30 Days to a Better You or Oblivion (It’s Your Choice)

Hello to everybody in quarantine land. Hope your toilet paper, hand sanitizer, favorite snacks and binge shows are enough to keep you going. Way before this situation ever occurred, I always had and still have remarked to my students that missing one day of training is equal to a week. Missing a week is equal to a month. Missing a month? You don’t even want to ask me about that. This leads me into something that I always found intriguing about training and conditioning of the human mind, how we think, perceive and react. I have always been intrigued about how people can condition or re-condition themselves to pick up habits. Habits, be they good or bad, are a learned thing. They are something that we either consciously or subconsciously subject ourselves to and therefor integrate into our daily routine and system of thinking, living and being. It’s very interesting to see how people can readjust themselves to conform, even conforming to circumstances that are beyond their control… or are they?

I’ve looked into many different psychological types of conditioning. You always see people doing these 30 day challenges on Facebook and Instagram and all sorts of social media. You always have people wanting to “discipline themselves,” “lose weight,” “quit smoking,” “be a better you,” “get the beach body that you’ve always wanted,” or learn how to focus your mind to “attain wealth and beautiful women,” all the meantime having “six pack abs.” This is very intriguing because it has a lot to do with the psychological state of mind that you put yourself in or allow someone or to push you towards. It’s all about what you become comfortable with.

What you become comfortable with is what is presented to you on a daily basis, so this 30 day model, which is quite unique and interesting, is a model that is utilized to change what you’re comfortable with and transform what you feel about something. Take for example that show that they have on cable, 90 Day Fiance. There’s this guy that flies all the way to the Philippines because he fell in love with a girl there, but she’s extremely poor. He goes to her village and sees the poverty that she lives in and is taken aback by it. There’s no comfortable bed; there’s no air conditioning; there’s rain coming through the ceiling, and ultimately the straw that breaks the camel’s back for him staying with her in her hometown is that there’s no convenient shower or bathroom. He has to shower out of a bucket along with her father. (This is what I’m watching to entertain myself during quarantine, so if my thoughts go astray please forgive me.) He was shocked by this, but I sat there and thought to myself, well, when I was a child, I would routinely visit my grandparents, and there was no shower, and we did basically the same thing. Because I was young and knew that this was the way it was, it didn’t bother me and still doesn’t bother me. When I’ve traveled to China, to the rural parts where I have friends and family, it’s exactly the same. So, you’re saying what does having a shower or washing yourself with a cold bucket of water have to do with conditioning? It’s all about what you become accustomed to. It takes the average individual, and we’ll use that term loosely, 30 days to reform their perceptions, attitudes and routines. This is a great tool to be used if someone wants to learn a skill, develop a different trait and so on. You do the same thing for 30 days over and over again until you’re reconditioned, and you integrate that into your system.

Conditioning oneself is 100% necessary in training martial arts and Kung Fu because the mind and body have to be conditioned to be able to perform at a peak level and in order to be able to access the mental and physical aspects of the training, as well as being able to utilize it in a fighting situation, be it self-defense or in a sport arena. I am a great proponent of doing the same thing every day in order to gain the skill that you require in the sense of your martial art training. I think it’s indispensable to have several techniques in your pocket, so to speak, that you can rely on at a moment’s notice. In order to obtain that instinctive response, those said techniques have to be practiced repeatedly. If you take a look at any fighting system, they’re all comprised of a handful of movements at their core, essential techniques that are practiced again and again regardless of what training vehicle the system has. A good example would be the 12 bridge hands of the Hung Gar System, the 10 seed techniques of Choy Lee Fut and the 10 essential tiger claw movements of the Tiger Claw System, the four predominant movements of Tai Chi, etc., etc.. These are used to condition the individual to be able to call upon these movements at the drop of a hat. That’s why you’ll find them peppered throughout all the different forms, weapons, wooden man sets, sparring and so on. Even if you look at boxing, they have four main movements: jab, cross, uppercut, hook punch. You don’t need more than that. What you need to do is to have these conditioned to come out in automatic response. This is the good side of conditioning.

Conditioning is a really great tool, but as any tool can be used to create something, it also can be used to destroy something and/or be misused. The 30 day training module creates a Pavlovian response that triggers the individual’s mind. It’s a very effective psychological device to get responses that you desire from yourself and/or an individual or a larger group and can be utilized as a very powerful teaching tool, but with improper intentions and in the wrong hands, it can also be used to create a lot of damage and disarray.

We must guard against implementing the wrong type of conditioning. What I’ve seen in this current situation is that people are easily corralled to think in a certain way which may not necessarily be to their best interest. If you pay close attention to what’s going on in the media lately, they have actually used and are continuing to use this 30 day model quite effectively. We’ve all been in lockdown almost 30 days now. The mass media and the politicians have used this to great success to recondition everyone’s perception of what’s going on. I’m bringing this up as an example because it’s right in front of all of our faces and needs to be seen for what it is.

To see something for what it is, you need to back out to get a clearer picture. From a psychological training standpoint, if you want to be good at something or have a particular response towards something, you need to hunker down and do this one said thing for 30 days. Once you’ve accomplished this, it’s been integrated into your subconscious and you just react upon impulse without thinking. This is true be it washing your hands incessantly or executing the same technique with precision, speed and power for 30 days straight to integrate it into your repertoire. I’m all for someone protecting themselves against whatever they think is going to hurt them, but I’m also wary of going overboard in any sense, be it a good habit or a bad habit. A bad habit can grow to be worse and end up ultimately destroying the individual, or a good habit can also be taken to the extreme in a bad way. You can over condition and over train and end up hurting yourself or have such an itchy trigger finger that you want to start a fight at the drop of a hat. This is the point of balance that has to be found by the individual martial art practitioner and common everyday person.

There’s also a danger in getting too used to something. You want to get used to something to a certain extent, but when you get too comfortable with it, then you no longer grow. You actually start to atrophy. This is no different than your muscles or your mind or the state of society. When you get too accustomed to something, it starts to grow rancid. If you have standing water in a bottle or some container for a long time, it starts to grow mold. You need to circulate different types of physical training and to circulate your mind so you don’t become complacent or become dull and placid to the point that you can’t think on your feet. Every day, you need to be running different types of mental and physical exercises in order to grow. So, yes, you can do the same thing every day, but you do the same thing every day differently. In that way you keep things fresh. Fresh is the way to be. Refresh the mind, refresh the body, refresh the spirit through your training, and strive never to become complacent. Even question your own thinking. That’s the special thing that makes Kung Fu training unique. Yesterday was my 41st anniversary — 41 years practicing Kung Fu — and I still don’t know a damn thing. I constantly question the validity of the constructs that I’ve built in my mind. By doing this, I start to understand and see more and see that I don’t understand as much as I thought I did. This is cool because that means I’m still growing. It’s not a stagnant pool of water. It’s a flowing, living thing, continuously feeding into the growth of the individual.

This is why the conditioning of the human being is a highly sensitive subject. You don’t want to prune the tree to the point that it grows crooked. Because you’re an organism and you are organic, you need to grow true to your nature and the nature of man is, in my opinion, to be free. So, it’s a very precarious line that you walk when you talk about conditioning. It’s astounding how easy it is to manipulate someone based on pushing particular buttons, making people jump through hoops of fire without knowing what they’re jumping for. That’s the dangerous aspect of mental conditioning. In the wrong hands, it can be devastating to mind and body, to a community, or to a country as a whole. It’s basically like fine-tuned brainwashing. You can entreat yourself and brainwash yourself into believing something that’s wholesome, but on the flip side, when put in the wrong way, the wrong place, the wrong time, and in the wrong hands, it creates havoc. This is very intriguing, but at the same time it’s incredibly disconcerting the ease with which people can be manipulated.

Speaking on the topic of conditioning and manipulation, now, every single commercial that you see has been tailor-made to talk about the pandemic. Okay, you may say, whatever, what did you expect them to do? Well, I have a huge problem when this conditioning model, which television commercials are, is hijacked to denigrate the country that I love (with all its faults in tact). This particular brand new Burger King commercial features several young people, and I emphasize young people, of an impressionable age, mid-teens to mid-thirties, and you know that age group, they all think they know everything. Fat, Lazy and Stupid, two girls and a boy, lying down on the couch, ordering whoppers and fries and whatever other junk food they want, and the announcer basically says, your country needs you to lie down on your couch, scratching your fat ass, ordering food that’s poisoning your body and your mind. Cause we all know inevitably after we eat fast food, we feel like crap. Yes? Yes. The icing on the cake, the slap in the face, the cutting me at the knees and then chopping my head off was the couch slowly rising and each individual young person giving a military salute as though they were heroic because they pressed a button on an app to order junk food. This is subliminal conditioning at its most evil. We were not born or raised by our parents to be fat, lazy and stupid and lie down on the couch thinking we were heroes. Commercials like this are jamming this thing down my throat, making everybody scared out of their wits that they’re going to die tomorrow. To exacerbate the situation, you’re asking me to lie down, pretend that I’m doing something heroic, eat chemically modified horrible food that destroys my immune system, and like it. If this is not the most insidious usage of mental conditioning, I don’t know what is. And it’s sweetly wrapped up in a bow, presented to you, American public, for your consumption.

It has everything to do with what you are accustomed to and what you perceive as normal. So, let’s talk a little bit about normal. And, no, I’m not into the “new normal,” either, because that’s a dangerous statement being utilized to condition you to thinking, feeling and being prepared for something. There’s no such thing as normal because those things that you perceive as normal are just your perceptions. Someone else’s perceptions may be completely different. I’m not a big fan of the term “normal” because it pigeonholes the individual to be a particular way when everyone is not “equal” in many senses of that word. Because you are part of this universe, you must acknowledge that there are innate inequalities in the universe. But those inequalities are not negative. Those inequalities are the diversity that make up whatever group we’re talking about, be it the universe, the planet that we live on, the country that you come from, the ethnic group that you hail from and so on. These inequalities are the special things that make us unique. Once you try to make everybody fit into a cookie cutter mold, you kill it. In the instance of Kung Fu, many times students or other colleagues will say to me, so and so does his form this way and the other guy does it that way. Which one is right and which one is wrong? The truth of the matter is they’re both right and they’re both wrong simultaneously because it’s what fits the individual. Because each individual is different and has a different mind, a different heart, a different soul, a different physical structure, it will come out differently. That’s the uniqueness. You want that difference, and you want everyone to be able to acknowledge and respect the difference. We’re not a homogenous pot of goo. Therefor, you have to be constantly aware of this and not only augment your training accordingly to accent and accentuate the traits that you have, cause your traits are different than other people’s, but you also have to take this one step further and understand that you need to choose properly and do what best fits for yourself. It is the individual spark within each one of us that makes us great.

You need to choose, and you need to know what to choose, and you need to be free to choose. The deeper question is, are you truly intelligent enough to be able to choose between right or wrong? Innately, individuals, even from a young age, sorta kinda know what’s right or wrong. Most of us from early childhood innately understand the difference between good and naughty. As adults, we rationalize certain actions as being ok, but deep down, know they are actually not. They’ve become ok because we’ve told ourselves a lie a thousand times, but in essence it’s still a candy-coated lie. It doesn’t melt in your hands; it melts in your mouth, and you can never get rid of that bitter taste. This is all about making proper choices. Proper choices are different for different people, but you need to make the proper choice as to what you want to condition yourself towards. You want to have the active hand in conditioning yourself as opposed to allowing someone, something or some other group to control that conditioning module. The 30 day conditioning process, as I said before, is a great tool only if it’s in the proper hands, and the only way that it can be in the proper hands is if it’s in the hands of the individual.

The individual needs to take an active role in conditioning. So, if you go to the gym and your trainer tells you to do some crazy exercise that you know your body can’t do, you have the right to say, no, I can’t do this. That conditioning model is in your hands. I routinely see different trainers doing exercises that I wouldn’t do. They stand by them and say, this is the best thing for your six pack abs or beach body (although we probably won’t be allowed to go to the beach), but it doesn’t fit me and therefor I don’t want to be part of it. This is why you find so many different variations and so many different systems, ultimately culminating in the same result, but finding many different ways to get there. They’re all correct because they’re made to conform to the individual’s needs and requirements. The individual must be the one in the center of things and not forgotten about when we talk about conditioning. The diversity that we have as individuals, the diversity that we have as marital art systems, the diversity that we can find within life in general is what makes life unique and special. When you try to make everything conform to a neat little box is when you stifle and kill not only the spark or the spirit, but ingenuity and innovativeness. So, I’m all for conditioning but with major caveats. Caveat emptor, the buyer must beware.

When you condition yourself, be it for the good or the bad, the positive or the negative, there are going to be repercussions. They could be great repercussions or horrendous repercussions, but the bottom line of it is there is no free lunch and everything has to be paid for. You have to know what side to be on and what you’re willing to pay. This is the true question because there’s nothing free in the world. Paying doesn’t necessarily mean monetarily. When you pay, you sacrifice something. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, so you need to be careful that you choose a proper item to condition yourself, i.e. get used to, because you will have to give up or sacrifice something else in order to get that. In training, you have to give up leisure and other creature comforts in order to attain the skill and expertise that you may want. The most precious thing that is definitely not free is your freedom, your freedom to think what you want to think, your freedom to do what you want to do when you want to do it, how you want to do it.

So, it’s very important that the martial art practitioner, as well as the everyday Joe, knows how to keep their mind clear, clean and unfettered by too many outside influences. Becoming accustomed to anything is a double-edged sword. It can be good or extremely dangerous in many ways. It all hinges upon the habit that one becomes accustomed to and being able to discern what is the difference between right and wrong. So, hopefully you can see what I’m getting at is the mind of man is both ultimately powerful and ultimately susceptible to suggestion. We must all understand this about ourselves, about humankind, and be highly selective as to what we allow take seed in the seat of our mind.

— Master Paul Koh 高寶羅

DON’T BE A ROOMBA

A Roomba is supposedly a “smart” appliance. But is it smarter than you? Are you telling me the Roomba can sweep the floor better than you can? Or are you just so lazy that you want to rely on these conveniences? I don’t have a Roomba, and I don’t want one. Even if you give me one as a gift for free, I don’t want it. It’s a giant oversized frisbee that I can’t even play with. A Roomba is intended for lazy people, and in the most sublime of ways, undermines the individual’s ability to be free and discipline themselves at the most menial of levels. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for convenience, but when convenience starts to destroy the ethical foundations of working hard and disciplining oneself, then we must take a step back and question the validity of such a convenience. Instead of having things like that think for you, you need to think for yourself. This is what I feel we are losing, or have already lost, in mainstream culture and mainstream martial arts. When an individual starts relying on things that are necessary to motivate them for their training, you never truly find a way to tap into your own motivation, your own power and energy to create and truly have a visceral connection with what you’re doing. Conveniences are nice, but real things, things that matter, things that will make a lasting impression and effect on the individual are inconvenient and must be worked continually, incessantly, fervently. Even if you’re so-called “good” at something, you can’t go on automatic pilot. That’s why I’m saying don’t be a Roomba.

A Roomba is an automatic pilot. You turn it on, you run the program and you just sit there and let it do its thing. Meanwhile, you completely disengage. In martial art terms, the form that you train, the techniques, the movements that you do, those are tools, just as those technological things, your personal computer, your so-called smart phone, your Roomba, your dishwasher, your Mr. Coffee, your electric toothbrush, they’re tools. Those tools should not be the master; you should be the master of the tools. But in order for you to master those tools and really be able to utilize them to the fullest, you must not be caught up with them. I remember talking with my teacher about how everyone’s not able to interface with what I’m teaching them or having a difficult time because they’re caught up with learning that particular piece. They’re trying so hard, to their credit, but almost trying too hard. In trying too hard, they negate the process of learning because you push yourself into a corner. That’s where I came up with the analogy of the Roomba, because inevitably the thing bangs into the wall, gets stuck under the couch, rolls up under the dog and bangs against the wall until you get up and reset its direction. Or maybe you don’t even have to get up; maybe you remotely reset its direction.

I hate that remote thing because life cannot be done remotely. Kung Fu cannot be done remotely. It’s that visceral thing we’re talking about. You have to have that. It’s great that you watch sporting events on TV and get all excited about watching the quarterback fumble the ball or make the touchdown, but you’re not on the field. You’re salivating as you watch the master chef cook on the cooking show, but you’re not really eating. You’re getting all jazzed up about these things that aren’t real but not understanding it’s not real and therefor missing the point. They originally called TV a boob tube because watching it made you a “boob.” Drugs are called “dope” because they make you into a dope. Everything that dulls the senses should be to us anathema. This is why I find Kung Fu so refreshing. When it’s played right, it heightens all your senses – sight, sound, taste, smell, feeling. In order to learn Kung Fu and really get the real feeling of it, it has to be live. It’s about the live response of an opponent having an altercation with you. It’s about the live response of you moving your mind and body and feeling all the humors within your body move. Not to get into scientific and medical jargon, but your blood, your chi, the oxygen levels in your body, all that has to be done physically within and without the individual. So, it’s dangerous to rely on anything that you personally don’t have control over. It’s dangerous to rely on autopilot, because if you rely on things that you don’t have control over, then once they’re either taken away or no longer accessible, you find yourself lost. Not only that, but you’ve given those things control over you. So, basically you’ve become an addict and you lose your freedom to be real. That’s contrary to what the exercise of Kung Fu is all about. Kung Fu is all about getting in touch with the real individual, as I spin my Fong Ting Gik around the room, thinking about this blog.

When you train, you can’t be that programmed Roomba that we’re using as an example and just go through the motions, hard, stiff and strong without feeling. Feeling is important. What is feeling? There’s the physical feeling of touch. You need to have that. If you don’t have that physical feeling of touch, you’ve already cut off one of your senses. You have to use all your senses to learn Kung Fu. When you come into the Mo Gwoon, you smell the incense, you smell the sweat, you smell the energy in the room. You taste it in the air. That’s why the training’s not the same when you’re not in the school. You can’t reproduce that energy. It’s what they say about the journey as opposed to the destination. Everybody’s caught up with the destination, but you haven’t even started the journey because you’re sitting on your couch watching something online remotely as your Roomba is picking up the popcorn and Cheetle dust instead of you getting off your ass and doing it yourself. There’s a difference between getting up and cracking two eggs, frying up the bacon and making your own sandwich as opposed to going to Dunkin Donuts. Oh, not even going, because you’re not allowed to go… having it delivered by a free delivery service, but you know it’s a powdered egg at best with mystery meat posing as bacon. Who knows how old it is? Who knows where it came from? I don’t even know if a chicken laid that one. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s a personal decision, how the student approaches his training. You can either approach your training by wanting to be 100% involved or you’re just going to access it remotely – even if you’re in class.

This has a lot to do with the ability and the attitude of the individual. You have to able to maintain and focus the proper attitude in order to keep the learning going. We can’t rely on a program, per se. You can learn the program, the movement, the technique, yet somehow you can’t make it come alive. Everybody has Photoshop; it’s almost standard for computers to have, but how come different designers have different levels of design? This goes back to the two fried eggs and bacon. You can get takeout, or have it delivered or make it at home. One way is convenient, easy, standardized, and always going to be the same time, but somehow it lacks that organic nature. Sometimes the student becomes so focused on the program, or form, that you’re missing the real point of what’s going on. It starts to become more performance than actual practice. This is what I was trying to convey to my (online) class last night, that the movement is an idea, not a form. It’s the ultimate expression of that idea, not necessarily a particular pattern. This is what most people get so concentrated on. It makes me think of the phrase, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” Most students, after a while, get stuck because they can’t see beyond the confines of the shape of that thing. But the shape that they see is something that they have preproscribed to the item.

This comes back to the student trying too hard. You’ve learned the set of movements. You’re trying very, very hard to make it happen, but sometimes when you try too hard to make things happen, it has a tendency to, at the very least, become stiff, dry and not a true representation of what you’re trying to learn or show. This has a negative effect of pushing the individual in the wrong direction. You get trapped in a box, and you don’t see a lid, you don’t see a doorknob or a keyhole. You don’t see the way out because you don’t know what to look for in order to be able to get yourself out of that rut. That’s another pitfall that a lot of students have is they fall into ruts. You get used to one thing. That’s what’s happening right now; we’re getting used to be being bombarded with negative media and thoughts. It’s pervasive. This is what’s dangerous about getting used to something. You get accustomed to throwing a punch a certain way. You get accustomed to throwing a kick a certain way. That’s fine in the beginning. You need something to latch onto, but the student must be warned that this is not the only way to deal with and/or execute a particular technique. As you become more advanced as a practitioner, you can have a stylistic interpretation, but you must be open to being able to see things different ways. When you get used to a first impression, your mind is not open. First impressions are dangerous for the most part because they’re based on only what you can perceive at that moment in time with lack of experience. What happens to most students and/or individuals is they get caught up with their first impression and can’t seem to be able to add on or formulate a secondary or tertiary impression. This stagnates them and leaves them stuck. Because they’re stuck, they can’t go beyond themselves and then there’s no more growth, and you end up doing the same old same old. In order to excel at any one particular skill set, one has to be able to revisit and revise their understanding and grow through that process. Getting more has a lot to do with giving up, giving up your preconceived notions and/or first impressions of what something is or is like. Your first impression is based solely on a knee jerk reaction because of your lack of experience and lack of information on that said system, situation, technique, individual person or whole situation.

In order for you to learn anything, especially the art of Kung Fu, you need experience, and this can only be gotten by having live real time experience, and always keeping the mind fresh. Even though as an individual you may be very astute, very smart, even brilliant, that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to be learned or gleaned. This requires consistent trial, error, correction, and then doing that again without ever saying, “I quit.” You are doing the same thing, but not necessarily the same way. You’re striving to make it better every single time without destroying the integrity of that which you are doing. It’s the process of work itself that makes it better, keeping the integrity of it in tact while remaining open minded. When you do what I’m saying, your growth potential becomes limitless in that item. You become limitless in your potential of understanding.

If you want to be more than what you are, you have to come away from you. It’s a point of departure from your norm, your normal way of thinking. You have to cultivate the capability of disassociating yourself from yourself in order to see what else can be done to make your interpretation evolve, change and grow. It’s dangerous to become fully automated like a Roomba. That’s the joy and pleasure of driving a car that’s a stick shift and not automatic. You feel the car, you feel the road, you feel everything. Stay real. Stay organic. It’s going to be different every time. Being alive is about having a live response. Feeling is everything. Feeling is being alive, even from the smallest task of sweeping the floor. You might say, “I got this Roomba. It can do this for me,” but for me, I’d rather do it for myself.

- Master Paul Koh 高寶羅

Ancient Wisdom for Life Today

Never underestimate the wisdom of the ages.

Everything that’s being put in front of us today seems to me to be gloom and doom and pessimism, and those things are contagious. This contagious attitude and mindset is the one thing that everyone needs to guard against, not only during this “uncertain time,” but during all occasions because life itself is a struggle, from the first breath you take, from the day you are born, until the day you die. You find it so hard, yet no one wants to leave. No one wants to die. Life is about living, so live life to the fullest. Live life in the physical, in the here and the now. Energize your mind and body, and be a true human being, flesh, blood, beating heart. You need to stand up and fight the good fight every day; that means mentally as well as physically.

Living is about working, having a task, having a purpose in life. Adhering to or buying into a permissive mindset erodes the foundation of what one’s life should be built upon. The true human condition is to get up every day and have εργασία (productive, constructive work for the free-thinking individual), in contrast to δούλος (slave labor), which is a negative connotation of work where the individual has no choice about their situation or outcome. I hear many people today saying that they don’t know what their purpose is in life. Granted, it is a very difficult thing to acquire a purpose, but this is the stabilizing factor in one’s existence.

This is what we learn on the first day and every day in Kung Fu, stability. We learn the stance, your physical stance, your spiritual stance, your mental stance. What stance have you taken to stabilize, normalize and keep yourself in the proper focus? I see too many people falling into the persona of the victim and allowing themselves to despair. Once you fall into that dark pit of despair, it’s almost impossible to get out because it’s a black hole of emotion without reason and logic that swallows up all light and hope. This is where you don’t want to go. I speak to my class every day (remotely online because I have no other choice), but I speak to them and work with them as fervently and passionately as ever before. I had to apologize the other day for raising my voice so loud and so many times I felt as though I was yelling at them (which I do normally) to wake up and energize themselves and fight every day to stay alive because that is what life is all about. Once you give up or give in to these dark sided emotions, the battle is over.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of late, coming back to a favorite ancient philosopher of mine. I’ve found great solace, freedom and empowerment in the words of Epictetus. One of these uplifting quotes, if you perceive it the way I do is, “No man is FREE who is not a master of himself.” This type of situation that we’re in at the moment has shackled our freedom, our freedom of thought, our freedom of action, our freedom of speech, our freedom to live the free life with our own passions and happiness in tact because this supposed dark image of death is looming over us. I take solace in the words of this ancient philosopher who, too, must have faced many dire consequences and in a much more hostile environment than we live in today.

This quote also speaks to me as a practitioner of the Chinese martial arts. As I’ve stated many times before, I have gained knowledge of myself, my limitations as well as my strengths and potential, and thereby have become a much more free individual because I endeavor on a daily basis to live. By living daily, fully, as much as possible, as much as I can, I strive to master myself and in this way make myself free. I am free because I can think with my own reason and my own logic and not have to depend on Big Brother to tell me where to go and what to do and how to think and what to eat and what to wear. Freedom gained through mastery of the self is one of the most wonderful, if not the most precious, gift one can give to oneself and no one under the sun, not even god himself, can take it away unless you willingly relinquish it or sacrifice it on the pyre of ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is the invisible shackles that bind people and bring them to a lower state of being and therefor make them into victims. This is where we said, you don’t want to go. The philosophers are there to tell you there’s a pothole in the road, and if they warn you and tell you there’s a pothole in the road; go around it, you should take heed. The knowledge and wisdom of the past can still be applied to today.

“Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind.”

–Epictetus

One must be extremely discriminating about what images one allows to enter into and take seed in one’s mind. I’ve never been much for mass media. I’ve never been much of an avid reader of these wonderful periodicals and newspapers that seem to me to be little more than just a glorified tabloid constantly bombarding and badgering like a henpecking old wife, not letting you catch a breath to use your own intellect to figure things out, which is the most important thing. The mind is the seat of everything. Once one loses their faculties, once one loses control over their own thoughts and decisions, then that individual is done. That’s why we say, “That guy’s lost his mind.” He lost his capability to reason and see things for what they truly are, to be able to calculate and measure the true circumstances of his surroundings, his life and the people around him. So, it is extremely important for us to be discerning and use judgment as to what we see, read and hear on a daily basis. Even though you may think you have an impenetrably thick skin about those things, if you expose yourself to them on a regular basis, they do have a way of permeating into you like wormwood. As we talked about in the previous blog, it’s very important to maintain your daily practice. Built within the Chinese martial arts is its cathartic nature, which, as a bi-product, engages your three states, physical, mental and spiritual. These three states are engaged in such a way as to force you to truly face yourself and look inward and thereby understand yourself better and be able to cleanse and purify yourself through this practice.

It’s very important to remember the human condition. I know I’ve said this many times before. Unfortunately, the human condition for most individuals is to be lazy. When we are content, complacent and relish in the physical pleasures that surround us, we become enslaved to them. The true wise man resists those temptations and rather asserts himself towards labors that will have productive and long-lasting results. This is the case with practicing Kung Fu. It is difficult. It is not initially pleasurable. It does not give you instant gratification. It does not give you comfort, but in truth, when one devotes themselves to the practice, it will bring you solace. It will bring you inner peace and a true understanding of the self. The true practice of Kung Fu, as how life should be lived, is to not seek the good in the external things one can acquire, but rather to seek it within yourself. We have no control over the external. We only have control over our own minds, hearts and bodies. This is, in actuality, more true power, and this should be fostered on a daily basis through your practice and through a proper mental state. Undue worry over something that you cannot control is a waste of productive energy and time. Rather, one should seek to fortify oneself and make oneself stronger from the inside out.

You must “attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do,” said Epictetus. You have to hold true to your beliefs no matter what the situation, no matter what people say, and no matter what is going on around you. In this way of being true to yourself, you gain your own self power. Kung Fu training puts you through a lot of tests and a lot of trials. It pushes everyone’s buttons. It touches your id and your ego in ways that you may never have perceived before and forces you to look inward unto yourself and discover your true self. The trials and tribulations that you face in your training and on a daily basis will introduce you to your strengths and potential. The individual must remain resolute and steadfast, unwavering in his conviction, and slowly, over time, as you work hard, you will build something that will endure for your entire life. This thing, this skill that you will learn and build over time through the practice of Kung Fu will lead you to your ultimate and true potential. This is not just good advice for martial art training, but also for how to live a productive and therefor happy life. Life is not meant to be sitting on the and binge watching your shows while you stand on queue at the minimart to get your Doritos and white bread to make PB&J in your pajamas. That’s not even good for me on a snow day, and life is not a snow day.

“First, say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do.”

–Epictetus

That’s life, and that’s how your Kung Fu training should be. When you start training, you’re planting a seed, and when that seed is planted, it has to be nurtured, looked after, watered and tended to regularly. Your life, like your Kung Fu, needs to be exercised daily. You can’t put your life on pause. There is no pause button for Kung Fu or life, at least from my point of view. I practice Kung Fu every day, every hour of every day. You may say, well, that’s impossible, you can’t practice 24/7. But I say no, I do it every day, because I practice Kung Fu not only in the physical realm but in the mental state. Anything and everything you do should encompass and embody Kung Fu. What you do is what you are. Kung Fu in this instance is linked with the Daoist concept of knowing “the way” to do things, the proper time to do things, how things should be executed by understanding the nature of things. When you understand the nature of things, you have a better understanding of the nature of yourself. Therefor, even though it looks like you’re doing nothing, everything gets done. Another individual may be running all over the place trying to do every single thing, and nothing gets done. A study of your own nature as an individual and as a human being is the true study of Kung Fu.

“No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I will answer, there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

– Epictetus

In other words, you have to work for what you want. You can’t have things handed to you, and if you have things handed to you then you owe somebody for them. Who wants to owe someone? Who wants to owe anything to anyone? When you owe, you are no longer free. When you work for something, anything, for the smallest thing or the biggest thing, the skill that you want to attain, that work produced the freedom that you have. You put your energy towards that endeavor, and it can never be taken away. Because you worked for it, it’s yours. It’s going to take time, and it’s going to take a lot of effort. Hey, that sounds like Kung Fu to me… time and effort. But once you work for this skill or any other, it’s yours. Your name is engraved on it according to the amount of work you invested.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

–Epictetus

That’s a theme that needs to be constantly running in the background like background music. It has to be constantly running through your mind when you practice, because if you take yourself too seriously, you leave no margin for error. No margin for error, i.e. looking foolish or being thought stupid, never allows you to stretch yourself and experiment and learn the breadth and width of your abilities because you’re held to this narrow, confined way of thinking. So, an open mind, a mind that is constantly being utilized, a mind that is constantly being educated and seeking the truth, is the mind that a true practitioner of Kung Fu and a true human being that wishes to live an enriched and full life should seek to have. The sated, satisfied mind acquires no knowledge. But as we said before, the mind is something that needs to be constantly exercised.

“Other people’s views and troubles can be contagious. Don’t sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.”

–Epictetus

We need to be careful. We think that other things are contagious or contagion or viral, but in actuality man’s thoughts are more viral than the most deadly diseases because those things dig deep into the back of our minds and seed themselves there unless you’re vigilant regularly to understand that you need to seek the truth for yourself rather than rely on someone else’s perceived notions of what truly is to guide you. I need to see, feel and hear for myself to know. You may say I’m a “doubting Thomas,” but I think it’s much more pragmatic to understand for yourself what truly is, what truly works, what truly is right, than to fanatically listen to or believe hearsay and gossip. This is true for martial art training and in life.

This is what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about the two feet that we stand on. That’s our stance that we talked about earlier. Our stance is that we train Kung Fu because we aim to live an enriched, empowered, happy life, and because we want this life of empowerment and knowledge, we have to train our martial arts. We are always testing and striving to learn what is more true on a daily basis. These two legs that we stand upon slowly allow us to walk, run, jump and eventually fly because that is the true potential of the art and of man — to be able to uplift himself and make every step and endeavor towards understanding himself and the world around him. If you’re better, then everything around you will be better, but in order for you to be better, you first have to fix your head. When your head is on straight and you see things clearly, you understand what’s going on because you’ve educated yourself towards those ends. Then, nothing can move you, and that’s the gift that you give yourself through your training. This is why you have to train every day. Train your body and train your brain. I can remember having a conversation with my teacher, Grandmaster Tak Wah Eng, about the “price” of priceless knowledge. For me, the training that I’ve received from him is priceless, so it’s impossible to put a value on it. Once you put a value on the knowledge, freedom and power that you get by training Kung Fu, by living the true life, by living the free life, once you put a price on that, you cheapen it. You dull its luster and malign it. There is no price for freedom and knowledge. They are priceless. That’s why you have to get out there and live your life.

“Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to…this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to REALLY LIVE.”

–Epictetus

A healthy mind in a healthy body

Νοῦς ὑγιὴς ἐν σώματι ὑγιεῖ
“A healthy mind in a healthy body”
- Thales of Miletus

I’m here in Chinatown drinking my coffee, listening to music and training with one of my senior students who is feeling the pressure from the negative perception that has been built up by people and the media about the current panic over Coronavirus. Let’s just clear the air with a little good Kung Fu and some Stoic philosophy. I’m not a doctor, but illness of the mind is sometimes worse than anything else. People’s mindsets exasperate the situation. You have a choice of how to perceive things. You can go about it in a logical, orderly fashion and make things better, or you can make things worse. No matter what happens, the only modicum of control that you or I have is our reaction to whatever is going on externally. If your reaction is to freak out and panic, then that’s what you propagate. You got what you asked for; don’t cry about it later. Instead, step back take a good, strong look. Think with your so-called highly intellectual mind and apply reason. Let’s get ourselves together. Put your mind back on a positive track. Don’t be swayed, persuaded or moved in wrong directions by what is permeating the airwaves. It’s vicious in a sense; it’s an attack on logic and sensibility, and people are feeding into it. I want no part of it. The only panic that exists is the panic that you create. Be sane, not insane. Fight back against the insanity by living your life.

It’s a very unfortunate statement that the mass majority of people are ill-educated if not uneducated and just react on impulse. One example of this is all the racist things happening against Asians. Diseases don’t see color, creed or nationality. It is complete ignorance not going into Chinese establishments, restaurant, supermarkets and mom-and-pop shops. It seems like you’re more likely to be killed by a stampede of panicked people trying to buy toilet paper and Purel than by the virus itself. Is the virus something that’s attacking your immune system or something that is attacking your brain? I think the real virus seems to be more from within people’s mind than it is from the outside. Are people going to get sick and die? Yes. Unfortunately, that’s a fact of life. It happens every day. You didn’t know that? And I’m not saying to underreact; just don’t overreact. Be normal. Have a routine. Establish mental and physical discipline because otherwise you’re just running amuck. People need to understand how to control themselves. Life is a fight. It’s a constant struggle, so you have to get up and go every day. That’s your routine.

Having a daily routine and sticking to a daily routine regardless of what is going on is important. Whether it’s raining, snowing or sunny, hot or cold, you have to do your thing. Otherwise, you have nothing to do, and because you have nothing to do, anyone can prey upon your fears and terrorize you. When you don’t know how to fight for your life, individuals can prey on your lack of power, light and energy, especially in this day and age where information is easily attainable and dispensed but not necessarily validated and substantiated by fact. They sow seeds of fear in your mind and heart. You become fearful, and you become a slave without chains, a slave to the media, a slave to social perceptions, and you sold yourself for toilet paper. What did your ancestors do before toilet paper? Die? Take a few steps back and look at the situation with a logical mind. If we do this, we can see that our overreactions are fueling the chaos. It’s not the virus that is the problem; it’s our reactions to it. First, you have to control yourself, and then maybe you can exert some modicum of control over the situation around you. If it’s going to rain, it’s going to rain. I’ll deal with it. I’m not going to hide under a rock and wait for someone else to come and save me. You cannot live in fear. That is not life; it’s death.

I wake up every morning and do the same thing. I shower, brush my teeth, wash my face and I go to work. You work hard, you go to Kung Fu, you practice your routines again and again. You go home, take care of your family and take care of your business. This is your routine and this is your discipline. The problem is most people, in my opinion and because I’m a people watcher, are undisciplined, unruly and unwilling to take stock of themselves. What many people don’t understand is that civilization is based on discipline. Without discipline, you have chaos, and then the whole world burns. You must have a logical methodology for self-discipline. You must have order, but you must create your own order, not have order superimposed on you by someone else. Do your form. That’s your order. You create order because you practice every day. Many people are content to let someone else tell them where to go and what to do and how to be, because that’s easier than sitting there and scratching your head and figuring it out for yourself. But when you do this, you allow others to feed off of your fear. But when you’re disciplined, you fear much less because you put restraints and controls on yourself by yourself for yourself. That’s what Kung Fu gives you. It gives you structure.

The mind is the seat of sanity and/or disease, and the Kung Fu practice is the cleansing agent. It is the vaccine for all nonsense and stupidity, but like every real medicine it is bitter, but man does it get the job done. After you take it and you’re healthy again, you’re so glad you swallowed that bitter pill because now you see everything clearly and feel your own power and energy. That has to trickle into everything you do. When you step off the training floor, don’t leave it behind. Take it with you and empower every part of your life with it. Then you’re really training. If you’re only training in the training hall, on the mat, in the room, then it didn’t really take root in you. It’s a magical touchstone, but you have to know how to rub the lamp for the genie to come out. You can’t just knock on the door, and he doesn’t have a cell phone you can call. Work your Kung Fu like you work your life every day. When things sit sedentary, they rot and it stinks. You have to rotate; you have to move the mind, move the body, move your energy; move your heart, body and soul. That is Kung Fu. That is what it is to be a tiger. That is what it is to be at the pinnacle of human existence.

Once you get hooked into the sensationalism propagated by today’s media, you’re being bought and sold – your mind, your soul, and eventually your body. That’s really the truth. You may hate me for what I’m saying, but you hate it because you know it’s true in your heart of hearts. If you give into fear, then you’re not free. That’s why Kung Fu is awesome. Kung Fu gives you freedom. That’s why, generations ago, when our Southern Shaolin ancestors fought to rebel against the oppressive Ching Empire, they were marked as rebels, but in actuality they were freedom fighters. The establishment didn’t like that because you’re going against the grain. Don’t rock the boat; conform. No. I’m free thinking, and because I can think freely, this makes me a human being and it makes me alive. If I can’t think freely, I’m a cog, I’m a screw, I’m a nut, I’m a bolt. I’m a computer chip in your program. F*** you and your program. Either by default or by design, the current situation has the possibility to manipulate our human emotional responses. Everybody has emotional triggers, but it is up to us to respond logically instead of reacting emotionally and irrationally. If everybody just took a step back and did what they were supposed to do on a regular basis, everything would be more calm. But because everyone’s freaking out, everyone’s infecting each other with a disease of the mind. The panic mentality only creates more panic. Instead, we should strive not to allow our emotional triggers to be tripped and approach every situation logically. This goes back to the ancient Greek quote about a healthy mind and healthy body.

So, how do you energize your mind, your body and your brain? You as an individual are connected to the universe, so the energy that you make goes out into the universe. The pebble that you drop into the pond creates that ripple of energy, so make sure you throw in a positive pebble. Kung Fu is about expressing oneself, expressing one’s mind, spirit and body. This is the beauty and legacy of the Kung Fu that we’re learning. It is self-empowering. You’re expressing your heart and mind through the technique. This is unification of the mind body and spirit.

So, don’t buy into the BS. Put yourself on the program and train hard. When you train and you feel alive, it’s like the first cup of coffee in the morning. You feel awake, and there’s nothing better than to be awake and alive. I don’t want to cry. I want to laugh, I want to scream, I want to fly. I may have nothing, but I’m free to live as I want to live and free to move as I want to move. The whole idea of what we’re training is to be a tiger. In nature, when the tiger is left alone without human intervention, he is on the top of the food chain. Nothing eats the tiger. The tiger is there, solitary, alone on his mountain, king unto himself. Don’t you want to be a king on your own mountain? Move, breath, think and fight every day.

- Master Paul Koh 高寶羅

仁 Essential Quality of a Martial Artist

Today I was taking some time to think about the Confucian concept of being a gentleman, which should not be misconstrued as someone with eloquent speech who is dressed to the nines. We’re not excluding the ladies, either. You have to understand the context and take into account the time, place and era that these Confucian doctrines were made. It’s not to say that this concept is geared only towards men; it applies to people in general, so, you’re not off the hook. Everyone can act with a gentle demeanor, gentle meaning respectful and honorable towards everyone in all things. Now, that being said, let’s check ourselves and everyone around us. See how many people that you encounter today, literally today, who behave and conduct themselves in this magnanimous way. I would venture to say, because I live in New York City, that they are few and far between. But they are out there. They do exist and we should strive to be one of them.

I may be an idealist, but one of the main things that spurred me to learn martial arts was not any particular movie star or action series, but rather the ancient concept of the scholar warrior, the hero, the knight-like figure, as romantic as it may sound. I don’t mean romantic with a dozen roses, but rather the romantic notion of a heroic figure that would stand up for what is right, what is just, what is correct. Before we can even talk about the deeds that inspired these heroic stories/legends, myths, etc., we have to investigate where this idea comes from. I think it stems from ancient times in China’s long history and is tightly interwoven with the philosophical and social ideals that were prevalent at those times during the formation of the Middle Kingdom and their martial art traditions. Confucius taught many art forms, one of them being martial arts in the form of equestrian pursuits, archery and I believe even swordplay. He thought of that training as part and parcel with becoming the Superior Man or the 君子 “Junzi”. The original meaning of this term was a prince, someone of noble birth. In today’s sense, a gentleman is thought of as someone who is well-spoken, well-mannered and wears stylish clothing. I’m not saying that’s not it, but that’s still an exterior façade. In the true Confucian concept, 君子 “Junzi” has nothing to do with the status of which one is born, but rather the status of how one conducts themselves in their everyday lives. We’re actually talking about the character of the individual. The character of any individual, be they a martial art practitioner or not, is displayed and demonstrated solely by their deeds. Confucius said, “The superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions.”

The Confucian concept of virtue is in line with the word 仁 Yan, which has been translated into many different words, benevolence, compassion, kindness, courtesy, goodness in the sense of a protective nature. The character 仁 is comprised of two distinct calligraphy characters, one meaning man and/or person and the second meaning “two.” It can be interpreted as how individuals should treat one another, or it can mean man and how man interacts with heaven and earth. Do you deal with things and treat people with a humanitarian sense and with a sense of love and caring? It’s about this philanthropic nature, doing things out of the kindness of your heart. This is at the core of the martial concept because the Chinese martial arts grew out of protecting not only oneself but one’s loved ones, family, country and beyond.

This is an essential quality of the martial artist in order to fulfill the ideals of what a Kung Fu practitioner should be. A fighter is not necessarily a martial artist while a martial artist does not necessarily have to be a fighter in the ring. So, the term “martial artist” I think is misunderstood and maligned by those individuals who don’t adopt, adhere to, understand, or uphold a particular code of ethics. As traditionally taught, a true martial artist has to embody this benevolent quality. If you’re going to train to be a martial artist, and stand up for what is right, it should be an integral part of your training.

Unfortunately, in modern martial art training, and mostly in recent times, the major concern has been the physical prowess of the individual and his ability to win a competition and/or defeat his opponent. I am by no means making light of this. This is also essential and a core precept, but cannot override the balancing point of ethical conduct and behavior. This is the balance that is struck between the warrior and the scholar, the two halves of the martial artist that make him whole. If one is nurtured over the other, then the individual will never fully realize his ultimate potential. That is, to become the superior man. This is what the training is all about, to empower and enlighten oneself so the individual becomes a better human being. If there’s no counterbalance in terms of a philosophical backbone behind what you’re training, then there’s no artistry in your martial arts. In the core of martial art training is built that the individual should be a good person and therefor contribute to the greater society.

This is the hard and the soft of it. How can you be a heroic figure without that balance between the hard and the soft? You see the grizzled war veteran on the battlefield, hands bloodied, (and again, I’m being super romantic so give me a little license) and he’s taken down all his enemies, but yet he has enough compassion to pick up the baby left on the side of the road during this tumultuous conflict and find it a place or save its life or rescue it from danger. You might be saying, “Oh come on, you watch too many movies,” but I’m sure it’s happened, not only in ages gone by, but in many modern confrontations. I think love in the sense of loving your fellow man because you’re able to see beyond the concerns of yourself is one of the grounding points of a real martial artist. The honor and respect that I learned and saw exemplified in previous generations has not trickled over as well as we would have hoped. This comes back down to the individual’s actions. Actions, as they say, speak louder than words. It’s how you carry yourself on a daily basis.

Am I benevolent and generous of spirit? Am I giving? We all have to question ourselves. I don’t work in a soup kitchen or engineer blood drives or work at the local PTA bake sale. Does this mean that I am not adhering to that Confucian concept of Yan? But these things can also be done in outward appearance, trying to manifest an image to make people believe that you are of this character. But it’s all a bold-faced lie, done to fool people, not from a genuine place. The Confucian concept is more about learning the self, not falsely doing deeds to create an image. I think the first thing that we need to do is put ourselves on the firing line and question ourselves before we point that high-powered firing line at someone else’s philosophical head. Today you have teachers, masters, professors, grand poohbahs of the lodge, self-proclaimed gurus and monks that say one thing and do another. “Do as I say, not as I do.” This is on the whole completely wrong and false. We as individuals, be it adults, parents, teachers, mentors, martial artists, must lead by example rather than just uttering these good words. And as I sit here and think about this, I wonder and think unto myself, “Hey you, you, too, have to live up to this on a daily basis. You can’t just say the things that should be said and do something else.” What can I do on a daily basis that encompasses these attributes?

I don’t have an answer for anyone. I don’t have a cure-all. I’m just making an observation, looking at things in general, looking at myself and looking back on this philosophical concept and wondering, how do we adhere or even begin to live with those precepts? As martial art people, we claim to have a code of conduct, high moral standards, ethics, but I don’t really see people living like that. Instead, like politics, martial arts often seems to appeal to those that desperately seek power over others. Martial art training and practice is not about power over others, but rather seeking virtue in all things. You seek to make yourself better so you make others better, and then you yourself are better. You seek to understand so you can help others understand, and therefor you gain greater understanding. I think it is very important for the martial artist to strive for this Yan, this compassionate, benevolent concern for not only himself but his fellow man that extends beyond blood and kin to all that he meets. If you don’t have genuine concern for others, then your martial art training is pretty much self-serving. And it is about the self, but rather growing beyond the self and being able to extend your knowledge, help, and experience, to others. Help others to grow and in that way help yourself to grow.

The real beginning, middle and end of it is, what does it take to be a real martial artist? The philosophical backbone of the Chinese martial arts is Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. The Confucian concepts we’ve discussed teach a martial artist how to be humane, because if you’re not humane, you have no humanity; therefor, you’re a beast, and I’m not maligning animals. It teaches you how to be an individual and interact with others, and that’s what martial art training is all about. Isn’t it about being a better person? Being a better human means you have to have humanity. You have to have compassion, benevolence, respect, honor, care and love for everyone. That should be the example that we should all follow and that should permeate throughout our training. In one way, martial art training at its core is actually quite contrary to this precept of being humane and caring about others, but this is the counterbalance that has to be struck. That’s the hard and the soft that we mentioned before. You train this hard, unforgiving weapon, i.e. yourself, that you’ve been forged into, but it’s counter-balanced by the soft, the caring, the concern. You place value on human life and live a good life because you know how easy it is to hurt someone, to physically maim, to break someone’s bones, even to kill. But you don’t have the power to resurrect them and bring them back or even to make them whole, so why would you ever want to cross that line? No matter how hard you train, you have to temper it with compassion and forbearance for the human condition. That’s the point-counterpoint that we’re trying to make in this blog. That can’t be forgotten because once you forget this, then you’re not really a martial artist. You may be a combatant, but you’re never going to be able to live up to that Confucian ethical standard of the Superior Man, the one of noble spirit. Even though you have all the physical prowess, you lack the moral fiber, that heroic stature that we look upon and say, we want to be like this. So, what are the ingredients of a hero? There are many, but this is one of them.

- Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

KUNG FU & LIFE: CONTENT TO BE ME

Apologies for being AWOL with my blogs for the last several weeks, but Chinese New Year takes a lot of energy and preparation and training and so on. I was noticing in those weeks how people’s satisfaction ranged, ebbed and waned during all the training. It’s very interesting to see how people react when put through pressure, pressure to perform, pressure to produce, pressure to bring it up to the next level. I noticed that pressure brings out the best or the worst in all of us. Fortunately, most people that I’ve trained rise up to the occasion and are able to be triumphant over their own personal issues and self-doubt when put under pressure. Transformation of the self is something that we all want, but in truth, we cannot change ourselves to be something that we are not. Everyone has to learn how to become happy with what and who they are instead of wishing to be someone or something else. We can only make ourselves better versions of what we are. Everyone is born with different gifts and abilities, and sometimes it takes a long time for us to recognize what we have and to be happy with that.

It reminds me of a story that my teacher had related to me. A few weeks before Chinese New Year, we were practicing together, and I had said to him that I was content with what he was teaching me, and actually I didn’t need any more at the moment because I could only absorb so much. He said this reminded him of a story. When he was much younger, he had gone to visit an old master herbalist here in Chinatown who has now passed away, and they were talking about medicines and so on, and there was another gentleman in the herbal shop, and they started talking about what it takes to be happy. They said, 知足者常樂! To be content is to be happy. My Sifu said he didn’t quite get it at the time, but now looking back upon it many years later, he understands, and I’m trying to grasp the understanding of what happiness has to do with being content.

I see in a lot of people that what breeds unhappiness is people’s discontentment with what they are, as opposed to what they have. Having stuff, having toys and junk, the big car, the house, the trophy wife, the two and a half kids, the six figure bank account and so on, those are all fine and well and I wish them for everyone, but that will not bring happiness. Only being content with one’s inner self is happiness. Quite often in martial art training, you have people looking at other people and what they can do, what they have, what they’ve achieved and so on. That’s fine to gain inspiration and motivation to work harder. It’s another thing to be covetous or envious. Most of us don’t understand that, as I’ve stated before in other blogs, we are not created equal. I don’t want to offend the Constitution or anyone else. I am a patriot. But I truly feel that everyone is special and unique. Therefore, in order for you to be truly happy, you must understand that you are unique and special, and there’s no one else like you on god’s given earth. Even twins differ. Identical twins are not as identical as you may think. Their mindsets and looks are slightly different, even if minutely so. They are not carbon copies of each other. Even the carbon copy that you have deteriorates over time as you run it through the copy machine. No butt prints please. So this comes back to the question of what is true happiness and if we take this statement, 知足者常樂!, I think it really boils down to understanding the gifts that the individual has. Some people can run fast. Some people can jump high. Some people are incredibly strong and some are not. Some are tall, and some are short. Some have blue eyes, and others are green, and some are brown.

So, coming back to Chinese New Year, there are lots of lion dancing teams all over the world as well as here in Chinatown NYC, and they’re all awesome and they’re all great. Everybody puts on amazing shows with lots of effort and energy, and I applaud all of them and they are spectacular to watch. I myself, being slightly older and from a different generation, learned a very classical old school Fut Shan style of lion dancing which is fierce in nature, powerful, and utilizes the movements of your Kung Fu training to move and animate the lion. This is a much older method that many don’t play too much these days because of trends and other more acrobatic and dynamic types of performances. And I think it’s great, but I can’t do that kind of stuff. First of all, I’m not 90 pounds and 5 feet tall, so those type of movements don’t work for me. Even though they are inspirational in nature and awesome to watch, I’m still awe of them and applaud them. But I’m not envious and rather on the contrary, I’m very content with the old school style that I’ve learned, be it good or bad, because it is unique.

So in the context of Kung Fu, I see a lot of people that are not content with what and who they are and are always looking at their classmates or other stylists and hoping, wishing and wanting what someone else has. As I had mentioned before, for motivation and inspiration this is ok, but wouldn’t it be better to focus on the attributes that you have rather than chasing after what you don’t have? Because in all honesty, it’s not yours, just as yours is not theirs. In order for us to progress and be happy and make headway in our training, we must learn to be content with what we have. Because if not, eventually we run the risk of not only not being able to emulate what the other individual has, but ultimately losing what we have.

It’s important to be satisfied with what you have at the moment without losing sight of where you came from and how much effort it took from you and others involved in your progression, evolution and growth. Don’t lose sight of where you’re going, but maintain that satisfaction, that happiness that you do have something, and even though it may not be what you want, it’s better than what you had in the beginning, which was flat out zero. This is what students always forget. They can’t maintain their mentality; they can’t maintain their level of satisfaction; they can’t maintain their level of progressive growth. They can’t maintain the mindset that’s required. That’s a happy mindset, knowing that even though the efforts that you put in at this moment may not come to fruition immediately, they will eventually. Once you forget this, you’ve lost the entire investment that you’ve put into your training from day one. You’ve thrown it all away just because you’ve adopted that s*@!$y loser mindset. Are you a winner or are you a loser? The distinction is defined in the mind of the person.

The true test is being content with what you have and not looking left, looking right or looking behind and thinking about what you don’t have and what would make you happy. If you have to think about what would make you happy, then you don’t really have true happiness because you’re not content. True happiness is being content with what you have rather than chasing things that you don’t. That’s how you have to play your weapon, your form, your Kung Fu. This is how you learn the item. This is how you learn yourself. Be content practicing and being part of that process. The ten moves I learned from my Sifu the other day were moves I learned 20 plus years ago, and someone else would argue that I just keep doing the same thing. But for me, when I do it with my Sifu, everything is brand new again because it’s brought to another level. This is not only because of the skill but because of the individual’s contentedness with where they are as a person. You have to be psychologically happy with your place, your lot in life, which most people are not. Are you content to sit and do one or two or three movements? Are you content with the single cup of coffee and the egg tart or are you envious of the other guy across the room having the giant 72 ounce Texas steak with fries? If you don’t have the concept, that understanding of being content, then nothing will ever satisfy you. A lot of times when I go to see my teacher, we do absolutely nothing except sit there and stare at each other and make some small talk completely unrelated to martial arts and Kung Fu. Then other days, we turn the entire world topsy turvy and make everything old new again. I am and he is content, i.e. happy, with either side.

This is not to say you should be content with your bad habits. A lot of people may misconstrue what I’m saying. You have to be able to recognize what is right and what is wrong. You have to train yourself to see the difference. Otherwise, you always go back to your default. You have to reset the password so you don’t go back to who you were before, who was not a bad person but who is not the person that you’re supposed to be now. We have to send you to AA… Assholes Anonymous. You must strive on a daily basis to remove yourself from that, the gravitational pull of your default reaction, and adopt a new one. In order for you to become content and be happy, you have to recognize that what you were content about before was not necessarily right. It’s good to change the socks, because after a while they smell. You have to learn how to adapt and change. Don’t use saying that you are content to lie to yourself that you are really content with what you have when you’re really just placating your ego and sweeping the issue under the rug. My Sifu is always fond of saying to me, “Don’t lie to yourself. Do it right,” and I chant this to my class on a regular basis. What this means basically is doing the right job all the time, being meticulous, having the right focus when you’re practicing and executing your movements. Doing everything to the T with clear mental and physical definition and not letting yourself slide or being spoiled or saying, hey, that’s good enough. In that way, when we practice properly in the right mental state, we can reach a level of contentedness and/or happiness because we did the best job that we could at that moment in time, putting aside the fact that it could be better, faster or stronger. Being content and being complacent are not the same thing. You don’t have to say that you’re content. You just know from the inside out that you’ve done your work.

When you know that you’ve done your best and are not just giving it lip service, and you know that you put forth your best effort, you never have a regret. It’s horrible to live with regret, but a lot of people live there, at the cul de sac of Shoulda Woulda Coulda. I shoulda did it, I woulda did it, I coulda did it. That’s all called regret. You’re living with regret because you didn’t do it when you should have done it. Do everything 100% all the way. If not, you will regret losing the chance. Don’t lose the chance. Get out of that cul de sac and move to a better neighborhood. When you don’t do your best, when you don’t do things with the right attitude, even if you do them, you do them with a tainted, contaminated frame of mind and it’s already besmirched. It’s already dirty because it wasn’t approached with the proper mind, proper heart and proper attitude. I don’t know what’s worse, living in the cul de sac of Shoulda Woulda Coulda, never trying at all, or trying, but doing it half-ass and not putting forth genuine effort. In my opinion, I think both of them suck and neither way will lead to a contented, lasting happiness. And I think this is what that Chinese statement means. 知足者常樂! To be content in all things is a lasting happiness. It’s not the child getting a piece of candy or chocolate and being happy for the moment. That’s not real happiness. Real happiness comes from a state of contentedness. It comes from who you are which is defined by your actions. This is not only long lasting but is also self-perpetuating. When you do things from the right place, the right way, with the right attitude, it only propagates that feeling to continue.

I see this all the time, especially when I teach my teenagers. They come to me in this pristine, untouched, virgin-like state because they haven’t been beaten down by society or “The Man.” They come on the floor happy. They’re happy to receive; they’re happy to work hard, and therefor that makes me happy to teach them. So happy begets happy and then the whole world spins round. I’m able to do things that I can’t do with other individuals solely based on their mental and spiritual status. Put all physical limitations aside because we all have limitations. How you get over your so-called limitations is being content with who and what you are. It’s about your personal energy, and you are in charge of your personal energy. It’s your incorrect perception that’s killing you, not the lack of being like somebody else.

Writing this blog made me remember a special I had seen a couple years ago on 60 Minutes or something. I remember them saying that for the average individual to achieve a level of contentment or happiness monetarily speaking, they estimated that it only took $75,000 a year to have everything that you needed, and anything in excess of that was too much. Yet many people have this kind of money but are still not happy. So, is $150,000 going to make you happier? I don’t know because I don’t have either. But I was just lying down eating my candied lotus root, staring at the lion heads on the wall, looking at my coffee cup, thinking, it’s not that bad. I’m not on a yacht in the south of France with a bunch of naked girls, but it’s not that bad. It’s cold and rainy, but it could be worse. I don’t necessarily think having more makes you happy.

No one’s telling you not to get a new haircut or not to buy a brand new pair of shoes or a new outfit. You can do your best to change whatever you want to change, but without finding the happiness or contentedness with the hand that you’ve been dealt, no matter how hard you work, you always end up undermining your progress because in the back of your mind you’re always wishing you were someone else. You can go and do whatever you want, but the truth of the matter is you are who you are wherever you go and whatever you do. In order to progress, you have to acknowledge what you are. That’s a bitter pill to swallow sometimes. But playing the blame game, blaming situations and/or other individuals for your issues and problems, will only create more discontent. If we focus on the external, we forget to work on the internal self. The truth of the matter is we don’t have control over any external circumstances, but we do have ultimate control over ourselves. So, you first and foremost need to be content, i.e. happy, with you, and then s*** starts to fall into place.

Don’t be a head case. No regrets. Do everything 100%. Move out of Shoulda Woulda Coulda. Whatever your task is, it doesn’t matter. One piece of form is not better than another, it’s up to the individual to make it work. No one is saying you shouldn’t want more, but you should also be cognizant of what you have before you lose it. Kung Fu is not an item, it’s the spirit. Don’t seek the item, seek the spirit. Learn to be content and happy with what you have and not ask for more. Be happy you’re you; I’ll be happy I’m me. I guess the bottom line is that knowing yourself is loving yourself. Loving yourself is being content with who and what you are. And being content with who and what you are is true happiness.

- Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

KUNG FU AND THE CULINARY ARTS

Thanksgiving is in a couple of days and I’m sitting here waiting to start a class with a new private student and munching on an Indian pastry that was brought back by a student of mine from his travels. I’m thinking to myself, wow, this cookie’s not too bad. I’m also thinking about the upcoming feast that everyone’s going to have, and everyone’s going to be cooking up a storm. It dawned on me that there is a major difference between the art of cooking and the art of baking, and I started to think about how these two skills translate to the art of Kung Fu. And as I think more about it, Kung Fu is a bit like cooking. But, wait. Not really. It’s actually a lot more like baking, isn’t it? Excuse my festive whimsy. But both cooking and baking as well as Kung Fu are a process, a process of learning, understanding and executing. Properly, I should add. So that’s my quandary. Is Kung Fu more like cooking or baking? Let’s take a look at these two different forms of culinary skill (ha ha… Kung Fu). The term Kung Fu means skill, therefor anyone that has skill in culinary arts can be said to possess Kung Fu. And you’ll know from the first bite if it’s good or not. You’ll know right away, just as in Kung Fu after a move or two you can decipher how good the practitioner really is. You don’t have to see the whole form, per se. The dish isn’t going to get better as you keep eating it. It’s either good from the get-go or not.

So, let’s have a little bit of understanding of the art of cooking. As I understand it – and I am not a cook, I just know how to eat – cooking is very difficult. There are many methods, many different skills that must be mastered in order to create a delicious dish. And the same thing can be said of baking. I think the greatest line of division between the two is that, unlike baking, cooking you can sort of, like, cheat a little bit. You can add a little water, add a little spice. You can augment cooking to a certain degree to the point that a mundane dish can be turned into something not that bad or really, really tasty. I mean, you’ve seen all those cooking contests where the chef/contestants are given a box of stuff and are told to produce something out of it. And many times they come up with a really fancy, amazing dish from some mundane ingredients. This is an example of Kung Fu.

But the big difference between the art of cooking and the art of baking is as with Kung Fu, in my opinion, there’s not much wiggle room as far as what you can add and delete without undermining the integrity of the fundamental technique. Let’s just preface, the concept of Kung Fu originally is to save your own life by being able to protect yourself under adverse circumstances. I don’t dispute the fact that Kung Fu can also be an art of self-expression, but once you start coming away from the basic tenets of that concept of being a fighting art, you lose the essential essence of what Kung Fu is all about. I’ve seen many people posting on their social media what I like to call interpretive dance, martial routines with a high level of acrobatic, theatrical skill. They look awesome, are very impressive, and I personally cannot emulate them, but drift far away from the original foundations of what Chinese Kung Fu is supposed to be about.

So you say, well how does this relate to baking? I am lucky enough to have a high-level chef as a longtime student of mine. He is a cook, but originally apprenticed and was a high-level baker prior to becoming a chef. Baking is all about adhering to specifics, specifics in the sense of weights, measurements, proportions. All must be critically, and I emphasize critically, understood and executed in the proper fashion, and there’s very little room for deviation. Because once you deviate from the correct proportions of baking powder to flour, you end up either with a brick or goop. I don’t know if you’re into eating a solid brick or some glop on a plate, but I’m not. Baking, compared to cooking, is much more specific. It’s a much tighter line that has to be maintained. My student who’s a French chef was brought up in the old school tradition of meeting particular standards. This is the same with Kung Fu; meeting these standards is the thing that clearly defines you as a Kung Fu stylist or practitioner. Coming away from this latest round of seminars in Greece that I did with my teacher Master Tak Wah Eng and Grandmaster Wai Hong of the Fu Jow Pai, only served to reaffirm the concept that your execution has to be specific, accurate, on point. I had used the example the other day in class that doing Kung Fu is like winning the lotto. You could have all of the numbers except one and say, “I missed the lotto by one number.” You still lost. “I almost got a bullseye.” It’s the difference between Kung Fu and something that sort of kind of wants to resemble Kung Fu but isn’t really exactly on point.

When an item is baked the way it should be, even though it’s relatively simple, like bread for example, it’s outstanding and amazing and is impossible to be duplicated by something that’s extruded by Entenmann’s. There’s nothing better than fresh baked homemade bread. And that’s the same thing for Kung Fu. There’s nothing better than a simply well-executed technique that is direct and accurate. It’s profound in its simplicity. It looks easy, but it’s so difficult to execute masterfully. This is how Kung Fu is like baking, and not as much like cooking where you have that room to wiggle and you can tweak it and change it. You may say, I can do that with my Kung Fu, too. Yes, this is true, but there is a certain level that must be adhered to in order to come up with the proper end product. So, if you witness, for the lack of a better term, old school Kung Fu, it’s decisive, straightforward and matter-of-fact, specifically in the southern systems. My Grandmaster always says, “make it clean cut.” That’s the directness. That’s the mental definition that is given to each technique by the practitioner. So, going back to the analogy of the homemade bread, what’s in it? It’s simple. It’s water, flour, salt, yeast. It’s clean cut. It’s direct. It’s straightforward. It’s accurate. It’s everything that you require, simply executed, and produces this product that can sustain you. This is the definition of true Kung Fu.

Some people may argue and say there are baking masters that create confectionary designs that will blow your mind. This is absolutely true, but within that framework of confectionary genius, they do have standards that must be met, lines that cannot be crossed because the end product won’t work. It will be, in the culinary world, inedible, and in the martial art world, unusable, unsustainable, unteachable. The bottom line is practicality, and what I’m seeing now as I’m training more and growing into the system that I’ve been devoted to for my entire life is, the simpler the better. The more direct, the more “clean cut,” the more you can derive from it and the more you can utilize it. I’m not saying that Kung Fu is not like cooking but it’s a lot more like baking.

But now let’s talk about the cooking aspect of Kung Fu. I don’t want to malign cooking because, remember, I like to eat. I think like a lot of you, I’m a connoisseur of eating. Kung Fu is also a lot like cooking, especially Chinese cooking. If you’ve ever gone to a Chinese takeout, you know you can order whatever you want on this menu of a thousand items, and it’ll be ready in 10 minutes or less and it’ll be freshly cooked for you. It wasn’t hanging around under a red heat lamp cooked three days ago waiting for you to come and get it. It’s fresh, clean, fast and efficient. The big question is why? Everything about cooking, especially Chinese cooking, is about preparation. You must be prepared. You must be ready. You must have all your ducks in a row. That means basics, basics, basics. Everything must be in place: physical stamina, flexibility, understanding of the mind and the body, stances, punches, kicks. All those things must be in the mix. All those things must be arrayed in front of you on the table in order for you to cook your Kung Fu. If you ever witness a chef in a Chinese restaurant or any restaurant, they have all their ingredients prepared for them.

When I was a young teenager, I worked in my friend’s father’s local Chinese restaurant as a busboy. And we’d always hang around in the kitchen watching “Uncle John,” the head chef, cooking. And the most time-consuming part of the process was not the actual cooking, but the preparation. The washing, the chopping, the peeling, the mundane, the boring, the arduous things that made the cooking fly. Because when Uncle John cooked, he cooked up a storm, and it was done in a matter of minutes. Dish upon dish appeared at the table. We’d close down the restaurant and all the workers would sit down for dinner. He would whack out the meat dish, the vegetable dish, the tofu dish, as well as a traditional soup to start the meal, and we all would sit down, like a dozen of us, and we’d eat together in less than 10 minutes, and nothing went cold.

In French, they call it, “mise en place,” which literally means, “to put in place.” In Chinese we say, 基本練功, basic training. If you don’t have the same background, you will not get the same result. Your background denotes what you’re going to get as an end product. So, it’s really paramount that the individual’s training in the beginning is really tight and to the letter. That, in the end, will give them the desired result. The martial artist should have at his fingertips all the essential ingredients that they require to perform any particular technique at any point in time. This, in and of itself, requires great preparation that must be done by the individual. It takes years of training to be able to produce that one item. It’s acquiring that skill that is the long period of time of preparation that no one ever sees or gives too much mind to when they see the individual practitioner. Same thing with the dish at the restaurant. You don’t see the preparation; you just see the finished product.

In the end, Kung Fu, as in these two culinary arts, requires great amounts of dedication, focus and learning. So, when you are presented with your turkey and/or an apple pie on Thanksgiving Day by your family or friends, understand all the work that went behind it. It’s easy to criticize and say what’s good and what’s not, but until you actually sit there and try on your own to make that same dish, or go through the same process that they have, you will never really understand, or be thankful for what you have. So… gobble, gobble… Happy Thanksgiving.

Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND

Problems, problems everywhere, and not a solution to be found. Life is full of problems. I’ve heard many say to me that only the dead don’t have problems, which is probably true… but we’ll find out eventually. The problem is not the problem itself, but rather learning how to deal with the problem. In the case of martial art practitioners, students and the like, as with normal people, we tend to become like ostriches and stick our heads in the sand and hide, hoping that things will get better or simply go away. But as soon as you peek out from under that blanket of denial, the problem is still there like a leftover bad monster decoration from Halloween staring you in the face. We all have problems, big and small, things that hit us sideways and make us wobble and things that just totally pull the rug out from under us. The one thing that we can rely on is the consistency of our martial art practice.

I’ve had many students come to me and say, I have this problem that I’m going through and I need to put my training on the back burner so I can deal with it. I sit there and I shake my head, thinking here we go again. People say, I have XYZ to take care of, therefor I don’t have time to train, but the training is there for you to help yourself have power and grow and maintain your strength and energy. Isn’t that what you signed up for in the first place? Or am I mistaken? Inevitably, every student comes in professing that they want confidence, self-discipline, a better work ethic, a way to relieve their stress, blah, blah, blah. And inevitably they don’t follow through. So they don’t follow through on themselves.

Taking time off from your training when you reach an impasse or more importantly a personal crisis is one of the worst things you can do. It’s just like you’re kicking out one leg from the table. How do you expect it to stand on three legs? You need all the support systems that you can get. People don’t understand that the martial arts training, no matter how rigorous and tedious and seemingly time consuming it may be to you at the moment things are going well, is the one thing that’s going to support you when things are not going well. It’s this infrastructure that you’re going to create through training that will support you over time. It’s the reservoir of strength that you can draw upon.

Once you take the battery of your training out of the unit, which is you, you’re not going to function the same way. That extra energy that you took for granted that you had derived from your martial art training has now been dampened and/or removed. You no longer have the wherewithal to withstand and be able to go beyond the troubles that are presented to all of us in daily life. Case in point, I had a student who was sick on Saturday. I was right next to him all day for four hours. I should be sick too, but I’m not. Why? Because I have enough energy and chi built up in my body that immediately, on a physical level, I block you. Your sickness can’t come through my system. Because we develop the mental toughness, the bad thoughts, or the bad energy, or the depression, doesn’t come through into our minds. Even though we may be exposed to something that’s an ill thought or an ill feeling or a physical ailment, it doesn’t permeate through because we’re strong enough to block it. For example, I have a student who just came from work. The work environment isn’t a good one. There’s a lot of backstabbing and bad attitudes. But he knows that he’s going to come to the Mo Gwoon and train and re-energize himself. You have to sweat it out.

Each one of us requires something unique, something special, something empowering that brings us joy, happiness and a way to circumvent the issues of daily life. The problems may be big or small but that’s really not the crux of what we’re talking about. Rather, what medicine are you going to use to maintain yourself, to maintain your own health, specifically mental health. Mental health will translate into physical health and vice versa. The individual becomes sick or ill not only from physical maladies but also maladies of the mind. Instead of using problems or life altering situations as an excuse to quit, you should engross yourself in the training even more. Don’t be an ostrich and hide your head in the sand. Now’s the time to get up and fight. I know it’s hard. Maybe you’re depressed or sad, and you might want to give up. Maybe you don’t know how to handle things. But when you train consistently in your Kung Fu, you find a respite; you find a safe haven; you find a place that you can reenergize, regroup, or at the very least go away from those issues for an hour or two and come back refreshed and be able to handle them better.

On a purely physical level, training gives you a rigorous physical exercise. When we engage in rigorous exercise, it releases endorphins. Endorphins are the body’s feel good drug. Why don’t you want to feel good? You don’t even have to pay for these drugs; they’re already in you. All you have to do is work a little bit and sweat, and they start moving. There aren’t any ill side effects, either, so I say, be a junkie for Kung Fu. Somebody might say, why can’t I do this at Planet Fitness? I can do the same thing going on a run or going to the gym. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just not the same. Training Kung Fu, you have to train your mind to fight. In this instance, we’re talking about fighting off anything that’s malevolent, be it from within or from without. You must adopt a warrior’s mentality. It’s a 100% commitment to that endeavor. So, this is different from your garden-variety workout that you’re going to get at a gym. There’s no one in the gym pushing you the way your Sifu will push you. Your Sifu will push you to the max, so that some days you will love him and some days you will despise him. This relationship between the teacher and the student is another integral part of the training that you won’t get if you go to Crossfit. Ultimately, those same students always come back to me and thank me for pushing them all the time because they made it through whatever situation they were going through. The training on the inside gives you an armor that protects you.

From a very basic point of view, the training is also a diversion. What happens is you get so embroiled in the problem or situation that’s going on at that point in time – and I’m not making light of it – but we all have a tendency to blow things out of proportion. You need a way to step back from the edge. It’s easy to say, step back, relax, take a break, but the body and the mind need a route, some particular way to facilitate that step back. I’ve said many times to the students, your Kung Fu training is your circuit breaker. So when the fuse is blown and it trips the switch and all the lights go out, how do you reset it? We can’t go to the hardware store and buy a brand new you. Once your fuse is blown, you yourself have to have a way to reset. So this is very apropos because Kung Fu training is all about learning the way, the Tao, the nature of things. The first thing that you have to learn from the example of nature is your way. You have to know the way of the person, the human being, and how to help yourself reset your own circuit. This is no easy task. Because of the way we’re hard wired and because of our so-called intelligence, we have a tendency to stray from the way, the nature of the human being. Animals are already attuned to the way; they only know the way that they’re supposed to be. They don’t sit there and contemplate themselves; they just follow their nature. So in one way they’re better off than we are. We tend to create our own problems. Because we have a tendency to escalate and/or create our own situations, we need to find a way to untie those knots that have bound us up.

Keeping a clear, strong, focused mind is at the core of martial art training and is also the thing that’s going to get you through the hard times. A clear, calm, cool head prevails above all. As I’ve said before in many of my Kung Fu In A Minute movies, even in fighting, you must be the eye of the storm, and in the eye of the storm, it’s calm. When you’re calm, cool and collected, the same problems that would have otherwise torn you down now only serve as a catalyst to make you stronger. You learn how to persevere and fight for yourself and overcome anything that may be holding you back.

The martial art training has the effect that if you continually play, it helps you find your way back to the real you. It helps you to reset yourself, bring yourself back to zero and be able to start again. At the end of the day, your problems don’t evaporate. They don’t float away on a cloud, but you have, through your training, been able to release the stress and the tension. You’ve found a new strength or have renewed your strength through the challenges that the training has put you through and will do again and again. In truth, an hour or two spent every day for your own personal gain, mental and physical health, is not a lot to ask of yourself for yourself, and everyone that’s connected to you benefits, too. So, whether you’re the CEO of a major conglomerate or the soccer mom down the block or a high school senior that just needs that extra bolstering from something more than what you get on a regular basis, your Kung Fu training is always there for you, and once learned, digested and consumed will be with you forever. It’s something you will always be able to turn to. You find yourself again. That’s what it’s all about. You may have lost the way but found it again through the training. It’s not from an external source. The martial arts gives you an internal way to rediscover and reaffirm and strengthen the individual. Other methodologies that do not give you self-power, are not true methodologies that give you the tools to open yourself up and release the power you need to take care of your problems. Because as we said before, the problems don’t go away.

Through your practice and its positive effects on your physical and emotional state, it, at the very minimum, becomes a release valve for the stress, tension and even depression that the individual will go through when problems arise, which inevitably they do. It’s the one bastion, the one sanctuary, the one safe place that one can turn to as a cathartic method to relieve all those things that ail the individual while giving them the strength to withstand, undergo, cope with, and eventually confront and conquer the challenges and problems that come with living. This is the true gift of martial art training and why the classical martial arts, the way they are taught with focus on personal improvement, empowerment as well as discipline, will always have a place in our society.

We are all presented with issues big and small, and you need to find a way to overcome them. My personal way to tap into the energy that we have is through my martial art training. From age 16 to 60 plus and beyond, it’s a very special kind of psychological drug that you can take.
You don’t know what’s coming and you don’t know how you’re going to handle it. But what’s worse is wallowing in that cesspool of self-pity, doubt and fear. When you come to train and Sifu yells at you and forces you to do things that aren’t comfortable, and all of a sudden you lose yourself to the practice, all the self-pity, doubt and fear flies away from you like dead skin coming off a snake. You peel it off and become new again. The problems aren’t gone, but somehow, physically and mentally you become transformed and you can better deal with whatever comes your way. When you face your fears head on and accept the challenge, you feel so light and powerful, as though you could fly from one building another because you’ve overcome this thing, this problem, this black cloud. You were able to face that fear head-on because of your marital art training. It’s like you had that golden sword in your hand and you just cleaved through the clouds. You can breathe again. You can’t be an ostrich. I don’t think in Kung Fu we have an ostrich system; if they do, I don’t want to learn it. Ha ha.

Everybody has had their mom or their auntie or someone in their family say, don’t touch this, don’t do that, be careful of this, watch out. You’ve been trained in a way to perceive problems as problems. Let’s rather perceive the problems as daily challenges that have been set in front of you, those tests that I talk about that happen every day. “They” have conditioned you to become fearful; now train yourself to become fearless. This is what you gain from the martial arts.
I’ll tell you the truth; I didn’t really want to write a blog today, but I set myself upon the task and wanted to rise up to meet the challenge, so this is what I came up with. See what you can do when you take your head out of the sand? Kung Fu saved the day again.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

TOAD IN THE HOLE

Some things are absolute. You either won the lotto or you lost. You either got punched in the face or you didn’t. There, there is no question. But, don’t think that there’s only one way to win or only one way to punch someone in the face. Thinking in absolutes creates polarization and divides within one’s self. It creates stagnation and does not allow the individual to grow and expand. Therefore, absolute likes and dislikes, absolute thoughts about how particular movements, techniques and applications should or should not be done is not necessarily the best way to look at things. Techniques, forms and applications are presented in a way that gives you a concept of how to look at it. This does not mean you should be imprisoned by that concept and/or perception. Having an absolute mindset stops the possibilities of something else being able to come out of that situation.
That being said, you find a lot of people thinking that this is absolutely right and this is absolutely wrong, especially when it comes to martial art training. This is especially true in the realm of the beginner. That’s the stage where people speak in absolutes. It’s just like a child. In a child’s mind, things are absolutely great or absolutely horrible. In Chinese Kung Fu, we consider the first ten years to be a first step, a beginner stage. I had the benefit of having this conversation with one of my Kung Fu uncles, Master George Husek, recently, and he made this analogy. The beginner is like someone who stays in the city and is looking up at the sky. How many stars do you see? Not many. As you get better, and move away into the country, you start to see more. Then, later, you go to the mountain and see the Milky Way and your mind is blown by what was always there but could not be seen. When you’re a beginner, you understand everything but see nothing. As you progress, you see everything, but know how little you understand.

When you’re a beginner, you tend to gravitate towards absolute thinking because you see on a very narrow path and you’re looking for one clear, defined way. A beginner thinks in absolutes because he feels there is one surefire way that any given technique is done. He is completely convinced of the fact that this is the one and only way, and any other way is the wrong way. That’s the absolute thinking of a beginner, and so it is for all of us. The problem with thinking absolutely is that you become that toad in a hole. There’s a toad in a hole, and he’s sitting in his hole looking up at the sky through his hole in the ground, and he says to himself, “Wow, I see the entire sky, I see everything there is to see,” but as soon as he puts his head out of the hole, he gets run over by a truck.

There are proscribed manners and ways of training, but there is no one right way. The same reverse punch can be thrown so many different ways from different angles for different situations. You’re given one example when you learn, but you should also learn not to be held back by that one set method. You’re supposed to expand upon that, not be held back by it. I think that a lot of people studying martial arts have a tendency to become fanatical in the sense that they feel the way the move or form was laid down for them is the way it’s supposed to be all the time. But this is a beginner mentality. We have to use a more critical method of interpretation. The toad has to make a wider hole to see a bigger picture. To not be able to see in a wider parameter does a huge disservice not only to the practitioner himself, but to the martial arts in general. Because one day those practitioners may become teachers and may pass along that narrow point of view.

This goes back to the conversation I had with my Kung Fu uncle, Sifu George. He had said to me, did you ever notice that the higher the level the master, the fewer students he has? And that another individual who’s less skilled has that many more students? And I said, yeah, and I never really understood why. He began to explain to me that the issue is, when the teacher is 6 months, a year, several years ahead of the student, they can have a dialogue. There is some common ground that they can find to speak to each other because they’re closer in proximity of knowledge and skill. Even though the teacher is slightly ahead, he’s not that far ahead, so they kind of understand each other. When you start out teaching, you have one archetypal way in your mind, and it’s the only way that exists for you at this point in time. This is what you teach, and therefor it’s easily transmittable. I had an easier time teaching when I knew less. I could teach more people faster and get them to do what I wanted because there was one clear-cut way. The only problem was that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. You were so convinced that this was the right way. This is true for all of us until you gain a lot more experience, many more decades experience. Then if you ask a higher level master like Sifu George, he said to me, “If my student came to me and asked me how to explain a particular technique, I would be hard pressed to explain to him one set way, because there’s so many variations, i.e., stars in the sky, that I wouldn’t know where to begin. And because I couldn’t explain to him one particular way to use the technique, he would think I wouldn’t know what I was talking about and would gravitate to the teacher with less knowledge who could give him one absolute method.”

If the teacher is much further evolved than the student, it’s much harder for him to explain or have a dialogue with the student. Beginner students that are just seeking that one absolute way, that one cure-all that will solve their woes, won’t go to a master of that level because there’s no platform for them to have a conversation. So you see how you end up with a higher level master having only a few students while the guy who doesn’t know much has hundreds. Look at how the real Sifu, the one that truly understands and has this great depth of knowledge, doesn’t get acknowledged the way the lesser one does simply because of the fact that the mass majority of individuals studying cannot see beyond the one absolute way. When you understand that there are many ways, you become a little bit more Daoist in your thinking. Each and every thing that needs to get done has a way, but that way may change depending on the circumstances. A master carpenter may do the same thing every day. He may make the same cabinet or table every day from the same type of wood using the same tools, but depending on the situation and the parameters that he’s given, he augments that so-called absolute way and is able to derive many different ways to solve the same problem.

Another good example of this would be the common American cheeseburger. You’ll find everybody going to McDonalds because they can afford it. Not only can they afford it financially, but mentally, it works for them because it’s quick, easy and fast. It solves the problem for the moment but in the end creates bigger issues. Whereas you could go and grind your own meat, bake your own bun, make all your own fixin’s and learn how to properly cook a good ol’ American cheeseburger and end up with a completely different result. That’s the difference between those two levels of mastery, those levels of understanding your art. One way is quick, easy and fast. The other is more difficult. The products may appear similar, but the end result will be very different.

If you think in absolutes, then a particular thing must be done a particular way each and every time. This is ok in the beginning to give you a baseline, but as you grow and start to understand more, you have to broaden your perspective. We must begin to accept that all things are required to make all things possible. The hard, the soft, the up, the down, the left, the right and so on. The correct understanding should be one of striving to comprehend balance and then maintain it. The balance is not always 50-50 but will adjust and change with the requirements of the day, situation, technique and so on. It’s ok to have a broader spectrum of understanding and say, hey, you know something? This same thing can be done slightly or even greatly differently than that baseline and yield more results, thereby making your understanding and knowledge and skill that much deeper. So now, at the end of our conversation, I’m absolutely sure there are no absolute ways to think absolutely about absolutely anything. Absolutely.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

WHERE DID MY MARTIAL ART COME FROM ANYWAY?

World Politics and its Influence on Martial Arts

Okay, so let’s talk about history and the martial arts. I think it’s a very misunderstood subject. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of martial artists become interested in looking into the history of their art. I found myself surprised that many did not know the roots, beginning and ancestry of the Asian martial arts. This struck me as really odd, because I’m a bit of a history buff, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s because no one reads anymore. If it’s not on Instagram or Facebook, you never heard it before. Today you have modern media (because they’re making money from it) beating your brains out that MMA is the one and only thing, when in fact combative arts have been in practice for thousands and thousands of years.

So, let’s understand the truth. Not your subjective truth, not the one that you were sold, hook line and sinker, or the one that you want to believe in because it’s convenient and makes you happy, but the real truth. Sometimes, the truth offends. The real truth is that history is written by the winners. When looking at the history of how the Asian martial arts proliferated throughout the world, the basic catalyst, in my opinion, was World War II. Prior to World War II, there was little or no reason for Asian martial artists to share their art with westerners. When American servicemen bombed Japan and took over, they came across the various arts of Karate, Judo, Jiu Jitsu, etc.. They said to the Japanese, well, that’s pretty cool, teach me, and, begrudgingly, because they were defeated and had no choice, they taught them, and slowly those arts were brought over to the west. The question of them fully being taught, shown all the “secrets” and so on can be another lengthy discussion altogether, but let’s just say they were taught and they brought them over to the US and then slowly to other European countries, and they became a rage. That’s not to say that these arts were not exposed prior to that, but this was a huge jumping off point. If we take several steps back even further, the same thing was done to the Okinawans. Hey, history repeats itself. The Okinawans have a long-standing history of trade and cultural association with China, but because they were conquered and subjugated by the Japanese, they, in turn, also were forced to “teach” their so-called “native” martial art, Karate, which wasn’t so native.

Let’s talk about Karate and what that actually means. Many people are under the misconception that the term Karate means “empty hand,” when the original calligraphy writing meant “Chinese hand,” so Karate-do means, “way of the Chinese hand.” The original names of many martial arts in Asia used this term, “the Chinese hand.” Just as Greece was pivotal and central in the development of western civilization, music, art, poetry, and the arts of war, so it was with China and eastern civilization. Were there other cultures? Of course. But just as Greece was in the west, China was the predominant if not the sole cultural influence for all of Asia. If you go back far enough, most of the smaller countries in Asia at one point in time were either part of the Chinese Empire or vassal states that paid homage to China. Did you ever ask yourself why China is called “the Middle Kingdom?” Because at that time, since they had no real connection to the west, it was considered the center of the known world. The Tang Dynasty was the height of Chinese power, and if you go back and look at any of the ethnic costumes that all the other nations wear, they’re all heavily influenced by Tang Dynasty culture. That’s the giant thumbprint that China left on east Asia. The Chinese innovativeness, ingenuity, overall capability and manpower is what established the basis for other Asian civilizations and cultures. It is the Middle Kingdom. But I’m going to come back to China later, because I have a beef with China, too.

Going back to the meaning of Karate and the change of its name… This was done with modern day Karate for political reasons, in my opinion. At the time the Japanese started to bring Karate over to Japan, which was not that long ago, around the turn of the century, the Chinese were going through political turmoil. We like to call China “the dragon” because it’s up and down, up and down. At this time, the Eight-Nation Alliance of Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the U.S., Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary came in and carved up all of China. This was a pivotal time in Chinese history when many of the great legends of Kung Fu were alive and fighting against the crumbling Ching Dynasty. The 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s were a long period of turmoil for the Chinese. China was down, and Japan was on the rise as a military power. The Japanese wanted nothing to do with claiming that any of their arts had anything to do with any nation other than their own. Because of their nationalistic pride, they would not dream of giving homage to the Chinese or pay respect to the original source. So, they changed the calligraphy for the character Kara from meaning Chinese to meaning empty hand. This was done under the guise of trying to make it seem more Buddhist and Zen-like, but in my opinion it was more of a strategic maneuver to disassociate the art from any Chinese roots. They didn’t want to have a connection to China because China was, in their eyes, “the sick man of Asia.” But they wanted the spoils; they wanted the best stuff, but to claim that it was theirs. This was also done later by the Koreans, who were a vassal state of China for many centuries. They had a close connection to the northern Chinese and learned northern systems of Kung Fu, just as Karate came primarily from southern systems of Kung Fu. Prior to and up to the 1950’s, the original name for their arts, as an umbrella, was Tang Soo Do, which also translates to, “way of the Chinese hand.” But, following the Japanese example, the Koreans updated and changed the name to Taekwondo to separate themselves from any connection to the Chinese. People have selective memories. The grandfather knows the grandchildren, but the grandchildren don’t always recognize the grandfather.

Martial history is so misunderstood and mixed up predominantly because of these two factors. One reason that this history is largely unknown is that during feudal times, martial art systems in China were kept secret and/or clandestine. Organized martial art systems came about in China for the clans, families or larger associated groups to protect themselves. We must understand that feudal law and medieval society were not looking out for the betterment of the individual, but rather for the gain of the Empire and those who were in the ruling class. So, in order for these smaller groups to effectively protect themselves from roving bandits, Imperial guards, and the like, they developed ingenious martial art systems that were practiced within the clan. They had to keep it secret because either you were a revolutionary looking to overthrow the established empire, which many southern systems have roots in, or you just wanted to keep your best-kept secret your secret and didn’t write anything down.

The second reason is this. Don’t forget that China, if not all of Asia, at that time was agricultural, as was Europe. That was their industry. They were illiterate and couldn’t read or write. Everything was passed down verbally, if at all. And of course, as all good marketing goes, you need a good gimmick and a good story to keep people interested. So, you have systems developed by saintly figures descending upon the founder in a dream, or wayward nameless monks teaching on mountaintops. An example would be the myth, and I do stress it’s a myth, of Bodhidharma or Dat Mo, the wandering Indian monk prince that slept in a cave in Shaolin Temple for nine years, found the monks there wanting and therefor taught them his brand of Chi Gung and Kung Fu. Baloney. Sorry to burst your bubble. The truth is that organized martial art training existed in China, and most likely in Shaolin and other temples, long before the advent of Dat Mo coming over to spread Buddhism, if that’s even the truth. The martial traditions of China stem from its original conception as a state. The injection of Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian philosophies came at a much later point in time, much more recently than many care to admit. Fighting is fighting, and China has been a fighting state since its inception.

The Karate that you see today is heavily influenced by the southern Chinese martial art systems, predominantly from Fuk Yin province, many claiming to originate from the southern Shaolin Temple – Five Ancestor Fist, Southern White Crane and the like. They are so close in technique and in performance to Karate, it is unmistakable that this is the original source. There was an extended period of time, from the 1300’s until at least the 1850’s, where southern China had ongoing trade with the Okinawan Islands. When Okinawa became part of Japan and that trade was cut off, Kung Fu in China continued to change and grow. So, you see the difference between Karate and the southern systems that are practiced today which are much more heavily embroiled in the revolutionary cause of overthrowing the Ching Dynasty and bringing back the Ming. All the five family systems, Hung, Lau, Choy, Li, Mok, etc. were an outgrowth of the burning of the southern Shaolin Temple. Some of the movements that we do in the southern systems have symbolic revolutionary overtones that the Karate systems don’t have. The true genesis of Kung Fu was about fighting for survival. No philosophy, no Chi Gung, no longevity exercises, just protect yourself and kill the enemy. The other things came much later as embellishment to the systems to make them more well-rounded.

Modern day Kung Fu, commonly called Wu Shu, also has a history behind it. Wu Shu literally means “martial arts” in Chinese, as opposed to Kung Fu, which means an acquired skill. The term Kung Fu is predominantly used by the Cantonese, and this is the major group that immigrated outside of China from the turn of the century up until modern times. Rightfully so, the term for marital arts that we became familiar with was Kung Fu, and not the term Wu Shu. Wu Shu, or Mo Sut, is the more technical term for Chinese martial arts. Today, Wu Shu is known for its flowery, dance-like, acrobatic movements with overtones of Chinese opera and theatrical performance, rather than having anything to do with fighting. This also is a huge history lesson because Wu Shu came into being with the advent of Mao Tse Tung’s communist revolution. It was about doing away with the old and traditional ways that in their view, “held back” China, traditional Kung Fu being one of them. They went about reorganizing the martial arts into a sport/dance/martial-esque art form. In the meantime, they persecuted, beheaded and/or excommunicated all the old masters. That’s not to say that traditional Kung Fu did not survive in China, but most likely anyone who stayed went deep underground for fear of persecution and death. Today, you are more likely to find traditional Kung Fu systems outside of China. The Wu Shu practitioner is an amazing athlete, but in terms of traditional Kung Fu, the combative technique and mindset is no longer there. The old southern masters had one intention in mind, take the country back at any cost. It truly was kill or be killed. You forged your body and mind into a living weapon because you had no access to weaponry. You had to become the weapon. Wow, this sounds strangely similar to some Karate concepts of forging the body into a weapon. I wonder why…

With the advent of Wu Shu, many years later, the Chinese government got smart and said, let’s reopen the Shaolin Temples and flood them with shaved-head pseudo-monks performing “modern day Wu Shu Shaolin Kung Fu.” They transformed it into a Disneyland for martial artists and tourists alike, which was an awesome marketing ploy and has paid off greatly. Now, because China as we said before, as the dragon, is on the upswing, many martial artists who in the past never wanted to associate themselves with their Chinese roots are now hurriedly rushing back to find recognition. I find this very funny. That’s why I said before that history is written by the winners. Before, the Japanese were the winners, so they rewrote Okinawan history and cut out the Chinese. Then, the Americans were the winners, and they took the Karate that the Japanese conveniently borrowed from the Okinawans and made it their own. The Brazilians are the winners because they took Japanese jiu jitsu and reformatted it into BJJ. What goes around comes around.

Now, the Chinese are coming back because they have money and political power. They are rewriting history and have all but obliterated traditional Kung Fu and only want their Wu Shu to be representative of the Chinese martial arts. Just like now the Chinese only want Mandarin to be spoken, not only in China, but throughout the entire world, and are going to great pains to obliterate all other dialects. I’m not a political guy. I’m just stating what I see. Every time I travel back to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, there’s fewer and fewer people speaking Cantonese. People are immigrating from different provinces and slowly pushing the Cantonese language out of existence. The funniest thing was, on my recent trip back to Hoy Hong Temple in Canton where Tiger Claw Kung Fu is from, as I was walking around, I was talking to the people that I was with and said, before we do anything, let’s light incense and give offerings. I said it in Cantonese, and only a group of older ladies that were in the temple praying understood me, and they all rushed over to talk to the foreigner that spoke their dialect. Meanwhile, the younger people there, including the monks that were in attendance at the temple, are not from that region and don’t speak that dialect. So, you might say, what’s your point? My point is, whoever has power is the one that dictates how things go down in history.

You can say I’m taking this way too seriously, but I look at it differently. I was taught and carry on a tradition that doesn’t adhere to the modern sport aspect of the martial arts. You can tell me I’m a dinosaur. Well, I may be a dinosaur, but if dinosaurs were alive today, you’d be lunch. I said in the beginning that this would be a blog about the truth, and that sometimes the truth offends. I hope I haven’t offended anyone, but the truth is, even martial arts cannot escape politics, big business, money and greed. There is a vast misunderstanding of martial art history because of masters being illiterate or afraid to speak because of fear of death. The martial arts have then been misrepresented by political history that casts overtones and shadows on the truth. No one wants to be number two or number three. Everyone wants to be number one, so no one’s going to readily claim that their art came from somebody else; they want to claim that it’s theirs. This is all understood, but if you want to truly benefit from the martial arts in general, you must acknowledge the truth and see it for what it is even if it goes contrary to your beliefs. It’s just like doing a DNA test. All your life, you think you’re one ethnicity, and then you find out you’re something else. You can’t deny the DNA. The same is true as far as the origin of martial arts. When you look at it, or at least when I look at it, I know where it comes from. The Chinese organized and codified the Asian martial arts and were able to proliferate them throughout Asia.

Today, everybody puts Kung Fu down and thinks it doesn’t work and it’s just a dance and so on, but in actuality, the Chinese martial arts is the grandfather, or maybe even the great-grandfather of all the martial arts being practiced today. It has a viable, usable function but has been
mistreated and maligned by the “winners.” Kung Fu is not portrayed the way it really should be for us, the traditionalists. Many of my brothers are out there, and we still hold true. Every time I go back to China and people see me practicing, they’re like, wow, what are you doing? Because it doesn’t fall into the parameters of what they were raised with, which is predominantly modern Wu Shu. So, if we’re not careful in all areas, there is the potential of us losing the traditional arts, culture and language that has brought these wonderful martial arts to us. We need to take great care and understand the history and respect it for what it is. Only knowing where you come from will allow you to know who you are and then, who you will become.

--Master Paul Koh 高寶羅

PRACTICE STOP ANALYZE REVISE

Learning is a process. We’ve spoken about this before, and I’m sure we’ll speak about it again, but it’s definitely something worth going over. Many individuals are not aware that they are not utilizing the process of learning when they’re training. Because of this, they miss out on knowledge that is sometimes right in front of your face. The truth of the fact is most of us, myself included, take a long time to discover a methodology and/or way of learning and practicing in order to gain true depth and understanding of the art that we are involved with. We all practice, but not everyone practices at the same level. We need to learn how to practice and learn. If you practice properly, you’re learning. If you know how to learn, then your practice has meaning. Ultimately what we are looking for in the process of learning is to make the practice meaningful.

On the first level of practice, you come to class. You change into your uniform. You bow in, line up and follow along. That’s good for the first couple of years. It gets you by; it gives you what you need. It gives you physical fitness, flexibility, strength and stamina. You may even gain a good punch, kick, stance, or even a technique or two. But true depth of understanding of the martial art system that you’ve chosen to study requires a much greater mental involvement and a certain level of intelligence.

It’s true that the crux of any martial art system is that it has to be effective and efficient enough to incapacitate if not kill the opponent. As I’ve said before, you have to get the job done. But this is inclusive with the learning process. In order for you to get the job done, you must understand the learning process. And what about what’s left after the job is done? The Chinese martial arts are much more heavily embroidered with other aspects of self-realization that go far beyond the initial concept of being able to overcome the opponent and win the encounter.

Learning the self is the ultimate goal in martial arts. I believe this is true in any true martial art, not a martial sport, not something that’s used for entertainment or to make money. In a true sense, the martial arts are there to better the individual, therefore bettering that individual’s immediate group, family and friends, and then impacting society overall. You come to class and the Sifu and/or master drops a pebble of wisdom or knowledge into your pond. This creates a ripple effect that then radiates outward if taken appropriately by the student. These small acts of wisdom or pearls of knowledge are what you’re searching for when you’re training. This can only be achieved if you have some methodology. I remember going through high school and college and not being able to study appropriately to gain depth of knowledge as opposed to short term memory to pass the exam or write the paper. The honest aspect of it was that we were never taught how to learn. We were taught to memorize and regurgitate. This is pretty much what you do for the first few years in your martial art training. You follow along, you memorize, you regurgitate, and you hope and pray that something stays on the wall. If you continue and stay longer and you’re astute enough, you’ll see that that method doesn’t really glean you any deeper insight, and you have to find another way.

So, we were explaining to the class the other night about how to find this other way. There are many ways that can help you to better understand, but the best way sometimes is to separate yourself from yourself in order to see yourself. This is why I was saying to my team the other day, we have to
• Practice
• STOP
• Analyze
• Revise
• Repeat (Per my Sifu, “No good. Do It Again.”)

Synchronization of mind, body and spirit is the hidden secret within the practice. As they say, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. Can you see your nose? I can’t. Training in any aspect of your system is purely a vehicle towards enlightenment. It’s not the end-all be-all. I had a wonderful conversation with my Si Gung, Grandmaster Wai Hong of the Fu Jow Pai, and he related to me in no uncertain terms that, “You don’t have to do the whole form. You need to use your mind.” He asked me how come so many actors are incapable of winning an Academy Award, and then proceeded to tell me it’s basically because they don’t put their mind into that role. Everything is stemming from the mind. The mind is the seat of knowledge and learning. You have to raise your understanding. What you’re working on in your practice is feeling your connection to the movement. The form, be it empty hand or weapon, is an access point. As we practice over time, we internalize the movement so it’s no longer the form. It becomes your instinctual behavior, action without thinking. You’ve downloaded the program and it’s so deep within it will never come out. Our practice must transcend the physical and become metaphysical. You have to practice so much that the form and the person disappear and there’s only the action, the idea, which is one with the nature of it, which is one with everything. It’s one with you. That’s the practice.

So, what do we mean by “STOP”? You have to be able to back out, so to speak, to see the bigger picture. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you look hard at your face, and then don’t you back out and look at everything in total? Left side, right side, try to see what it looks like in the back… oh, there’s a hair sticking out. Don’t you do that? That’s what we mean by STOP. Step back and take a long hard unbiased view. Strive to match yourself up to the archetype that’s being put in front of you. Otherwise your name is Forest Gump and you’re running for no reason.

You should analyze yourself. Pay attention mentally, physically and spiritually. It’s all about the personal approach of the individual that has to be modified and grow. It’s a constant process of processing the information that’s been given to you. Analyzation is a form of digestion. You need to be able to digest everything that you’ve taken in. If you don’t fully digest the food you’ve taken in, the nourishment cannot filter through your system. Therefor it goes to waste. The same will happen with the knowledge you’ve been given, so you need to take the time to analyze. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand this because they’ve gone through the modern school system where you go from one grade to the next grade to the next. They let you pass through the grades just to get you through the system. A lot of modern martial art training, because it’s become a big business, has also adopted a similar attitude. This is all fine and well if you’re just treating it as a hobby or pastime, but if you really want to step in the true realm of becoming a lifetime martial artist, that type of learning and method has to be put aside. Because at some point there are no longer any belts, stripes or any kind of accolades to be had. The only thing you’re going to end up with is you looking into the mirror of your soul and knowing if you’ve really done the work or not.

This is the self-study you have to make. You must turn inward in order to have the external. Most don’t want to do that because that’s the tough thing, going in and literally taking yourself down to the bone, looking at yourself, ripping yourself apart with no compassion whatsoever and then starting from scratch again. And this process must be repeated not once, but many times if you wish to improve. If you don’t want to go through this process, you will not improve. You will lie to yourself; you will fool yourself, and you will be stuck in space and time with everyone else. Everybody gets stuck at some point in time, and when you get stuck, you’re incapable of going beyond yourself. You’re just banging your head against the wall. When you come to these moments, this is when you have to STOP, analyze, and then revise.

You create your own reality. You create what happens. If you say crap, it’s crap. If you say it’s amazing, it’s amazing. We are all a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you create in your mind’s eye is what you will see. You must create a different reality. You must recreate yourself through the internal by reinterpreting yourself and everything else. That is the only way. Recreate yourself again. Again? Again. It’s only for the betterment of you. I want to give you a brand new pair of shoes, but you insist on wearing the shoes with holes in them. Why don’t you want to move up a level? “Because I’m comfortable.” That’s not comfortable; that’s complacent. Revise your understanding and go beyond yourself. Tell yourself, dude, get out of the way because I need to move forward. Extend yourself beyond the confines of today’s version of you. That’s what ultimately Kung Fu is, a mind-body expansion tool. You’re only going to become better, but you do have to pay for it through that cycle of: Practice, STOP, Analyze, Revise, and then go back and do it again. If you really know how to practice and how to become self-analyzing and self-critical, it’s an amazing journey. It’s not sunshine every day. Sometimes it’s rain and thunderstorms, but you need to go through all those peaks and valleys. This is the cycle of learning and growth.

The true study of the martial arts is the study of the self. It’s a self-help tool that has to be worked. It’s not in a book or a formula. You can’t juice it or buy it in a health food store. The guru on the mountain can’t do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. It’s a b**** and you gotta get on your knees and take it, and that’s equal for you, me and everyone else. If they tell you something else, they’re selling you on snake oil; it ain’t real. The real thing is the truth hurts. It’s bitter; it’s cold, but that’s what you need. So be happy and keep practicing.

-Paul Koh

KUNG FU MEDICINE: GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YA

Happy end to the summer! Hooray. Finally. We can get back down to business. I’m sorry to burst everybody’s bubble. I love the summer just like anyone else does, but it’s the worst thing when it comes to training in the martial arts because everybody takes the big vacation, not just physically but mentally. You know how hard it is on the day after Labor Day to get organized and get your act back together. But I have a secret. That secret is Kung Fu. That is the medicine that we all need to get ourselves back on track. I’m not a party pooper. I want the warm weather and the sunny days to continue, but everybody’s got to get their head into focus. There’s no better way to do this than to get back into your training. Kung Fu is one of the best cure-alls that you’ll ever find. It’s better than eating your Wheaties, having Cheerios or going to the spa. It’s the best thing since sliced bread, or maybe even better.

Kung Fu has a powerful medicinal effect. I feel it on a daily basis. The way I see Kung Fu, it’s “good for what ails ya,” as the saying goes. Why is Kung Fu such good medicine?
It’s akin to you going to see the Chinese herbalist in your local Chinatown and him diagnosing you with your said malady and giving you a prescription. Now, if any of you have ever gone to a Chinese herbalist, he won’t give you the medicine in the form of a pill. This is very much a western concept of wanting it fast and getting it easy in a vaccination or a pill. In the old Chinese way of doing medicine, as many of you may know, the herbalist will prescribe many different herbs and roots that need to be boiled down in a very specific manner over a certain period of time with a particular level of heat and water content until you come to the right consistency. Then, you have this medicine that can help you to get over your ailment. This serves as a perfect analogy for what you can derive from your training. In the case of Kung Fu, it is your Sifu who gives you the prescription that you need.

I’m speaking right now from my own personal experience training on a regular basis, not always concerned about “being good” per se, but rather, about being good in total, as an individual with a holistic approach. This is something that many students may not be aware of, but within Kung Fu training is built a holistic approach to help realign all the different systems within the body. Now, I’m not a medical doctor. I don’t have any case studies. But, I’ve witnessed in my own training that regardless of what I’m afflicted with at that moment in time, I’m able to overcome it and surpass it from the training that I receive in the “prescription,” i.e. the specific form graciously taught to me by my teacher, Grandmaster Tak Wah Eng.

I take notice that when I train regularly and focus my movements, right away, my eyesight is better. You may say, well, I still see you using reading glasses. Yes, that’s true, but the clarity with which I see and view things feels sharper and more concise. Regular practice makes your perception more clear. Your muscular system is much more toned. We’ve all seen individuals that are “gushy.” You touch their flesh and you feel like you’re touching a mushy bowl of rice pudding. Even though you may not do the Stairmaster or jog or lift weights, the Kung Fu practice by itself is already impacting your muscles, your ligaments, your tendons and all your joints. It’s creating greater blood flow and easier conductivity of the electrical charge that runs through your body (chi). Regular practice equalizes the body’s systems. Twisting, turning, stretching like a tiger, expansion and contraction of the movement makes the body in all its facets move to the extreme so you gain that huge range of motion and physical expression of energy.

Every twist and turn of the body is realigning the skeletal system, allowing you greater mobility and range of motion. Twisting and turning contorts blood vessels, allowing them to flow more blood through the body at an easier pace. With every breath and every grunt and groan and specific sound that is uttered when you execute the movement, the tonal quality of the sound impacts the different organs in the body because your body is very sensitive to vibration. In modern medicine they use sonograms, sound waves of different frequencies to help heal. This was already known to the ancient masters and is part of why we have those types of different sounds inside the body. We don’t yell just to yell, but it’s helping you expel the bad air, i.e. chi, and tonify the different internal organs based on the frequency of the sounds that are made. You have to do it right with the proper mindset and in the proper way in order to gain the benefit. That’s why you need that one-on-one touch; you need to consult Dr. Sifu. The ancient masters understood that you require something extra above your daily routine in order to keep the body a well-oiled machine, and that’s basically what we’re doing when we practice the form. We’re working all the different systems, lymph nodes, heart, liver, lungs, spleen, kidney. We bring the physical, spiritual, internal and mental all into line.

The effectiveness of Kung Fu as medicine for the entire individual requires the entire individual to be involved and goes far beyond popping a pill and hoping for the best. Just as we spend hours boiling down the medicinal tea that was prescribed to you by the herbalist, you will spend countless hours boiling down the various techniques and movements that you learn in your practice. Traditional Chinese medicine, if you’ve ever had the chance to have it, is not the cherry cough syrup that mama bought for you from the local drugstore, but is in actuality really bitter and smells pretty awful. It kind of reminds me of a scene in a Little Rascals episode where all the orphans are lined up and each one has to take a spoonful of castor oil. They viewed it as nasty and horrible, and sometimes we view the training like that. But that bitterness is a cleansing effect that the practice has on the total sum of the individual. After you get used to it, it’s not that bad; it’s kind of like brussel sprouts. You come to understand that the secret lies in a daily dosage of practice. It helps to preserve you in all aspects of your humanity.

The best gift that you can give yourself is to go and see your Sifu, your Kung Fu doctor, and get that dose, get that charge, get that medicine to bring yourself back into focus. This is especially true now at the end of the summer when everybody’s a little loopy from overindulging themselves. It’s good to have this cathartic regimen that you can return to and reenergize your body and your mind and bring everything back into proper alignment. Kung Fu is Chinese medicine. You have to know how to cook it. But if you know how to cook it and work it, this is medicine that makes you come alive.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

NO NEED TO BE GREEDY

Today in the martial arts, you see many individuals chasing after the so-called rainbow. Many people try to acquire as much knowledge and techniques as possible. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we all have to be weary of becoming greedy. What I mean is, how many shoes can you wear at one time or cars can you drive? If you find yourself wanting to chase that so-called rainbow, ask yourself: Have you truly exhausted the full scope of understanding within your originally chosen discipline?

The breadth and depth of Kung Fu knowledge is as wide as the Grand Canyon and as deep as a crater. It is totally unnecessary for someone to be greedy in terms of technique. Most if not all systems of Chinese martial arts and Kung Fu are already so broad in spectrum and nature that everything is already incorporated within. If you strip back the fine veneer that covers everything and wraps it up in beauty and grace, most systems are just made up of several techniques. These several basic techniques — and I use the term basic to mean essential or elemental — are what incorporates the system and makes it what it is. It’s four legs to the table, four legs to a chair. Without these four legs, the table or the chair could not stand. The four “legs” of any martial arts system are:

• Stance (stability and mobility)
• Hand Strikes (fist, palm, fingers, claw, edge, etc.)
• Kicking (all manner of kicks, knee strikes, sweeps, etc.)
• Grappling (throws, locks, standing or on ground)

If one takes the time to examine a single technique or two or three, they can see that all these four essential items have already been interwoven into the fabric of the movement. The ability to see these essential items within any one technique is dependent on the perception of the individual, not determined by the system itself. Demonstrated within any one given technique and/or position or posture, elements of these four essential qualities exist. Just like options in a stock purchase, these options can be exercised at any one given point in time when the situation arises, therefore giving the individual fighter a wide range of techniques. He is thereby not limited by the movements of his system, but only limited by his own personal ability to access these options and exercise them appropriately. It is up to the individual to be able to recognize what is available in one given position and/or selected number of techniques and to be able to recognize these options. It’s the ingenuity and the innovativeness of the practitioner that allows the movement to flower into its entirety. And when we fall short, this is when the techniques just become what we see on the obvious surface. Therefore, no one system is more or less than another; rather it is we, the individual practitioners, who are able to take what is present, derive its essence and make it more than what it is.

The issue is that you have practitioners of particular systems always looking at the other side, at their neighbor, and saying, wow, look at what they got. It’s not wrong necessarily to look, but look with the intent of trying to find that which already exists within your own system. It’s not that it doesn’t. Maybe the information wasn’t passed down to you or you didn’t make a keen enough observation. All these systems have these movements already built in. We can’t misconstrue the specialization of a particular system or style to be the only thing that they do. This is just like when you go into a restaurant and they have a chef’s tasting menu. That’s their specialty, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a cheeseburger on the menu. Every system has a specialization. That doesn’t mean that the broader aspects of Kung Fu fighting are not contained within. It’s not necessary for the practitioner to acquire something different, but rather be inspired to find that which exists within what they’re already learning.

I have a good friend, Sifu Vangelis Tampouratzis, that teaches southern style Chinese Kung Fu and has incorporated his Kung Fu techniques into the world of kickboxing. He has taken his traditional Choy Lee Fut training and has successfully converted it into kickboxing. He is able to make an easy translation from the strikes, kicks, takedowns, locks and throws from his traditional format into the kickboxing arena. This should not be a problem for those that have a well-rounded understanding and are able to view the martial aspect of the techniques that they have learned. What is essential is that we understand that we need to have the key — that is the mindset — to be able to open and utilize the movements that are contained within the form. We must study hard to try to grasp these keys. Without these keys to open the doors of knowledge, the knowledge is encased within the form or technique, and we will never have access to it.

A great example of this outside the martial arts could be that of a race car driver. All the cars that are on the track are high-powered, awesome machines of speed, but in the end, it truly boils down to the driver. Is the driver capable? Does he have the skill and the knowledge to take that high-powered machine to the heights of its performance and make it work? Regardless of whether you have a Porsche or a Ferrari, if you don’t have the skill and the knowledge of how to drive properly, you will end up being roadkill. The true point of the matter is to understand what you have learned, not necessarily to go looking beyond your own doorstep. Rather, seek the treasures that are hidden within the knowledge that has already been given to you and bring them forward.

In truth, when it comes to the art of fighting, less is more. When you are actually in a situation where you need to fight, not in a sporting event or organized match, quickness and surprise are the elements best suited to the situation. Speed, power and simple, direct technique is most appropriate. Directness in your attack, ferocity and power are essential to get the job done. Everything that is inessential should be stripped away, and the technique should be as effective as possible. Therefor, in the art of fighting, one should concentrate on a few techniques that truly work. You want to be able to have something in your hands that is instinctive and can be repeated again and again. That is to say, you have several techniques in your pocket and you can make them work every single time. Every good system is built upon several well-founded techniques and practical movements that can then be applied over and over again without fail in multiple configurations. When one student or practitioner has too much to work on or too much to worry about, then the true essence of the martial technique is lost. The true essence of understanding is that the few make the many. The one technique can flow out or branch out to become multiple techniques. This is why I say it’s unnecessary to be greedy if you’re capable of understanding what is possible with one said movement.

I just want to make a qualifying statement about what Kung Fu is. The true art of Kung Fu is a skill that can be taught, a skill that can be passed on, a skill that can be brought forward from teacher to student and utilized. This doesn’t mean that it can be mass produced by any stretch of the imagination. If you claim to have Kung Fu but it cannot be taught or shown to someone or be duplicated again to a certain level of proficiency, then it is not Kung Fu, it is rather a god-given gift, a talent of that individual. Simply said, if an individual can fly, that’s a god-given talent. If he can teach you how to fly, then there might be some Kung Fu there. If a skill cannot be passed on or shown to somebody and duplicated, then there is no Kung Fu. Kung Fu is an acquired skill that you get through diligent practice and being taught by someone who has already acquired the skill. Therefor it should be able to be duplicated again and again. Experience over time with practical training will give you the best results and make you understand the essential ingredients that are part of your training. That will make you understand you don’t always have to have more. Sometimes more makes less. Sometimes less makes more. What is essential is the practical experience that you gain from training consistently in your chosen system. This training should lead you to an epiphany, an awakening, an enlightenment and lead you to the proper concept of Kung Fu.

Many individuals feel that more is more, but this is not always the case. When you eat at a buffet and try to consume as much as possible within a short period of time, you usually end up feeling sick to your stomach or throwing up, thereby defeating the purpose of it all. This is no different than training in Kung Fu. In general, Kung Fu systems are broad in their scope of knowledge and have been embellished over the centuries. There still remains a core within each system to allow the practitioner full access to the knowledge within the system without looking for too much external augmentation. As taught to me by my teacher, in Fu Jow Pai, we have ten essential movements of the tiger. Choy Lee Fut has ten essential seeds. Hung Gar has twelve bridge hand techniques. Each system is built on classical conceptual movements that branch out to all the other movements. It’s no different than painting. If you have the primary colors, you can make a multitude of colors, but if you’re not a master of those primary colors, there’s no art. In Chinese cooking there are only a few ingredients that create the taste. Once you’re missing those essential ingredients, you’re chasing that rainbow that leads to nowhere. Because that’s where rainbows lead– nowhere. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow… you’re sitting on the gold, fool!

We all go through this. This is a process of maturation within your system. One must begin to look at the structure of one’s system and slowly digest its “optional” techniques that are almost hidden in plain sight. By looking around at everything else, you get distracted and may even lose your original motivation and understanding of your chosen system. In the end, let’s step back and take a good look at what we have in our system with a discerning eye to detect the possible options available. Master the few, and they will become many, if not even unlimited… If you keep looking at what everyone else has, you will eventually lose what you have. Work your Kung Fu to flesh out everything that is already there. No need to be greedy.

- Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

EVEN KUNG FU IS SUBJECT TO THE LAWS OF INERTIA

in·er·tia | \ i-ˈnər-shə , -shē-ə\
a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force

I always get this same question, and this past weekend was no different. My daughter had her engagement party, and through the course of the cocktails and chit chat, inevitably somebody asks me, what you do, which is always a difficult question for martial art people because no one really gets it. They always say, “Ooh, you have a black belt,” or “Your hands are registered as lethal weapons,” and you have to educate them somehow in regards to what you really do as an educator within the martial arts. They inevitably ask you how long you’ve been doing this, and you say the several decades or more, and they look at you with this glazed disbelief and say to you, if you’re a master then why do you keep training? I spend time training on my own, teaching my students as well as spending several days with my own teacher each week, 30 plus years into it, and this baffles them. They don’t seem to understand why. I was thinking about it the other day as I was explaining something to some students and yes, Kung Fu is completely and utterly subject to the laws of inertia. Inertia – that’s a really weird word. When I was kid, I never understood what the hell that word meant, but now I know that everything that’s alive and moving is subject to the laws of inertia. Basically, the laws of inertia state that an object (aka you) in motion will stay in motion and continue in the same direction it’s going, and an object that is still will remain still, barring interference from some external force.

Training for us “old timers” that have been involved in Kung Fu for almost 40 years or more is not an option. There is no opting out. A Kung Fu brother of mine that everyone knows (Sorry, brother, I’m going to put you on the spot), Sifu Tai Lik Johnson, trains and teaches every day. He’s an animal; he doesn’t stop. I take inspiration from this. There is no haphazard training; there is no on and off schedule. I don’t want to be doing the hokey pokey. You all know the hokey pokey, right? You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out? I don’t want to be in and out; I want to be all in. I’ve seen too much of this, and I understand that inconsistency only breeds inconsistency. You have to be consistent in your consistency to make any kind of stride or gain. You’re not allowed to get rusty. You’re not allowed to sit back. A body at rest stays at rest. You know who stays at rest? The dead. Unless you plan on being a Kung Fu zombie, at some point you have to get up off your ass and start moving. Another Kung Fu brother of mine, Sifu Rik Kellerman (sorry I’m calling out to all you guys but I want to use you as an example) hurt his knee recently, but he didn’t opt out. He just kept training and trained around the injury. He is healing himself and he’s going to come back even stronger. I also take inspiration from this. I also want to make a shout out to my Kung Fu brother Sifu Bill Fong who has always worked harder than everyone and just came back from having open heart surgery and I know he’s not going to let that stop him. None of us are going to rest. We’re going to keep moving forward.

As you start growing and moving forward, there is no way to cool down. Once you stop actively practicing, regardless of what stature you’ve achieved in your prior achievements, it’s just that. It’s prior achievements. You’re not going to surpass yourself. A great analogy is that Kung Fu is heated water in a pot, but if the flame is too low, the water cools. If the flame is too high, the water burns up and dissipates. I’ll tell you what else Kung Fu is like when you slow down and you stop. Kung Fu is like cold pizza and warm beer, and if you tell me that you like that, I’m going to say you’re weird. No one likes cold pizza and warm beer. You have to work it every day. We have to learn how to utilize our energies to keep moving us forward. You have to practice every day, and I almost want to say that it’s a relentless type of practice. I love the quote from Henry V, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends.” I feel that this is the call to arms on a daily basis for myself and many other martial art practitioners that we need to have in order to constantly see progression and improvement in our work. We’ve seen many high ranking individuals, students and/or teachers reach a certain level and stop because they say to themselves, since no one’s at this level at this point in time, it’s good enough. What’s good enough? The question rises in your mind. How much money is enough money? How much vacation time is enough vacation time? Kung Fu falls into the same category. How much Kung Fu is enough Kung Fu? How much knowledge is enough knowledge? Knowledge goes hand in hand with power. How much knowledge, power and understanding is enough? This is something we have to ask ourselves all the time.

As I’m writing this blog, I’m actually working out at the same time, playing a few movements on the bench, trying not to stop the flow of energy, spirit and attitude which is required in order to do Kung Fu properly. The practice is all consuming, at least where I’m concerned, and I think many artists can speak to the same thing. I was trying to explain my angst about this to a very good friend of mine, another Kung Fu brother, and he basically came to the conclusion, “You have an illness.” I said, “What is my illness?” He said, “You’re a perfectionist.” I said, I think you’re absolutely right. This is an incurable disease that is inflicted upon most Kung Fu practitioners and artists in general. The practice is something that, for lack of a better term, possesses you, and in this possession, you are driven to a constant seeking of perfection. Therefor you must always be aware of the laws of inertia being applied to you. We cannot stop. In one end of the spectrum, it’s a constant daily grind and it is difficult to maintain, but once it’s done you’re so happy that you’ve done it and you know you’ve accomplished something. On the other hand, it’s something that I look forward to and is the highlight of my day to be able to keep it moving, keep it going, keep all the plates spinning simultaneously. It’s a personal challenge that the individual must undertake. It’s your own personal gauntlet that you have to take up and make the strides not only to maintain but to be better at everything you’re putting out there. The inertia factor coupled with the perfectionist mentality of a martial artist is something that we all work with, struggle with and need in order to move forward and better ourselves.

If you stop training altogether, things are not going to be the same. It’s so hard to warm things up again after you’ve let them cool down. You may say to me, am I not allowed to take a day off? Can’t I go on vacation? I’m not saying you have to do this 24-7, but you always have an opportunity to train. In the confines of your mind, you will find limitless space and time. Many times when an individual doesn’t have the physical space and time to train, you can sit there on the train or the bus or in your favorite chair and mentally visualize and train yourself even if it’s just for 5 or 10 minutes. Obviously, this is a form of meditation, and this will also help to keep you active. If you cannot visualize doing something in your mind, it is going to be rather hard if not impossible to do it in the reality of the physical state. So it’s extremely important to understand that the battle against inertia is fought upon the physical as well as the mental plane. Sometimes, it’s both simultaneously; sometimes it’s one or the other, but nevertheless it’s an unending battle to continue.

Either you keep moving, or you die. You may say, oh my god, am I going to die tomorrow if I stop doing Kung Fu? You won’t, but let me tell you, it’s a slow, self-imposed stagnation. Stagnation means you’re going to get stiff… you know what a stiff is, right? I don’t have to tell you. You slowly sentence yourself to this inevitable end, which we will all come to, but I want to go down in a blaze of glory. I want to be kicking and screaming all the way. I guess it’s something akin to what the Spartans say, a glorious death. For me, there is no slowing down. The tiger is on the move, and I’m going to keep moving to the best of my ability as much as I can, as often as I can. I’m going to do my best to keep myself going physically, mentally and spiritually.

To do this, we have to train hard every day. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the good old days. Let me tell you about the good old days. First of all, there’s no such thing. There’s only the here and now. I feel sorry for the individual that peaked when they were 17 years old. They were the big man on campus, a football or baseball star in high school, and now they find themselves ready to have a midlife crisis or worse, just dreaming about the good old days. The good old days are right here and now in this moment in time. I’m not sixteen or seventeen years old anymore. We have to train more frequently, more in depth and harder (in the proper sense) than we did when we were teenagers because when you’re young, you’re stupid. This goes for everyone. No one is excluded from the laws of inertia or the laws of stupidity, which are prevalent when you are young. As you get older and have more sense and awareness of yourself, you have to use that to bring in a tighter focus and understanding. You have that constant motivation to keep on going, to keep on striving for the better, to make today and every day coming in the future a better day than the past. You don’t have to sit there and dream about your glory days when you were young. Even though I’m older, I’m younger now than I was before. Because you have the right attitude. Inertia doesn’t like the right attitude; the right attitude is the antidote to the laws of inertia. We’ve all seen examples of much older individuals, people in their 80s and 90s, that seem to stay young, and it’s because they keep themselves occupied and active, challenging themselves to do the most that they can every day. That’s what keeps older people young, healthy and vibrant in all aspects of their life.

When you have the proper mental attitude, you create a positive cycle of energy that allows you to do more. The more you train, the more you will understand that you don’t understand. Because you’ve come to this conclusion, you want to train more. This is the law of inertia. Even if you do poorly, because you have a positive mental attitude, you can take inspiration from that and continue to forge forward. I don’t care if you did well or didn’t do well; you still have to train. Many times when you “win,” you lose, but just because you “lose” doesn’t necessarily mean you lost. People are under the misconception that because they “got it right” on the first try that you actually accomplished something. Let me tell you, it was a fluke. It was what we call a happy accident. It’s not something that you can reproduce. Real Kung Fu, because it’s a skill, can be reproduced again and again. That’s something that you have to work for. It’s something you have to mess up countless times before you grasp the real understanding and actually can produce what you’re looking for continually. Here, we come back to the concept of consistency. You must be consistent in your action, in your speech, in your thought, in order to have any kind of forward mobility. The problem comes when people meet pressure or stress, but true learning will present those issues to you. Only with external pressure can we become better. Only through adversity and challenges can we overcome our circumstances and truly make ourselves what we’re supposed to be. So now, as I’m writing this blog to you, the Queen song “We Will Rock You” is playing, and I’m thinking about the lyrics about overcoming adversity to get out there and rock you. This whole blog is about overcoming the adversities that have been placed upon you or that you place upon yourself. So in essence, the inertia that you feel is the inertia that you’ve created… You must constantly fight against yourself not to get comfortable being comfortable. This is the test that you must go through in order to get to the next level.

You learn from your errors and your mistakes. You must inspire yourself to work harder and try again. Kung Fu is a daily pursuit, a daily devotion. Good days and bad days all add up to make you what you are, and you have to accept both wholeheartedly. Most people just want to have the good times, but you can’t have the good times without the bad times. That’s the contrast. That’s the yin and yang, the sweet and sour. You have to have those bitter, hard, not so pleasant moments in order to understand what truly is and what should be appreciated and striven for. We don’t care if it’s a good day or bad day, we still do the work. Day in, day out, we keep moving. Don’t stop your own progress. Once you stop, you’re f***ed. This is the law of inertia.

In conclusion, I think we’re in good company. From Aristotle to Galileo to Newton to Einstein, let’s get in gear with these fine gentlemen and don’t slow down.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

WEAPON VS. EMPTY HAND… IT’S A CHICKEN AND EGG SCENARIO

The last few weeks I’ve started to concentrate on training my class on some weaponry, and several instances have come up where students were able to draw analogies between their empty hand form and weaponry. Kung Fu weaponry and empty hand training go hand in hand, one helping the other, beginning and ending, one full circle. The question is, which came first, empty hand fighting or fighting with a weapon? This has always been an ongoing debate. Different individuals claim one or the other. Some claim that empty hand was first and then transitioned into weaponry; another argument says that weapons were first and then slowly modified into empty hand training. These are very unique viewpoints, and both have valid arguments.

Obviously, due to human physiology, it’s very natural for human beings to pick up an implement and use it, be it a tool or a weapon, but it could be just as easily argued that the hand by itself is a tool that can be converted into a weapon. The example would be two kids fighting in the sandbox. One steals the other’s toy, and then they start swatting each other. But they ultimately might even pick up a stick, a rock or their toy and whack their little friend… The beginnings of Kung Fu weaponry and empty hand training. But all joking aside, it is equally natural for the human being to utilize their body or a tool to enhance the functionality of the human body, and this is just my point.

A great example would be this past Saturday, I started a double dagger intensive class, and right off the bat, I got comments from students in the class saying, wow, Sifu, I never realized how much the weapon actually did derive from and support the empty hand movement until we started doing this double dagger set. My retort to the student basically was, yes, you’re absolutely right. With these two small knives, it’s easy to see the direct relationship that it has to your empty hand movement. Sometimes, the longer, more exotic weapons detract from the ability of the student to perceive them as extensions of the body. This double dagger sequence is so closely tied into empty hand fighting that it better exemplifies the yin and yang relationship between empty hand and weaponry techniques. These short, double handed weapons take a direct cue from empty hand fighting. The weapons are held in two hands and act as more obvious extensions of what the empty-handed practitioner would do. Another great example of this would be Filipino stick and knife fighting. Southern Kung Fu systems and that art share many techniques, movements and concepts. This is because both arts were under military law and suppression by those feudal governments that did not allow the layman to have military weapons. Because they were denied military grade weaponry, methods had to be devised to allow for smooth transitions between empty hand and bladed or stick fighting techniques. This can also be seen in Okinawan Karate that draws its roots from Chinese Kung Fu.

The old adage is that if you truly know Kung Fu, then whatever item you pick up can ultimately become a weapon. Articles such as benches, oars, fishing nets, hooks, prongs and all sorts of farm implements were assimilated into martial art systems and became weapons because they utilized the archetypal structure of the empty hand fighting and tweaked it a little bit to help match that tool. Another great example other than the double daggers of empty hand mirroring the weapon and weapon mirroring the empty hand would be the wooden bench which spans the scope of southern Kung Fu systems. Almost everyone has a bench in their system, in their house, in the tea shop. It was the most handy, readymade weapon that you could just pick up and throw down, so that, too, was assimilated and melded to work with empty hand movement. I was just doing a bench class last night and made a point of giving over my bench to one of my students and performing with the class empty handed as though I was still holding the bench but with two clenched fists. Slowly, everybody stopped and stepped back and just watched me perform it as an empty handed form. It worked just as well because I was able to extrapolate the empty hand movement from the weapon form.

So, why so many varying weapons, especially in Chinese martial arts? I think this is a really good point to look at. There is a huge range of different weapons within the Chinese marital arts, long and short, flexible and hard, whip-like, small and large. Weapons are tools, and you need different tools to do different jobs. You can’t use a hammer to do the job of a screwdriver, and you can’t use a screwdriver to do the job of a pliers. Even though they’re held by the same hand, the functionality of that tool is specific to a task; therefor many different weapons developed. That can also be drawn in an analogy to the various hand positions found within many Kung Fu systems. This deserves another blog which we’ll get into at a different time, but the varying hand positions that are found within the Chinese martial arts also mirror those of the weapons. As another saying goes, every finger is a dagger, every hand is a knife, every arm is a sword. The empty hand section of our training serves to forge our hands into different weapons: hammers, sickles, hooks, knives, daggers, spears, and so on. So, again, the actual relationship between empty hand movement and weaponry is extremely prevalent. They are one and the same, or at the very least, an outgrowth of each other simultaneously rather than two different things. In my opinion, the weapon movement should mirror the movement of the system that the individual is studying. The stabbing, slashing and cutting with the weapon relates directly to slashing techniques of the hand, cuts, strikes, blocks and so on. Even the terminology that we use for empty hand as well as the weapon is almost literally the same, so right there that at least blurs the line of separation.

There really should be no argument in the mind of the student; your Kung Fu technique is your Kung Fu technique. Empty hand and weapon are each an outgrowth of the other and feed back into each other. I really don’t see a separation. Having this point of view as taught to me by my teacher has helped me immensely because you are able to assimilate the weapon into your movement. Rather than it being a foreign object, a dead article in your hand, it becomes alive, and you can translate your physical body language into the weapon. Over time as you practice, you begin to assimilate the attributes and techniques of that weapon into your own physical practice as well. One saying that comes to mind is that the weapon is an extension of the body; therefore the actions of the body lend themselves to the use of the weapon or the tool. The weapon follows the physical dynamics of the human body and can enhance and extend the reach, power, speed and dexterity as well as mobility of the human body, therefor creating a diverse way of accentuating the skill of the practitioner.

Both the empty hand and the weapon accentuate, foster and support one another. It’s very evident that the stances and techniques of Kung Fu as played today are an outgrowth of warfare on the battlefield and on horseback, but we can also see it goes the other way around, where personal hand-to-hand combat techniques taught by individual masters can be augmented to work into weaponry. I have done this numerous times with my teacher’s guidance where we readjust empty hand movements to become weapon forms as well as weapons to become empty hand. They should be one in the same; they should be seamless, one closed circuit. The bottom line between the two arguments of whether weaponry or empty hand came first is neither here nor there in my opinion. It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. You can sit here all day and night and argue about which is more important, the chicken or the egg, the egg or the chicken. The truth of the matter is, I’ll eat both, so it doesn’t matter which one came first. Both equally benefit the other. This should not be an argument of which came first, the chicken or the egg, the weapon or the hand, the hand or the weapon, but rather a complete, unique circle. I think this different way of viewing things will help the practitioner to understand both his empty hand and weaponry training that much more, to see them as a unit rather than as two different things.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

TEACH YOURSELF TO LEARN

So over 4th of July weekend, we had a bunch of days off. We didn’t have classes for several days because everybody wants to take a break and go away. It’s not my norm, but I said, okay, well, this year I’ll just cave in and do as the natives do. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday classes were packed. Everybody was packing it in before they left for the long weekend to get in their last licks. Thursday was 4th of July, and I wake up and say to myself, you know what, you deserve to take it easy so let’s sleep in. I sleep in a little bit, get up, make some coffee, start doing stuff around the house, and I notice, wow I’m achy all over. What’s the matter with me? Am I getting old? As the day progresses, so does the pain, hips, knees, shoulders, everything. I say to myself, WTF? This is not my norm. I spend the entire day bitching and moaning about how much everything hurts. I celebrate Fourth of July, fireworks, barbecue, movies, the whole nine yards, but nothing seems to help. I say to myself, well this has got to stop; this is not my normal routine. On Fridays, I always spend time with my teacher, so I decide I’m not going to interrupt this; ONE DAY OFF IS ENOUGH. Friday morning, I get up bright and early and make my way to Chinatown NYC. As soon as I start training, literally just a few seconds into practicing, everything starts to melt away. I’m jumping, kicking, punching, rolling on the ground like I was 15 years old, and nothing hurts. What the hell?!

I remember what one of the old Grandmasters said to me years ago. He mentioned that he practiced at least several hours a day, and at that time he was 86. He said if he didn’t do that, he would die. I didn’t get it then, but I sure as heck get it now. I believe that once you start training at a certain level, this becomes your way of life and what you need to do to survive. Now let me preface that. Everybody thinks that because they practice, it’s their way of life, but come in close. Let me whisper in your ear. Between you and me, it’s not, because you don’t do it the way “we” do it. Let’s be serious. People train several times a week for an hour or two. They count it off in days. I count it off in floor time. If you’re really considered a “good student,” you’re on the floor maybe six hours per week. Some a little more, some a little less. You may argue the point with me, but that’s not a way of life; that’s a hobby. What I’m talking about is training daily. Forty hours a week is a full time job. THAT’S a way of life. You see what I mean? It’s simple math. You’re training and performing at a different level than most people. I know, I know… you have a job, you have a significant other, you have laundry to do, you have your favorite show to watch. I know, I know… but my leg knows, too. So, when I came back to my real normal routine, everything was set right. It felt like I was on a different planet. You need to push yourself on a regular basis; that means every day, both mentally and physically.

You need to do it every day until you go so deep into the movement that you’ve fleshed out the real heart of it. You can only do this through countless repetitions over decades of time. True depth of understanding only comes through practice. You may say, “You know what? I could hang a bag and learn how to throw a punch and a kick and beat somebody up.” Yes, you can. You can learn that in six weeks, but you’re not learning Kung Fu. You’re not channeling your mind; you’re not improving your spirit. Kung Fu does have its roots in learning the art of fighting, but it also has mental imagery that you have to create. It’s more difficult to project the mind into the movement; it’s easier just to mimic the movement. This is why we have to work so hard to go to another level of understanding. In sports terminology, they call it “the zone.” It’s a fervor; it captures you; it grabs you; it pulls you in. You either understand this or you don’t understand this. You’ve either touched it or you haven’t touched it, and that’s a difficult thing to explain to someone who practices casually as a pastime or as an exercise. As my friend Sifu Paulo Neiva said, “Kung Fu is for everyone, but not everyone is for Kung Fu.”

Sifu can show you and give you key instruction in the finer points, but ultimately, you must teach yourself. This you can only do through countless repetitions, trial and error, going back and doing it again and again. I play on the wooden dummy and do the same movement over and over, the same old bleep bleep every day again and again for decades. Why? We train like this to gain a sixth sense, to understand without striving to understand. Just like I speak to you and you understand what I’m saying, and I understand that you understand what I’m saying. That’s how you become fluid in the art. You go beyond a certain level and you practice differently. It captures you; it permeates you, and you go to a place, that if you haven’t gotten that hot before, you won’t really know what I’m talking about. That’s what you see when musicians seem to have spasms because they’re so deep into what they’re doing. You have transcended yourself and you’ve transcended the movement. You know exactly where you are, but you don’t know where you are because you’re so far down the rabbit hole. This happened to me on Saturday as we were shooting a movie. We were doing a technique again and again, and as the punches and kicks were flying, I couldn’t stop my hand. I didn’t intend to do it, my hand just said, open him up and hit him. At that moment, I wasn’t playing the form. I wasn’t even me. I don’t know what I did; it just came out.

You go from not knowing a form, to knowing a form, back to not knowing the form, becoming nothing again. It’s everything and it’s nothing. It’s zero and a google at the same time. Then you reach a point where you say, well, now I got it right, but right is relative to the point in time where you are. Right is not right forever, or another way of putting it, you have many levels of “right”. You can be “right” for your level but still not right in another way. It could be much better. This will only be attained by constantly doing it on an everyday basis. There is no other way because it is a living art form, not a mechanical action. This is up to the person. Have you put in the time or not? If you have put in the time, talking to someone who hasn’t put in the time is completely useless. It means nothing. How do you explain a raging boil to someone who doesn’t know how to light a fire and doesn’t have a pot? You can’t do it. He doesn’t have the faculties to understand you. So now, as you’re walking that journey that I said was so much fun you never want it to end, you keep walking. When you reach that spot where you think there’s an end, double check. It’s probably a mirage, and you better keep on going because otherwise you get stuck.

You need to do more. You know the form, but the form doesn’t know you. Think about it in those terms. Kung Fu is just like money; you can never have never enough. How much money is enough money? I saw a report on CNN or 60 Minutes or something, and they said the average individual really only needs about $75k/year to be happy. This pays for food, clothing, housing, a two-week vacation, etc. But you know what? If I gave you $75,000, it still wouldn’t be enough. You’d want to have more because you could get more; you could derive more. If you learn a little Kung Fu, you want to learn a little bit more and then a little bit more. You know the only way to get more money is to work for it because if you steal it you’re going to go to jail or end up dead in a ditch somewhere off the side of the road. Same thing with Kung Fu; the only way is to work for it on a daily basis. If you try to steal Kung Fu, i.e. fake it, you’re going to get caught eventually. Even if you think you may be a diligent student, if we really take a hard look at any one of us, I bet we could work a lot harder, myself included. No one is above the truth. The truth is you need to practice. Even if we are “good,” we can always be better.

So getting back to my conversation with the old master, the one who told me he practiced every day at 86 years old. We asked him, “Sifu, how did you get to be this level?” He said, “Seventy years.” At that time, he was almost 90, so he had 70 years of continual practice. When you tell me you’ve been actively practicing for a decade or more, I say, keep on truckin’. Because 70 years every day is 70 years every day. One day 15 years ago, or 6 months 10 years ago is a dream. That’s why I say even though sometimes I feel like I work real hard, in my heart of hearts, I know I could work harder, I could practice more, I could get better. I need to grow a little more beyond myself. I must put in time to the practice. So, over time, you do turn away from certain things, other endeavors and pleasures that you may have taken up at another point in time in your life become less important. This is not because they’re no good, but they’re fleeting, and Kung Fu is much more infinite in scope. It has much more impact, but you need to be there to feel that impact. You don’t feel the earthquake worlds away; you have to be on the fault line. So you have to be on this fault line that we call the practice of Kung Fu.

We’re talking about actually understanding an art form. If you want to attain that level, that degree of understanding, then there’s a certain amount of sacrifice that has to be made. It’s physical, mental and spiritual sacrifice. Without putting anyone down or maligning anyone else’s practice, the average individual won’t sacrifice that much to get to that level. Neither side is right or wrong, but you must make a choice at some point and then be happy with your choice. If you choose to go that route of devotion and want to attain a higher level of understanding, then be happy with that decision and take all the good and the bad that comes with it, because the good and the bad is what’s going to lead you to that level of understanding. If you choose the other side, then don’t have regrets that you didn’t choose the other road because then you’ll have neither. You cannot have your cake and eat it to. In the past, many individuals from different practices have sequestered themselves in order to clear their mind and concentrate solely on that endeavor or that devotion. That reminds me of monastic caves where monks would pull themselves up by pulleys in baskets and live in a cave. Once in a while their brethren would send them food, but they would never come out until they reached a certain level of understanding, zen, peace of mind, oneness with the universe. In order for you to do your work, you must do your work alone. Your Sensei, Sifu, guru, witch doctor, whatever poison you pick, can only take you so far. If you don’t put in your time, you will never attain the understanding, and even though your Sifu may talk to you, you will only hear words.

The only way to truly get better is if you get out of your comfort zone. You’re comfortable practicing the form ten times, so you have to practice twenty times. You’re comfortable with thirty times, so practice fifty or sixty times. Practice under duress; practice with a handicap; practice until you go beyond the handicap, until you’re no longer comfortable being comfortable. You don’t want to be comfortable. Comfortable means you’re not growing. I agitate you; you grow. I don’t agitate you; you start to dwindle. When you lift weights, you agitate the muscle, and it grows. When you study, you agitate your brain. If you don’t do this, you don’t grow. If you get comfortable being comfortable, you start to languish and you lose. This is all on the mental plane, but this mental attitude transfers over to the physical. Do it in your mind and then transfer it to the action of your body. Don’t just running the physical course, but run the mental program.

The point of practice is digestion. You have to digest it; you have to break it down. It has to filter through every part of you so you absorb the nutrition of it. Everybody’s so eager to eat, but not to digest. Instead of eating more, you need to digest. You have to digest in your mind, your heart, your body until it doesn’t even look like what you thought it looked like when you first learned it. If it does, you didn’t do it right ,and if you tell me you know it’s not right then I’m going to tell you shut up. So just go back and do the same old thing. I’m learning the same thing I was learning when I was 15 years old, and now I’m 53. Do the same old thing until it’s no longer the same old thing. You will see something that others cannot see. This is what the practice is about. It’s an awakening; it’s an enlightenment. It’s opening up the third eye, gaining that sixth sense that you can’t pass along and you can’t teach somebody else. No matter how much you are taught, you must end up teaching yourself. This is the point of practice.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

PRESS PLAY FOR KUNG FU

I was reading something the other day that said if you can hold a smile for 30 seconds or more, just the sheer act of holding the smile, even though you may not feel happy, is purported have a therapeutic effect and make your day happier. I just spent the last half hour or so on the phone with a very good friend of mine who I consider a brother, and that action itself already put me in a good mood. This got me thinking about how we need to play our Kung Fu. Don’t train Kung Fu; play Kung Fu. That’s the term that we use. We don’t say “work” your Kung Fu or “do” your Kung Fu. We say “play” your Kung Fu. 玩功夫Wan Kung Fu.

Hau To was a famous doctor in Chinese antiquity, and he created what he called the “five animal frolics”. The word “frolic,” even though it may be erroneously translated from the Chinese, already tells you the overall attitude that you have to take when you perform or practice Kung Fu. It’s just like any other art or sport. You play baseball; you don’t “do” baseball. You play football; you play the piano; you play the violin. We always say play your form, play your weapon, play your matching set. Let’s play a game of chess or play this song. The word “play” is much deeper than people give it credit for. It’s a bridge that allows you to cross over to a place of different understanding. Kung Fu teaches you how to be through the premise of play.

This is the attitude that should be taken by the individual when they practice. The word “practice” sounds very much like an arduous, painstaking task (and sometimes it is), but let’s substitute the word “play.” The word “play” denotes happiness in doing that endeavor. The concept of play is something that every child knows, but as we grow up, we forget and lose touch with that aspect of ourselves. We must find the passion and joy of a child playing. I had a young student come up to me on Saturday, and she was so excited because she had just discovered the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She came up to me and said, “Sifu, they’re Kung Fu turtles, and they do this and they do that!” I could see the joy in her face and how it inspired her and made her want to play more. That’s what we have to learn. Even the littlest child can teach us how to be. The innocence, genuineness and openness that that child had when she was telling me her story is what each and every one of us want to have when we approach our practice. Because we’re taught to be “serious adults,” sometimes we forget. We need to remember how to return back to that special place, that mental state that allows us to practice properly.

Play stems from imagination. As we grow up, we often put our imagination on pause. Children, on the other hand, are wide-eyed and always thinking in an imaginative state. As I was watching some students the other day, I made note that most of them don’t utilize their capacity for imagination. You might say, “Sifu, playing games, imagination, how does this relate to fighting?” You might say this sounds like nonsense, but then I’d have to disagree with you. Imagination is the stem from which all art forms begin. It is the root. Someone at some point imagined how they would execute the technique that they wanted to execute and came up with a routine, a play, that they would utilize to practice it. They went and tested it, came back, revised it, and redefined it into a method, a play that they could utilize again and again, fostering the mind and the body to meld together through this play and imagination.

Even when we do sparring, it’s a game. When I was a young teen starting to do free sparring, this is what one of my masters told me. Sparring is a game of tag. I’m not trivializing it, and I’m not saying don’t be serious. But you must look at it as a game in the sense that you have to play it. It’s the mental state that you have to be in when you’re in that fight or sparring situation. You can’t be angry. You can’t be upset. You can’t be so caught up that you lose focus because you become too emotional. Step back and look at it as a game. “Tag, you’re it!” One analogy for a fighter in a sparring match is a racecar driver. You have to remain cool, calm and collected. You cannot run to extremes of emotion; you need to have balance. It is a game; it’s fun. Even though you’re in the heat of combat, or you’re in the midst of a race, you still remain the calm in the eye of the storm while everything else is swirling around you. When you learn how to play your Kung Fu, after a while it takes you to a certain mental zone, and you need to know how to go back to that mental zone in order to tap into that right energy, that joyful and positive energy that allows you not only to practice almost effortlessly, but allows you to grow into the art and into yourself.

The power of the mind, the power of imagination, the power of play is not wholly understood. We fashion ourselves and our reality based upon how we think. As adults, we have to deal with reality, so our imagination and play are tempered by that. A little kid imagines they can fly, but you can’t fly. That’s not to say you can’t imagine or mentally identify and define how you’re going to utilize any one technique when you practice your martial arts. That mental identification and re-definement is critical for your growth. The student has to realize that the form and/or the practice put in front of him is a puzzle that needs to be unraveled, figured out. It’s a game that you have to play with yourself in order to figure yourself out. The exercise is a teaser that allows you to investigate how deep you can actually go, how much you can actually see. I see many students approach their practice in a very stoic manner, dry and devoid of feeling, and I think this is a mistake.

This is why you always have drop off. You have people signing up to go to the gym or joining a martial arts school and then quitting one month later. This is in part because of the mental state they put themselves in. They view it as a task as opposed to something to look forward to. I can remember my teacher always saying to me, when you practice, you have to practice as though it’s your most favorite thing to do. It’s your favorite drink or your favorite thing to eat. It’s the most enjoyable thing that you’ve encountered, and you relish it. Playing something, be it a sport, a musical instrument, or the art of Kung Fu, is what each and every individual should be looking forward to rather than striving to do. When you watch two tiger cubs play, they “play fight,” but they’re playing and learning survival skills. This is exactly how you’re meant to train; take revelry and joy in the art of your practice by playing your practice rather than looking at it with feelings of dread and drudgery. When you have this frame of mind, you can access different aspects, feelings and understanding, and put yourself in the right mood to gain from the practice which has now become play. You make it much more enjoyable, palatable and digestible, simply by looking at it in a different way. In that way, you change your mental perception of the practice and make it that much more easy to assimilate into your system of thought and movement.

Doing it and hitting it hard is all fine and well, but if you don’t approach it from the point of view of playing, enjoying the process, enjoying the ups and downs, and relishing every time you get to train, the training will not have the same effect. Kung Fu is good medicine, but we need to be open to it, and having that state of mind of play allows our mind and heart to open up to it and accept it more easily. The concept of the mental state of play is not only on the individual but can also apply to the group. I’m sure everyone has experienced when the class is up and happy, and everybody’s working hard. The energy in the room makes everybody that much more receptive to the learning, as opposed to having a class where everybody is not in a good mood. The concept of playing Kung Fu is about creating the right energy, mental and spiritual, that allows you to not only practice, but practice well, and digest and adhere to all the things that you’re learning.

So, as I was watching some students practice, I had to make the comment to them, you are a little stiff, your energy is a little dead. It wasn’t because they were doing the movement improperly, but the energy was off. They weren’t doing it with live feeling, that happiness that comes in the play. If you’re struggling to do it, you can’t force the energy to come out right. In many instances, you just have to let it happen. I’ve used the analogy in the past where you say to your friend, we’re going to go out and party and have a great time tonight, and inevitably you don’t because you’re so desperate to have that good time. You’re so desperate to show how much you know and how good you are that you negate the positive energy that should be there just from the sheer joy that you can stand in the room and do the movement.

It’s all on your approach. Do an experiment with yourself. Take a piece of your form that you really like to play, but approach it differently. Change your mental state. Do you want to do it hard and fast to show what you know, or happily play it? I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try hard, but don’t be desperate. Try that a little bit on your own and see what the outcome is. I think if you properly do it and observe it in the right way, you’ll see that the attitude of play allows you to derive so much more than the attitude of, “I’m going to make this happen.” This is not to say that you’re not driven or focused. But when I practice, I just do it. I’m happy to do the movement; I’m not trying to show you how much I can do or how much I know. I know this works because I practice all day long, but at the end of the day, I’m not tired. The only thing that tires me is people with a bad attitude or bad mental state. When you approach your Kung Fu from a joyful mentality, it’s not tiring but actually inspiring. It creates more energy that becomes physical energy. This is how interrelated the mind and body are. You view yourself and think about things in a certain way, and that’s what they become. So, it’s about changing the mind’s perception of how the practice should be. That’s really what we’re taking about, and that manifests itself into physical action. Your form may not be perfect, but that changes over time. Your attitude is something that you can start to work on immediately, and that will have a profound effect on how you practice and change the end result. So I say to you Wan Kung Fu 玩功夫 -- play your Kung Fu; enjoy your Kung Fu; revel in your Kung Fu; make it something that you look forward to every day.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

DON’T GET TIED UP IN YOUR RANK

Rank is a double-edged sword. It can cut for the good and cut for the bad. There is a point in time when you need rank. Rank gives structure and goals for the individual to shoot for. It is totally required in today’s day and age because people have even less attention span and focus than they did 30 years ago, let alone hundreds of years ago when no rank existed whatsoever. In the “old days,” you apprenticed yourself to the master for your entire life until he retired or passed away, and then you became the master, hopefully. There was no other incentive other than learning the art for the sake of the art. In today’s society, people need other motivations because they’re so caught up with having status, having a name, having something to show for it, rather than putting in the work and having the work speak for the quality of the individual. Rank is basically a motivational tool, an incentive, a carrot in front of the jackass to keep him moving.

First, second and third degrees are all about you honing your skill, your understanding, becoming fluent in your art form and your technique. From third, fourth and fifth it’s about teaching, becoming a teacher and helping to spread the art, supporting your teacher and supporting your school. Not too many people really get into that. It’s a much higher level. Anything above fifth degree black belt is all about your payback to the art, the system and your teacher. Back in the day, if you had a third degree blackbelt, that meant you had at least a good 25 years or more of experience. It meant you fought for it and bled for it and maybe lost a tooth or two. Those ranks were hard won and had a high level of value. I can remember breaking my hand, breaking my nose and quite a few black eyes to get a third degree or more. Not too many people want to go through that today. Rank is an important tool. But, when perceived solely on the basis of ego, it becomes detrimental to the overall growth of the individual practitioner as well as the martial art training hall.

Rank becomes detrimental when people think that their rank personifies who they are. But doesn’t it? Rank should epitomize the individual practitioner and serve a tool to remind them to what level they can aspire to, rather than what they truly are. It is a signpost to the potential that lies within the individual student rather than an overall accomplishment. In truth, learning and becoming better is a never-ending journey, and receiving a rank is only a signpost on the road that should remind you to continue moving forward in a positive direction.

There is a point in time where the individual passes themselves on that road and begins to understand the true function of rank, and is no longer hung up on it. If you really want to continue to grow, you need to take the roof off the house. The perception that you have of your rank is keeping you down. That item that used to be motivational becomes demotivational because you start lording over everything and everyone because you have a fifth degree blackbelt. In truth, as all steps forward, this becomes the true doorway into the learning of the martial arts. All of us that have spent an inordinate amount of time (30 years plus) training in our given art form, I think will all attest to the fact that once you reach this equivalent level, there is a major transformation, and you begin to understand that you’ve only begun to understand. In this one moment of epiphany, you can dispense with all ego, bravado, and anything else that was tied to having these ranks. You can truly begin an unfettered start to learning again.

When people find out that you hold a black belt or some rank equivalent in a martial art, they say, “Oh, so you must be a master,” in a Homer Simpson kind of voice, but you understand, hopefully, that that’s not the case. It’s just a stepping stone to a higher level of understanding. Ranked individuals return to become beginners again. Many times, I don’t wear my belt, I don’t wear my sash. It’s tied up and it’s on the Sun Toy (ancestral altar). There was a time when I was more into wearing it to show “what I am,” “what I have” and “what I accomplished.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but as I said before, when you pass yourself a few times, you realize that those trappings are not necessary and even hold you back. They keep you from growing because they put a cap on how you perceive the learning and the growth, and ultimately how you perceive yourself.

It’s good sometimes to mix it up and train with non-black belts to keep it real. Underbelts can sometimes do just as well if not better than black belts because we forget what it took to get there. What it took to get there is what it’s going to take to keep it there and move even further along. The danger of having a high rank is that it undermines your openness and the unspoiled nature of the beginner student mentality. Sometimes, you get your black belt, and it’s like cancer. Cancer ultimately kills and it’s very difficult to put in remission, and even if you do, it may come back. This is the crux of the matter. Some individuals, when they get their black belt, lose the proper understanding and get something else, which I like to term black-belt-itis, and it’s caustic to their growth. Because as we established, learning is a journey and it goes on forever. If you believe that, then you not only have to get rank out of the way, you have to get yourself out of the way. Sitting on your laurels about the glory days when you first started training and worked so hard will only get you so far. The car’s run out of gas; it’s time to get out and walk. You have to stoke the fire all the time; otherwise the fire goes out.

Keep it real. Honor it, respect it, cherish and honor the knowledge. Devote yourself to the learning, but don’t be held prisoner by the rank. Don’t care about the rank any more “in that way.” Because if it no longer holds sway over you, you can learn more. This is where a lot of senior practitioners in whatever art you want to talk about cannot continue to grow because they stagnate themselves with the wrong mentality. Rank means nothing unless you put in the work. You have to work it every day. If the 5-Star Chef doesn’t stay on top of his ability, then his five stars are gone. I try to remain vigilant to keep myself on the straight and narrow. As I was training yesterday with my teacher (as I have continued to do for the last thirty plus years), Grandmaster Tak Wah Eng, he said to me, in a blanket statement, “Don’t lie to yourself. Do it right.” I try to live by that on a daily basis. Most people dream the dream; they don’t live the dream. If you live the dream, you have to take stock of yourself. Sometimes it may come up much harsher than you’d like to hear, but in my opinion, that’s the only way a true martial artist or artist of any kind can and should be.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

NATURE VS. NURTURE… OR MAYBE NOT

I’m sitting here… Wait… I always say I’m sitting here. I’m actually not sitting. I’m walking back and forth between working with different students and on this blog, and I see a message coming over on Kung Fu In A Minute from a gentleman in South America claiming that he can’t learn Kung Fu because he’s very strong (his words, not mine), but not agile. This reminded me about a conversation that I was having with a group of students last week in regards to the debate between nature vs. nurture, which comes up in a lot of different areas in life. Looking at it from the standpoint of training in Kung Fu, to try to answer this individual’s question, all of us are impacted highly by various forces in our lives, things that we can control and things that we absolutely cannot control. The debate between what creates a good martial artist, be it his innate nature, whatever he received in his DNA strand from his ancestral background, height, weight, strength, maladies, and so on, versus what we are exposed to and then become accustomed to, what we’re weaned on, what we’re nurtured with or raised up with. I think both of these factors have major implications on the martial art and the martial artist.

These two extreme factors have a lot to do with stylistic attitudes as well as types of techniques that are employed, utilized, specialized in, and who can apply them and how they can be applied. Certain martial art systems are modified and specialized so that they’re much more inclined for a particular body type, mentality, or even topographical region, as opposed to others that are much more general and broad in spectrum. This also is the case with individuals. All of us as human beings have special attributes. None of us are created equal. Even though we all have basically the same hardware, our software is different and unique and therefor special. Ten people go to the same movie; ten people walk out with ten different viewpoints, all being correct, except for the eleventh guy that always keeps nudging you and asking, “What’s going on? What did he say?”

What many fail to understand is that the differences that we have in both nature and nurture will contribute greatly to how a particular marital arts system is employed by the individual. Many students have said to me, so-and-so is strong, so-and-so is fast, how can I be like them? The truth is, certain people can do certain things based upon their size, their innate flexibility, and their innate strengths and weaknesses. Some individuals are predisposed to being fast and strong. Others are predisposed to being flexible and agile. This by no stretch of the imagination means that any one individual is better or worse than the other, just different based upon their nature. Your nature is what you’re born with, what you’re endowed with. You get a lot of good and you get a lot of bad in the package. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t improve on what you’ve been given.

When you enter into the nurture aspect, i.e., the training that you receive, that which you are exposed to originally has a huge impact. It is a fingerprint on the martial artist that is almost impossible to eradicate. This is just like the initial nurture that you receive as a child, which has a profound impact on your life regardless of your innate nature. It sets a default in the physical and mental nature of the person and sets a course that they will follow even though they may not be aware of it. Your first exposure to martial art training is critical; it leaves an indelible mark on the individual practitioner that will either help or hinder them in their training. The way you perceive things, understand things, decipher techniques and how they’ll be utilized and played with in your training, has a lot to do with that first step that you’re given. I’ve had students in the past who have had other backgrounds in other martial arts. For example, a student that was initially exposed to Karate or Taekwondo has a harder time acclimating himself to the way Kung Fu thinks and moves even though they have a similar background. This is solely based upon that being the individual’s first exposure. It colors everything that you do, so it’s very important that the initial exposure is proper in the sense that it gives the correct infrastructure for the system that you’re studying. (Just as a side note, it’s highly critical as teachers and instructors, that we give the student the best possible basic training in order to set the tone for future training to follow.) If you see a lot of modern day Kung Fu practitioners unable to tap into the inherent strengths, techniques and fighting ability of the systems that they’re involved with, it’s because of the lack of that hardcore basic training coupled with the individual’s nature.

It is very important that the individual understands what his nature is and what he’s capable of doing. I’m not saying that you’re incapable of doing certain things that other people do, but other people will be predisposed to doing things that you can’t and vice versa. I’d like to talk about a student of mine, and for this blog I’ll just call him “Iron Bones.” Everybody in the school knows who he is. When you match up with him to do conditioning or any type of two-man training or sparring, god forbid you come into contact with his shins. He the next to skinniest guy in the school. He’s wiry, muscular but not overtly, and his bones in general are created from iron. This is something that stems from his DNA that is part of his personal nature. No matter how hard you train, you’re not going to be able to emulate this because it’s just not part of your makeup. He can use this to his benefit and can do certain techniques that other people that don’t have this attribute cannot, strictly based upon the nature of the individual. There’s no way I can train someone to be like that. You can’t change your blood type. It is what it is, and you have to work with that. Another example would be where stretching is concerned, you will see some individuals that are innately flexible and are able to do a split, be it right, left or straight in the middle, with little training or effort, and then there are other individuals that actively stretch on a regular basis and still may not be able to attain a full split. This doesn’t mean that one is better than the other; it’s just what they are. The individual Kung Fu practitioner needs to develop a good understanding of his physical and mental nature, the parameters that he has to work within.

Some people can play a form and articulate the innate feeling and play it so well and hit all the marks and make it look exactly what you perceive any one given system should look like, but they may not be able to utilize or fight with it. You may say, “Sifu, what do you mean?” In all honestly, not everyone is a fighter. Nor is everyone a performer or an artist. Some individuals are blessed with the nature and have been nurtured by a high level master and can do both, but most can’t. This is just the cold hard truth. Many really good fighters are not good at performing hand forms or weaponry, and vice versa. In the realm of fighting there are individuals who have the physicality and the mentality to be good fighters, and if provided the proper nurture, they can excel in that realm. A kid with no martial art experience whatsoever who grew up in the streets and had no choice but to learn how to fight to survive already has a leg up on someone that may have the attributes but not that type of experience. There may be an archetype that you want to aspire to, but just because you like golf doesn’t make you Tiger Woods. He’s a product of his nature and his nurture. He’s not just one. There are forces at work on both sides that push you to become what you become.

There is a lot to be said about what you’re exposed to on the nurture side and what you assimilate in your training that accentuates the innate abilities of the individual. All factors, be it flexibility, speed, strength, or mentality, can be attributed to your nature and augmented through the nurture of the training. Coming back to specialized and broad systems of Kung Fu and martial arts in general, some practitioners may be more predisposed to particular systems and styles based upon their physicality, mentality, and also what they’re willing to put themselves through. This is a unique part of the nurture aspect as far as martial arts is concerned. When you’re a child you don’t have a choice other than to accept the nurture that you receive from your parents and/or family unit. But as a martial artist, you can take the opportunity to pick and choose what in your system benefits and/or matches up with your particular character and/or nature, physical and mental. You can also choose how much pressure, or stress, you want to expose yourself to. We were saying the other day that stress is a dirty word – everybody says stress is no good, and I agree with you to some extent, but there are different types of stress. When you’re being “nurtured” in the martial art setting, you will be put through stressful situations, stretching, physical conditioning, stance training, mental training and so on. These are all different forms of stress, but in a positive format that is a nurturing part of the training that forces the individual to reshape and mold his nature to conform to an idea. This allows him to be able to actualize the techniques and physicality of the system that he’s learning. In the case of Kung Fu training, “nurture” is almost too soft of a word. Kung Fu nurturing is tough love.

How does wrought iron become steel? You must understand the properties that iron has. Then you take the raw iron ore and process it to the point that it becomes high grade carbon steel. That’s what you’re looking at when you say nature and nurture; you’re talking about properties and process. That’s what you’re talking about when you’re doing martial art training. It’s not what people like to say, nature VS. nurture. On a personal level, you may have been born with a certain nature and raised a certain way, but with martial art training, at least for an adult, you can take a steadier hand and make choices. The choices are tough sometimes because it’s physically and mentally demanding, but in order to get raw iron ore to become steel, it has to go through a very arduous process. Similarly, the individual, regardless of his innate nature, has to go through the process of the nurture, or training.

The two aspects of nature and nurture in my personal viewpoint don’t go head to head but rather should complement one another. I don’t think these two forces are diametrically opposed, but rather, that they should be seen as almost a yin and yang combination. As I’m writing this blog, and I’m looking at the rattan shield inside the school, it’s also speaking to me about the concept of nature and nurture. Rattan by itself is strong, fibrous and flexible, and because of these inherent attributes, it can be molded into a shape and interwoven into a rattan shield that a knife or spear cannot pierce. Hey, kind of sounds like yin and yang. This is an excellent example of utilizing the nature of the item then nurturing, or molding it to make it into even more. When you’re looking at an individual athlete, be they a martial artist or not, you must take into account the nature of the individual, the properties that are within this one person that make them what they are, as well as the external forces that were placed upon said individual to mold them into what we see.

Understanding your internal nature and what you’ve been given, you make the decision on how to work with those attributes. You have the choice. So, as I look out across the training floor and see all the students working on their drills, I see various individuals. Some are tall with long limbs; some are much shorter. Some are heavy, stocky and well-muscled; others are much thinner and wiry in frame. Yet all of them can come away with something from the training if they are aware of their innate nature and utilize the training to nurture those attributes to bring out the best in themselves. At higher levels in your training, you yourself should become aware of what you can specialize in, things that you’re good at, techniques that become your touchstone, that you can always come back to and know you have in your pocket. That’s a personal thing that each and every one of us has to take time to develop. As we said before, 10 practitioners of the same system will all have a particular look and feel, but each one of them will be unique unto themselves and come away with what they understand and what they can do.

So, now coming back to this individual and his statement about how he’s strong but not agile, and therefor can’t learn Kung Fu. He may not have the agility that he thinks he needs, but through proper training, i.e., nurture, he can acquire agility to the best of his ability. So you can’t say to me that you can’t train. I firmly believe that everyone can and should train in Kung Fu (haha… of course). I’m saying that it’s not nature vs. nurture, but instead a mixture of both. It’s internal attributes and external forces that you align together to make yourself into the best martial artist that you can be. Everyone needs to develop a better understanding of themselves and strive for the best that they can do, utilizing these two forces together.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅

KUNG FU: LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE

There’s no easy way around the issue of practicing. Learning an item is only that. You can learn an item without truly understanding or knowing it. You have to be able to chew on it and digest it and hold onto it. This can only be done through daily practice. Daily practice is something that a lot of students that are not “into” the art of Kung Fu can’t really fathom. I had a student last night give me the excuse that he had to leave early in order to pick up his laundry before 9pm. As he made this statement, the entire class laughed at him. Now, I’m not telling you not to have clean laundry; I’m all for that. But, the reward, the transformation, is within the practice. I’ve said this before, but you can’t cook with cold water, and you have to break some eggs to make omelets. Getting hot takes quite a bit of time, but only getting hot will allow you to reveal layers of understanding that can’t happen if you just dabble in it.

Treating your martial art practice as a hobby or a pastime is all fine and well, but in reality, is completely the wrong approach. I understand that life gets in the way, but Kung Fu is a way of life; therefor it should get in your way. It should get in the way of all the other things that distract you. It should get in the way of the things that keep you from investing the amount of time that’s needed to get you hot enough to be able to cook something up. Only then can you pass through those self-set stumbling blocks that every one of us encounters. Only then can you reach another level of understanding. You might say to me, I’ve heard this before, you’ve said this before, my teacher has said this before, I’ve read it in a book. You’re probably 100% correct, but it requires repeating on a regular basis. You can’t get something for nothing. If you give a little, you get a little, and if you give a lot, you’re going to get a lot. This is not an understatement. This is just the plain, cold truth. The time and energy being given by any one individual to their daily practice will be seen by those than can. And in this daily practice, the individual practitioner will start to understand their art and themselves.

This understanding is first rooted in basic training. You must continually train your basics, unceasingly, for decades. Train your stances, drill all your basic hand techniques and kicks until they become so well ingrained in you that they are almost a preoccupation. You’re consumed. When you’re standing there in the middle of the office at work and you start busting out movements, then you know you’ve been bitten by the Kung Fu bug. You’re practicing all the time; it’s become an obsession. You’re a chain smoker of Kung Fu. That’s the way you’re supposed to practice. You’re supposed to practice 24/7; you’re not supposed to practice between 7-9pm on Thursday night. You’re supposed to be so all consumed with the practice that it never leaves the forefront of your mind. You end up having Kung Fu dreams where you’re sitting there in bed making motions in the air with your hands, going through the form at night. That’s the way it’s supposed to be (at least for me). That’s the true practice; it colors every part of your existence. It has to be that obsessive-compulsive desire to constantly perfect your movement and in that way perfect your understanding. Using all your senses to practice – sight, smell, taste, feel, and then you develop the internal understanding. You start to develop a sixth sense, a knowing, an understanding of how things should be. You start to verbalize the language (Refer to my syntax blog) that is Kung Fu in a physical and mental way.

I was saying the other day in class, you practice for the click. You have to click with it, and you have to work hard for the click. Otherwise, it’s a mechanical gesture devoid of spirit, chi and understanding. When you get that click, you cannot explain it to anyone else unless they go through the same process that you went through. How many times have you gone through the process? How many times have you reset yourself back to zero and started again? Another even more intense question is, how many times have you quit, relented and come back? How many times have you thrown it on the ground, cursed it, picked it up, kissed it, said I’m sorry, and started again? This goes for all art forms, vocations and callings. If you haven’t done that at least half a dozen times, you’ve never done it.

You’re going to go through this multiple times. That’s the journey, and there are a lot of bumps and potholes in the road. You have to learn to navigate the training, take in the good, the bad the high and the low. A lot of people think there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or that the grass is greener on the other side, but as I’m fond of saying, it’s only Astroturf. Reality sucks and you have to deal with it. That’s why making excuses is the easy way out. The hard way, which many people today don’t really want to deal with, is to go through the process. The process is gut-wrenching and soul searching. It turns you inward and forces you to look at yourself and weigh everything. In a lot of the old Shaw brothers movies, you see a layman who goes to the temple and wants to learn Kung Fu for the sake of revenge. He learns a little but then doesn’t have the fortitude to complete the training and runs away. Sound familiar?

You may ask, Sifu, when does the training end? It doesn’t end. It continues forever. Your practice should last your entire lifetime and carry you through all the different changes, progression and evolution of your life. If it doesn’t, you either picked the wrong thing or you’re doing it the wrong way. From my personal experience, which is all I can speak of, my Kung Fu practice has followed me through different stages of my life and has helped me to progress through them and slowly, hopefully, fulfill the life that is a gift that you’ve been given. Your Kung Fu practice becomes an awesome maintenance tool for body, mind and spirit.

You may wonder why some people are better than others and some are getting it and some just can’t. It has to do with the time and effort the individual has put in and the way you’ve devoted yourself. If you only do a little bit, you may learn something, but you’re never going to permeate the true meaning of the practice, which is the development of the individual. The training becomes a magnification of the individual’s character. The training transforms you from a piece of coal into a glittering diamond. Now, we’re putting the magnification on you. We’re looking for character flaws, for the cracks; we have to cut that out and purify ourselves. Not many people can withstand that because the pressure increases. The heat increases, and it forces you to find those cracks and cut them out. It becomes extremely personal; it’s about perfecting the individual. That’s what you’re doing in your practice. As you practice and try to capture the idea of the movement, in actuality, you’re perfecting yourself. You learn to see your impurities, your character flaws, you take stock of them, you acknowledge them, and then you work to polish them away through the practice. You span the physical to the mental to the spiritual, and flow right back into the physical again. This is no different than any other art, a stroke of the brush, a flick of the wrist to strum the guitar, extending of the hand, extending the mind, the spirit and the body as one. That process is the process that transforms. It is only by spending time with the movement and spending time with your teacher that through the crucible of the practice you come to understand. You have to go within and spend time with yourself on yourself.

When you practice, you are using the vehicle of the form to tap into your energy, which is like lightning in a bottle, the bottle being your physical body. You want to capture that lightning in a bottle and make it work. You are just energy. You’re the lightning in a bottle. How you’re going to use that lightning is your choice. You can squander it, waste it and be foolish, or you can really hone in and make yourself into something. That’s what you’re doing with the practice. The only way to touch it is to practice incessantly. The inside makes the out; the outside never makes the in. You have to work from the inside out. This is what most people are missing. It goes beyond that punch and kick, that deadly technique. Rather, you’re working the energy. Don’t work the move; work the energy. The energy is also a byproduct of your attitude, so while you’re working the movement, you’re working your energy; you’re working the attitude; you’re shining yourself up. That’s what the practice is about.

We’re talking about your attitude, your approach. If you approach it from the right frame of mind, from a happy perspective, being happy to go through the process, happy to be worked over by the art itself, you’re going to glean more than someone who’s being dragged through the mud kicking and screaming. It’s up to you maintain that positive, happy outlook regardless of whether you’re learning a new form and weapon or working on something you’ve been working on for years. It’s that happy, content approach, that overall jovial attitude towards being in it that is going to allow you to harness that lightning in a bottle.

-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅