wayne hansen wrote:I was lucky with my first two teachers
They set the path for all my future teaching
I hate to think where I would be now if I had some of the current crop
Same
Yeah, the current crop. Some here at RSF. Can you imagine?
Internal Martial Art:
Standard practice of general movement principles that is meaningless these days. Art sought in choreographic mimicry.
Sifu Self-own can't even explain it to himself in a way that points to anything practical.
Tai Chi Thoughts guy contradicts himself and doesn't even care as long as his blog gets attention.
Orangecat...whew
The other hack that doesn't know where their psychotropic delusion of understanding and attainment will land from one week to the next - acting on whatever manic impulse gives them the tingles at the time.
Piling more words on the thing only buries it deeper - putting it further out of reach. It's already out of reach for most people anyway - addictions, distractions and dependencies...living outside of oneself more and more each day and expecting to find IT.
There's more than one way up the hill - but only two more.
Digging deep into the the internal, intrinsic energy requires the luck of finding a teacher who has it, and then being around the right people who follow that teacher without altering or meddling with the teacher's process. Like what windwalker has been doing. A rare thing.
The other two require the practice of the fighting method(s) - lots of solo and lots of testing. One way involves building martial body with long weapons/tools/implements and empty hand solo. Another way involving empty hand and properly structured sparring. The in-house testing needs to be comprehensively structured in order to be congruent with the solo work so the carry-over is seamless. The antagonist applies pressure without regard for the method the other is working at internalizing, as often as not. That means contact using the lightest of touch to the hardest, and realistic patterns of attack. And then going out of the incubator and testing against people (non-initiates) who are genuinely trying to destroy their opponent.
Anything other than those three is less than a half-measure to developing Internal Martial Art.