Emotions

Another area that needs to be mentioned is emotions. Dr G was big on emotions. He was always talking about emotions this and emotions that. I did not pay much attention in the beginning. The only experience I had ever had with people talking about emotions was crying women, or people with mental problems.

I think I said that Dr G was a Psychologist as well as a Dr of Chinese Medicine didn't I? So when he began to speak about emotions, I mostly felt like he was talking about stuff that didn't apply to me.

What Dr G would say exactly was "you cannot get good at the physical kung fu unless your emotions are balanced". Or your emotions were in good shape or something along those lines. This made no sense to me at all. By that time, I had attended all kinds of classes with all kinds of teachers. It was a given that each instructor would have their idiosynchrocies. I felt that since Dr G had gone to college to get a Psychology degree, he wanted to talk about it.

As time went by, I began to get a better feel for what Dr G was getting at. It was his opinion that if a person was not happy and well adjusted, they could literally never get very good at kung fu in a well adjusted way. A person could become good at kung fu and become a sadist maybe. Dr G would say that was not good because the man should not want to hurt people just because he took kung fu.

I didn't really believe it too much. I thought that Dr G was saying that if you were sad or angry then you could not concentrate on your practicing. That was not such a big deal. Not being able to practice one day because you were angry.

Then Dr G began to talk about emotional energy instead of just emotions. According to Chinese medicine, emotions come from the internal organs, not the mind. If the internal organs are in one shape or the other, they cause one emotion or the other. When Dr G said that a person could not become good at kung fu unless they were emotionally stable, he was implying that the energy of the emotions in the body could interfere with the energy of kung fu practice.

One way to view this is as a series of valves and tubing that is pumping water around. When the person does his kung fu, then water is moving around the tubing to wherever it should go. If the person is angry, it would be like a valve was closed halfway on one of the tubes. The water would go rushing around the tubing, then run into the half closed valve. The water would back up, the pressure would increase. The water is not flowing efficiently. The kung fu is interfered with.

That is the kind of thing that Dr G was trying to say when he recommended that people gain control over their emotions when they were practicing kung fu. He actually gave advice that people should not practice if they were emotional. I know when I first heard him say this, I thought he was a weakling or something. It sounded stupid or womanish to me. "Oh, I don't feel good today. My panties are in a bunch. I better not practice". That was how I heard his advice. Every other kung fu class I had ever attended was geared towards pushing yourself to reach some goal or the other. The kung fu class that I had just left to come to Dr G's class was all about driving yourself to your limits to get strong.

Much much later, on my own, as with most of the other things I learned from participating in Dr G's class, I discovered the real reason why a person is supposed to control their emotions so they can be good at kung fu. I could never decide if Dr G could not find the words to describe what was going on properly. Or if he just plain didn't want to talk about it. If it was a secret he kept for only certain people.

The mind is directly connected to the body. Your brain does not sit up inside of your skull all by itself. Anything that happens to the body will directly effect the brain. When Dr G said emotions would interfere with kung fu practice, what he was trying to say was complicated. If a person felt emotion, say sadness, then the organ associated with that emotion would physically change. It might get soft or hard or change according to the tenets of Chinese medicine. When it did, the brain changed also.

It is important to understand this is not a mental thing. It is not mentally thinking "I feel sad", then having the brain act troublesome. It is a physical connection with physical changes. If the liver shrank for instance, the area of the brain associated with the liver would physically be affected. It might shrink very slightly also.

This is actually an extremely powerful idea if you can understand it. I took kung fu for 20 years and never heard anyone explain it adequately. I feel as if I stumbled across the answer. I have always thought that people recomending that you control your emotions was all philosophy or psychology or mind games. I never for a minute thought that there was an actual physical reason for it.

I think my experience would probably hold true for most western people. Asian people grow up with the ideas that emotions are associated with the organs. For them, if someone said control the emotions for good kung fu, they would instantly understand the reason was to minimize the physical effects on the internal organs that emotions have.

Believe it or not, that is really eye opening for me. Even though I just wrote it, I am sitting here thinking I better write this down somewhere because it is really important. The reason that Asian philosophies recommend that people control their emotions is so that their internal organs stay calm and healthy. I am shaking my head that is so profound, but so odd sounding.