Shaolin Kung Fu

I started doing that when I was 16.

I started doing Wing Chun, which is like a Shaolin Kung Fu derivative.

And I got into boxing when I was about 20 when I moved to Norwich.

And so I'm almost, well, I'm 40 next year.

Essentially martial arts, the reason why they're different in my head, stuff like martial arts would be stuff like Kung Fu, Tai Chi, maybe Aikido, um, Stuff where essentially you're learning something, not necessarily for how effective and practical it is, but more for the skill.

And it's like the technique and the skill and that's the thing you're getting out of it is learning these skills and techniques.

It's not to say that someone who's a fucking expert in Shaolin Kung Fu couldn't absolutely kick the shit out of me.

I do think that people that do Kung Fu aren't as effective actually in a fight.

And then later on, when I was about 25, maybe more than that, maybe 23, I'm not sure.

I started doing Nam Pai Chua and Shaolin Kung Fu, which wasn't very spiritual.

There was a tiny bit of meditation, but I was very interested in Zen Buddhism at the time and its relationship to the martial arts.

So I was very interested in that.

You don't hear it very often, but the term McDojo is such a vast term, right? And so whenever I hear things like then combat magic coming from...

And I understand that combat magic, you know, cursing and, you know, going back to the whole Aleister Crowley versus McGregor Mathers, how they were doing their thing in the early 1900s.

So this isn't new, you know, going back to even Alphys Levy, who disliked Agrippa and talked shit in... his transcendental magic and rituals and dogma you know so this is like a thing between egos especially in the magical realm yeah it's interesting to hear something like um from like a shaolin kung fu school and i you know and obviously willpower mental you know acuity um and these things are are part of the practice but then it's like taking that into the magic realms there seems to be something that i think is important and that's compartmentalizing these things That then when you blend them, that's when you get into a little more woo-woo kind of strangeness? I don't know.

What do you think about that?

In this training that I went through, for the moment, maybe take all the spiritual part out.

Simply the Kung Fu training, the Shaolin Kung Fu training.

There is a saying which is Shaolin Kung Fu literally means walking through the valley of pain.

So...

What does it mean? When you are doing stretching, stretching, stretching, stretching, it's going to be painful.