What Wing Chun Can Teach You About Life
Less is more — as long as you’re grounded
I looked for a self-defense class that could do more than teach me how to throw a few fancy punches. I wanted time-tested principles to keep me focused. I wanted ancient philosophy to keep me grounded. Among krav maga, muay Thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and straight-up self-defense, I ended up taking wing chun — and it’s the best decision I’ve made for my mental health this year.
Wing Chun was globalized by Bruce Lee, who studied directly under grandmaster Ip Man. When you think of Bruce Lee you might think of highlighter yellow jumpsuits and high-pitched “yaows”, but these are smokescreens used for entertainment value, silly tropes that Bruce Lee cleverly played up in order to reel people in.
Wing chun is not silly “yaows” and yellow jumpsuits. It is an ancient art that carries the weight of time-tested life lessons.
Like so many other Eastern martial arts, wing chun emphasizes knowing yourself, minimizing your effort-to-force ratio, and using the enemy’s force against them. Reportedly, it was a martial art developed by women for women. No wonder, then, that it is most potent against bigger, stronger enemies. No wonder it teaches you to work with your limitations instead of against them.
Here are the two main lessons I learned from wing chun:
- Don’t brace yourself — ground yourself.
- Don’t give in — let go.
Like taijiquan (a.k.a. taichi, the martial art that developed from the Taoist philosophy), wing chun offers a yin and yang of life that keeps me balanced.
1. Don’t give in — let go.
Try this wing chun exercise for yourself: grab a friend and ask them to push one shoulder, then the other — and try not to move your feet.
Before you start, get into the proper wing chun stance: have your feet facing forwards, shoulder width apart, bend your knees slightly, tuck your tailbone in enough for the small of your back to be flat to the touch, and pull your shoulders back and down. Imagine your hips cradling a metal ball. Imagine you are hanging from your head, and feel yourself sink.
In the absence of wing chun training, trying not to move your feet while your opponent pushes your shoulder becomes a brute battle of strength. You’ll grunt and grit your teeth, and maybe even try to push your opponent with your shoulder. Whoever’s bigger and stronger will win.
With wing chun training, you’ll see how ineffective this is. You’re exerting too much yang : warm — or hot-headed — energy. You’re putting a lot of strain on your shoulder, core, thighs, and calves to make sure your feet don’t move.
With wing chun training, you’ll learn that the best way to beat your opponent is to let go: if your opponent pushes your shoulder — just let your shoulder move. Specifically, keep your shoulders, core, and hips in a sideways H-shaped frame. When your opponent pushes your shoulder, pivot the entire H-frame around your spine.
In boxing, a critical move is a slip: you dodge the opponent’s punch by slightly moving your head. Not only do you not get punched, but the opponent wastes a ton of energy because a punch that is cut short by hitting something is less energetically costly than a punch that swings all the way through. Punching air is exhausting.
With wing chun, letting go is the equivalent of a slip: let your opponent waste their energy, and thereby preserve your own. Preserve your H-frame, and the opponent might as well be pushing a pendulum planted in the ground.
Remember to let go, not give in. If you go limp as a noodle, of course, you’ll get flung around — by your enemy, by the world, my life. This is too much yin — or soft — energy.
Letting go works if and only if you ground yourself.
2. Don’t brace yourself — ground yourself.
Go back to the exercise and try again to keep your feet steady by not letting go. Feel again how much you brace against your opponent’s push.
Bracing creates tension. Tension gives your opponent — e.g. life — an easy way to knock you over. You’re like a board of plywood: easy to pick up and knock over because you’re stiff.
With wing chun training, you’ll learn that the best way to beat your opponent is not to brace against them but to sink into the ground. Let your shoulders sink, let your elbows sink, and imagine your hips cradling a heavy pendulum.
With this stance — with this mindset — your feet sink into the ground. You become the ground. Instead of a piece of plywood, you become a deep-rooted tree.
When you become the ground, your enemy is helpless.
Sound mystical and woo woo? Go find a wing chun practice near you and experience it for yourself. (In other exercises, you might find yourself pushed around like a rag doll by someone half your weight. That’s exactly what happened to my six-foot, two-hundred-plus-pound teacher when he studied under a direct student of Ip Man.)
Why does this work?
Wing chun’s effectiveness speaks to the concept of strong versus resilient. Remember from high school chemistry that glass is strong, but gold is resilient. Glass is strong because the molecular bonds retain their shape — but that’s exactly what makes glass fragile. If you throw a mirror it at the ground, the molecular bonds are too rigid to accommodate any shock. The whole thing shatters.
In contrast, gold is resilient because even if you take a hammer to it, the piece as a whole stays together. This is because the molecular bonds are soft — they change and shift to accommodate any new shape they need to take on.
The same principle comes into play in wing chun. Would you rather be glass or gold?
If you tense up your shoulder, you are glass: you become rigid, and your own arm becomes a control stick in the enemy’s hands. Your body renders you a puppet.
If you relax, if you sink, you are gold: you become resilient. Why?
Because you maintain your H-frame. Now, the frame might seem like something you have to keep rigid, but remember you’re only maintaining this frame so that everything else can move; the equivalent of “soft molecular bonds” is the connection between your H-frame and your thighs, your knees, and whatever muscle it takes to move the frame forwards, backward, up, down, sideways, and rotated. As long as you maintain this frame, and keep your shoulders and elbows sunk, you’ll find that actually, it’s easy to either deflect or counter your enemy’s exertion.
As long as you stay sunk and maintain the integrity of your frame, you won’t move, just different parts of your body. Like gold, you’ll stay resilient.
In life, ground yourself and let go to stay resilient
You’ve probably walked into conversations that are determined completely by someone else. Maybe you don’t even get to consider what you want to eat for lunch before a group of friends determines you’re all going to Chipotle.
Chipotle is good. Maybe you don’t mind — the first few times.
But it happens again and again: you keep getting dragged to places your friends want to go, and never once go to your top choice.
Maybe this hits you suddenly and you start to get resentful. So you tell yourself next time you’re going to put your foot down: you’re going to exert where it is you want to go and make sure you all go them.
But you start to ruminate, and the next time you meet up with friends, you’re already on guard well before lunch. You keep rehearsing what you’re going to say, and maybe this digs up past occasions where it felt like your friends talked over you or dismissed your ideas. Those things might happen again, so now you find yourself rehearsing how to respond to all those occasions, too.
Maybe a friend notices you’re tense and asks something. You tell them what you want for lunch, but it’s clear you’re not asking: you’re declaring. To them, this might seem out of nowhere. Some might ask follow-up questions or jokes. But since you’ve already been fighting with them — in your head — you might interpret anything as yet another attack. You might explode.
Instead of letting go, you gave in. Instead of grounding yourself, you braced yourself. And things blew up.
Say instead you took a few minutes to ground yourself: sink your shoulders down and back, straighten your back, let that pendulum sink into your hips, and your feet into the ground. Walk into that conversation with your H-shaped frame intact. You’ll find it easier to go with the flow while not getting pushed around or pushing others around.
Wing Chun applies to so much more than physicality. When deciding between career options, considering where to live, or even how to schedule your weekend, grounding yourself removes so much of the tension while allowing you to stay flexible.
Ground yourself by finding what it is you want to sink into. Is it spending quality time with family? Easier to turn down that extra assignment at work — after giving it serious consideration. Is it changing the world? Easier to reject that job offer that pays more — after going into all your interviews with an open mindset. Is it your own integrity? Easier to deflect snide comments and, eventually, topple a bully by simply standing strong your ground — after giving them the benefit of a doubt.
Say instead you braced yourself. Instead of turning down that extra work assignment, you might find yourself burying yourself in a bunch of assignments that barely push your career forward in order to make more money to eventually spend time with your family. Instead of gracefully turning down a high-paying job, you might find yourself doggedly extracting a higher salary for a job that doesn’t even fit your values in order to maybe one day change the world; even worse, you might find yourself frantically applying for even more jobs in the hopes that anything might fulfill your purpose. Instead of casually brushing off a bully’s snide comments, you might find yourself ruminating, letting resentment fester with each slight until you get ready to bite off their head — and explode.
Bracing yourself in anticipation of what could happen makes you easy to shove over.
Ground yourself and let go for resilience.
