Most of social media is designed to lead you astray, particularly in the martial arts and some of the worst manipulators (whether they know it or not) are those that train and teach our arts.

First of all YOU ALREADY KNOW IT so you don’t need ‘teachers’ telling you that you don’t understand and it takes years of training etc. they are laying smoke screens and diverting you from seeing what you should already know naturally.

Every mammal is born with this inner knowing, look at cats, dogs, monkeys, tigers and so on, even humans when they’re ’in the zone’ they didn’t need anyone to tell them what they’re born with. The irony is that we say that they are ‘naturals’.

Taoism is always telling us to ‘be as a new born babe’ because the sages know that we have to recognise what we were born with and already have. The condition is often described as a ‘man with a precious jewel between his eyes searching the world for precious jewels’.

It’s our thinking mind and social conditioning pIaying with our emotions that gets in the way and the social manipulators know this and play on it making us feel inadequate.

Once you understand this, and that what we already know cannot be defined by thought, we realise that the thinking mind and a good teacher can only guide us so far and that we have to make the journey to get rid of and cleanse ourselves of these bad teachings and indoctrinations to see clearly who and what we are and allow our mind, emotions and body to do what it was born knowing what to do.

Our neigong (inner work and meditation) is to be still and silent and leave our natural mind and energy to do what it does best. Our qigong (energy work and exercise) is to allow the mind, emotions and body to stimulate, store and release our natural energy through the exercise movements of the body. These skills then form the root of our being and martial art practice.

The important thing to recognise here is that this is our nature, we were born with it like every other mammal on this planet and have to discipline the conditioned negativity that masks it.

This is why we emulate the kindred animal spirits in our arts. Maybe we should stop saying ‘try’, ‘train’ and ‘work’ and like our fellow mammals should ‘do’, ‘play’ and ‘unfold’ naturally becoming what nature intended.

Our humanness should then be the ability to have increased levels of empathy, compassion, patience, kindness and the ability to share and work together to make our environment a better place.