It is my belief that as a teacher, I should not only teach
what I know but also how I know. I have seen too many
instructors trying to teach what they know at their
advanced level to beginners and have failed in their
teaching obligation. Obviously, a person who has risen to
a higher level in life has arrived at that point by learning
certain things and it is those things that I must teach my
students. I must teach them HOW I came to this point in
my own training so that they too might benefit from the
wonderful training methods that I have undertaken in my
life.
Many of those training methods go back thirty years and
many I have since forgotten or no longer train in myself.
However, being a stickler for documentation of
everything I have ever learnt, it is all there in the written
word or later in film and video when these documentation
tools became available to me. So I am able to draw upon
many different sources in order now to document
formally all of those training methods that I have found
useful over the years. Areas such as push hands from
Taijiquan will take up a whole volume on its own so I will
not be presenting such areas in this volume. Only those
'extra' training methods that might be seen as being off the
beaten track of the mainstream internal Gung-fu will I be
presenting here.
The Way of Internal Gung-Fu Fighting
It is the way that we fight in internal Gung-Fu that is the
most important aspect of self-defense. We can learn
thousands of the most amazing fighting techniques ever
invented and will not be able to defend ourselves if we do
not know HOW to defend ourselves. It is one thing for
someone to be able to kick at 90 miles per hour, but all the
speed in the world will not help if he does not know when
to kick! There are definite principles of internal Gung-Fu
self-defense to which we must adhere rigidly. I have
found from often painful experience how important each
of these principles are in the fighting area.
At first, it might seem to you as if you are learning so
much, so many little pieces of the puzzle that often it will
seem like you will never get the pieces together. But
gradually, through the training, it will all piece together
forming one solid finished puzzle that will stay with you
for life. But you must train and train in the training
methods in order to put the puzzle together. For me, it is
like beginning a new book. I have so many loose ideas
floating around, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle thrown
onto the floor and it often seems like it will never come
together in some semblance of normality! But as all
writers find , it always does. But only after many hours and
even years of slogging it out piecing it together. And it is
exactly the same with internal Gung-Fu, it WILL come
together and you will, in the end wonder what all the
worry was about. The training methods are designed to
bring you to the logical ending where you no longer have
to think about self-defense, you just do it. This is the
beauty of these training methods, all you have to do is
train! However, being westerners, we always want things
yesterday, we ask too many questions trying to get there
sooner, we try to intellectualize and use our conscious
mind rather than our body to learn what has to be learnt. If
you think too much, you will never learn. To the western
mind, that sounds strange as we, most of us, are brought
up in some western schooling system where only the
logical part of the brain is nurtured. We are taught NOT
TO LEARN! By teaching us to think about everything,
the left side of the brain is left far behind and our body
mechanics are also left far behind, so much so that by the
time we are into middle age, we still have the body
mechanics of a small child! Chinese philosophy teaches
us to learn with our body, to allow the movement to teach
us sub-consciously. In fact if you study any indigenous
race, you will find that the elders teach the children certain
games. These games are designed to teach the children in
a fun physical way, about those aspects of life that they
will need for survival when then become adults. Often the
body mechanics needed for survival are taught through
dance with male and female children learning the dances.
The ancients knew, unlike we more 'sophisticated' human
beings, that to try and teach children logical skills or to
force them to learn would mean defeat. So they invented
playful games that would teach the children everything
they would need in life without them knowing that they
were being taught! The body mechanics of these early
lessons go into the sub-conscious brain and are forgotten
by the time the child reaches adulthood, but they are still
there in the body! The body has taken from the game the
essence of the game causing the body to do exactly what it
has to do without thinking about it, leaving the conscious
mind to get on with the things that it must get on with. We
westerners are for ever trying to learn what we should have
learnt in childhood but never did. We wonder why we
cannot move correctly or maintain balance, or why it is
that we often have awful social lives or broken marriages
etc. The reason is that we never learnt what we should
have learnt in our childhood.
