I've had a lot of this stuckness this year. Coincidentally, I'm told that I've made a lot more progress this year than ever before (workshops coming soon--we'll see how that claim holds up, checking ego at the door in 3, 2, 1,...). I've also focused on a lot of things I had kind of shelved, but in my most recent stuck phase, I've done something I've never really done before. I stopped training the curriculum I'm supposed to be focusing on, and it's huge. I'll elaborate.
Currently, I'm trying to make sense of a lot of the material in the Phoenix System, particularly the transforming, removing, and curling in attacking methods (read: the subtle, hard ones). I've had some degree of success with transforming, I think, but I'm dead lost on removing and curling in, or at least I think I am. This causes me to want to drill them and then feel like I got nothing out of it at the end. In response, I find myself wanting to drill less and get my hands on people to do applications more--and I feel majorly stuck and discouraged from doing the foundational drilling that defines the path to success in Yin Style Bagua.
In Yin Style, we say that applications are a test of development, and we get development by drilling, mostly solo. That means that while they can be helpful and clarifying, we don't get our development from doing applications, and so I can use my current overwhelming desire to do only applications work as a clear symptom of a greater disease--I'm not getting what I'm trying to drill, at least not as quickly as I want to. If I was getting it, I would be able to detect that development creeping in, and applications would return to their fun but mostly superfluous state. The need for another body to push around, feel, and experiment upon would be low, and everything would go better. My training would be motivated and motivating, my development would be solid, and my applications, when I do them, would actually work. That's not what's going on now, so I feel stuck.
What I've done in the past when this comes up is to hammer on the same things and to try to push through the plateau, and if I'm honest, I can say I don't think that's ever worked. I do think it's necessary to do some of this kind of thing, to be clear, because if I'm not willing to keep pushing at the material I'm trying to understand, I'm not really going to build the foundation for development that I'm after. On the other hand, I think too much effort of this kind is worse than wasteful. It's an actual detriment because it's so frustrating, so stagnating, and so boring. It breaks the engagement with the art that causes training to be fruitful, and it turns training into dull, hard "grinding," to steal a term from video gaming. The thing is, grinding of this kind doesn't magically provide an increase in level by default. Getting awesome in real life isn't so kind as getting awesome by proxy in a make-believe digital world.
This time, despite the Phoenix work that should be at the center of my agenda, I've fallen back upon working on things I "already know," mostly foundational Lion System strikes, although I have a certain interest in Phoenix extending and chopping that I give some attention to, and none of this is likely to be part of the workshop agenda that I'm prepping for just now. I've also been working on some Lion System forms that aren't at all on "the curriculum." The results are actually pretty huge. My engagement shot back up, I'm feeling things I've never found before in the Lion techniques, I'm tightening up my footwork tremendously, and I'm not bored with my training any longer. I actually want to get out and just train instead of feeling obligated to get it done (while wanting development or new training ideas or something to get me back into the swing), which has been the case far more often than I'd like to admit.
The reason this works is because of the nature of play. When we are allowed to play, without concern for whether or not we're getting it right, we'll be more interested and motivated. We'll also push ourselves to new heights. In any and all cases, we can break open the shell of stagnation that is weighing us down, a shell that is really caused by trying to force our way to something we cannot seem to get to, maybe because our foundation isn't there yet or because we're missing certain pieces of information, certain insights, that will allow us to connect to the development we're after. For me, it doesn't matter how much I get out of this Lion training or these Phoenix attacking methods that aren't "on the test," all that matters is that I'm able to explore these concepts around the goal I'm most interested in right now: developing skill for fighting use.
This has allowed me to look at these basic ideas that I "already know" and to do them differently than I have before, to explore them, to push them, and to see how they can work for me on meeting that goal. The result has been great training sessions that refine my technique and understanding along with coming up with some great combinations and striking drills that I can directly apply for fighting applications use. Of course, as a result, I'm seeing my partnered applications in our group training get-togethers really taking off in crispness and effectiveness. It's a big deal, and, like I said, it's reconnected me with the desire to train for the sake of getting better.
I think what this phenomenon is proving for me is that development is happening in the background while we attend to other things, so long as we stay active in closely related efforts. I haven't done a lot with Lion System striking or forms in the past several months, frankly, and yet as soon as I turned my attention to them, I was able to see them in an entirely new way. Not only that, I was able to feel some of what I have probably been missing all along--my sweeping strikes particularly have been missing the sweeping character, a fairly significant problem with them. Also, my combinations are no longer the rote drills that they had to be at first. Now they are directly informed by the kinds of applications I want to achieve with them, applications I can imagine, put into drills, and then execute very effectively the first time when I work with a partner.
Now, we have to be careful. Yin Style is a very precise art. We must always be training to be stable first and accurate second, and we often say that the technique has to work "the first time, every time." This means that even though I'm playing, seeking creative ways to use the techniques, they have to be performed well, seeking refinement, and informed clearly by the goal at the center of training, which for me at the moment (and really for most of us most of the time) is skill in fighting applications.
Maybe I could make some somewhat
Whatever the case, it seems to work.
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