Category Archives: Wisdom

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11. Who Do You Think You Are? Part 1

17 July 2020

I have to let go of what I am, if I am ever to become what I choose to be.

Let me unpack this a bit.  I am making a number of significant implications in this statement.
The obvious message is that we are not destined / doomed to be the person we currently are, we can in fact recreate ourselves.  This is not only a key theme of the great existentialist thinkers but is evident in the work of many of the early Greek thinkers.

It is common in many social systems and some religions to consider oneself a fixed socially static being.  The idea implied is that God has made me this way, or the blood I’ve inherited from my ancestors has, and I should be content, accepting and be the best fit I can be in my given place.  This is, of course, an idea that suits those for whom chance has placed at the top of the social hierarchy.  If you are in the highest caste you will certainly like the system to remain rigid.  If you are born rich, with a title or great privilege, you’ll like the idea that somehow you must be suited for that position.  Consider the many stories in which the lowly groom saves the princess or wins her favour, possibly saving the kingdom.  When the final twist of the story arrives, it turns out that the groom is actually a long-lost aristocratic/royal son, dispossessed by some common bureaucrat/jealous relative etc.  Because, of course, his blood, or some version of ‘the divine right of kings’ will have endowed him with the courage, wit and determination to overcome.  If you are old enough and English you will remember a favourite hymn we all learned at primary school, “All things bright and beautiful” did anyone notice the line “the king is in his castle, the poor man at his gate, the Lord has made them high and lowly and ordered their estate”.  Such sentiments have helped maintain the privilege of the few for centuries and much more importantly, curtailed the ambitions of the vast majority.  But are you destined by social position to be a certain sort of person?  I’m labouring this point a bit because I have come across so many people who, when asked what is stopping them from achieving some particular ambition, after lots of deep consideration, said that they felt it wasn’t there place, or words to that effect.  They had unconsciously bought into the idea of class or caste or some version of this idea.

What about upbringing?  Am I only the result of the sum total of my life’s experiences and my reactions to those?  You are hugely the result of your past in many ways.  But let’s be clear.  It is generally not the things that happen to you, but how you reacted to those events that have shaped you.  It is not by chance that the vast majority of psychotherapy, of every type, spends a lot of time and effort examining a person’s past.  It gets complicated because you were also taught how to react, so that comes back to upbringing and frankly it seems that some people are born fighters, some are born optimists, which brings us neatly to genetics.

What about genetics?  Don’t I inherit everything I am: my disposition, intelligence, fitness etc. from my parents?  The answer is a sort of yes and no.  What the most recent studies seem to suggest is that we have a huge library of potential genetic factors to choose from.  Having a gene for a type of cancer for example is like having a particular book on your shelf, but you could go your whole life never taking that book off the shelf and opening it.  The breadth of potential is huge, but the environment of a cell seems to determine whether a gene is switched on or off.  That environment incudes not just the nutrients or toxins we take in from drinking, eating, breathing etc. but includes the effect of the exercise we take and (roll of drums) what we think.  Yes, you read that right.  What you think and the emotions you trigger sending neuropeptides to every cell in your body is hugely responsible for the chemical environment of your cells and that will affect which genes are switched on or off.  That is why so many diseases are now referred to as stress related.  Who you are and how you perceive the world you live in are the result of your past thinking.  Which means, of course, that what you think now is moulding your future world and person you will be.

But whether by divine will or genetics or the shaping of nurture, is it true that we are stuck with our current state?
Is it the case that the best I can do is to learn who I am and be content with that?  Well if so, what a great excuse.  It does take the pressure off me to even try to be better.  I can’t really be to blame for anything either.  Every character weakness or fluke of birth, I can excuse myself for.  I get my temper and gluttony from my father, my laziness and alcoholism from my mother, my lack of discipline from their parenting and my right to sit in the House of Lords from God.  It’s not my fault, it’s all just the way it is.

But what if I choose to be different?  Is it possible for me to learn a different way to think; a different behaviour, habit, attitude or tendency?  Could I, for example, learn a technique to control my temper?  Could a determined effort to think differently become a habit and them my new normal?  Could that new thinking produce a new behaviour?  Could that behaviour become a habit and my the new behaviour is assimilated into who I have become?  Could I imagine the person I wish to be, and find a way to become him/her?  In short, is it possible to take the responsibility for the creative process and reinvent me.  Not simply pretending to be something different, but actually becoming different. 

Think about this.  If I pretend to be a gardener, by doing some gardening every day and I keep up the pretence for a year or so, surely at some point the claim that “I’m not really a gardener, I’m just pretending” becomes meaningless.  Imagine how successful such a plea would be in court, “oh I’m not a burglar, I’ve just been pretending to be a burglar, by burgling other peoples’ houses”.  Be, what you wish to become.
The other implication is that we need to let go of who we are.  The problem is that we become attached to our identity, no matter how much we do or don’t like it.  It takes a major act of the will to simply let go.  When I gave up smoking, one of the hardest things was letting go of my previous identity.  I was a smoker, and for years I was a smoker who no longer smoked.  It was who I was, part of my identity and as such it was unconsciously precious to me.  We simply feel uncomfortable with the new version of ourselves, like wearing new shoes, or a wholly different style of clothes.  Ironically, the more society in general disapproved of smoking, the more pressure I felt to give up, the more I resisted.  I am one of those people who when feeling attacked in any way, will react by bringing up my guard and come out of my corner fighting.  Even an element to my character, that I disliked, like smoking, was still part of me and therefore I felt protective of it and tried to hang onto it.
I had to learn to identify myself with the person I was becoming by my current choice, not the person I had become by that complex combination of circumstances that was my history.
So it is the case that “I have to let go of what I am, if ever I am to become what I choose to be.”  The letting go part, is often the hardest part of that equation.

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10. Creating Yourself

6 July 2020

Stop trying to find yourself.  Create yourself.  Stop burying your head in distractions because life seems to lack meaning, find your own meaning.

We live in a culture where Anti-Depressants are the most prescribed drug after Antibiotics.  Certain demographic groups are more likely to die from suicide than literally anything else.  Many people are spending more time and effort trying to feel good about themselves and the direction of their lives than they are just living it.  Many people lack any real meaning or purpose.  For this reason, people will look for projects to distract them; projects that will be so all consuming that they won’t have the time to stop and notice the futility of their lives.  They play computer games to the point of addiction, getting themselves lost in a world of adventure and magic (the magic could be nothing more than the opportunity to rise from the dead after failure and start again).  They follow other people playing a sport to the point of total association; you hear football fans saying things like “we won” meaning that a football team, that they personally have nothing to do with other than watching, won. In one study they found that around 40% of English men said that without football their lives would be meaningless; and few of them actually play football.  These projects need not be, of themselves meaningless or without virtue in their own right, but they can still be a distraction to stop those involved from taking a moment to really look at their own lives, for fear that they will discover them to be futile.

Let me make a suggestion.  A suggestion based on an awful lot of long-term studies (one Harvard study, that I’m thinking about, has been going one for 70 years now) into what makes people happy and healthy, content and fulfilled.  It is the quality of your relationships that will make the greatest influence on your life.  Not the number of them; the quality.  It’s about feeling secure in those relationships that you have.   

Here’s the thing.  Until you are content, secure and happy with who you are, you won’t be able to sustain a secure and happy relationship.  When you like yourself, others will like you too.  When you love yourself, others will love you too.  When you respect yourself, yep you guessed, others will too.  I’m sure you’re getting the idea now.  Kung Fu Living is a mechanism for developing the skills, the power and the discipline to become the person you most wish to be, the person you can love and respect.  It is a process designed to enable you to recreate yourself into the best you possible.  It is about ‘mastering your potential.’  It will change the way you think about others and the way you think about yourself and in doing so, it will prepare the scene for better relationships, and enable you to create your own meaning in life rather than simply distract yourself from noticing the lack of meaning.

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9. The greatest danger to you

6 July 2020

Protection from the greatest threat to your life.

People often ask about self-defence in terms of being physically attacked.  They don’t always get that Kung Fu should be a lifestyle, a process of personal development, emotional maturity and spiritual growth.  If it were just a way of fighting off a violent attack it would be a much simpler thing.  Although that alone is far more complex than most people initially presume.  Learning a few fighting skills within the context of a lesson is one thing.  Being able to use those skills within the context of a real-life attack is quite another.  That is the first distinction of a good instructor; that they train you in the emotional control necessary for real life application of the art.  But a complete Kung Fu teacher (Sifu) is also a life coach.  They help you to develop a personal philosophy that enables you to live life to the full and to grow into the person you both have the potential for and who you wish to become.  Life’s battles are hard and often the most dangerous conflicts will happen within your own mind.  Teaching you to deal with a stranger violently attacking you is actually just the structure for a vastly wider and more holistic curriculum.  For a start, you are much, much more likely to be attacked by someone you know, than by a stranger; a family member or most likely your partner or spouse.  But the person most likely to try to kill you, by a long way, is YOU.  Suicide is a far greater risk to your personal safety than violent crime or domestic abuse.  People don’t kill themselves because they want to be dead, they do it because they can no long tolerate their life.  If you want your life to a different experience, you have to first become a different person, with different thoughts, perceptions and attitudes.  You are able to be a happy and content person.  I would argue that inner peace and joy are natural to you, the you that you would be if outside influences had not barged you off course along the way.  We shall be looking at the theory, strategy and practical methods enabling you to grow into the person you wish to become, discovering the real you along the way.  That is not just the theme of many of these blogs but is also a major aspect of the whole Kung Fu Living program.

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8. Ethics of Violence

6 July 2020

There are generally two elements to consider.  What is the right thing to do and how do you develop the emotional control to do the right thing?  I shall be focussing here on the first part of this question.

Unless you are comfortably sitting in a government committee meeting deciding whether to use military intervention, you are most likely to need a decision made on your use of violence in less time than it takes to blink.  This is why you need, not only, a general principal to work with, but also to have considered a number of scenarios in advance, so that your application of your general principal can be considered.  If you consider a scenario imaginatively enough, with your response worked through, it becomes part of your memories and experiences.  This enables you to act fast in the future if a similar situation arises.

The result of not doing this can leave you worrying after an event whether your actions were right.  You may suffer guilt that you should have done something, or that you shouldn’t.  Worse, indecision at the time could render you unable to act at all, frozen in what is sometimes call analysis paralysis.

 If you don’t have some mastery over your emotions, your moral choice could be irrelevant as you either freeze in fear, or become too violent from anger.

By the way, in case you weren’t familiar with the terms, Ethics is the study of principal and theory about right and wrong, while Morality relates to the practical behaviour based on such theory.  However, the terms are often used synonymously.

 While I don’t want to write a book on ethical theory, some consideration of how you should behave is relevant here.  If all you learn from training in Kung Fu is how to fight, we might as well have just sold you a gun.  A real master makes those around feel safer for his/her presence. 

Every increase in power must be accompanied by a proportionate increase in integrity.

Let us consider how you might arrive at an ethical system.  Bear in mind that most people have several ethical systems running simultaneously and this can be fine unless the systems offer different outcomes and then you have yourself a moral dilemma.  It is likely that you make some moral decisions based on traditional religious views that are so culturally ingrained that you have not considered where they came from.  You may continue to hold these morals even though you don’t believe in the religion yourself.  Such views are very resistant to change as they form part of the very structure of the universe for us and make us very uncomfortable to even consider questioning them.

Let me summarise most ethical theories for you.  As you enact a moral choice you are likely to be considering either the past or the future.  You may be referring to a rule laid down in the past, or considering the outcome in the future.

A Deontological Ethical system (deon meaning duty) is code based.  You could have been given a set of commandments or rules.  These are usually hierarchical or put in an order of preference to avoid contradictions, for example if telling the truth will get an innocent person killed, then it might be morally right to lie.  Action is therefore predetermined as moral or immoral.  This way of thinking takes away the anxiety of making a decision as, for most situations, the decision is already made and is set out in a rule.

A Teleological Ethical system (teleos meaning goal) looks to the likely consequences of your actions to determine if they are right or wrong.  When you get to the event you make the decision based on your best guess.  And there is the problem; you cannot foresee all outcomes.  These systems vary, mainly, by the criteria by which you are judging the outcome.  For example, are you aiming to do the thing that produces the most loving consequence, the most happiness, contentment, prosperity or converts to a religion?  A more sophisticated version of this asks, what would be the consequences if my considered action were universalised, i.e. would I want to live in a world where everyone did what I’m about to do?  The simple, and almost universal, version of this is simply to ask, would I like this done to me, or if you find it hurtful, don’t do it to other or treat others as you’d like to be treated.  This is asking you to consider the outcome and to prioritise other’s feelings as equal to your own.  This gives us a sliding scale of personal responsibility from an injunction to do no harm, through, do good when presented with the opportunity, all the way to deliberately look for opportunity to do as much good as you can.

Most law has to work on the basis of pre-decided rules, even if the rule is intended to produce a particular outcome.

Most of us, most of the time, use a combination of such systems.  We might use a written code to choose a desired outcome even if we can’t follow the letter of the law, but what we might consider to be the spirit of the law. 

A major problem is caused by people using a law intended for good to cause harm.  Also, people get very upset when they intend to cause one consequence but the actual outcome is quite different or even the opposite. 

If you are a professional in a legal system, one of the biggest headaches you will encounter is determining people’s intention.  You could forgive a poorly considered act if the person’s intended outcome was sound, or at the very least their intention might be considered in mitigation.  But I am not writing about legal systems here.

In this, I am aiming to help you develop your own moral compass rather than suggest a system to judge all moral choices of all people.  I want you to be able to evaluate your own moral choices and be comfortable with them, both before and after you act.  This will help you avoid prolonged hesitation or guilt and self-recriminations. 

You are not a computer with perfect knowledge of everyone’s intentions, or of every potential future outcome.  This makes ethics much more like an art than a science.  But all arts require practice and can be done with more or less skill.

It seems self-evident to me that you should judge yourself by your intentions, you know your own intentions even when you don’t know another’s.  While it is natural to consider your own interests and those of your loved one’s as priorities, don’t let those interests be at the expense of others.  Give all people equal consideration.  Remember the ‘all people’ includes you.  If you can do no more, at least do no harm.  Remember that doing deliberate good or deliberate bad for or to others will ultimately benefit or injure you, affecting your psychological development in a way that will determine whether you have any joy and contentment in life.  If, to protect some from the deliberate actions of others, you have to harm those others, do the least harm, but remember that your actions in doing so are the consequences of their choices and intentions.  These are axioms, meaning I can’t and don’t intend to prove their validity.  However, I think you will find that if you try to construct arguments against them, you will find that you feel uncomfortable in the effort and have to question yourself as to why you would even want to.

One of the greatest difficulties in developing your own moral compass will be in finding that you are out of step with your own culture.  “When they see you dancing to music they can’t hear, they will think you mad.”  It can take more courage and strength to be go against the cultural flow than merely doing what you think is right.  We are herd animals and crave, at a very deep level, the sense of fitting in and being accepted by our tribe.

A word about pacifism.  As a high principle, being a pacifist always sounds very altruistic; the idea that even in the face of personal attack one would offer no violent response.  I’ve even heard martial artists say that they would only use defensive techniques.  Strategically that doesn’t work.  If you only blocked incoming blows, all you do is postpone your defeat.  If you want to win or more importantly, not loose, you will have to use an attacking technique.  If you want to inflict the minimum harm and you have the necessary skill, you can deliver a strike that will render your attacker unconscious or temporarily unable to continue.  Trust me, that takes a lot more skill than simply disabling or killing your opponent.  Hence, the more altruistic you want to be, the more passive you want to be, the more skilful you need to be.

The other problem with being totally passive is that evil prospers when good men stand by and do nothing.  Should you intervene to stop another being hurt or killed?  If you do nothing to stop evil, when you are able to, you might be reasonably considered a collaborator; perhaps not as guilty as the perpetrator, but certainly partially responsible.  Protecting yourself is Self-Defence.  Protecting others is to be a true Warrior.

I mentioned earlier that you can visualise scenarios so clearly that they become an experience in their own right.  If you watch the news, read novels, listen to stories etc, you will find that there are many opportunities to consider scenarios where you have the chance to consider how you should and would respond.  Practice the thought process for every situation that you hear about and aim to reach clarity as to your own intentions in any situation.

What is often the harder aspect of acting morally is not the theoretical response that you think you would like to have, but the very practical response of your emotions.  Anger can cause you to react with too much violence, fear can cause you to freeze.

Both anger and fear are reasonable, rational and all too human reactions to many situations.  Over the weeks and months of this program, we will look at how you can learn to control and focus your emotional reactions in a way that will enable you to respond in a way of your choice, not entirely dictated by your physical emotional reaction.

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7. Effortless skill takes a lot of effort

6 July 2020

I was talking the other day to someone who said that they practiced Chi Kung, but they didn’t do any formal movements or set breathing.  They did it intuitively, they said.  They also allowed their body’s needs for nutrition to guide their eating and their own instincts would be a better guide to martial arts techniques in the event of having to fight.  Now this got me thinking.  This idea of intuition needs some unpacking.  In the case of this particular person it took a couple of questions to establish that they knew almost nothing about Chi Kung and whatever they thought they were doing; their use of Chi Kung was limited to the name.  However, it did make me wonder, how much can we listen to our body, rely on intuition and follow our instincts?

I found myself remembering musicians who did, it seemed, play by intuition.  They could make up the melody as they played it, totally improvised, spontaneous, fitting the mood of the listeners and apparently utterly inspired.  Ah, but hold on.  Did they pick up an instrument for the first time and do that?  I’m pretty sure the answer is no.  What they did was, they practiced with their instrument until it became as extension of their own body, until they played it unconsciously.  They learned how music is structured so that they would stay within a key without giving it a second thought and if they moved from a major to a minor key and changed the tempo during a piece, it would be unconsciously deliberate to change the mood.  Their understanding of what order of notes would ‘work’ was also perfectly unconscious.  Such playing is not really intuitive and instinctive, it is the result of years of learned method and technique, but learned so well that it can be done without the effort of the cerebral cortex.  It is the cerebellum, an area of the brain whose functions we are not conscious of, that is responsible for such actions; much the way most people can walk, use a knife and fork or indeed the way typists don’t need to consider the keys, but simply look at the screen and choose their words.

What we consider intuition is principally the ability to know or do something unconsciously.  For example, you realise that you are aware of a person in a crowded room who is feeling nervous or out of place.  Is that intuition or did you simply notice some body language that implied such feelings, but you were not aware of the initial perception because that happened at an unconscious level.  Of course, the amount of our perceptions that reach the conscious level is truly tiny, in the region of a billionth of the actual information that comes in through our various senses.  The bits of information that reach the conscious part of the mind will depend on what we are habitually tuned in to.  The same will be true for those who just know what the weather is going to do etc.

So, what about intuitively knowing how to eat, exercise or even fight?  Ask yourself this, does your appetite always direct you to the right balance of nutrition?  We appear to have evolved over millennia while sufficient nutrition was a rarity.  As a result, we all have an inbuilt tendency to fill up when we get the chance.  We ‘intuitively’ know that fat has a lot of potential energy, so are automatically drawn to it.  We know ‘intuitively’ that a fruit that is ripe won’t give you a bad stomach, is sweet and also full of energy, so again we are drawn to it.  During the millions of years of scarcity these were useful survival instincts, but today, when we have access to unlimited fat and sweet foods, following our intuition, our instincts, will kill us. Whenever I hear someone say they just intuitively know what is a healthy diet, it always turns out to be a combination of what they were fed as children and what they have learned since.  What they really mean is that they don’t consciously consider it, but of course their unconscious, learned knowledge is guiding them.  It may be that their learned knowledge is, fortunately, correct and in which case, they may well appear to have ‘good intuition’. 

It seems therefore that if, and only if, you have a thoroughly learned skill, you will likely reach the point of using it unconsciously, which will seem to you as if you are not thinking about it, because consciously, you’re not.  You may well think of that as intuition or indeed it may feel like inspiration but actually it just means that you are very proficient.  One person may certainly aggressively fight with what they think of as instinct, but it is most likely just a few moves that they have seen others do, have imagined doing them (which the unconscious brain will have remembered as if real) and they aren’t consciously thinking about what they are doing because they are simply in a fight or flight state.  Such a person will likely lose to anyone with real skill, but they may well do okay against another untrained person by a combination of a simple technique and a lot of aggression.

It is always going to be the case that what seems to be intuitive, instinctive, unconscious skills are always the result of many hours of training.  Shifting skills back to the unconscious cerebellum is the normal process of learning.  Effortless skill, takes a lot of effort.

White rhino

6. Rhino or Unicorn

6 July 2020

When the rhinoceros was first described to Europeans it was almost certainly from the accounts of sailors who returned with stories of the animal.   Even so, they probably first saw only dead examples at trading stations and ports.  What did they report?  Stories of an animal as big as a horse, but stronger, with a single horn in the middle of its head and untameable.  The legend of the Unicorn was created.  Until only recently, there was more information about the beautiful and mythical unicorn than there was about the ugly rhino.  It is an uncomfortable truth, but we would rather our stories were beautiful, fabulous and mythical than ugly and true.

Over the years many martial arts have gone through a similar transformation.  The Roman father would teach his son that it was “a sweet and seemly thing to die for your country” even though the average Roman battle field was far from “sweet and seemly.”  The smell of terrified sweating men slipping in blood and ripped out intestines.  The sound of agonised screaming, pitiful whimpering and men crying for their mothers is not really the image to inspire the young to go and die to make a few aristocrats a bit richer.  Wars throughout history have received a similar literary treatment.  Glorious in the telling, brutal in the realisation.  

I have seen and been taught some beautiful martial art forms (patterns/kata) only to discovered that the movements involved are so far from their practical application that they are like comparing the Unicorn to the Rhinoceros.   Learning the form becomes totally disconnected from learning the techniques.  One starts a lesson learning an elegant series of movements that are the unicorn of martial arts.  Then, when you break down the form into its individual parts and try to apply each technique, you find that you have to do each movement so different (rhino like) that you end up learning two versions of the same technique, one that is pretty and one that works.  The problem with this is that it is often the form version of the technique that you learn automatically, or unconsciously and therefore the one you will use in the stressful situation of a real fight.  At its worse, you can have movements in a form that no one now even knows how they might work in a fight, they are just there like some strange choreography.  At some point in the past, some master included a technique in a form to help teach his students to use it within the context of other techniques, but time and the martial arts version of Chinese whispers has reduced the technique to a meaningless pretty flourish of the hands.  This is why every technique in every form of Tao Te Kung Fu should be performed exactly as it is to be used in real life.  Don’t be tempted to embellish or change a technique to make it more beautiful or complicated for the sake of appearance or to make a form appear more elegant, it won’t do you any favours when you need it to save your life.

Now ask yourself which warning is more effective on a security fence.

“Keep out. Rhinoceros loose in this field.” or “Beware of the Unicorn”

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5. The Kung Fu Living Approach to Learning

6 July 2020

When I learned to type I practiced the sentence “the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog” because it uses every letter and if you can type it without looking you have the alphabet cracked.  When my kids learned to play musical instruments, I remember them going up and down the scales and arpeggios.  These, not only ensured that they learned how to play every note, but they got used to various sets of notes that tend to be used together according to the signature key of the tune.  The forms in Tao Te Kung Fu forms have a similar approach, particularly at the advanced level when they have the characteristics of the different elements, as if each were a in different Key.  That is where the similarity ends however.  The Forms in Tao Te Kung Fu are developed to ensure that the techniques are arranged in a way that they can actually be used.  Any combination of two, three or more moves from any of the forms could be used exactly as they are and will be effective in any real conflict.

It is vitally important that you practice your forms while visualising an opponent and perform each technique as if it were real life.  Let me give you one example of how things can go wrong.  This come from a man who trains police officers how to use their guns in the US.  Some years ago, he had been running classes on arrest procedure.  The recruits would role-play exactly what they would say and how they say it, to make sure that when they were anxious, on the street, they would get it right.  He taught them to point their finger like a gun and tell the pretend bad guy to put their hands on a wall or car bonnet, spread their legs and then inform them of their rights etc.  It was with some alarm that after one batch of new recruits had arrested their first real criminals, he heard that one officer had gone through the entire procedure with his gun still in his holster, but a stern finger pointed threateningly at the dangerous bad guy.  The fact that he had done it so convincingly that the bad guy had complied with the instructions is beside the point and the topic of a different discussion.  If the bad guy hadn’t also been so nervous that he wasn’t thinking straight either, it could have gone badly wrong.

Over years of working in nightclubs and pubs I have seen and taken part in hundreds of physical confrontations.  There are some things one can generalise about.  Most fights are over within a couple of seconds.  If they continue beyond two seconds, it’s either because the combatants don’t really want to be fighting, but feel obliged to, or because they are too drunk, or it’s because the fight is over and one is simply now beating the other up.  The guys who like fighting and do it week after week are usually not very skilled, but they tend to have a short combination that works consistently, so they use it and if they need to, repeat it.  They tend to win because past victories have given them confidence, they rarely come up against a skilled fighter and they don’t stop to think, they just fall into their practiced combination.  The combinations in all the Forms in Tao Te Kung Fu are functional, practical combinations of techniques that will work for you regardless of your size, strength, age, sex or level of fitness.

“Tao Te” means something like the virtuous way, and refers to the effectiveness or power that comes from following a natural way, a way that takes account of all aspects of human physiology, the mechanics of anatomy and the practical tactics required to win in real confrontations.  Tao Te Kung Fu as taught in the Kung Fu Living program takes advantage of the most recent developments in the neuroscience of skill acquisition, utilises techniques from a wide range of traditions and benefits from decades of real-life experience in the security industry.

Many martial art styles require such levels of conditioning, strength and fitness that only young strong men can really excel; and they will often pay the price in later years as the physical punishment of their training takes its toll.  Because Tao Te Kung Fu has been developed to enable a smaller, weaker fighter to overcome a larger and stronger opponent it is ideally suited to people of all sizes and ages.  Not being dependent on vast strength, Tao Te Kung Fu puts an emphasis on speed and precise targeting, with many fast striking combinations and close-range techniques.  While the training will help you become stronger, fitter and more supple, but your capacity to excel in Tao Te Kung Fu is not dependent on these.

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4. Our philosophy

6 July 2020

Truth is like a jewel you find in the mud, you might not be looking for it, you might not have known what it would look like, but when you find it, it stands out for what it is.

Much of what we do at Kung Fu Living is based around our philosophical approach, so it seems appropriate to share a thought or two about that.

It is our belief that Kung Fu should never be reduced to something as trivial as fighting skills.
Kung Fu really means achieving excellence through hard work or discipline.  It is about becoming a master of the art of living.

For some, from many different martial arts backgrounds, this blog may appear to be out of place.  There are many martial arts in which the fighting skills are preeminent or indeed all they learn.  For many, training in Kung Fu is a way to get fitter, stronger and more supple, a way to develop confidence by having the ability to defend themselves in dangerous situations, or just a fun skill to learn.  Obviously, it is all of those things, but if that is all you get from Kung Fu, it would be like thinking of a meal with friends as merely an opportunity to eat.  You would, I believe, be missing the heart of it.
For us and many others, martial arts training is so much more; it becomes an integral part of your way of life, an aspect of your identity.  For some, it becomes a spiritual discipline, a journey of self-development and self-realisation.

Kung Fu Living is for those people who want to discover The Way of The Warrior as a spiritual journey; a path to self-fulfilment.

The Contemplations in every day of the program are intended to be axiomatic.  An axiom is a truth that I may not be able to prove, but if I share it with you, you’ll be able to see that it must be the case; it is self-evident.  We often use such a way of thinking when it comes to rights.  I can’t prove that we should have, or grant others with, any particular right; I can only state that it seems to me that people should have this or that right, and if you can’t see it, I have nothing to fall back on.  We are all stumped when someone asks ‘why?’ to what we consider obvious; ‘Why should we try to be fair?’  ‘Why can’t I kill him?’  We can gape like a fish and bluster ‘are you serious?’ but if someone holds out, pretending that they can’t ‘just see it’ we struggle to know where to start.  If they really can’t see it, we will tend to conclude that they are psychopathic, that there is something wrong with their brain.  Indeed, such a person would be dangerous and probably will be locked up eventually.

In eastern philosophy the skill of the sage or Sifu is not so much in seeing the meaning of life, but in being able to show it to someone else in a way that enables them to say ‘oh yes, it’s obvious now you’ve put it like that.’

My hope is that as you follow this program you will often think, ‘well yes, I think I always knew that.’

referee lifting hand of winner fighter - learn kung fu online

3. Sport or Tournament Styles

6 July 2020

Historically, many martial arts have tried to ensure their continuation by becoming a sport once the conflict or social condition that lead to their creation was past.  Although this has proved to be a very successful strategy, no one wants to take part in, or watch, a sport in which one or both of the contestants die within the first two seconds.  Therefore, a set of rules have to be introduced to make it safe.  Which, when you consider the essential purpose of martial art, is a bit like a system of gardening that ensures nothing grows.  Inevitably the style will change to match the rules, often becoming unnecessarily complicated, because when a simple move would hurt or kill your opponent, your need a more complicated technique that will achieve victory harmlessly.  You will hear participants in some competitions say, “I could have won in the first seconds if I’d been allowed to do this or that.”   Sometimes a slimmed down selection of techniques, for example boxing, where the gloves limit you to only punches, means that victory begins to depend much more on fitness and strength rather than just skill.  If we wanted to train people to take part in tournaments, we would have to miss out many of the most effective techniques.  It is not uncommon for people to train to a high level in some sport styles only to find that when they get attacked their skills are of no use, because no one showed them how to win a fight, only how to keep a fight going for minutes without anyone getting hurt.

With that said, many tournament styles are exciting sports in their own right, and often they give great physical confidence too.  That translates into an ability to stay calm and in control in the face of aggression, which is often enough to enable the participant to demonstrate confidence and their skills may be perfectly sufficient. They need to be careful though and understand the limitations of their style, as they simply won’t have been taught how to quickly win against someone with a more practical style.

martial art woman wrapping hands ready for training - learn kung fu online

2. Introduction to martial arts

6 July 2020

A passion pursued with discipline and a discipline pursued with passion; both an art and a science.

It is, of course, from Mars, the Roman God of war, that we derive the terms ‘Martial’ and ‘Martial Arts.’  So long as humans have felt (or indeed been) threatened by other people they have developed skills to defend and/or attack.  Many of these skill sets developed into complete systems; systems that could be structured in a way that made them easier to pass on or teach.  I say ‘easier’ because once you have a codified formal structure nothing gets missed out, like learning the alphabet ensures that you, at least, know all the letters.

While there are only so many useful martial movements that a typical able bodied human can make, some movements will come more naturally to some people and be more applicable for them.  If I run up and down hills every day, or ride a horse over vast pastoral grassland and have very strong legs, it might be more natural for me to use a kick.  If I spend my days wielding an axe and lifting cut logs around, I might find a punch comes more naturally to me, taking advantage of my upper body strength.   Among the ancient Greeks a martial art, referred to as pancratium in the Olympics, developed differently in different areas.  In some city states they specialised in kicks, in others, throws, grappling or hand strikes.  In China a similar thing happened; different styles developed in the various regions.  Styles will even vary from one school to another and between individuals in the same school.  With identical techniques available to them, an eighteen stone, six-foot four guy will apply his skill differently to a seven stone, five foot nothing woman.

All styles developed in response to particular needs/threats and particular social/political conditions.  Will the other guy be armed?  What with?  Will I be armed?  What with?  Will I be unarmed in the middle of a battle because my weapon has broken and I’ll need to take one off an enemy, preferably killing him in the process?  Will my opponent be wearing armour, rendering strikes ineffective and require me to use limb manipulation?  Will I be unarmed because the military dictators of my country have forbidden weapons, meaning I have to work out how to use agricultural hand tools as weapons?  Am I from a race of small statue banned from having weapons by the conquering enemy who are generally bigger and armed?  The answers to all of these questions have produced particular styles of martial arts.

Over years, generations and even centuries, the original need or social conditions framing the development of the martial art may have gone or changed.  The practice of a style may have become a tradition within a culture; continuing because “we’ve always done it like this.”  One way to practice skills and keep them sharp is to develop a sporting contest that uses the skill, hence Jousting, Discus, Javelin and Archery.  Of course, sports in which competitors die soon become unpopular, so they have to be developed to make them less dangerous.  However, fencing can be practiced if suitable armour is worn.  Two guys can practice punching each other if they wear gloves and agree not to hit each other on the back of the head.  It’s possible to practice grappling on the ground if you agree not bite or rip each other’s eyes out.  In this way many martial arts have flourished.  To a greater or lesser extent, all of these martial ‘sports’ have retained many elements that could still be put to use in a real fight.  Boxing, Muay Thai or Tae Kwon Do may be of more use in self-defence than Jousting, Tai Chi (when taught as a meditative exercise) or Discus.  It is for this reason that Tao Te Kung Fu is not a tournament sport; it is first and foremost a martial art designed to work in real life.  No effective technique is removed on the grounds that it is too dangerous to use in a sport.

The disciplined practice of almost any skilled activity, whether sport, dance or art will result in a range of benefits; perhaps physical fitness, a more astute analytical mind, or the deep self confidence that any expertise tends to grant the practitioner.  The martial arts are the perfect example of this; a discipline that strengthens the body, the mind and the spirit.

Unfortunately, in some martial arts the training techniques have become bogged down with an over emphasis on tradition.  It is not unusual to find some styles that, to this day, use exercises that cause chronic injury, in spite of better practices being available.  The reason for this is usually that when the exercises were developed the instructors were aiming to ensure a soldier’s fitness to survive the next year or two on battlefields with no consideration of their long-term health after the age of thirty.  Blindly following tradition is not a good reason to continue such practices. 

For many today the emphasis and goal of their training is the all-round physical conditioning that it can provide; not simply strength, endurance, flexibility and balance, but precise coordination and asymmetrical fluidity of movement. 

For some it is the rich depths of tradition, ceremony, theories, principles, techniques and metaphysical philosophies that even a lifetime of study couldn’t hope to truly master.  Many find that the meditative focus of coordinated thought and motion aid both concentration and relaxation.

Some, most value the humble, quiet confidence and the sense of security that strengthens the human character and overflows into all aspects of life, from business to relationships.