Eye Opener

Last night’s class was a real eye opener for me. Sifu asked us to start the class by doing siu lim tau, but just as I was preparing to start he told me to correct the others. I was gobsmacked. This was something I had never done before. It’s hard enough getting your own form right, let alone correcting others. Usually the more senior members go around the class correcting students but this time the burden fell on me.

At first I thought I just didn’t know enough to be able to identify where other people were going wrong. And in many ways I don’t. For example, I found it really hard to assess whether my colleagues’ stances were correct. So I left them alone! I saw a few shoulders tensed and sloping, so I adjusted those. Interestingly, mistakes increased as time wore on. More on this later.

Correcting Others Helps Me

I can see that my correcting others is a twofold exercise. They get my input on where they are going wrong and can correct themselves accordingly. But also, it’s an exercise for me. I have to think more about correct structure and form. Seeing the form from this new angle helps. Previously I’d only experienced siu lim tau internally; I had my own personal experience of it. Last night, however,  I was seeing siu lim tau from the outside. The more I think about it, the weirder it seems! But, at the same time, there is unmistakable logic in asking a student to correct others.

An Increased Responsibility

Another consequence of this task was that I felt a responsibility I’d not felt before. I couldn’t just dismiss my task and only pretend to do it. Sifu spots things like that and chastens you for not correcting the student and then corrects the student himself. I had to embrace the task and try to do it well. Last night’s siu lim tau took maybe 10 minutes and the interesting thing was that as time wore on, my friends’ shoulders started becoming more tense and more ‘distorted’. The fuk sau shoulder would either be further forward than the other one, or lower. Of course, this gives me a perspective I didn’t have before. Now I can see a pattern emerging.

As time wears on, your muscles get more tired, and you make more mistakes. But you might also lose track of how the correct structure feels and deviate from it because you’ve been immersed in the form for so long. It’s much easier to sense change than sense something that hasn’t changed. For example if there is light pressure on your skin, after a short while you begin to not notice its presence. As soon as the pressure changes, you become aware of it. Both these factors conspire to distort your structure. Because I’ve seen this pattern externally in others I can now be aware of this pattern in my own siu lim tau.

Sifu Is Cleverer Than He Looks

One things for sure. Being asked to correct other students has made me feel a responsibility to really know my stuff, to become a better practitioner. Sifu knows what he is doing. The invitation to the instructor’s course, the assigning of responsibility to judge others: it all encourages me to do better, to practise more, to read up on things. I’m sure this has the same effect on my peers, too. I now have a responsibility not only to improve my skill, but to be able to help others improve theirs too. Sneaky, very sneaky.

This must be a well trodden path in my club that I just wasn’t aware of in the past. I’m really impressed. What a great way to motivate people to work harder.