the practitioner stronger in life.2 The first purpose of Kung Fu was to fight disease.
3 Kung Fu led to a much deeper understanding of the laws of nature by working through the body.
Thus, it is important right from the start to understand that the correct study of Martial Art must have both internal (your relationship with yourself) and external (your relationship with the outside world) aspects intact. Like the two halves of the Yin/Yang symbol – separate, yet containing a small representation of the other (a spot) – these aspects must be shown to relate to each other, and helping you to understand this principle is one of the primary aims of this book. When we unlock our understanding of this relationship, we increase the use of (and the number of possibilities for using) our Martial Art training in everyday life. This understanding develops a sense of balance and by using the exercises presented in this book, it is my wish that you develop this sense and become open to the possibilities of how it can accentuate your life. The extraordinary thing about authentic Martial Art is that you work through your own body and build a relationship with it in order to understand about the power of balance through your own experiences. This direct understanding will then begin, quite naturally, to find its way into the other primary areas of your being, namely your mind and your emotions. Then, slowly, a new perception of yourself will begin to emerge where the body, mind and emotions work in dynamic harmony with each other, bringing extensive integration or ‘oneness’ with yourself and your environment.
FIGURE 1
The Intelligent Warrior
The title of this book, The Intelligent Warrior, was not chosen flippantly. The etymology of the word ‘intelligence’ comes from two words: ‘inter’, which means ‘between’, and ‘legere’, which means ‘to choose’. Thus, the word ‘intelligence’ implies a sense of balance, an ability to stand between two things and then make a decision, or the intention to take action in one direction or another; indeed, the word ‘intends’ means ‘to stretch out’ or ‘to move in one direction’. On the other hand, the word ‘warrior’ means ‘bringer of chaos or war’ and this, at first sight, might seem to contradict the word ‘intelligence’. After all, why would anyone want to bring chaos into his or her life? However, we all have both conscious and unconscious fears that affect our day-to-day decisions and actions, and bring about the same situations in our lives repeatedly. This can make us feel trapped or imprisoned at times in our lives when varying degrees of intensity or stress arise, and in order to free ourselves of these fears we must become aware of them in order to ‘open’ to them or ‘throw some light upon them’. We enter a state of chaos when we sense warring factions within ourselves, but only by seeing and accepting this state of chaos can we gradually bring some balance and understanding into our lives.
The Meaning of Kung Fu
The term Kung Fu roughly translated means time spent working on something in direct relationship to yourself so that your skill and yourself simultaneously evolve. Thus, Jimi Hendrix was a Kung Fu guitarist, Claude Monet was a Kung Fu painter and Confucius was a Kung Fu philosopher. A martial artist works on himself through the medium of his or her own body; the body is their instrument rather than a guitar or paint brush.
The art of expressing the human body was one of Bruce Lee's favourite topics. He maintained that learning Martial Art should ultimately allow you to express yourself ‘honestly’ (by this he meant to free of the confines of thought, habits, and attitudes) to be able to adapt to your environment in times of stress. Therefore, Kung Fu really means time spent working on yourself; it is a reinvestment of energy in yourself. We will deal with this principle at great length in this book, for one of the first things that must happen during your training is for you to gain awareness and control of your energy so that you do not continually dissipate it with physical, mental or emotional imbalanced states of being that are elicited by fear and its related emotions. And just as a good company reinvests some of its profits back into itself in order to adapt, survive and change in response to the prevailing climate, you as a martial artist must reinvest your energy back into yourself to become stronger and more able to meet the responsibilities that your life demands. You will then be able to defend against imbalance in yourself and recognize the effect that people and external/internal conditions have on you. This is the truth of real self-defence, and any discussion about Martial Art must consider this.
Common Misunderstandings
The Public
I have had many conversations with martial artists and the public about Martial Art, and the one thing that strikes me is that everybody thinks they know what it is. Interestingly, it is a subject that seems to provoke people into expressing strong opinions. The top-five reactions of people when I am introduced as a Martial Art instructor are:
1 ‘I better stay away from you then’ or ‘I won't get on your wrong side!’ usually said in a jovial tone and followed by a little smile as if they were the first person ever to think of such a quip. It is a tedious reaction because it is immediately assumed that I have a propensity to resort to physical violence, when in fact true Martial Art is about harmonization and not the use of inappropriate force to dominate someone.
2 Holding a bottle of beer or cream cake at a party tends to elicit the response, ‘I thought you were supposed to be super fit and weren’t supposed to consume things like that!’This reaction expresses the attitude that in order to be a martial artist you must live a life of saintliness and purity, which is rubbish because a martial artist must open up to everything, including ‘temptations’, in order to adapt. It is not a question of denial but rather a question of experiencing and discarding what is useless, one of the fundamental laws of adaptability.
3 The person immediately takes a comic fighting posture, gives the customary war chant ‘Hiiiii ya!’ and follows up with a reference to the ’70s cartoon Hong Kong Fooey. Some people deal with their fear of Martial Art by turning it into a caricature.
4 They proceed to explain what Martial Art is and tell me how they were once a black belt and that their master could do amazing feats such as walk along walls and defeat multiple attackers with a single touch of his finger. This is indicative of a particularly pernicious attitude bred in people who train in martial sport; it is an overly competitive attitude that is usually based on their own feelings of impotence.
5 They immediately adopt an attitude of subservience and over-the-top reverence for my illuminating presence. This type of person tends to want somebody else to take responsibility for them and always looks for answers from the outside instead of from within themselves.
Why have I gone to the trouble of outlining these somewhat comical responses? Because it is my belief that Martial Art, largely due to the huge media attention lavished upon it, has been grossly misrepresented and misunderstood by the public. Why is this important? Because many people, both men and women, are suffering from a lack of teaching to help them cultivate their warrior spirits truly and fully.
Martial Artists
The media is not solely to blame for this. So-called martial artists themselves also perpetuate misrepresentations. Three of the most current misrepresentations are:
1 The Internal School. The main culprits here are people who do T’ai Chi in satin suits and funny slippers in the park on Sunday. They proliferate quasi-Eastern mysticism that preaches about Chi, the importance of yielding and how you can use your energy to redirect your opponent’s force and cast aside knife-wielding maniacs with the calmest of demeanours. These people are playing a very dangerous game because a real street encounter with someone who actually wants
