The ‘Taste’ Of Kung Fu…. We’re told that people learn auditory (hearing), visually (looking) and physically (doing), we always use all 3 methods but depending on character will lean more towards one method than the others, I’d like to also add a personal one – taste. Taste? I hear you ask, how can you learn by taste?  Do you have to lick your instructor? Thankfully you don’t, BUT everything has a ‘flavour’ if you can sense it and if you pick up the ‘taste’ of Yang Family Tai Chi, tiger, snake, leopard, dragon, Hung Gar or whatever, you start learning … Continue reading The ‘Taste’ Of Kung Fu

  Why Bowing Is Important When you walk into a Dojo or Kwoon, before and after a lesson and before and after any kata, form and pairs work in a traditional system you will bow as a sign of respect.  This simple sign of courtesy is a great reminder and marker of the varying types of mindset we have to engender and train at each stage of training. Entering the training hall it separates you from the outside world and reminds you to clear all external worries, anxieties and  distractions from your mind so that you can focus on the … Continue reading Why Bowing Is Important..

In the classics it says ‘suspend the head’, what most people don’t get is that it is an ‘active’ requirement, this means that you have to actively do this all of the time. This is an act of mindfulness. It lightens and aligns the body making it weightless and mobile, but the moment it becomes inactive – you become a clumsy zombie! The classics also say that power ‘comes from the feet, is manipulated by the waist and expressed through the hands’. Whatever we do, we always start from the feet, when I touch a student’s arm they resist in a … Continue reading Yang Tai Chi ‘Head & Feet’