Transformative Martial Arts

happy trainees with overflowing brains

I am back in Paris after another excellent seminar with Luo laoshi in London. I was not originally planning to go, but the seminar in Paris ignited too many questions and was too much fun for me to want to miss the opportunity to take part in another session.

As usual the material was very simple and pragmatic. I could spend time wtriting about the indidvidual techniques and forms that he covered. Much as I like the entry  methods, or the hooking methods that we practised I prefer to concentrate on the deeper aspect of the seminar. I want to point to the process rather than the content as we say in NLP.

Luo laoshi has been spent a lot of time over a many years thining about how to teach. In his early seminars in Europe and the US he was more interested in presenting techniques and scattered forms.  His idea was to keep the deeper logic of the system for his senior students, which is traditional practise in Chinese arts. It did not really work though, not because the participants were unimpressed by the material that he gave, but because in his enthusiasm he just did not like holding information back.

These days laoshi is clearly presenting not just technique, but the logic that underpins it, and a relatively complete frame in which to develop your own practise. I say relatively complete because there are always details, concepts or angles that he does not have time to go into. Equally the frame will mean nothing if a student does not apply themself to the practise, both solo and with partners.

Watching the other participants I could see that some of them really caught what laoshi was aiming to get across. I look forward to practising with them again, because if they work on what they learned they cannot help but improve.

If you were there and did not think of the seminar from this perspective – start now. If you are about to see Luo laoshi in Israel or the US then pay attention to this system process aspect. It is rarely presented in the internal martial arts so it’s capacity to both simplify and boost your practise is all the more valuable.

Thanks Nick and Matt of palmchange for the organisation, and for developing such a friendly, lively group of training partners.

Thank you also to the London weather for a wonderful mix of warmth, rain, storms (which we narrowly avoided) and the rainbows.