HAVE FAITH!

 By Phillip Starr

My teacher, sifu Chen, struggled to teach me the various zhan-zuang (post standing) postures as much as I struggled to do them correctly. I did my best to imitate the posture that he demonstrated. “Like this”, he said. He glanced at me and immediately stepped in front of me.

“No”, he said as he adjusted my hands, elbows, and hips. “Ah...better”, he muttered. “Stand like this every day for twenty minutes.”

After the adjustments he'd made, I felt very uncomfortable. TWENTY MINUTES? I thought that what he asked was nigh on to impossible. And he noticed my apprehension. “Yes”, he went on. “At least twenty minutes. Longer is better, too. It will help you develop your gong-fu skills a lot. It helps in many ways that you don't understand yet.”

And so I did it. I didn't altogether understand the whole concept but I had faith in my teacher and what he taught me. It would be some time before I came to realize the profundity of what he gave me that day and many other days. But I believed in him. I had faith.

This is perhaps the most important element of learning martial arts. If you lack faith in your teacher, you probably won't practice as he tells you. And if that's the case, you can easily miss your goal by a very wide margin.

In the East, it's a given that the student have absolute faith in his teacher and that the student will do whatever the teacher tells him to do. Sometimes what he tells you to do is very tedious and boring; at other times, it can be downright painful. But in the East the student will do it, regardless. Westerners are often (perhaps even usually) less apt to do this. They want to know “why.” And to a traditional teacher, that's nothing short of an affront to his authority. His “answer”, such as it is, may often be quite painful.

Sometimes, perhaps even much of the time, what he teaches will seem a bit incomplete. This is very common in traditional teachers. They may want to test your resolve; to see if you'll strive to dig deeper to more thoroughly understand what they gave you. They also understand that what a student learns by digging deeper is more broadening, more meaningful than if it was simple “spoon-fed” to them. That said, I have found that many Western students almost insist on being mollycoddled and “catered to”, believing that since they've paid good money for instruction, everything should be openly given to them. But the teacher knows better. If the student really wants to learn, this is how it should be done.

But it requires faith. Without that critical ingredient in the relationship, the recipe for real learning is incomplete.