Sihing

Listening to Sifu Hayes talk about the rank of Sihing yesterday, reminded me a lot of my time in China. He reminded me of when I achieved the rank of Sihing and then was kind of left to my own devices. It's interesting how lost you can become when you are used to someone leading you down the path with a harness and then, all of a sudden, even though you've walked the path a thousand times, they take off the harness, and want you to walk the path on your own. Sometimes feeling lost can lead to frustration and anger. Even though it's completely unwarranted. Although I never felt that about my training at Silent River, I had a similar experience.

In China there was a very interesting period near the end of our time there where we were 'set free'. At the time, my classmates and I felt a lot of bitterness about it because we hadn't finished learning the discussed curriculum, and we felt we were kind of being cheated out of our education let's say. Now, I see it was a very crucial part of the training for me, and it was a test from our Master. You see, many of his students had become teachers at his school. I know that part of the scenario sounds familiar. But, I would say 90% of those students had stopped practicing altogether, and had none of their own goals. They taught mostly for the money and, spent a lot of the time when Shifu was not around, sitting and playing on their phones.

This period was a very trying time. Shifu just left us to practice on our own. Without feedback, often it's difficult to feel like you're improving. But, I still pushed myself to go to class everyday. I had faith I suppose. And I knew I already had a million things to work on. I also learned how to motivate myself to practice. This is something that has helped me every day.  I know how important it is to keep working and moving forward. And I know that having that period of time to practice my own self discipline right before I came home, really helped set me up for a positive reintegration back into what  I would call 'normal' life. Where the average person doesn't have 8 hours every day to spend training, but somehow still drives themselves to make constant improvements.

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it."
~Lou Holtz