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