gongfu

 One of the biggest problems people have in learning gong fu, is effectively and smoothly going from one to stance to another. Once sequence or form practice makes this possible, the problem that follows is usually either choosing a way to stand to execute a technique without thinking about it, or finding the right height to stand at in a stance. If you are free fighting, and you have to evaluate what your doing, your probably going to lose. Unless the other person is evaluating themself even more scrutinizingly. Should something ever happen in your everyday life, requiring you to use your gong fu, it’s useless if you have to plan your attack or worse your defense with a lot of thought. Especially when it comes to something as basic and natural as where and how to stand.

 Lighten up. The reason that we practice stancework is obvious, and it has nothing to do with making sure that your  standing a certain way when your fighting. Stancework was discovered and refined to find all of the possible ways to move while upright, and strengthening their functional ability. At a very high intermediate level, your stances still won’t look proper when actually used. Perhaps, a real deep master of gong fu would have perfect stancework while fighting. I can tell you though that 6 hours a day, 3 years later, you will probably still have high partial stances in fighting, though you’ll be able to use the skills gained from stancework at every point in the fight. There is nothing wrong with high partial stances. In fact, I think it demonstrates your practical understanding of real gong fu. The problem would be, if you were doing sequences, or training and were using high partial stances. But that would require a stupidity too akward to suggest.

 When your stancework is strong, which, the way I was taught, takes three years, you can easily “outstep” people. People can’t approach or retreat from you for example  unless you let them, an other thing is that if they aren’t swinging at any given moment, you can use a proper stance to knock them over, even if they significantly outweigh you.

 Stances are a way to examine your own body mechanics. Stances are a device first, and a tool later. Since through stances, you discover how to use any way of standing to various ends, even proper stances can be effectively applied, which is when you start to be able to use the actual stances. A beautiful thing to watch. When that happens, the stances take on a different form. But that doesn’t matter if we’re still worried about how to get from one stance to the next.

 The answer is in understanding. Gong fu is simple. But it takes time to unravel it into the simple. Once you digest what you know, you’ll see more.

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