My focus in teaching Wing Chun (詠春拳 Yongchun Quan), the Shaolin tendon method (少林易筋經 Shaolin Yijin Jing), the Yin Yang and 5 Elements method (陰陽五行功 Yinyang Wuxing Gong) as well as the Daoyin method (導引功 Daoyin Gong) clearly is on the internal aspects of all of these practices.
This blog explains how an approach to movement traditions based on Daoist philosophy cannot only enrich a movement practice, but offers a path for a much deeper transformation process.
Now there is also an updated English translation of „The Healing Aspects of Wing Chun – An initial discussion of the Siu Nim Tau, the first form of Wing Chun“, a paper that was originally published in German. From this page of the Journal of Martial Arts Research (JOMAR) you can now download the German as well as the English version of this paper: https://ojs.uni-bayreuth.de/index.php/jomar/article/view/133
There exist many versions about the origin of the martial art Wing Chun. And it is not always easy to tell which story or what part of which story is correct. Yip Man’s (葉問師公) story of Wing Chun’s origin was an important one to me, because I was a student in his lineage. It puzzled me for a long time.
The movements you can already see in the first videos and the ones you will be seeing in the coming videos of this series about the internal aspects of the first three Wing Chun forms on my YouTube channel, are not the complete movements from the Siu Nim Tau (小念頭). I take movements from the different sections of the Siu Nim Tau and break them up into tiny bits. This way it is much easier to see how you can take a step by step approach to come to grips with the internal aspects of the Siu Nim Tau.
After you feel that you got a better grasp of the overall connectedness within one of those bits, you do the whole section of the Siu Nim Tau it belongs to. Then you observe whether you can import the feeling that you have just developed within a mini movement into a more complex set of movements. It is a back and forth between these bits and the whole section, or even the complete form. The Siu Nim Tau is way too complex to get something meaningful out of it by only repeating it as a whole over and over again.
I will soon start a video series on the internal aspects of the first three Wing Chun forms (Siu Nim Tau, Chum Kiu, Biu Jee – 詠春拳的小念頭、尋橋與標指). It will be published on YouTube. Here you find the link to an introductory conversation between Steve Cook, San Diego, and me about the background of my approach: https://youtu.be/u585HnACyTk
„Practicing the Dao, you let go every day. You let go and let go, to get to non-action.“ (Daodejing, chapter 48)
In my last blog post I was talking about ziran in the context of internal practices. However, following movements, observing them and allowing them to simply be sounds far easier than it actually is.
READ MOREMany of my students are in the slightly older category with a variety of physical problems, hypertension being one of them. So, recently, I was asked by a student what to do when you have back and neck pain after practicing the Yin Yang method.
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