DAP SAO FLOW & MINDFULNESS

Dap Sao Flow & Mindfulness

How to develop Mindfulness through Dap Sao Flow?

First we must understand what is Mindfulness, which is being described in the last post. Briefly, to be fully present at every moment without judgement, and seeing things as they are. Why is this important in Kung Fu training? The Mind should not be guessing or imagining what the opponent will be doing as these will make you misinterpret and confuse. The Mind should not be filled or stuck with too much information which may be false alarm or wrong interpretation. Without clarity in the Mental Body, the Energy Body will be unbalanced, and the Physical Body unstable. This can be a chain reaction, snow-balling into panic, difficulty in breathing and  inefficient motor coordination. Sparring may be important to train and test realistically, but is bad for Mindfulness as you will be disrupting your nervous system loading it with anxiety. Then how to train? Dap Sao Flow is the answer.

Dap Sao Flow allows the trainees to train progressively working systematically so that appropriate assimilation is programmed into the Physical Body, Energy Body and Mental Body mindfully. At every stage of training, the principles of Mindfulness need to be observed. The Ego Mind will have to take a back seat. Over time, the Ego will mellow down and be cooperative as the training environment and condition is designed as such.

How is Dap Sao Flow able to do that? Let's look into the system. There are three stages of training:-

• Stage 1 -- Basic rotation exercise. -- At this stage, practitioners will learn to relax, let go and go with the Flow of the momentum of rotation One person will lead, the other follow and vice versa. The four Basic Fundamental skills of "Tun" (swallow), "Tu" (spit), "Fo" (rise or float) & "Zhen" (sink), will be trained with the momentum of the Flow exercise. ( will dedicate a Post on these soon). There are still many concepts and principles that we will be training at this level besides what is said above.

• Stage 2 -- Compliance technical drilling exercise. -- This is the stage where all concepts and principles can be explored, experimented and refined to each individual attributes, capacity and capability. It is a fully compliance training environment for the practitioners to "internalise" what they have learned with mindfulness. Therefore, keep on repeating a certain technique, fine tuning it, until it becomes effortless.

• Stage 3 -- Interactive Flow management exercise -- This is the stage where practitioners "test" their skills, but still maintain Mindfulness. Besides proving themselves, they must make sure that they are in full control and aware of what are happening within their Physical Body, Energy Body and Mental Body. Example physically, is the distance, position, footwork and structure optimum for a particular encounter. One the Energy level, are you able to use your "pneumatic" power, and Mentally are you searching for a solution instead of executing "automatically". This  level cannot be easily explained in a Post like this, it need to be "guided" along the way.

In all the above exercise, the principles of Mindfulness should be always maintain. The trainees should not feel intimidated, nervous or confuse as all techniques are again progressively and systematically introduced and indoctrinated into your subconscious mind by lots of repetitions. And over time, impressed upon the subconscious mind as habits, good habits of course. therefore techniques should be as fool-proof as possible.