Still the Student

Still the Student

My Sifu taught me far more than I could ever realistically practise.

I was thinking about this during this morning's Qigong class.

Whenever I trained with Grandmaster Wong Kiew Kit, there were always more practices, skills and ways of exploring than I could possibly take away and train deeply at one time.

So I didn't try.

I would sometimes take one thing that had particularly caught my attention and spend the next year exploring it. Not simply repeating the technique, but practising it, experiencing it and gradually discovering what was there.

Over the years this gave me a broad training, but it also gave me something else. It taught me that we don't necessarily understand a teaching when we first receive it.

Sometimes we need to live with it.

Coming full circle

My training has always seemed to move in circles.

I return to the foundations. Then something takes me a little deeper. Something else catches my attention and I follow that for a while. Eventually I find myself returning again to something I thought I already knew.

But of course, I am not the same person returning.

Recently, internal force has been calling me back.

I don't really know why.

And perhaps that is part of what has changed in me too. I don't feel such a need to know why.

For much of this last year I have increasingly approached my practice as an explorer rather than as the person who knows what is supposed to happen.

There are foundations I trust. Skills that Sifu gave us. Principles that have guided decades of practice.

But beyond that, there is an enormous landscape still to discover.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of practising an art for a long time. You can come back to where you started and discover something you couldn't see before.

Returning to internal force

When I first encountered internal force training, it immediately grabbed my attention.

I had spent many years practising martial arts and I was searching for something I felt was missing.

Internal force seemed to be it.

And in one sense, it was.

I discovered that it was possible to develop considerable force without relying upon muscular strength and tension. But I also began discovering things I hadn't been looking for.

I had more energy.

My mind became clearer.

There was a groundedness and stability that came from the training. And there was another dimension to it that was much harder to describe, where physical training, energy and spiritual cultivation no longer seemed quite so separate.

Back then, having more energy mostly meant that I could do more.

And I did.

A lot more.

Looking back from where I am now, that makes me smile.

Because as internal force has begun calling me back again, I find myself approaching it with a different question.

I'm less interested in how much energy I can develop.

I'm interested in what happens when that energy becomes something we can rest within.

Strength without holding

There was a moment in this morning's practice when this became particularly clear to me.

We had been practising Pushing Mountains and Separating Water, cultivating internal force through the arms and palms before returning to stillness.

I found myself saying:

We're not holding ourselves, but any position that becomes held gets held by the energy, the force that you've built.

That stayed with me.

Because so much of my exploration recently has been around holding and unholding.

We often associate strength with our ability to hold.

Hold our posture.

Hold ourselves together.

Hold our emotions.

Hold our ground.

Keep going.

Perhaps there is another kind of strength.

One that doesn't require us to continually brace ourselves in order to remain steady.

In internal force training, what can look quite powerful from the outside can feel remarkably soft from within. The body isn't limp, but neither does it need to become unnecessarily tense.

There is structure, but less effort.

Strength, but less forcefulness.

Perhaps even resilience without quite so much holding.

What kind of resilience?

Towards the end of this morning's class, a student, Kate, asked a lovely question.

Could cultivating internal force ultimately be cultivating resilience? Physical resilience, emotional resilience and spiritual resilience?

I think it can.

But my understanding of resilience has changed too.

There was a time when resilience meant that I could withstand more. I could hold steady when things became difficult. I could keep going.

There is undoubtedly value in that.

But sometimes even resilience can become another form of holding.

We become very good at holding ourselves together.

What I am becoming more interested in now is whether there is a resilience that doesn't require quite so much effort.

A steadiness that comes from being grounded enough to meet what is happening.

To feel an emotion without immediately needing to escape it.

To experience uncertainty without immediately having to resolve it.

To wobble without assuming something has gone wrong.

To trust ourselves enough to remain present.

Perhaps internal force isn't simply about having more energy.

Perhaps it is also about how we inhabit ourselves.

Still learning

This is where I find myself returning to Sifu.

There are things he taught me many years ago that I thought I understood.

And perhaps I did understand them, as the person I was then.

Now I sometimes return to one of those teachings and something else reveals itself.

During the class this morning I imagined Sifu looking at me with that familiar smile and saying:

So... you're ready to hear it now?

And probably having a little chuckle.

There are moments in practice when something suddenly becomes obvious and I find myself thinking:

Ah.

That's what you meant.

Thank you.

More than three decades into this journey, I find that rather comforting.

Still the student.

Still practising.

Still discovering.

And still occasionally coming full circle, only to realise that the circle has brought me somewhere new.

Cultivating Internal Force

This September I am beginning a new Monday evening class exploring the cultivation of internal force.

We'll be returning to some of the practices that have accompanied me for many years: stance training, Qigong, breath, mind, stillness and the traditional methods through which internal force is developed.

But I don't want this to be simply a collection of techniques.

I want us to explore.

To practise deeply enough that the practices themselves have an opportunity to reveal something.

Because perhaps the most interesting question isn't:

What am I supposed to get from this?

But:

What might I discover if I stay with it?