Many renowned martial arts masters are known to have spent many hours in quiet and still meditation and contemplation. I carried-out three-years of intense meditation (from 1989-1992), or there abouts, in a monastic setting. I gave-up physical practice, as well as all reading and writing. I used the hua-tou ‘Who I hearing?’ (given to me by my Ch’an teacher – Richard Hunn), and eventually penetrated the empty essence of the ‘mind ground’. This also happened to be the ‘empty essence’ of my physical existence and changed my entire perception of reality. This change in base – or ‘foundational’ - view has been permeating through my mind and body ever-since. It is a gradual process of discovering different ways of viewing reality, as various situations arise and fall away. It is the ‘difference’ in sensory stimulus that generates the circumstances for a new and deeper insight. A new understanding is always in response to an environmental challenge, although it is true that the ‘environment’ can be the outer world, just as much as the ‘inner’ world of the interior of the mind, emotionality and perception of the inside of the body. There is much to work-on as insight is continuously upgrading into an ever-improving understanding of reality. There is a fundamental ‘turning-about’ in the deepest recesses of the mind - this is the permanent and radical change achieved in an ‘instant’ often after years of intense struggle – which permeates through to the conscious-mind – but only over-time. At least, this has been my experience confirmed by my teachers. When the body assumes a martial stance, the perception of the entirety of the structure is far more profound, intricate, precise and ‘exact’. This is the change in the perception of ‘stillness’, but as the body ‘moves’ into different martial stances, there is an equally profound alteration in the perception of ‘movement’, and how ‘stillness’ and ‘movement’ continuously interact with one another (effectively ‘merging’ whilst remaining ‘distinct’). The observations associated with these changes are endless, as it is a never-ending improvement of human perception not only within martial arts, but also within (and throughout) life.
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