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
