In this offering, when I start teaching Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do, the forms/Hyungs/Poomsa/Kata are going to be a vital part of the curriculum for all women and girls who study Chung Do Kwon Tae Kwon Do with me. In Korea, forms are referred to as either Poomsa or Hyung. I spent 13 months in Korea working for the U.S. Air Force as a fire fighter. During that time, because I held a Brown Belt, I taught my first women’s class during the years 1968 and 1969. Along with the kicks, blocks, and hand attacks, I taught the beginner’s form, Chungee to a woman named “Hawon”.

This form, (Chungee) that I taught “Hawon” was the replacement for H Form 1, 2, and 3. Kata is the Japanese word for forms. Since Tae Kwon Do is one half Taek Kyon (Korea’s 2,000 year old foot fighting art) and one half Japanese Oh Do Kwan Karate, it is perfectly acceptable to call them forms, Kata, or Hyungs/Poomsa. General Choi also studied Shotokan Karate with Funakoshi Gichin just before he was to return to Korea after studying Calligraphy while in Japan for two years.

Why I am talking about this today is to give you a note about what practicing the forms mean to me and why I want you to learn them and learn them well. I want you to be excited about learning forms as I am in teaching them to you. I want you, at the primary level; to be great at performing the Hyung Chungee and to know that, it has nineteen steps, with two yells.

Not only does forms train you to defend yourself from four differing attack planes and directions, it also trains you to let go of whom or what you were defending yourself against just the second before, and to move quickly on to the next attacker. Without any doubt, what I am proposing is a “baby-steps” way of learning how to defend yourself against multiple attackers. But make no mistake about it: forms practice is a dead certain way, more than any other system that I know of for females to learn how to fight.  But more than all that, it lets a student not only, for the first time, see their body flex and harden in a certain way that can cause real immediate harm and permanent damage to an attacker, but it also lets a pupil learn methodically how to move in a fighting stance and arrive at the point that you want to be at and be ready to deliver a powerful punch or block to an exact targeted spot. Forms are a “transition mindset” that takes a student who knows her blocks and punches quite well and then moves themself into a forms system that puts it all together with either a low or a high punch or block that has you them be as close as they can be to learning the blocks and punches while are still not actually fighting someone. It is the best way to learn about the intricacies of proper blocking and target selection that I know of, bar none. It slowly builds your confidence too, because you see you doing either the moving, blocking or punching every moment you are performing a form.

It is as if the creators of Kata, Hyung, Forms, and Poomsa were thinking of females when they, over a period of years, created and improved upon what most of us in America call forms. Forms are a very important bridge to a whole new world for you. For most women and girls, this practice of learning and perfecting their forms is the first step they will take on a long journey to becoming a great street fighter. It may seem quite drawn-out to you right now, but in time when you get good at this sequencing of breathing, stepping, blocking, and punching, and yelling, you won’t think twice about doing something like this and not look back. I promise, it will change your life in ways that I cannot describe, because it is your life. I am telling you now about what it is like for me, but I cannot tell you about the experience about what it is going to be like for you. I can only say it will be great. This is why I want you to write in your own hand, exactly how your training session went, and what you did right and what needs to be improved. Five to ten years from now, you will thank your lucky stars that you took the time to document your new adventure. Remember to write in your martial arts journal every day of the week.  

Saying all this another way, you will be relaxing and then flexing muscles that you have never felt being used like this, over and over again. But there is more, a whole lot more. You will learn to glide. You know what that means don’t you? It means that you will learn to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee”. It means that you will learn how to move your body from point A to point B like an angel and there won’t be anything the attacker can do to comprehend, to put a stop to what it is you are doing to him with what seems like very little effort from you as you float in and out of his grab/kick/punch zone and he won’t comprehend why this is happening or why he is being stung repeatedly by beautiful butterfly that is stinging him like a bee.  But there is much more at stake, there is something even better than gliding to where you want to be, and that is gliding effortlessly and hitting with extreme pin-point precision and power with what appears to be no effort at all on your part. Why do you want to learn how to do all this? For one thing, it is something the attacker cannot perform himself in almost all cases, nor understand what is going on with you and him. But even if he could understand and know the events that are happening by the seconds not by the minutes to his body, he would not expect it from you, a woman or a girl, not in a million years. You would take him completely by surprise, he will not be quick enough to offer any resistance to your counter attack, because he does not think any force like this  could be coming from a female.  You will always have the element of surprise on your attacker because of his violation of a Rule of War: know your enemy better than they know themselves. That’s why I ask you to never, ever discuss with a man what you learn from me! Another reason is that once you learn how to do all this and live the back-story on all of it, you will be able to use Martial Arts for the rest of your life, and you most definitely will.

And that’s the seedling of what I am trying to reveal to you right now. When you are involved in a street fight with someone who thinks they can take you, he has not found out yet that he does not have your training and commitment to your training because he is just a bum, or a mugger with no technical training, or much common sense at all. You would be surprised at how many men don’t know anything about martial arts, except for watching Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee on T.V. maybe!  This imaginary street fight you find yourself in the middle of, the attacker won’t even understand how it happened and what you did to him. Unless someone can explain it to him he will be like the road bandits who attacked the first ever Gung Fu expert in the world, a Shaolin monk in the forests of Northern China. Can you imagine a time in the world’s history when there was no martial artists anywhere except in the monasteries? That’s the way it was for a long, long time. It was a Shaolin temple secret about what they knew and what they could all do. The bandits hid and waited for a man walking with only a wood staff and they knew they would rob him and leave him for dead on the trail. I would pay good money to go back in time and see the birthing of self-defense and watch that encounter. It would be over very quickly, really in the blink of an eye: the bandit or bandits would be the ones left for dead. Instead, it would be the monk who would be on his merry way to the distant monastery.  The forest animals would have supper that day for sure. And don’t forget that one or two fewer bandits made the trails safer at least for a little while.

You are going to learn how to do forms first, slow and easy. Then you will do the same form at medium speed and power. But then, hold on, you are going to do it flat out as fast and as hard as you can. Then when you are sweating and out of breath, you are going to do it again, but this time, you are going to go faster and hit even harder! Now you tell me, does that sound like fun! Yea, I think so too. The trick is to do these in what the Chinese Kung Fu practioners call doing the movements in “chains”. This means that you will learn only three total movements at a time and you will do all three moves at a slow and very deliberate and focused pace. In fact, until you get into the “groove” of it all, you may want to speed up a little bit, but don’t do it. Keep it slow and deliberate, just like Tai Chi Chuan does their moves. If I get the time or you ask me, I will tell you about the first time I saw a live demonstration of Tai Chi Chuan in 1972 in Manchester, England, United Kingdom. Can you sense from reading this that this is a very deliberate way to build your patience?

You can feel your muscles working as they transfer your body from A to B over and over again. In my way of teaching, you cannot do it slow enough for me. When you finally go into medium speed, you will think you are breaking the speed limit! I want you to develop your desire to do “medium speed” forms long before and until such time as you know for a solid fact that you can do Chungee with-your-eyes-shut-tight. When that moment comes, you will know it and then and only then, can you go on to medium speed and medium striking power. And finally when you can perform Chungee with your eyes completely closed and you can do it easily and gracefully you can go on to full speed, full power. But even then, at either medium or at full speed you still start out with doing only three movements at a time. That’s your North Star, learn three movements at a time, and no matter what the speed is, until you know it “cold” do it “in threes”.  You chop it all up into “chains”, then you put it all back together, and you glide and hit, glide and block.

Full speed and full power is the ultimate test and the ultimate proving ground for all the hard work you have put into your slow and medium speed practice. Full speed and full power is a proving ground because now you get to really learn how you actually fold your arms before you punch, under almost fighting conditions. It lets you really see for your self how you do the forms without any “in this moment” constraints. You are going as fast as you can possibly go. What you have to watch out for is being sloppy at higher speeds. Every move, every thing you do has to be perfect at full speed. Why? Because the way that you train, is the way that you will fight in the streets! You want to aim for being able to do something that the attacker has no way of competing with you. You may think you can train all day at full speed but you can’t, you have to give your unconscious mind time to absorb all that you are learning. When your unconscious mind is whispering to you, listen carefully. Listen to that voice and be guided by its wisdom.

Believe me, wearing a karate or Tae Kwon do uniform is a nice touch and certainly required in a standard Tae Kwon Do/Karate/Kung-Fu class. But this is not a bricks and mortar class is it? This training is for me to train you to be a great street fighter, not a dojo Black Belt, but a real street fighter.  However you do or don’t dress for your training sessions is fine with me.  If there is no uniform to be discovered by a family member, there is no “iron clad” evidence of your ongoing education is there?   

I personally feel that I can teach you self-defense techniques for years to come, but I can never teach any martial art to you unless you decide that is what you want to do, more than anything else. In other words you must “meet me in the middle of the bridge” and you have to know that are you making that commitment. If you have the desire you can most definitely move the mountains, and as they say, and the rest will follow you. Learning all the training techniques is no small undertaking, but it can be done. It takes three years in most Tae Kwon Do dojos, so you have an idea of how long it will take you to master what I have to teach you.

Forms teach you how to keep your head on a swivel and always be aware of the eight doors of the octagon that any one or more doors can open up and several men may step out to attack you while you are defending yourself against another solitary attacker. My coaching of you about your forms is to not get caught up in fighting one attacker when three others are trying to hurt you all at the same time. The next reason to study kata, hyung/Poomsa/forms is to learn about what your body feels like when both chi and intention to harm someone is vibrating and healthy, deep inside your body. It’s a strange feeling to have those “two mindsets” alive and activated inside of you, and all at the same time. They match up like water and water. Having that desire to hurt someone is a normal reaction to a potential attack. What you are going to learn more about is that the protective spirit inside of you is ready to go all the time. The only thing you need to do is to train like crazy, to give your sub conscious mind something to recall and then feed your conscious mind so that the pieces can be put  together at the right moment. You have to look at training as a change of your life to start out studying this system for decades to come. That’s right ,decades to come, as your life flows along with it.

One reason that it is a strange feeling is that, you have never experienced your body, mind, and spirit working together for such a purpose as defending yourself by striking someone very, very hard, have you? The second reason is that when intention and your Qi/Chi is activated like I have described, you will experience an awareness that is very powerful, and again it is something you have never ever felt before. And don’t for a moment confuse this feeling with feelings of anger because defending yourself has nothing to do with anger in any way. Why forms will be powerful for you is that there is a certainty that you have never had the feelings of your Chi/Qi “moving” in one direction before, with the intention of hurting someone when it comes out of your body and forcefully pierces someone else’s body. Just imagine, as you block, punch or kick as moving from your feet upwards in your body from whatever you are doing at the moment. And that is how you summon your Chi/Qi each and every time you need it to penetrate an attacker’s body. Simple really.

I know it was a weird feeling to experience my own Qi /Chi when I did sense it for first time doing my three H-forms as a 16-year-old white belt. What is great about doing Kata/forms/Hyungs is that you begin to slowly realize that you are plenty powerful with out getting in touch with your anger. Let me say it simpler: anger is bad for fighters, joy and happiness is good for fighters! In time, you will realize that anger has no place in a fight against someone who is trying to kill you. You will find as I did, that anger is a feeling that can get you killed because it makes you do weird things to “get back” at someone, rather than being cool, calm, and collected when you fight. Being angry or mad at your attacker is just entertainment for him anyway, because it means that emotionally he got to you, doesn’t it? He wants to have intimacy with you no matter what it takes, and by not getting in touch with anger means that he is shut out of your mind, body, and spirit. Not thinking of your anger as an option is the only way to be successful as a martial artist.

I want to make this point by illustrating with a short story I always tell my students as they are beginning their journey. Do you remember being a little girl and sitting in your high chair? Did your parents give you a little rattle to shake and play with? Did you remember laughing and being very pleased that you got to shake that rattler and make some noise? Do you realize it was your first successful attempt at being heard for something you did? Do you remember how much fun it was to shake that rattle and laugh and gurgle about how great life was treating you?

Do you remember that dark day when you dropped your rattle, and it just flew out of your hand and hit the floor? I can tell you what happened even though I was not there. You started to cry and scream and shout, “I want my rattle”! But nobody came to your aid, as soon as you wanted him or her to, so you cried and screamed until someone came and picked up the rattle, washed it off and gave it back to you. All was returned to normal wasn’t it? You were happy again. Of course you learned a very valuable lesson: when you expressed anger as a toddler, you got what you wanted. As an adult woman the infantile response of expressing anger may be your first line of defending your self even to this day. I am here to tell you that expressing anger is just another way for an attacker to see deeply into you and see what buttons he can push to torture you. What I am going to teach you is that by no means is an infantile response of anger the best response to violence against you. What I am going to teach you, your attacker will never be prepared for nor be able to recover from. And martial arts philosophy and mindset is something that is quite foreign to him indeed. It is called martial arts training and that definitely includes all the self-defense techniques I can put up on your screen and teach you.

Now, check this out, you can bring forth all the intention, focus and desire to really hurt someone when you do your form/Hyung and then bring it to a close and completely stop your training session. You can sit down and read a magazine, and have a glass of water and relax. Then you can go right back to do the exact same form again and bring forth all of your full blown intention, and commitment to really hurt each of the four imaginary attackers coming your way and still be as fired up as you were before you stopped for a break. You are putting the mind in a position where it can experience you in “fighting frame of mind”, and then you can turn off the fire under your Chi/Qi for a while and then resume it when you want to. I have done this type of practice more times than I can count over the 55 years that I have studied and done forms and it is always new and always the same. My point is that you have not really had control of your body, mind, and spirit yet, until you have performed forms for a few years. There is just nothing like it on earth. My rule is: too many? That’s not enough! And once you start to teach this form to a girl friend, you will learn and know it even better.

And finally, the physical benefits are amazing because this training will strengthen your arms and legs, your chest, your back and everywhere in between. I almost forgot to add that if you think you could not hit a target in a fight, just simply work on your forms for a while and see what you believe about your ability to hit anything you want as small as a pencil eraser on the end of a pencil.  Keep your attention “on the look out” for your very own personal “flip flop”, because it will be the day when you know for a fact, that you are a martial artist. Said in another way, can you name anything on earth that can teach you how to fight without you getting hurt? This is it; this is the way to do your intermediate work prior to actually fighting some male student. I want you to fight only with men when you finally do start free sparring for real.  I still want you to keep to yourself, what you have learned from me when you do free spar with male students. Let me know about your own day of the  “flip flop” because I can’t wait to hear all about it.