Ving Tsun: You Can Go Home Again, a pandemic story

 A while back, I wrote a series of posts journaling my epic two-year journey from chubby chronically-ill suburban mom to chubby chronically-ill suburban mom who also does kung fu. A few things have happened since then. Let's catch up.

I finished the two-year program and kept training, rain or shine, an average of about ten hours a week. There were minor obstacles, sure - the occasional lupus flare-up, that one time I had major abdominal surgery - but even those problems became opportunities. Probletunities! Chances to sit still and observe, study how my Sifu teaches and how different students learn. I took a lot of notes. Helped out around the school, herded the cats during seminars, and eventually got back to training hard with a new focus - my Sifu trusted me to start instructing. As I took on more responsibilities as a senior student, the school became my second home.

Then the pandemic hit, and I couldn't go home anymore.

My compromised immune system lands me squarely in the high-risk category for covid-19 ... with all the ugliness that entails. So I went into ultra-mega-lockdown quarantine mode, and learned how to do life from inside a bubble. For over a year.

I never stopped training - the Texas schools teamed up to host classes on Zoom so we could all keep working out together from a nice, safe distance - but I'm not about to lie and say the isolation didn't have a serious impact on my training. Good and bad. There were a lot of introspective epiphanies about my forms, my structure, where energy comes from, etc, that I never would've had in a crowded class. ... But ... I was suddenly the sole driving force of my motivation to train, and most of my daily energy was being devoted to little things like keeping my family safe in a global pandemic and shoring up my crumbling mental health while processing bottomless buckets of existential dread. 

It's exhausting. There were days when I just couldn't train. When doing two-person drills in the air, by myself, in my house, in front of a screen full of little screens, filled my chest with such a tide of melancholy that it spilled out of my eyes. I was homesick. 

Kung fu is patient, though. It waited for me to finish wallowing and remember that there are a million things to study that don't involve having a training partner. So I wiped my face, worked on my forms, and tried to be as patient as my kung fu.

Waiting is not my favorite thing. I'm more of an instant gratification gal at heart. But one of the biggest lessons Ving Tsun has taught me is that some things just can't be rushed. Take a deep breath. Play more siu nim tao. No amount of fussing on my part would get a vaccine into my arm any faster.

Time passed - a thousand years? the blink of an eye? who knows? - and suddenly there's light at the end of the tunnel. I find myself fully vaccinated and, with some precautions on the advice of my doctors, ready to get back to class.

I can finally go home again! And y'all ... it is daunting. On multiple levels.

For one thing, I've spent the past year avoiding being within six feet of other people, nevermind touching their hands with my hands. I think about the years I spent blithely breathing the same air as dozens of other sweaty people and I shudder. The thought of going back to that now is a teensy bit anxiety-inducing. 

For another thing, I am Not In Shape. The past many months have drastically skewed my carbs/cardio balance. My quarantine physique is now much less "kung fu warrior" and much more "charmingly precarious stack of soup dumplings". And sure, yes, everybody loves soup dumplings, but nobody expects them to win a fight.

Getting back to training at my school is going to be difficult. It'll take work, a lot of it, not just physically, but also mentally, emotionally. I'll get tired. I'll get overwhelmed. I'll get scared. There will be uncomfortable conversations with other students as I set boundaries for my health. Sometimes I'll fail; have to pick myself up and try again. It would be so much easier to just stay home and be a hermit forever. To just ghost my Sifu and never come back.

But if I wanted easy, I wouldn't have started training Ving Tsun in the first place.  

So I reached out to my greatest resource - my Sifu and Simo. We talked about what it'll take for me to come back to in-person training, and worked out a plan. The rest is up to me - my Sifu can't do the training for me. I've got to put on my Big Girl Pants and actually go to class. It helps that I get to train in a place like this:

I'll have to use every lesson that Ving Tsun has ever taught me. Relax. Advocate for myself. Stay aware of my surroundings. Relax again. Don't expect, don't compare - my kung fu will not be the same as it was a year ago, and it shouldn't be. Relax harder. Don't give up; play more siu nim tao.

It's finally time to put in the work. See y'all at class.

Ving Tsun Kung Fu: Focus On The System

There are thousands of Moy Yat Ving Tsun practitioners, but very few of them will achieve the caliber required to become a legitimate Moy Yat Family Sifu. It takes around ten years of dedicated training under one’s Sifu and literally thousands of training hours (10,000+).

The Sifus of the Moy Yat Family put an extraordinary amount of work into passing down the Ving Tsun system. Grandmaster Moy Tung has spent his entire adult career dedicating himself to the art of Ving Tsun under his Sifu, Moy Yat, who did the same with his Sifu, Yip Man. Sifu Moy Sup Tung of the Austin school continues that tradition of hard work, dedicating himself to his Sifu, Moy Tung, and the Moy Yat Family by passing the pure, unchanged Ving Tsun system down to his students and grandstudents. Because of the dedication of Sifus, the Kung Fu that is taught today is the same as the Kung Fu that was taught to Moy Yat by Yip Man.

In order for the Ving Tsun system to continue to be passed down to future generations and preserved in its purest form, it is important to remember that the focus of our school should always be on the Kung Fu.

During the course of your training, you will encounter distractions. One of the most common is the temptation to socialize. Talking during class should be kept at an absolute minimum out of respect for the Ving Tsun system and to avoid disrupting the focus of other students. The Ving Tsun school is a place of study, not a social club, or a networking opportunity for students to build their own interests outside of Kung Fu. 

Another common distraction is the tendency of students who are young in their Kung Fu to compare their progress to others’. Seeing other students playing more advanced forms or working on chi sau can be exciting, but it can also distract by making you want to skip over your current training to “advance” through the system more rapidly. It’s good to be excited about what you’ll learn in the future, just be sure to stay focused on the Kung Fu that your Sifu wants you to work on at the moment. Everything else will come in time.

Remember that your Sifu is passing the Ving Tsun system down to you. The details that he teaches have been acquired over the course of decades of study with his Sifu and the Kung Fu family. It’s these details that combine to make up the Ving Tsun system; they’re very important and students should pay careful attention to them. If Sifu gives a detail in class, it should spread through the school like wildfire, with students putting effort into actively focusing on that detail until it becomes ingrained habit.

While details should be shared between students, it is never a student’s job to teach another student. Only Sifu, or people he has specifically trained to instruct the system, should be teaching. This ensures that the system is being honored and passed down pure and unchanged.

Do your best not to fall for any distractions you may encounter inside or outside the school; stay focused on your Ving Tsun. To show respect to all the dedicated work of your Sifu and the Sifus that came before him, all you need to do is show up to class on time, wear your uniform, pay attention to what’s going on around you, train consistently, and represent the school well. This Ving Tsun work ethic will serve you well in all areas of life.