Zen and The Martial Arts - Formlessness

I Liq Chuan is called "The Martial Art of Awareness" for good reason. Zen philosophy is inextricably interwoven into it's training approach. It's simultaneously the most difficult and most rewarding part of practice.

Recently in one of my local Tempe, Arizona classes at Falling Leaves Kung Fu, we were discussing I Liq Chuan's "Three Mental Factors" of present formless and neutral, with an emphasis on "formlessness", and how that formlessness applies to martial art.

The formlessness here is a mental quality of formless. In a recent conversation with my Sifu about the subject he explained "it's more about not locking (mentally) onto things".

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