G’day Bruce!

So I took the last week off from outdoor training-instead concentrating on Nei Dan stuff-due to the big bunch of wildfires in the area making the air rather dangerous for us asthmatics. Got a nasty roughing up of my trachea in the process. So anyway, my ’student’ and I got back on the horse today. We did the usual qigong warm up, but I decided today that instead of teaching straight Taiji, I would teach some self defense basics rooted in Shaolin that honestly have more to do with Bruce Lee’s methodology of body mechanics and Hung Gar than, say, traditional longfist or Kempo. (The style I’ve been training in for the better part of the last 5 years is very heavily derived from Kempo, especially in its lower levels.) I figured since she had no real fighting background, she could probably use a dose of proper teaching of things like punching, stepping (getting out of the way), and simple wrist blocking/coiling. What I found was that instead of the Pai lum Kempo I’d been training in for so long coming out, it was rather Jow Ga and Jeet Kune Do, but modified by the soft principles of Taiji and the soft-hard principles of Dragon style Shaolin. It was, well, refereshing. I felt a confidence return that I hadn’t felt in a long time (e.g. the antithesis of “you don’t know the system so you really don’t know anything.” The odd thing was that I never got that from the Head Instructor-a 7th degree, and only occasionally from the 2nd instructor-a 6th degree. I mostly got it from my best friend, a 20 yr old 3rd degree. Very disheartening.)

What I found was that the lead-hand punching techniques that I had learned from Jeet Kune Do suddenly reappeared after years of being sort-of shuffled off to the side. Ditto with the wrist blocking and coiling I got from Jow Ga. What also happened was I started to see a sort of union and balance with Taiji techniques, finding Yi and qi in places I hadn’t looked for it, finding Taiji jins in the most unexpected places as I was scrambling for the best way to teach my student how to defend herself with proper technique. For example: the soft wrist block-jiu sao (sp?) in Jow Ga. When applied to a punch, its natural carving motion is one of the best intercept techniques I can think of. You sort of carve over the wrist/forearm with your wrist at a bit of an angle and apply a sticking/listening jin via your pinky. In the process, a very natural next step is to turn that carve into a wrist grab. What came next is really elementary, but before I began serious Taiji study I never would have known it existed. Yes, thats right enterprising Taiji-ers, the next thing that popped into my mind was “hey…why not use pluck jin here to bring the guy toward you and off balance…that totally kills his root-abruptly too. Hard to recover from.” So, i plucked, and wow…it felt RIGHT. Like you could take the Taiji principles and apply it in the least-expected places and…suddenly you’ve got something very interesting on your hands.

Anyone else out there got stories they can relate like this?