Thread: Liam's year of Martial Art's in China

Liam Beale Martial Arts adventure in China

Liam Beale talks to NLP Trainer Michael Beale about his year of Martial Art's in China.



Following a year in China Liam has just finished a Martial Arts degree in the UK and is currently in Hong Kong on his way to Beijing. He plans to continue his Martial Arts, music and film making ambitions in China.

(Please allow up to 2 minutes for the MP3 download if you want to listen to the discussion.)

http://nlp-expert.co.uk/Martial-Arts/Liam_Beale.mp3

Liam's Martial Art's adventure in China - Podcast Transcript

Michael : Good morning Liam, thanks for doing this podcast on your adventures in China doing martial arts. If I can ask you to kick off by saying who you are and a little bit about what you do.

Liam : OK, my name is Liam Beale, I've just finished a degree in Martial Arts and Strength and Conditioning in Buxton University in Derby, which is the first in Europe as far as I know. I guess my main thing is martial arts, but I also do film-making and music-making, I've just finished my first feature length film, which is called 'One Life or Another' and will hopefully be on Google Video sooner or later.

Michael : Now, you spend a year doing martial arts training in China - what actually appealed to you about going to China?

Liam : Hard to say exactly. I think the big thing for me was knowing that I was doing a martial art as it's traditionally done, and to the extent that it's normally done. So for example when you see images of the Shao Lin, who I've trained with, you see that they train for eight hours a day, where as in England we train an hour one day, an hour another day and then that's it for the week.

So it's more authentic to go over to another country and see how they do it themselves. It really opens your eyes to the amount of effort that you need to become good at martial arts.

Michael : Can you give a sort of time line of your trip - where you went to, how long you stayed - just to give people an overview of how you spent your time there.

Liam : I left at about July 2005, just after my A-levels, which I really didn't care about at the time. I went to a school in the Northern province, in Ji Lin, a school which was heavily advertised on the internet, and not particularly good. It was full of foreigners who were also attracted in by the same website - it was kind of a trap.

You'd go there, and you'd pay an awful lot of money, not by Western standards, but by Chinese standards it was a lot of money, and by the time you'd already walked in the door, you supposedly owed them $900, which makes it very hard to leave.

And then my instructor there wanted to leave and start his own school, me and a couple of friends went with him to a place called Shandong, which is the Eastern province of China. And then we stayed in a disgusting, disgusting school for about two months before we moved to the final school in Yantai - which was pretty much an abandoned factory, where we had no heating - and it snowed for six months.

And I had a giant hole in my wall - and because there was no heating and because it was so cold, it got to the point where if I had water in my room, it would freeze - and I had to sleep with all of my clothes on, including my boots and my hat over my face.

Yeah - it was cold.

Michael : Now you started answering this earlier, but I'm going to ask you - would you do a compare and contrast of martial arts in the UK and martial arts that you've found in China?

Liam : My opinion of martial arts in the UK is incredibly low. And often when I have these conversations with people that do martial arts in the UK I seem to be quite belittling of them. But it's just the case of - firstly the instructors just aren't as good in the UK, they just aren't, because we have a different system.

Because, in the UK we're scared of hurting people, for one - we're scared of the whole legal system involved in hurting people. Which is good to an extent - but if you really want to learn, especially with martial arts, you have to have and element of danger, which increases the speed that you learn.

Secondly because everybody here only learns for a limited time. They have a job and then they train. They go to school and then they train. In China you just train for your life, that's it. You train for eight hours of the day every day. And you don't rest.

And also, we've created a lot of bad ideas about martial arts in the West. If you look at the phenomena of Qi - Qi is Chinese theory, which essentially equates to 'breath'. But when people take that into the Western sides of things they completely warp it, they turn it into something quite commercial and quite abstract. So when you see people in England when they talk about Qi, they talk about it as if it's some kind of powerful thing, that they can use to defeat opponents and things like that - in China it's not like that at all, it's pretty much just the way that you breath.

And that's it.

Which is incredibly mundane. And if you say that to some Western practitioners they get amazing offended by the notion that the things that they are teaching are a bit over-dramatic.

Michael : We've had certain discussions about how you found the food over there, but I think it's something that people that are thinking of going may be interested in. How would you compare the difference between UK food and Chinese food generally?

Liam : It's quite funny, because Chinese-Chinese food is very different from the food that you will find in a Chinese restaurant in England. You will not get anything that they will ever serve you in China. It's completely different.

Firstly, Chinese food tends to be a lot greasier. I'm not entirely sure why, the way they good it I guess. And you're not entirely sure what you're eating half of the time. I'm pretty sure I've had pigeon, I've had dog, I've had donkey, and in more overt meals I've had things like wasps, I've had pig brains - which is really nice actually - I wouldn't discourage someone from having any of them.

Wasps are a bit pointless to be honest, because they just taste of whatever sauce you put on them. I don't know. I wouldn't recommend wasps.

Michael : And what about the people?

Liam : Chinese people tend to be incredibly friendly, but sometimes that can become incredibly uncomfortable.

For example in China, what we would call lying - there's a different ethos around lying in China. In China there's the idea that you 'save face', and by that they mean that they try not to personally be the bearer of bad news - so if something bad is happening, they'll tell you something good is happening. Just so it's not their face that you associate with the negativity. And that's quite normal, that's quite common.

And for Western people to be under that kind of environment can be incredibly annoying. We make a big deal about people being honest with us, and people lying to us, but in China it's completely different. So you never know what's going on. And if you try and organize something, it won't happen. That's the mindset that you have to be in, be prepared to by disappointed in terms of organization.

Michael : Looking back on it, what do you think you've learned in your year? What do you think the main things - or at things in a different way - how are you different now then when you first went?

Liam : The best lesson that you could ever learn in going to China, or going to a place where martial arts originated from is that you learn not to have any more excuses. And by that I mean, once you've trained with the supposed best, and you see that they're just human beings like anyone else, you can take that knowledge back to England. And then you realize that you could do as much training in your bedroom, or anywhere else in the world as you could do in these supposed monasteries full of masters and things like that.

It's quite an important thing, because people will always talk about somebody else that trains harder. There's a big 'the grass is always greener' thing. Even when I was in China people would say 'Oh, the real Shao Lin, they would do this.' and it got ridiculous after a while, because people would distance themselves from actual training, they would distance themselves by saying 'other people can do this, I wish I could do this.'

So, the most important thing that I learned is not to distance yourself from actual action. And being able to say, 'this is where I am, I need to make the most of this.' and you can take that anywhere.

Michael : And what advice would you give to anybody that was thinking of going over there?

Liam : Firstly I'd say, ignore every website that you find because the websites that you find will be what attracts the most people, and because it attracts the most people, it dilutes the experience that you're looking for.

In the first academy that I went to, I wanted to be surrounded by the Shao Lin, the traditional Chinese martial artists. And because so many like-minded people, like myself, came along, it meant that it was mostly Americans taking photos of things, and training not particularly hard.

I was training, probably, harder than anyone else there, because they were all just tourist more than anything. They were their for a month at a time, they'd get bored of it.

And those places are much more expensive, by the way, because people will adjust and people just fuel it with money because they think that they have to pay.

What I would suggest, that if you can find entry into China, get your visa sorted out and things like that, and then go on your own accord and find your own instructor because the quality of what you're learning will be so much more traditional, and you'll be paying so much less for what you're getting. It's by far the best way of doing it - especially if you want an experience, a cultural experience, that's the best way.

Michael : Before I ask for your contact details, is there anything else that you'd like to say about martial arts generally - maybe something that we've already said - something that you think is important and you'd like to mention it to people.

Liam : Well I think as we're getting into the modern age, it's becoming more apparent to me, especially after the degree - when people talk about martial arts, they automatically link it with the idea of the East and Asia, and although Asian culture, Asian philosophy are very important, very good things - I dislike immensely the that they're always linked to each other.

So you can never really talk about just martial arts, or martial arts in a global sense, because martial arts is becoming increasingly Western these days - there are many Western martial arts, that people tend to look down on, and I'm not entirely sure why.

I think people need to understand that if you're interested in Eastern culture, that's ok - if you're also interested in martial arts, that's also ok, but they don't have to be the same thing.

Michael : And what are your contact details if anyone would like to speak with you?

Liam : Well, my normal email address is just my name, liambeale@hotmail.com. and apart from that there's ljbeale@gmail.com and that's the one I check the most often.

Michael : Ok, thank you very much indeed.

Liam : Thank you.