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Food for thought and quotes for pondering

 

Quotes for pondering:

  • A student said to his master: "You teach me fighting, but you talk about peace. How do you reconcile the two?" The master replied: "It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war." - unknown
  • "Maximum efficient use of energy, mutual welfare and benefit." - Judo maxim
  • "Don't think, feel." - Bruce Lee
  • "As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do." - Andrew Carnegie
  • "Become the one." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • "When crossing hands with ordinary people you do not need to use too many techniques, broad knowledge of many techniques is not refinement; the changes within a body are simply infinite. When skilled people compete in martial skills it is similar to a general using his soldiers: having good soldiers without brave officers and you can not win battles, having good skill in technique without good kungfu and you can not win over others. Therefore in speaking of soldiers it is not in their numbers that is important it is their bravery; skill and technique being plentiful is not as important as their refinement." - Gao Yisheng
  • "The power comes from motion, not emotion." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi in reference to piquan
  • "Da Ying Shi Zhen De, Da Shu Shi Jia De!" (rough translation: If you fight (hit) and win its real (true). If you fight and lose its fake. This is Zhang's response to a question from a young Hong Yixiang about internal/external, fighting, the true meaning of internal skill, what "winning" a fight means, etc.) - Zhang Zhunfeng
  • "Success in MA requires a good system, a good teacher and a good student. One must respect the system, respect the teacher and respect the training in order to succeed." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • "The wisest mind has something yet to learn." - George Santayana
  • "Fighting is live or die. Sparring is win or lose." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • "Fighting is fighting. Not internal. Not external. Just fighting." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • "The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions." - Confucious
  • "Internal martial arts is a way of training." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • "It's how you train that makes you good." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • " Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
  • "When you find ‘relax' you will find structure. It's like driving in a car when it is raining outside. Inside the car you are relaxed… drinking coffee, listening to the radio but people outside in the rain are going “Ahhh, I'm getting wet”….they are distracted. Stay relaxed inside." - Luo Dexiu Laoshi
  • "Walking is man's best medicine." - Hippocrates

 

Food for thought from Wood Laoshi:

  • Training among school brothers and sisters is not the time for egos, there is no winning or losing among us. There should always be a commitment to continual self-improvement and there should always be a commitment to mutual improvement. It is not important to be better than someone else, but to be better than yesterday.
  • Think of interactions in terms of angles, shapes, planes, trajectories of movement, lines, etc. Just determine where to be, where not to be, where they are most likely to want to be next, where they are able to go next, where you are, where they are - its not really thinking about it either. Just fit in where you should be and flow with / flow around / redirect the energy.
  • Skill in martial arts isn't magically acquired or somehow conferred through osmosis by hanging around in a martial arts class. You've got to put in the work on your own, you've got to do your homework.
  • One aspect of humility in training is learning to look at one's self first. While it may be protective of your ego to say that "that doesn't work" or "he punched me wrong," its self-defeating in the long run. We train to see the truth, and there are lessons to be learned along the way. If one doesn't look honestly and unrelentingly at those lessons they're only cheating themselves.

 

Copies of some of my writings on the forum:

  • Xingyi's pretty intimately connected to our lineage of Gao style. Luo Dexiu's done Bagua and Xingyi. The Hung's all did Bagua and Xingyi. Zhang Zhunfeng did Bagua and Xingyi. Gao Yisheng did Bagua and Xingyi. Wu Mengxia did Bagua and Xingyi. Li Cunyi did Bagua and Xingyi, ... as did Zhou Yuxiang, Zhang Zhaodong, Han Muxia, and some say even Cheng Tinghua. Even if they all taught it separately, imagine yourself what came out when they were fighting.