Wing Chun First Form
The literal translation of Siu Lim Tao as I understand it, is “Little Idea”, and over the years I have come to realize just how powerful a concept it embraces. I have heard many other explanations, some reasonable, some bizarre, to the extent that some people say that there is a secret form that goes beyond Siu Lim Tao and that is the “BIG Idea” form. The are no secrets in Wing Chun only people who wish the hide their ignorance behind a pretence. If you are told that “You will learn the secrets when you have trained long enough and shown your dedication.”, you can usually translate this into “When I find out myself I will tell you but in the meantime carry on giving me your money or I will slap you.”
The point is that you must have no ‘little’ or small ideas in your head when you practise, this means that you are concentrating on your moves and energies and not worrying about unrelated ‘little’ thoughts, such as “How much did I spend last night?” or “I wonder if they would like to go on a date?”. To learn to concentrate on yourself is a difficult thing to do as we are not accustomed to doing it, it is not since being small children that our brains have had to consider co-ordinating new body movements and so we have to learn once more to focus on our movements so that we can correct ourselves. It is not a problem if you are constantly making mistakes, if you are aware of them you can put them right, but if you are unaware of the errors you will continue to reinforce them through repetitive practise until they become bad habits.
In learning to be self-critical you will begin to appreciate and understand yourself in a different light, criticism is not only a negative thing, you must also take it on board to realize when you are doing something right, essentially we are talking about a form of meditation, not the mystical heart stopping levitation type, but an intense internalization of body movements and how they controlled and used.
