Richmond Push Hand, Now Offering In-Person Classes!

In fact, the key service we provide is self-awareness coaching.  We do that by allowing our members to enjoy the profound somatic and energetic experiences through internal martial arts practices.  Members learn to become mindful of their physical body, posture, energy flow, mental and emotional state.  You can say we are a self-awareness school wrapped in an internal martial art’s skin!

Having said that, we do have experienced martial artists who joined our program and found our coaching has inspired them to many new ideas and ways of training.  So whether you are seeking ways to have a better understanding of yourself, or you are a martial arts enthusiast exploring for new inspiration and options, we warmly welcome you to check us out and see if we are a good fit for each other!

As simple as self-awareness might sound, many people run their lives in auto-pilot mode without paying attention to their experiences at any given moment.  You may think there is nothing wrong about that, but without self-awareness, our choice of actions are ungrounded and easily influenced by our emotions, often leading to impulsiveness and regrets.  Self-awareness is a good remedy to that.  With self-awareness, you are able to observe your physical state and your inner feelings and to connect the dots.  You will start to make your choices consciously and get to see the world differently.  You will be able to see beyond duality and discover other unlimited possibilities in between the two ends of the spectrum.   Life will become truly beautiful at that point.  Once a member told me, “I wish someone told me this when I was 18 years old.  I would have lived my life in a totally different way.”  It’s that POWERFUL.

Martial arts can definitely be rough, especially when such skills are applied to blood-shedding combat during battles or life-or-death situations.

However, martial arts themselves are just tools and are neither “good” nor “bad”; just like everything else in life, it all comes down to how people choose to use them.

When practiced with inner peace, martial arts are efficient ways for us to enrich our human “being” experience through the use of our bodies and conscious integration.  Martial arts exercises effectively enhance the bonding between our physical bodies and our human energy fields, developing our mind, body and spirit at once, unleashing our holistic potential.

This is a great question.  Let’s imagine you are a very large corporation and there are many different departments and employees (including your body, mind, emotion and spirit), each has its own way of thinking, characteristics, different needs and expertise.   The corporation will be at its optimal operation when the leadership has a clear vision, and gets full support from both the internal staff and the external clients/markets, and everyone voluntarily coordinate with each other to bring the vision to reality.

That’s POWERFUL, isn’t it.  I would love to work for a company like that.  Every single particle of you would too!  How to facilitate this kind of work environment inside of our body?  We will have more in-depth discussion in our program.

Before I answer this question, allow me to share a very famous Chinese fable with you, it’s called Mr. Ye Loves the Dragon:

Long time ago there was a very wealthy man known as Mr. Ye.  He loved the concept of dragons.  His furniture is carved with dragons.  His attires were embroidered with dragons.

His house is full of dragon-related decorations.  Everyone knows he loves dragons.

One day, a dragon heard about this Mr. Ye the dragon enthusiast and decided to pay him a visit.  The gigantic and mighty dragon arrived in front of Mr. Ye, waved his sharp claws to greet his fan.  As much as Mr. Ye loved the images of dragons, a live dragon was too much for him to handle, and he died from shock.

Some people fancy real fights especially those who have never been in one, but in reality, real fights are nothing like movie scenes or video gameplays. You never know how skillful the other person is.  You never know if the other person concealed a lethal weapon.  You never know how many others are hiding in the shadows. You never know how strong and the ability of not feeling pain a person can be under the influence of drugs or alcohols.  Regardless of how skillful a martial art practitioner may be, such conflict almost always comes with difficult-to-bear consequences, such as legal lawsuits, loss of mobility, permanently ruining someone’s life, or suffering from the loss of own life or loved ones.  Some people regret it for the rest of their lives, some people don’t even have a chance to regret.  We invite you to let that sink in for a moment.

While our community members are goofy and playful most of the time, this is one of the few topics which I always discuss with my members with extreme seriousness (and the other serious topic would be safety).  After all, we are experts in facilitating self-awareness.  At the end of the day, the key message we want to share is to make conscious choices.  Before we resort to our last option, we need to ask ourselves, have we carefully considered the necessity of such action, and are we fully ready to embrace all the possible consequences?  If the answer is yes, then go for it and make the process as snappy as you can.  However, before we reach that conclusion, I sincerely hope our smile, confidence, authenticity, compassion, space-holding skills and a good sense of humour that we learned from our training here have already led everyone to a win-win situation.  From my humble opinion, those are by far more powerful and useful skills than fighting techniques.

After listening to what I have to say, if you feel learning how to make conscious choices is a much cooler option, we warmly welcome you to check us out.  If you still choose to be a real street fighter after careful consideration, that’s great too as you are the expert of your own life situation and you know what’s the best for you, just that in this case, we might not be your ideal companion in achieving your goal

Biomechanics may sound like a big word, but it’s merely referring to the way we move our body.  The reason why xingyi, bagua and tai chi are called internal martial art, is because unlike external martial art where they start their journey from muscle-focused movements of the body part that’s moving, authentic internal martial arts training focus on coordinating the entire body to complete a move with the use of fascia.  Please note internal styles are not necessarily better than external styles:  under proper training, both are different roads leading to Rome.

Yes, we emphasize on biomechanics a lot, because by learning internal arts biomechanics consciously, the process subtly deepens our self-awareness, changes our way of thinking, regulates our emotions and upgrades our somatic behaviours, eventually leading to the key concept we wish to introduce to our community, which is to make conscious choices.

While self-defense classes may seem effective against a specific situation in a classroom setup where the training partner would more or less comply and cooperate, such training can easily put the practitioner in greater danger under real threat.

How?

If the practitioner only knows the moves, without having an integrative understanding of the biomechanics that quietly support those moves behind the scene, self-defense moves can be easily countered by stronger force, and the time spent on failed attempts could have cost the practitioner the golden opportunity to take other options.

While our programs don’t have any shortcut to offer, we take solid approaches for our members to embody the efficient use of human biomechanics and consciousness, so they can make conscious choices and respond with unique actions that are suitable for that present moment.  After all, any event can take an unexpected twist and lands outside of the self-defense drill at any second.

• Safety measures
• Fundamental concepts of internal arts and how they relate to our holistic well-being
• The value and philosophy behind our program
• How to apply internal arts techniques to our daily lives
• What to expect/look for from our official curriculums

If you are an experienced practitioner, we warmly welcome you!  We love having enthusiasts come and exchange experiences with us.  It would be our honour if you like what we do and decide to participate in our program.

If you know the form we do, you can definitely skip our 100 level courses and advance directly to our 200 level courses and above, depending on your level of experience.  Having said that, the Secrets to the Holistic Internal Art course is unique in its own fashion.  We have had practitioners with years of experience taking this course, and all of them found the course to be inspirational and opened doors to concepts which they have never known before.  Chances are, you will love the course too!