SELF-FULLFILLMENT   HOW YOU CAN    CHANGE   YOUR LIFE

WingTsun is concerned with change, as one can clearly see in external WingTsun (self-defence) where your role changes from that of defender to attacker. If the opponent's strength is greater our punch becomes a Bong-Sao or Jam-Sao, an advancing step becomes a turn or even a step backwards. But if we are rigid or refuse to change we lose our equilibrium.

We cannot change the opponent's attack and must accept it as a fact, but we can change something about ourselves. Instead of pushing the opponent's arm away, we push ourselves away from him. If you imagine the opponent's arm being as immovable as a wall the problem becomes clear: we cannot push the wall away, but we can push ourselves away from even the strongest wall. At each of his tutorials GGM Leung Ting admonishes the students as follows: "Don't be wall-pushers. Push yourselves away from the wall!"

For many years I have concerned myself with inner WingTsun, the 3rd level of WingTsun. This is no longer about defending yourself against an attacker. Nor is it about gaining control or influence over others, or about wealth and status. This 3rd and most important level is about you as an individual. It decides what kind of a person you are, how you feel and whether you lead a contented, happy and harmonious life. You may win several million pounds, Dollars or Euros, but if you think this will change your life in a decisive way you are mistaken. You can move from Europe to New York, but if you hope that your life will be different you will be disappointed. Whether you drive a new Mercedes or an old VW Beetle, whether you are rich or poor, you will not feel very different. Indeed you may feel worse, for you will always encounter the same problems, always have the same difficulties with certain types of people and always feel overlooked, disadvantaged by fate or victimised. In short, you will suffer. The world will still appear to be a vale of tears.

This is because you believe you can change your life by changing your circumstances. Because you believe that you can solve problems. But in that case you are what GGM Leung Ting calls a "wall-pusher"! You can travel to the most beautiful South Sea paradise, but after a while you will be confronting the same problems again, for you have brought yourself into this paradise. And you have remained the same. The way you are, your personal nature, attracts a certain kind of life like a magnet. However great your knowledge, however fat your wallet or powerful your car.

But you can change your life by changing yourself. While you remain as you are you will attract the same life and difficulties as now. The way you are determines your life and continuously confronts you with the same insoluble problems. Your problems do not become solvable by changing your external circumstances, having a better job, a nicer house, a more beautiful girlfriend or a better-looking husband. After a short time you would be facing the same suffering.

Accordingly the highest level of WingTsun is about yourself, about pushing yourself away from the "wall" of events. If you can do this you can change your being and become a different, new person who will attract a different life.

How do you become a different person? Only if you want to enough. When the pressure of suffering becomes too great, a desire to end the suffering is created in such people.

The first step is a kind of self-observation - "know yourself!" Nobody really knows who he is, although most would insist that they know themselves very well. But while we are often quite good at assessing others and can pinpoint their weaknesses, our own negative characteristics always remain concealed to us. If somebody were to mention them to us, we would vehemently deny that we are like that. In some way a built-in buffer prevents us from seeing the truth about ourselves which is so obvious to others.

We are not the amiable, friendly and nice person we think we are. All the difficulties we encounter have something to do with ourselves, with our being, and we ourselves are to blame, nobody else. When the light of introspection falls on us and we start to discover that we are not the wonderful person we imagine ourselves to be, a process of change already starts to set in. Although none of your circumstances have changed, although you still live in the same flat, shop at a cheap supermarket and cannot afford a holiday in the South Seas, you have started to change yourself and therefore your life. 

Once again: Do not try to change your circumstances in life or push the wall away, push yourself away from the wall and change your position, change yourself!

In order to change you must take snapshots of yourself like a dispassionate camera and discover how you really are. And you must become conscious of how rarely you are conscious. We humans are like robots, like machines driven by the great wheel of life, but we are unaware of it. We live under the illusion that we can control our own lives, and act responsibly and consciously at all times.

Therefore we must recognise by self-observation how seldom we act consciously. By recognising our own incapability we automatically become a little more conscious. So observe this thing that bears your name, catch yourself out when you do nasty things. Do not excuse them to yourself. Recognise that you are no better than somebody you condemn for the same action. For that is you yourself! Whenever you condemn something in another, first check inwardly whether you yourself show the same behaviour towards others!

We ourselves are to blame for all the problems we blame others for. For we do not really know ourselves, and it is not clear to us that we, as the people we are, attract a certain life. We blame everybody else, the circumstances, bad luck, lack of opportunity, the envy and jealousy of others and look for evidence of conspiracies and mobbing, but we always leave one unknown quantity out of our equation of life: ourselves!

Presumably our creators or guardian angels are sitting on a cloud somewhere and making bets on which person will be the next to recognise his/her own nature and chief feature*, thereby taking the first step on a long journey of individual psychological evolution and transformation.

Keith R. Kernspecht

(10th degree Grandmaster WingTsun (Europe)

Founder, Head and Chief instructor of EWTO)

* Our chief feature is something concealed to us, but which all those who know us could usually identify very quickly. If we vigorously protest against this and break the friendship as a result, we are merely proving that they have hit the nail on the head.