My earliest memories would have had to be in the early 90s watching Enter The Dragon on VHS or tv. Bruce Lee blew my mind away with his physical presence and martial art skills. But it wasn’t until the early 00’s that I had direct experience with the Martial Arts, this was some kind of mixture of TKD/Hapkido and Yudo(Korean Judo) and it really reinvigorated my imagination and what could be achieved if I put the effort in. But sadly I didn’t do more than 1 formal class as I was discouraged by my family from pursuing it(boy do I regret that!).
The idea of practising martial arts kept coming back to me, particularly as I gained more confidence in myself I would come back to the martial arts in May 2011 when I was living in town at the time ( previously I was basically living in the woods away from everything which was one of the factors that put me from practising during my college years. So the art I chose to return to the martial arts was Ving Tsun. It was the original system that Bruce lee practised before he left for the states. I also had some knowledge about ip man before the films were famous. Jeet Kune Do was my ultimate goal at the time in long run but I wanted a solid foundation in Ving Tsun. Interestingly I dreamed of my own style that expressed myself before I actually knew of JKD’s philosophy.
But the deeper i went into Ving Tsun with my various instructors I found it to be a complete system that if well understood and trained correctly is arguably one of the best systems out there that deserves a better reputation than it has generally. Like all systems , the community has the drama , backstabbing, misunderstood concepts etc.
But as mentioned in my first post. I’ve moved to Scotland where the quality of wing chun is low or poorly understood by particular lineages.
But on a positive note, there is a wider mix of systems here than what I had in my town down south.
Thank you for reading this and Goodnight 🙂
My Gung Fu Journey 