day 95: guest speaker!

concepts:

• do not aim
• do not fixate
• work with change
• work with opportunities
  

forms:

• chen long form
• kuen wu jian
  

this Sunday we had a guest speaker. Master Tsao (Chow-sp?) is visiting from Hong Kong, and is here until mid-February. some people in the class know him as the father of Vincent, who was in the Long Beach jian shu class. his daughter lives in LA, and so he's visiting her for about a month. he practices choy li fut and Yang tai chi.

Sifu introduced him, and let him say a few words and answer a few questions. Master Tsao also did a short push hands session with Phunsak. during the question-and-answer period, Master Tsao discussed the nature of tai chi footwork and body positioning, and a lot of what he said echoed Sifu's instructions (particularly about the nature of grinding the rear heel while entering the bow-and-arrow stance, as well as the nature of slow movements to train relaxation and balance).

Sifu announced that we would have a lunch with Master (or Sifu) Tsao, and also more chance to review the Yang form during today's lessons.

chen long form

we proceeded by going further into the chen long form. i think we're getting to a point in the form where it's becoming harder for people to remember everything. it's taking quite a bit more work to practice the form, since there's more of it to review. of course, this is no different from any of the previous generations who've learned the form, which makes me wonder just what people did in the centuries before modern tools of education (e.g., videos, the internet, books, etc.).

sometime in the middle of our practice of some of the applications today, Phunsak raised a point that we had briefly covered in yesterday's Saturday class. we (Phunsak, John, and i) were having a discussion about extending the concepts from yesterday dealing with the unfixed (or free) nature of techniques, with the notion of seeing if we could see variations in the chen techniques similar to the way Sifu had pointed out the possible variations in bagua forms. this led to a tangent about the nature of pressure points and joint locks, and the nature of entries into them, particularly with the combination arm-bar and head-lock from yesterday.

Phunsak said that we shouldn't focus on targets. seeing my quizzical expression, he posed the question to Sifu, who confirmed this with the following observations:

• do not aim--in a fight, it's too difficult to choose a target and then aim at it. trying to decide on a particular target and then reaching for it leads to target fixation, and decreases your ability to react and adjust to the opponent's actions. in addition, it prevents you from seeing other, potentially better openings to exploit.
• do not fixate--this applies to targets or techniques. again, deciding on a specific course of action (whether to go after a specific target or to employ a specific technique) leads to rigidity in thinking that prevents flexibility in behavior, making you less able to respond to opponent threats or to take advantage of opponent mistakes. you can have overarching ideas about what you want to do to win (e.g., you recognize an opponent has a weak structure with poor shoulder and hip balance, and so you'll want to utilize this to your advantage), but you want to avoid planning a script--because, as has been repeatedly stressed by military strategists: no plan, no matter how detailed, can ever predict what will happen, and hence no plan ever survives the initial moments of combat.
  
• work with change--Sifu also stressed that sometimes a target or technique is appropriate in some moments, but not appropriate in others, and so are never constant. you have to work within the context of change, and hence be willing to let go of a plan that can't accommodate change...and because plans specify a fixed series of actions, they are not about change, and so never really accommodate it.
  
• work with opportunities--when engaged in a fight, you need to concentrate on just working with the opportunities that are presented to you. this means that when confronted by a given situation, you need to be able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of you and your opponent(s), and then be able to see what options you have to protect your strengths while exploiting your opponent weaknesses.
  

the catch with this is that to do it within the high speed of a fight, you have to be fluid enough to simply move without excessive thinking. this relates back to the lessons of the past few months regarding combat, and the need to focus more on principles and less on techniques--it's too difficult to remember specific techniques, especially in a self-defense situation, but much easier to see how principles can operate within a particular fight situation and accordingly move to apply those principles.

kuen wu jian

after finishing the lesson plan for the day in the chen long form, we continued with the kuen wu jian. i hadn't practiced this as much as i would have liked this past week, since i've been trying to fit my Ironman training in. the result was a bit of a struggle. it didn't help that the rain and wind began to go full force, leaving us huddling under the awnings of the school.

during a break, Master Tsao took more questions, and then did a performance of the tai chi jian. of course, being a bit thoughtless, i forgot to record this. but i may ask him to do it again, and so we'll see.

with the rain and wind falling hard, we called class to a hurried close, and went to lunch with Master Tsao.