I have a stand-alone website CLICK HERE.

To paraphrase and contextualise Epictetus…

How we feel in a violent situation will influence how we think in a violent situation.

How we think in a violent situation will influence how we feel in a violent situation.

They will both, in their own way, influence what we do in a violent situation.

It is important to not only accept this but to also understand that the quantity/quality of the effect of how we think and the quantity/quality of the effect of how we feel when under pressure is a sliding scale.

As such no one-size-fits-all solution.

The challenge becomes ‘Can we come up with a generic method that can provide value for all of us’?

We are not alone in this quest, every Elite Sportsman knows this search and luckily for us the Internet is awash with information from Sports Psychologists to aid in eliminating, what in less dangerous environments, might be referred to as ‘performance anxiety’.

To take a leaf from the book of Sports Psychology we need to create a template that we can slip into whenever we need to perform a specific task.

This is where a layman’s understanding of how our Mind works becomes essential to progress.

Everything happening to us ‘in the moment’, all stimuli, are processed by our short-term memory.

The short-term memory is our director, our captain, it calls the shots.

But the short-term memory has minimal storage capacity, by some estimates, short-term memory can only hold around seven items of information at one time. 

Anything deemed not mission critical is shunted off into storage, into our long-term memory, where the brain permanently stores the information for future recall when necessary.

How we deal with what is happening right here, right now, right in front of us is the remit of our short-term memory.

But if we get in strife and hope to call on our training we need to access long-term memory.

While we are actively training all of our training information is stored in our short-term memory, but as soon as we leave to go home that info is moved to long-term storage.

When we think about an elite sportsman playing flawlessly, and effortlessly, we say that they are in the ZONE.

Being in the ZONE is being in unobstructed, unfettered contact with our Long-term memory.

How do we access the ZONE when we are in the middle of an active shitstorm?

Because this is more important than anything else.

All of our knowledge, all of our training and pretty much our only hope is in the ZONE.

And as the ‘Brown Becomes Airborne’, we are not.

If we return to the Sports world we see suggestions of setting up cues or triggers, single movements or thoughts that call up complex actions, and complex movements without complex thinking.

If we think about our computers, we click an icon or an alias to open a program.

Addressing the Ball in Golf, preparing to take a penalty in football, waiting for a delivery in cricket, taking a set position in a foot race, and waiting to return serve in tennis are examples many of us will have experience of from school if nothing else.

In these ready positions, the emphasis is as much on setting the tone of our emotions and settling into a pre-trained mindset, only once we are happy that we have adopted these positions do we engage in our trained skill.

Self-Defence Martial Arts are anticipating being surprised, but I think we all know that we cannot expect the unexpected.

The only thing we can expect is some level of surprise/shock.

Do we have any IDEA how to move into and adopt a ready position whilst in a state of surprise/shock?

HOW WE FEEL CHANGES HOW WE THINK.

HOW WE THINK CHANGES HOW WE FEEL.

THEY BOTH CHANGE HOW WE ACT.

EPICTETUS. 130A.D.

Despite their complete misunderstanding, they are correct, Wing Chun is smoke and Mirrors..

Hey Guys.

This is a longish post that should pull a lot of other posts into a single focus, no matter what you think is going on it will pay great dividends if you read it through to the bitter end and retain the information.

The main reason I dislike YouTube videos regarding Wing Chun is that the people who make them clearly do not fully understand what Wing Chun is, or what it aims to achieve.

Sadly, I am not only talking about the haters, this includes the well-intentioned souls that step up to defend Wing Chun’s honour.

In many instances, the “Defenders of the Faith” are doing much more damage to Wing Chun than the detractors ever could.

By putting time and effort into demonstrating that Wing Chun can work in a ‘Real Fight’ they are moving away from what Wing Chun was, is, and could be.

The detractors that make negative comments about Wing Chun are not doing anyone any harm, they are just voicing their opinion, which is everyone’s right.

They have no understanding of Wing Chun and so they call it as they see it.

 Through the lens of ‘Not Knowing,’ they say that Wing Chun is nothing but ‘Smoke and Mirrors’.

Despite their complete misunderstanding, they are correct, Wing Chun is smoke and Mirrors..

Then up stand the loyal disciples, usually young men keen to impress as young men are.

Through effort and enterprise, they try to show that the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ can work in a ‘Real Fight’.

It can, but it is nonetheless still just ‘Smoke and Mirrors’.

Understanding Wing Chun is more about understanding LIFE than it is about understanding fighting.

A big ask for a young person, and by young I am talking about being under 40 years old.

The reason Great Kung Fu Masters are old is not because of a lifetime spent training, it is because of a lifetime spent living.

People who understand Wing Chun say yes, Wing Chun training is as you call it, ‘Smoke and Mirrors’.

But the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ are not Wing Chun, they are simply a vehicle, a way for us to see and explore Wing Chun.

Just as a prism can split a beam of white light to show the colours of the spectrum.

Without the use of a Prism, all that is visible is a beam of white light, but those of us who previously saw that light pass through the spectrum know that in truth that beam of white light is in reality, every colour of the rainbow.

Smoke and Mirrors.

This is where ‘Shit Gets Weird”

Wing Chun is a Conceptual Martial Art.

There is nothing physical.

But the only way we can interact with or experience the Concept of Wing Chun is through physical interaction and physical training.

It is doubtful that Dr Leung Jan of Foshan had any IDEA about Quantum Physics, but that is exactly how he created Wing Chun.

Light as a particle and a wave.

Doing and not doing.

If you have stayed with me this far then it should be clear that to understand the nature of Wing Chun we must understand, as well as we can, the nature of Dr Leung Jan’s thinking.

But here is more weird shit, this thinking can only be understood through the physical interaction of what we call training.

Seeing as how he has been dead for more than a century connecting to his thinking may be difficult.

But enough has been handed down through the years for us to at least find the door, and hopefully prise it open.

Hints that have been left like breadcrumbs are often ignored because they have been usurped and used as cliches by the movie industry, or exhausted as advertising spin.

But it is these very cliches and spin statements that hold the key to understanding.

These are the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ that hide Wing Chun.

And there are hundreds of them.

Here are a few that I found value in exploring.

He attacks first, but I strike first.

He walks the Bow, but I walk the string.

These two nuggets are from the Kuen Kurt, the language is flowery so we need to update it.

The first describes the reality of counter-attacking, in a simple clear way.

As you all know, I think that the majority of Wing Chun students do not understand counter-attack, but this is it in a nutshell.

Q. Does a counterattack need any kind of defensive action?

If your answer is yes, or some variation of simultaneous attack and defence, you are among the people that do not understand.

The second is a clear instruction that we attack with straight lines, we walk the bowstring.

But think about the things we use to try and sell Wing Chun.

We claim that Wing Chun is not a ‘they do that, so we do this’ type of Martial Art.

What does this imply, especially when we think about how we train, someone poses a strike {they do that} and we reply with a counter from the Wing Chun repertoire {so we do this}.

What we do in training is clearly not what we are meant to learn.

Here we go again with the ‘finger pointing at the moon’.

In our Science focused education system, we are accidentally taught to abandon abstract thinking.

But I maintain that only abstract thinking can cut through.

Think abstractly, but deeply, about statements such as ‘fighting without fighting’.

And my favourite ‘it is only when we do not try to use Wing Chun that we use Wing Chun’.

If as per the statement above Wing Chun is not a ‘they do that’ style of Martial Art, surely this is implying that we never know what is going on.

Think deeply about this one.

If we know what is going on, if we know what the opponent is trying to do then we are involved.

This is fighting.

Wing Chun does not fight.

As I have said there are hundreds of IDEAS we can think of, hundreds of breadcrumbs, you do not need to use the ones I use.

The message in the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ reveals itself bit by bit, in small packages as our understanding grows.

When we have none or little understanding the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ present themselves as a pile of steaming Horse Shit.

This is what the haters see, just plain white light.

With some understanding, shapes appear in the smoke, and weird, unrecognisable reflections flash across the mirrors, it is pretty much gobbledygook.

This is what the defenders see, still plain white light.

But a time does come when the IDEA presents itself as a Fog Lamp that cuts through the smoke, reflects off the mirrors, and illuminates the prize.

The Prism.

Violence is white light, Wing Chun is a Prism, and the training is a rainbow.

To understand a Concept’ we must use a ‘Concept’, to understand thinking we must use thinking.

After that, we just smack people.

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY

Alfred Korzybski

My opponent did not need to work for the win, it was given to him.

About 15 or 20 years ago I was talking to a workmate when I discovered he trained in Karate, we began talking about training when he shared his opinion that Wing Chun didn’t work in a real fight.

When I asked him why he thought that punching people in the head or kicking them in the nuts did not work in a ‘Real Fight”, because that is part of what Wing Chun teaches, he said I did not understand what he meant so the obvious thing was to touch hands.

In a friendly way.

We were in a quiet part of a very large building so we decided there was no time like the present.

Long story short, he came second.

I may only train in Wing Chun, but I understand Karate.

I would stand out of range until he tried to close on me and then I would swarm him.

After a few minutes of this, pretty much rinse and repeat, we called it quits and I asked him what he now thought about Wing Chun.

At this point, he told me that what I had used was not Wing Chun.

This really puzzled me, how did he come up with that opinion?

Despite the fact that he did not train in Wing Chun, he knew that what I was doing was not it.

It turns out that what I had done was not what he had seen on YouTube. 

I was no longer surprised.

Lately, YouTube has been suggesting many videos to me that offer up a wide variety of opinions on Wing Chun.

Most of these are negative.

Most YouTube visitors are just searching for some kind of shortcut to what their teacher is offering and not really casting an intelligent eye on what is being shown, the majority of these people are still struggling to understand whatever Martial style it is that they are training in.

I am not trying to be mean, but most of them have a very limited idea of what Martial Arts do, especially their own Martial art.

One thing I can assure you of is that once we understand what makes our own style work we know what makes all styles work, and pretty soon we realise that all styles work.

After all, a punch is just a punch.

So it stands that if we do not fully understand why our own style works we will never understand how other styles work.

And of course, YouTube also appeals to people who love the idea of training in Martial arts, but lack the motivation to do the work.

After watching M.A. presentation after M.A. presentation they believe that they have absorbed a great deal of information, but without a personal, practical context, none of this information winds up as useable.

Therefore, in their lack of context, they proclaim that it does not work.

I grew up in post-WW.2. Britain, throughout all of my early life violence was commonplace, I have been, like all of my generation, in so many violent situations it even sounds exaggerated to me.

To be expected I did not win them all, no one does.

But in the situations that I came second in, there were very few times where I was beaten by a more skilled or better-trained fighter.

I made mistakes, I made poor decisions, and I lost.

My opponent did not need to work for the win, it was given to him.

Not all of the time for sure, but at least 90% of my losses were my own fault.

And even though I like to think the opposite is not true, 90% of my wins must have been the other guy making mistakes, and making poor decisions. 

This is reality.

We become better fighters by eliminating errors.

We eliminate errors through regular and intelligent training.

We eliminate errors by doing the little things right.

KNOWLEDGE IS GAINED BY ADDING SOMETHING NEW.

WISDOM IS GAINED BY TAKING AWAY SOMETHING OLD.

LAO TZU

Obviously, the sooner we redress the situation the better, but it is NEVER too late.

Learning any skill is a lot more of a puzzle than a task, and one of the most enabling and at the same time disabling aspects is how well we deal with mistakes we make along the way.

As Carl Sagan pointed out in his cautionary tale about the Bamboozle,

 ” If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge.”

But this effect happens at all levels of thought, we all avoid owning up to errors, especially if we worked hard to get to this incorrect position, and think we will need to restart the whole thing to get it right.

What can help with this is understanding what in a 1969 paper Management Trainer Martin Broadwell called the “4 levels of teaching”  which today is better known as the “4 levels of competence”.

The four stages are:

1. Unconscious incompetence. The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognise the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognise their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.^[1]
   
2. Conscious incompetence. Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognise the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
   
3. Conscious competence. The individual understands or knows how to do something. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration, and if it is broken, they lapse into incompetence.^[1]
   
4. Unconscious competence. The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending on how and when it was learned.
   

Once we see that it is simply human nature to get everything wrong at first it makes it so much easier to retrace our steps and make a fresh start.

The main fear is that if it took us 10 years to get it wrong it will take another 10 years to correct this mistake.

No one is ever 100% wrong, it is usually more like 5 or 10%, and frequently it is not the physical aspects but how we think about or look at the physical aspects.

We were looking in the right direction but at the wrong thing.

The very fact that there is a Buddhist Sutras covering this is an indication of how prevalent it is among us all.

With respect to my  Wing Chun training, this was definitely the case for many years in my past, and through conversations with my teacher/sifu it was also his experience, and he told me that his teacher had told him the very same thing.

We should not fear getting things wrong, it is only by understanding what is incorrect that we can recognise what is correct.

Obviously, the sooner we redress the situation the better, but it is NEVER too late.

I have been actively teaching Wing Chun for over 25 years, and it is my observation, from teaching hundreds of Wing Chun students, that most students do not recognise what Wing Chun is trying to teach them.

They are looking at what they think is Wing Chun, but they are seeing something else.

There is no need to be upset or embarrassed by this, I was in this place, as was my Sifu, Jim Fung, and as was his Sifu, Choy Shun Tin. 

“I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t look at me; look at the moon.”

THE BUDDHA.

Like most YouTube videos this was a set-up with a specific agenda, and unless I am mistaken the agenda was to show how ‘Karate kicks Ass, and Wing Chun sucks’.

The YouTube algorithm recently suggested a post of a well known internet Karateka facing off against an almost equally well known internet Wing Chun player. 

I do not mean any disrespect by this description, but I only know these two guys from the internet.

As you all know I do not like commenting on videos for the simple reason that we do not know what the participants are trying to do and it is so easy to get everything wrong.

But this video sat in my head like an extra hot curry sits in your belly and it just had to be set free or else I would have soiled myself.

As someone who understands Wing Chun, I was dismayed to see what the Wing Chun YouTube influencer was putting out there.

Like most YouTube videos this was a set-up with a specific agenda, and unless I am mistaken the agenda was to show how ‘Karate kicks Ass, and Wing Chun sucks’.

This is not an spiteful, and unwarranted roasting, the actors were willing to put it out there to be interacted with, it even had a share button, so here it is.

Before we even address how ‘BAAAAAD’ the presented Wing Chun was we should first address it as a match-up itself.

Which had a lot to teach about “fighting ignorance“.

For starters, the match started in homage to Enter the Dragon with both men touching wrists.

Pure cinematic bullshit.

This only works if the opponent is an actor whose role is not to react.

Or, as in this case, if one man is 30cm taller than the other man.

For the moment let’s look past the fact that Wing Chun does not fight and just deal with what is presented.

If we are up against a taller man the most important thing is to control the distances.

Especially the kicking distance.

We must be either to far away to kick, or if we talk Wing Chun, too close in to kick.

Which against a skilled kicker means pretty much Nose-to-Nose, jamming up their legs.

The correct Wing Chun position is to firstly be out of range, and as the opponent steps in to fire off a kick, step in to the nose-to-nose space, jamming the legs and smacking the dude in the head as a bonus.

In this instance this so-called Wing Chun Man was in the perfect position for a skilled kicker to take his head off.

And of course, the Karateka said thank ‘you very much’ and kicked him in the neck.

Right there, in any kind of realistic situation, this was “Game Over”.

Credit where credit is due this kick was a display of high skill.

The short video is less than a minute in length, and yet the little man still manages to do so many things wrong.

I still cannot decide if his positioning was simply a bad decision, or attempted suicide.

Let’s now look at this from a Wing Chun perspective.

As I say all the time if we are touching someone in any way what so ever, it should be either causing them pain, or disturbing their balance.

Triggering a Somatic Reflex we can then exploit.

So being in a wrist-to-wrist standoff is just madness {or attempted suicide}.

Being an American {or Canadian, they are so often just stoned Americans} he more than likely believes that what is on the movies is reality, he cleary thinks that trying a Pak Sau and punch against an aware and prepared opponent will work.

After all if Bruce Lee did it it must be good.

Moving on.

We can clearly see that everything the little man was trying to do was at Chi Sau range, which is the Neutral Zone, the Middle Zone.

The Middle Zone is the Fool’s Zone, because to have any influence on our opponent we must press forward.

Which is what the little man does and gets fed a diet of fists.

Wing Chun does not attack, it counter-attacks, but the little man kept trying to press forward and just got fed pain.

In training, we may sometimes step into our opponent to get familiar with the compression of space and time, {because our training partner does not wish to commit to a genuine attack and step into us and pay the obvious price}.

It is a training artefact and not a strategy, as counter-attackers our best bet is to almost stand and wait until the opponent steps into us, but the only way we can come close to replicating this time/space compression in training is for us to step forward.

On the occasion where the little man did get inside the defence of the bigger man he had no plan, no intention, did nothing to change the bigger man’s thinking, and as such was simply pushed out into a perfect kicking position.

Just target practice.

So little time, so many mistakes.

Despite this being a pitiful example of the very worst example of Wing Chun, it has a great deal of value.

It is a clear and accurate video on what not to do.

One thing this video clearly shows is that Wing Chun fails miserably, and almost instantly, if not used in the time and place it was designed to operate, as a counter-attacking method against a committed attacker.

Another thing on show here, and a problem that can get into a students’s head, is coming back for more and thinking it is training you how to get the technique working.

It just teaches you how to get flattened.

While the little man acknowledges that he was pinged he just steps back in and does the same thing. 

As I said earlier, I do not know if this was simply making bad decisions or attempting suicide.

The really bad thing about this video is that it perpetuates the IDEA that Wing Chun is a fighting style, and a very poor fighting style at that.

Wing Chun was and is intended as a genuine set of answers to genuine problems.

With a genuine problem, if our first answer does not work we do not get a second chance.

If we touch an opponent we must either cause them so much pain that their brain turns off, or we affect their balance to the same end.

It is videos like this that feed the complete misunderstanding of what and why we train.

I will cover this later.

IT IS EASIER TO FOOL PEOPLE

THAN TO CONVINCE THEM THAT THEY HAVE BEEN FOOLED.

MARK TWAIN.