A violent encounter is a form of ‘Culture Shock’, and the only way to deal with ‘Culture Shock’ is to accept, adapt and find the middle ground.
I recently read an article that claimed Western Intelligence is waning due to our avoiding reading over watching video.
Watching videos requires no mental interpretation, and as such, we are eroding our ability to convert words and IDEAS into mental images, as we all know our Brains love and live by mental images.
Just putting this out there, it has nothing to do with this post.
My Sifu’s school was an excellent place for beginners to engage with Wing Chun. It was orderly, technically informed and above all, safe, but as you progressed to the intermediate level, very little changed in the approach, even as a Senior Instructor, the training was pretty much unchanged from the very first day we entered the school, still orderly, still technical, still informed and above all, still safe.
So, what is wrong with this approach?
Perhaps nothing.
It depends on why you are training in the first place.
My Sifu offered an approach where progress was measured by the ability to accurately copy what we had been taught and then to explain the established method of instruction to others.
This is an Academic approach to training, the system was a copy of organised education, a genuine SCHOOL.
As such, the end game was to progress from student to teacher {Instructor}, from teacher to professor, {Master} and finally from professor to recognised expert {Grand Master}.
It was an Academic approach where progress was measured by the ability to accurately copy and explain what we had been taught and to advance the established method of instruction.
This is in no way a criticism of my Sifu’s approach; he made it very clear that this is what he was selling, and as an Academic product, it was of a very high quality. We should be a bit more even-handed; this is the mainstream Martial Arts model of every style.
There were many occasions when asked about how we could use the training; my Sifu would say that it was up to the individual and how well they could transition the knowledge into practice.
If we step away from Martial Arts for a second, this is reflected in everyday life, it is essentially the tension between an Academic Expert and a Master Craftsman.
The value of each depends on context. If you wish to design a water delivery system, you would call a hydraulics engineer but when the pipes burst you call a plumber.
My Sifu turned out many quality Hydraulic Engineers.
How do we now become Plumbers?
ALL TRAINING IS INADEQUATE AS A METHODOLOGY.
Engaging with a violent and aggressive attacker is just about as far away as we can get from how and what we train.
But is it different?
If we revisit my Sifu’s comment that“ it was up to the individual and how well they could transition the knowledge into practice”, this implies that the information is already in the teaching and that once fully understood, there is nothing needed to add, nothing extra to learn.
I agree with this.
Once we see that most martial arts training is about training future teachers and not future fighters, it makes it easy to differentiate between what is an academic explanation and what is a practical methodology.
But most importantly that they cannot be both.
Once we accept that all of our FORMS are collections of movements and not patterns of movements, and here again, that they cannot be both, we create fertile ground for hybridisation.
Training is inadequate when it comes to dealing with violence.
The difference between violence and training is not a difference of scale; it is not about being quicker or more physical or even more relaxed or more mindful, it is a difference of philosophy.
The difference is the WHY.
Neither is this a difference in identity; we are not trying to measure apples by oranges. Wing Chun is organised or systemic violence, and what the attacker is doing is, at least from our perspective, unorganised or non-systemic violence, but they are both expressions of violence.
A violent encounter is a form of ‘Culture Shock’, and the only way to deal with ‘Culture Shock’ is to accept, adapt and find the middle ground.
Ask any ‘Tradie”, and they will tell you that the answer always contains a level of compromise, that, like it or not, all work is done in the middle ground, which must work here and now while professors get trapped going over old blueprints, locked in their study looking for perfection, rapidly becoming irrelevant.
To be sure the best ‘Tradies” are the ones that know the most and compromise the least, but they still compromise.
Navigating a violent encounter is about capturing the middle ground, about compromise, about mixing what we know to be “RIGHT” with what we think is perhaps simply “NOT RIGHT”.
It becomes a sliding scale between what we know is ‘RIGHT” and what we know “WORKS”.
Like all ‘TRULY SIMPLE‘ things, they open a portal to increasing complexity that can only be navigated if we can maintain the original SIMPLICITY.
Why do I prefer the term ‘Fundamental Particle’ when other words such as seed, core, or root would do the same thing?
Apart from being a bit of a nerd, it is because, by definition, Fundamental Particles are considered indivisible. There is no need to look beyond this IDEA and create confusion, but you can call it anything you want, they are only words, and it is the IDEA we are concerned with.
Let me ask a few questions first though.
Imagine, for whatever reason, that a ‘big’, fit, strong, and angry man is in the process of trying to punch you in the face.
Q. How important is it that your defence works the first time of asking, straight out of the gate, so to speak?
I know my answer but this question is for you.
In a random incident where there will be some level of surprise, there is a good chance that any response will not work optimally unless you are Bruce Lee reborn.
Bad Guys that intend us harm always follow up on the attack and follow-up fast, regard this as a rolling, almost continuous attack.
Q. Do we think that our follow-up defensive action would be more effective, equally effective, or less effective than the initial defence?
It is your call, and in this scenario, your face, so answer any way that makes you happy.
Accepting for one moment that you are not Bruce Lee reborn, and did not finish off the Bad Guy at the instant of the first attack…
Q. How many chances do you think you will get to prevent disaster?
There is no right answer to something with so many variables; this is just establishing ‘CONTEXT”, and helping us estimate the cost.
The Fundamental Particle is ‘Physical Alignment’.
I told you it was SIMPLE.
In over 25 years of teaching, this is the cause of all the failed exercises I have witnessed.
Think of your training, and believe me, I can see it in my own past training, how often do we get the easy stuff wrong the first time of asking, only to have a ‘Facepalm’ moment when we realise?
Good results come from good application of technique; good technique is always dependent on the level of our physical alignment.
Like all ‘TRULY SIMPLE‘ things, they open a portal to increasing complexity that can only be navigated if we can maintain the original SIMPLICITY.
At this point, we could shift to the term SEED and ask what grows from this SEED,? And how do we nurture and maintain it?
If we get this RIGHT and maintain its RIGHTNESS as it migrates upstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for things to go WRONG.
STEP 1. Establish correct physical alignment.
STEP 2. Maintain correct physical alignment in dynamic and complex situations.
STEP 3. When things go awry, as they most certainly will, regain correct physical alignment.
This post serves as a precursor to my next post, I pose a question here that I want us to think about and form an opinion, so that it influences what we read in the next post.
I have a decent understanding of how our brains treat information, if I include this as the first paragraph of an article, it will be read and then ignored as we hunt down what we think is the “Meat” of the post.
This is just how our brain works.
I would like us to establish a self-evaluation Metric?
Q. What parameters need to be met for us to think that something is CORRECT?
Dictionaries come up with things such as accurate, exact, free from error, ‘in accordance with fact or truth’. In short, for something to be correct, it needs to be 100%.
To be expected, if we talk about something as being Incorrect, the opposite is true, and the dictionary brings in such words as mistaken, wrong, in error, erroneous, and ‘not in accordance with particular standards or rules’.
If an action or idea is 1% incorrect it is not correct. DUH!
This leads to the counterintuitive statement that being 99% right is the same as being 100% wrong; it is not CORRECT.
Think about that for a moment, where do you stand on this?
This is a self-evaluation, I have no investment in your choice.
Q. Why is this even important?
A. Because it shows us how we measure things.
At the centre of any system, there is something, a component, a concept, a “fundamental particle” that influences and impacts the whole system to such an extent that being less than 100% negatively impacts EVERYTHING upstream.
It may not break the system, but it makes it impossible for the system to reach optimum operational status.
The next post will be on and around Wing Chun as a system, do we know what the “FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLE” of Wing Chun is?
There is an old joke about a guy who is walking down the street when a roofing slate slides off and falls downward, he dodged at the last moment and it missed sticking in his shoulder by 10cm.
Phew that was close I hear you say.
Unfortunately, it hit him in the head and killed him.
There is little doubt that we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we perceive it, and this perception, this image, is built up incrementally over the course of our lifetime, it is never set in place and undergoes many reinventions.
As ‘out there’ as it sounds, the easiest way to improve something is simply changing how we see it, which in turn changes its importance. And this cascades into trust and priority, which we may not realise it is the basis of choice.
Last week’s training was mostly about punching, so keeping it in line with this, how do we see/perceive our punch and punching? How and where do we file it away in our ‘Battle Computer’?
I do not remember how many punch variations we worked on but let’s call it four.
Did you perceive this as four separate punches or four variations of the one punch?
Why is this relevant?
Hick’s Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of choices available. Logarithmically means that every added choice takes longer to make than the previous choice.
Theoretically, deciding which punch to use will take more than four times as long as deciding to just punch, and although we will not consciously compare the variables, we will do it subconsciously.
How we SEE our punch might just be the difference between going home or going to the hospital.
Sticking with ‘PUNCH’ for the moment, what do we punch with?
Are we using a FIST, or are we using a HAND?
I am sure you have a good IDEA of where this is going, depending on how I see my training to hit someone I may need to choose between a punch, a palm strike, a knife hand chop, a slap, a backhand, a hammer fist or a finger poke.
Refer back to Hicks Law to see the problem here.
Without meaning to over-egg the cake, “What are we striking with”?
Hands do not float independently in the air; they are connected to our wrists.
Consider my Sifu’s maxim of “Shoulder pushers Elbow, Elbow pushes Wrist”.
It is possible to get lost in the weeds with this type of regression to a point where we end up thinking that everything is initiated by the collective “BODY”, or if we are hooked on specifics with our Big Toe, so some level of compartmentalism is advised.
“Shoulder pushers Elbow, Elbow pushes Wrist” is, in essence, describing the general mechanics of all of our Hand Strikes, it is the fundamental mechanics of using an ARM.
Again I ask, why is this relevant?
As Martial Artists, we subscribe to the IDEA that it is INTENTION, and not conscious decision-making, that drives the physical application of our Martial skill, this position has been held for as long as there has been Kung Fu and is a central tenet of the work.
Now modern Neuroscience agrees with this age old wisdom, and while Conscious Intentions are formed through deliberate thought and awareness, where you consciously decide on a goal and the steps to achieve it.
They recognise that Unconscious Intentions stem from deeply ingrained habits, unconscious desires, or past experiences, influencing behaviour without conscious awareness. In other words, how we train.
Advances in neurological medical scanners have allowed scientists to observe brain activity, which leads to movement before conscious thought.
Intention happens before we think about doing things.
Have you ever heard the term… “I just could not get my head around it”?
What do you think it means?
We have spoke about this many times, essentially it is only what is in our Heads that can come out of our Hands, and of course, this is training.
But what are we putting in our heads? There is a dark side that is always present and often unseen.
I was recently watching a T.V. Show that was set in the late 70s England, at one point a young man was in a situation with three skinheads that turned on him and gave him a sound beating, nothing new there, back then that was pretty normal. But the young man on the wrong end of this thing did nothing to protect or defend himself, he did not even attempt to flee the scene, he just got the shit kicked out of him.
This triggered a memory from my Sifu’s school about 15 or 20 years ago, bear with me on this, it needs a bit of a back story for context.
My Sifu had a very large school, in Sydney alone there were 14 sub-schools, with approximately 50 teaching personnel of varying levels from Branch [Sub-school] leaders, Branch Instructors down to assistant Instructors, even my Sub-School, which averaged around 15 students, had 4 teaching members.
To prevent the school from turning into a complete MacDojo all Instructors needed to attend Wednesday evening training under Sifu’s supervision, and as a Senior Instructor in the School one of my duties was to mentor a certain group of these Instructors on these Wednesday evenings, usually Non-Asians from the branches in the Western Suburbs, which was and is the working class part of Sydney.
Yes, this was racist, but it was not meant to be disrespectful, Sifu had always thought that Westerners thought and processed information differently than Asians, that Westerners preferred hitting things to doing FORMS, and on top of this that people from Western Sydney were an individual sub-set to the rest of Sydney.
In practice, what I did amounted to no more than translating Sifu’s polite words into ‘MACHO’ language and roughening up the edges of Sifu’s descriptions.
This one evening I noticed a small group of guys not exactly getting enjoyment out of the training, so I went and asked if I could help, there was a little bit of indecision, and then one of them piped up “This is not exactly keeping things REAL is it”?
My attempt to persuade them that Forms, especially Chum Kiu, were important fell flat so I asked what they would like to do instead.
Long story short they said they did not know what to do because all we taught them was “Limp Shit that does not work on the street”.
I said “O.K. let’s fix that, attack me and then we will start from there”.
They declined and said it was pointless because as a Senior Instructor I would know what to do and do it easily.
I was a bit lost with this comment, and in hindsight did not make the best choice, I said, fine, I will attack you, and if it fails, we can work from there.
There was a bit of indecision and looking from one to the other, and then one said “Let’s do it, but do what a street thug would do, just do not hurt me”, we all laughed, and I agreed.
I realised I was potentially setting myself up to get ‘regally’ embarrassed and punched in the head, but I had painted myself into a corner.
I decided on starting with a distraction, so I told the guys how I thought I could be biting off more than I could chew, to which they all laughed, and while they were laughing I gave the volunteer a huge double handed push in the chest that sent him flying into the wall, I immediately followed up by grabbing him by the throat and pinning him to the wall while posing a hammer fist with the other hand.
As soon as I grabbed his throat I knew things had gone to shit, the guy just went limp, the colour drained from his face, his eyes became glassy and he offered no defence.
I immediately let go of him and turned to the other guys, asking what had gone wrong, luckily no-one appeared to notice what I had noticed, and the conversation was about how fast it had been and how they had not even seen me move.
I was in my early 50s at the time and told them that it was not that I was fast, this allowed us to steer the conversation into preparedness, distances and awareness.
If it had been a real situation, that young Instructor would have just stood there while I pummelled him unconscious.
I told them that “KEEPING IT REAL’ was more about thinking fast and paying attention, about understanding that this guy you are now talking to is not interested in talking to you, he is trying to slow your mind down, that “KEEPING IT REAL” was to understand that this guy wants to hit you, and if you are close enough he will hit you, and that you may not even see it coming.
Things settled down and we did a bit of work on entering and exiting, on transitioning from defence to attack, and hopefully I demonstrated how the Chum Kiu Form helps us control the distance between the two protagonists.
But what did alarm me was that in the conversation they implied that by teaching advanced defences against complex attacks all we did was paint a picture that the attacker was a skilled and difficult opponent.
I could hear the ‘Dark Side’ softly breathing in the background.
Are we teaching ourselves to be scared, are we failing to see that the Bad Guy never gets any better than he was on our first day of training.
If we do not remind ourselves that we are the ones getting better, we are the ones training and preparing it is so easy to slip towards the DARK SIDE and not even know it.
The BAD GUY will not be getting better because, they are just Arseholes looking for an easy win, they will try to distract and then hit when you are not looking.
Just as I had done to them.
Before they left, they came and thanked me again for the help, I just hope it stuck.
Long story short, one of the most significant things I have become aware of is that we do all of our learning while we sleep.
This post is an intro to what I intend to be a relatively concise and probably long-winded look at the non-physical, intangible aspects of our training.
This stuff is a great deal more difficult to write about than it is to participate in, so do not get put off by this wordy approach.
As you all know my job in the 1980s required me to become familiar with the concepts and practices of “Lateral Thinking”, to the extent that I was sent off to a number of weekend even week-long workshops at the De Bono Institute for Creative Thinking, this in turn started my fascination for how the brain works and how the body interprets the signals.
Long story short, one of the most significant things I have become aware of is that we do all of our learning while we sleep.
Keeping this in mind, everything we learn, practice, train, or develop, be it tangible or intangible, physical or non-physical is a product of A SLEEPING MIND.
This places the whole physical or non-physical argument in a very strange place, but if nothing else shines a light n how important the INTANGIBLE aspects of the work are.
Q1. How often have you said or heard someone else say, “I was in two minds about it”?
Q2. How often have you said or heard someone else say, “ The guy was so Single-Minded”?
Q3. How many MINDS do we have?
It is widely accepted that we only have only one Mind, but I think we all have experienced situations, especially in training, where the mind instructs our body to do things we did not ask it to, in fact, it acts against our interest as if it was a separate mind.
For instance, when I do my party trick of asking you to straighten your Arms, usually standing with your arms folded as in the stance, instead of following the very simple, very clear instructions and straightening your arms, you raise them to shoulder level.
How did this happen?
Our mind double-guesses the situation and decides that what was asked for was to straighten them in front of us.
But that was not what was asked.
This may seem quite trivial, but what would happen if our mind did this in the middle of a violent situation?
OOPS!
This is the realm of what my old Judo Sensei referred to as “Mind Boxing”.
In case anyone finds it odd that a Judo Sensei would refer to ‘Mind Boxing” instead of “Mind Grappling” or whatever, we need to look at a small slice of British social history..
Between the end of W.W.2 and the explosion of Kung Fu cinema in the late 1970s in Britain all Martial Arts styles were regarded as some sort of Boxing.
Hence the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 Hong Kong.
To the rank and file in Britain this how Martial Arts were described, there was…
Roman Boxing or Pugilism which is today’s boxing.
Gentleman’s Boxing, which was the Victorian era Baritsu Fighting system.
Chinese Boxing, which of course was Kung Fu.
Japanese Boxing, which is Karate.
Styles that used their feet were and still are called “Kick Boxing” even though their names say nothing about feet.
In Europe, this was French Kickboxing or Savate.
Even today, the majority of Americans and Australians who have no active involvement in Martial Arts call everything Karate.
So when my Judo Sesei talked of “Mind Boxing” he was not talking about Boxing, in todays way of speaking he would have probably called it ‘Mind Fighting” or perhaps “Mind Martial Art”.
In the late 1960s trying to instruct young “Christian” students in what was essentially Zen Buddhism risked the wrath of angry Catholic mothers or at least an irate local priest.
So, just like my early Sensei, when I talk of “Mind Boxing “, it is simply a label that is used to differentiate between the physical and visible aspects of the work from the purely mental/emotional and intangible aspects of the work.
Understanding this aspect of being human can give us a great advantage over a Bad Guy who does not understand this.
Hey Tribe.
Sam and I were going over some things we aim to bring to the fore in the coming few months, I am sure you can see that we had a hoot doing it, even if it is super serious.
We all take our ability to maintain balance for granted because to a very large extent it is not us that does the work, not consciously at any rate, it is an automatic background task that gets applied by a separate program than our everyday “I am Groot” Mind. mind.
On one level we all know this, but not the level that does Wing Chun.
Understanding this aspect of being human can give us a great advantage over a Bad Guy who does not understand this.
There are aspects of Boyd’s O.O.D.A. Loop at play here, and we will cover this during the work.
We need a method to train how to activate our previously “established” Chi Sau training in Sparring sessions. Or, we will just be dancing.
In any Martial Art, there is a well-established path from basic training to actual engagement, these “Core Ideas” separate one style from another.
This progression works along the lines of physical conditioning → coordination drills → combat technique → force-on-force sparring and then engagement.
Wing Chun is no different in its approach, the progression is the same just the type of content differs.
Our FORMS act as conditioning and basic coordination; we also have combat techniques, and then we have Chi Sau, which is as close as we come to force-on-force sparring.
But Chi Sau is far more complex than just sparring, Chi Sau is both a training vehicle and a sparring vehicle, which can cause problems and misunderstanding.
Training and Sparring are very different animals to the extent that Sparring is of very little value as a training vehicle, just as we are too busy to be thinking about training while sparring.
As a training vehicle Chi Sau teaches coordination, combat techniques, and physical conditioning, but of real interest, it teaches how to dynamically accept force.
Sparring is where we use what we have learned through training.
We need a method to train how to activate our previously “established“ Chi Sau training in Sparring sessions. Or, we will just be dancing, and learn very little regarding engagement.
Wing Chun is a very intelligent system so it should be no surprise that we do have such a method, if we know where to look for it, and how to access it.
Enter the Mok Jan Jong, the Wooden Man.
Like so much of our training, there are many layers or levels of understanding to every component of our system, how we approach or work on the Wooden Man is far more important than what we do with it, this is the “Concept” aspect of the work.
When playing on the Dummy, what “Concept” are we trying to realise?
This is not as complex as it may sound, after all, the main IDEA behind Wing Chun is simplicity.
So what are we doing here, are we trying to realise attacking concepts are we trying to realise defending concepts, or are we exploring our Chi Sau?
The Wooden Man is nothing more than a training partner, so are we playing, sparring or training?
For the context of this post, we are exploring Chi Sau with our Wooden Man.
From this perspective, when working on the dummy pay special attention to the rotations that occur when moving into contact, at contact and through contact with the Dummy Arms.
This is SO very important, in fact, I recommend exaggerating the amount of rotation that you are using to illuminate that there is natural rotation in every move.
Once we reach a stage where through practised repetition we have internalised and habitualised rotating into, through, and out of contact it will naturally become how we make contact with everything we interact with.
It is this rotation that constantly compromises our attacker/partner’s balance.
If we are at a stage where we practise our FORMS with freedom of movement, going more with feeling than shape and pattern, and here as well it does not hurt to exaggerate the movements; we are adding more and more complex rotations to everything we do.
Bringing both of these practices into our Chi Sau allows us to get comfortable with doing them in a semi-dynamic environment, that transfers well to free play, and of course free play is a precursor to genuine engagement with an attacker.
Once we become comfortable with this type of work it becomes clear that this type of engagement keeps our attacker/partner permanently off balance and in a weakened position.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Heraclitus.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 