THE COURSE WAS THE MARVELOUS
Sifu Chris and Grandmaster Wong sparring at the Sabah Special Course
Sifu Chris Dydik
Shaolin Wahnam USA
20th October 2011
This Course Was The Marvelous
This course was an incredible progression of the Flow Method (and of the now famous Flower Set course in Finland) as well as the Special Intensive Kung Fu courses of the past. I don't know if the Flow Method can get any better!
This Mind Level thing that everyone is raving about? Sigung transmitted to us the essence of the Dragon Strength set (if not in whole then certainly in part). Not only could we apply it to the Wudang Taijiquan set, but to any set of our choice (I applied it to one of the Triple Stretch sequences to great effect).
Sigung's demonstrations were absolutely incredible. He demonstrated pressing on Edwin with such speed that the next day, Edwin said to some other participants: "So how many arms does Sifu have? I counted at least 4!"
After the Flower Set and Drunken 8 Immortals courses, I couldn't understand how those courses could just be scratching the surface and that we would go deeper in this special intensive, but that's exactly what happened. Whereas in previous special intensives we spent most of our time in our specialization groups working out sequences, in this course, we used the same application format as recent regional intensives -except we did this for all of the chosen sets!
For those unfamiliar with this format, we were in one big group and as a few patterns of a set were shown to us, we split up into small groups to work out application ideas for a short time, then got back together and shared our applications with everyone for Sigung to critique.
The result was an even greater ability to work out applications for any set. I feel like I could take any set now and very quickly work out useful applications of at least 95% of the patterns.
As if that wasn't enough, Sigung shared with us a wealth of sparring secrets including greater detail in taming, pressing, chin na application and escape philosophy, feeling escape philosophy, footwork, and profound application progressions. As my Siheng Jose Antonio said, Sigung told us at the graduation dinner that it took him 20 years of mostly trial-and-error to discover these secrets himself!
And then there was the force training. Sigung led us through an incredible One Finger Shooting Zen session (thanks for suggesting that, Roland!) and an impromptu but very powerful teaching and practice of the second of the 18 Lohan Arts. It was so powerful that when we finished, everyone was quiet for a second, and then we all just burst out laughing at how ridiculously awesome it was!
On a personal note, I totally fell in love with the Triple Stretch set. I didn't realize it before the course, but it quite nicely extends the Dragon-Tiger set, including a wealth of powerful force-training methods and several excellent sequences that Past Masters already worked out for us!
I also had an amazing force-training experience on the second day. After doing some Two Finger Zen from the Triple Stretch set for maybe 10 minutes at most, I had an incredible chi flow where I felt two spheres of chi completely external to myself on either side of my body. My hands kept circling them in chi flow and they got bigger and bigger while slowly moving up in front of my body, then merging into a single giant chi ball.
Then I felt this chi ball consolidate down into my dan tian, which then expanded to fill my entire chest and arms. It was quite an interesting experience, and it had never happened to me before. Perhaps more incredibly, the same thing happened a couple of days later after practicing just a portion of the first section of the Wudang Taijiquan set at the Mind Level!
(The usual disclaimer applies: such experiences are not to be chased and are simply one of many ways that we may receive confirmation of good practice spontaneously in chi flow.)
Again, thank you Sigung, thank you brothers and sisters for helping to make the course so special, thank you Damien, Rosalind, Godfrey, and Bernie for what was a typically flawless course organization in Sabah, and thank you Sifu for training me such that I could become skillful enough to take part in this course.
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Chris Didyk
Shaolin Wahnam USA
Thank You.
Grandmaster Wong performing Wudang Taijiquan at the mind level
The above discussion is reproduced from the thread Special Shaolin-Taijiquan Course, Sabah, Malaysia, 12th to 18th October 2011 in the Shaolin Wahnam Discussion Forum.
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