Thursday, May 1, 2014

Explaining the fight for liberty through Bruce Lee's kung fu

I've spent the past twenty years, (or better) of my life studying the martial arts; Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do in particular; along with the Filipino Arts of Kali and Escrima.  In fact I teach a very small group of people in my garage, free of charge. Often times I am awarded for my efforts with gifts from my students, as a way of them showing their appreciation. I make a real effort to make them realize that learning Martial Arts is an exercise in freeing the soul, connecting the physical with the spiritual.  This is particularly true in Jeet Kune Do, as Bruce Lee emphasized on a continual basis, the need to break away from the rigidity of traditional martial arts, and let the soul, or the individual be over the art, instead of the art being more important than the man. Traditional martial arts have a way of imposing a spiritual tyranny over an individual, as the "way" of a particular style supersedes the needs of an individual trying to learn it. Bruce realized that man is enslaving himself to a method of training with that ideology, and he sought to free men from it. In doing so he coined the now infamous term "No Way as Way," which to those of us in the Jeet Kune Do world means adopting what is useful from different styles, and rejecting what is useless. It means letting our inner natures dictate what is right for us in learning, instead of forcing ourselves to adapt to something that may go against our own, personal design if you will. In other words, using "no way as way" means unrestricted freedom in the development of martial arts skill and attribute development.

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