Going Backwards in Training!!

Yesterday one of my Guys was over to train with me and at the conclusion of the evening he told me that he felt he was going backwards with his training. I know the feeling he was experiencing but is it really going backwards?  In the first couple of years of training everything is new, everyday you feel that you have added something to the Tool Box, it is an almost constant addition to your Knowledge Base, people quite wrongly {I.M.O.} think that this is moving forward, advancing, but it is really only collecting. 

The real training does not even start until you try to understand how to use all of this stuff you have collected, and how to relate everything to the "Core Values", it is often at this phase that people give it away, it just becomes "Too Hard" and they tell themselves that they just don"t get it often deciding to go and do B. J. J. instead. The truth is that this phase should be seen as an indication that you are finally beginning to make moves in the right direction, it is only when you start to ask Question's that you realise you do not have the Answers, if you are really lucky you will find that you are not even asking the right Questions and so you begging the search in earnest.

Any Kung fu takes a lot of time and a lot of thinking if you hope to get close to the real "Heart of the Matter", it cannot be achieved by only being involved for 2 hours an evening twice a week, it requires that you involve yourself in some related activity everyday, especially doing the Forms and thinking about what you have learned, and it is only when you start to think about what you have learned that you realise you do not know very much. The reality is that you do know quite a lot, it is just that for some reason in the early years we all think we know a lot more than we do, and if our Ego is driving the Wing Chun Bus this realisation can seem like a minor failure, which of course it is not.

There will be many times through the life of your training when you quite simply need to "GO BACK AND START AGAIN" and this usually reaps huge Rewards in Knowledge, but this does not really mean going back to grade 1 and do the work all over again, it is more that you need to take your Mind back to an earlier place, a place with no preconceptions and no aims of advancement and look at the information with new eyes, and a clear Mind, when you do this often you find that there was "One little thing" that you missed or overlooked that changes everything and propels you farther forwards than you could of ever imagined.

When ever I hit a Plateau I do not sink into a sticky Funk, instead I get excited, a Plateau is a sign that I have collected all the Clues to this section of my training, so instead of loosing momentum I get even more involved, I know that as soon as I digest all of the current information I will be hurled into the next phase of training if I am ready or not...................