Peaceful Warrior Woman: Protector of Your Body and Boundaries

What is a peaceful warrior?

The term Peaceful Warrior may seem like an oxymoron. I took the idea from the book (and movie) Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. I chose the term to emphasize that this women’s self-defense class offers much more than physical techniques of self-defense. In fact, the physical self-defense techniques taught in the class are the least important segment of the class.

The self-defense techniques serve as a training vehicle through which you can begin to experience a vastly more efficient method of movement. If you choose to adopt this practice, you are not likely to ever be the victim of a surprise attack of any kind. This is because you will sense possible danger and won’t stick around when someone is acting suspiciously.

Each week you will train in how to move and interact from your center of mass. This is how all animals except humans move and interact with their environment. Once you are able to place your attention in your center of mass, you will be aware of all movement in your environment and you will sense potential danger of all types.

Going through your day with your full attention in your center of mass, you will feel a new sense of aliveness. Moving from center of mass means you will be moving with exceptional efficiency, which improves athletic performance and all physical tasks.

Great example of a wing chun expert enforcing clear boundaries.

This unique women’s self-defense class offers training in four integrated areas:

Put your mind in your center of mass:
When your mind is in your center, you will feel centered, grounded, confident, and assertive. Most predators will leave you alone because they will view you as a hard target. Also, with your mind in your center, you will quiet the normally loud mental chatter that otherwise prevents you from knowing instantly who is safe to be around and who isn’t.

In addition, with your mind in your center rather than in the mental chatter that we all commonly get lost in, you will more easily tune in to your bodily sensations that inform your intuition. As you quiet the mental chatter, you will better intuit when something or someone seems a little off. When we trust and honor our intuition, we can easily detect potential danger and avoid it, whether the threat is a stranger or someone we know.

Learning to put your mind in your center of mass is very uncomplicated, but it requires constant practice. All the practices in the class will be performed while focusing your mind in your center. And as you go through your day, you will learn to initiate all movement with your focus in your center, which confers self-empowerment, confidence, and increased energy.

At the birth of civilization, humans began to lose their animal instincts. The practice of learning to pay attention to how you move can help you regain some of your animal nature and animal instincts. Humans are the only animals that lost their ability to move from their center of mass. As your ability to move from your center improves, you will experience increased aliveness in your life. Like other animals, you will be more aware of and in harmony with your environment.

Although it’s important to review past events and plan for future events, almost all of us spend far too much time doing that and not nearly enough time living in the real world. The real world is the world of the present moment. It is the world of moving from your center of mass. Living in the real world means fully experiencing everything going on in our immediate environment, which is not possible when we are caught up in reviewing, planning, and other forms of mental chatter.
Situational Awareness
Each week we will spend a couple of minutes discussing some of the ways to identify and avoid potential danger, including identifying behaviors common to human predators. However, it is important to not get fixated on looking for specific predator behaviors because you will miss a behavior you are not looking for.

In the unlikely event of an actual attack, your situational awareness will allow you to see it coming, which will give you the opportunity to evade if possible or to preemptively attack the attacker as he begins to initiate his attack. That element of surprise will give you an enormous advantage. Rapists and other violent predators use the element of surprise to physically and psychologically overpower their targets. The predator will always have the advantage unless you are skilled and practiced enough in situational awareness to sense the threat in time to either avoid the predator or to preempt the attack with your own surprise attack.

Situational awareness and learning to live and move from your center are directly related in that they both lead to living with greater aliveness throughout the day. The more time you spend each day practicing moving from your center in all activities, the greater your ability to rapidly shift back and forth between analytical thinking and your animal way of moving from your center. This will also allow you to rapidly switch back and forth between the fine motor control needed for operating all the functions of your electronic devices and the gross motor control needed for defending yourself.

No matter how much self-defense training you acquire, physical altercations are always very dangerous, which is why maintaining situational awareness is far more important than self-defense techniques. One of the goals of situational awareness is to sense potential predators in time to avoid ever finding yourself in the same space as them.

Situational awareness and moving from your center of mass includes maintaining a healthy curiousity about your constantly changing immediate environment. That sense of curiosity about people and situations leads to a more vibrant way of life.

Self-awareness also contributes to situational awareness. It does so by belping you to break the freeze and avoid willful blindness, both of which are discussed later on this webpage.
Boundary setting
As you develop situational awareness as a routine practice, you will feel increasingly centered and confident. Predators and others will see by the centered way you walk and hold yourself that you maintain impeccable boundaries and they will leave you alone. Predators prey on the vulnerable, and avoid women who are very aware, assertive, and maintain clear boundaries. In many situations, verbal boundary setting is sufficient to dissuade a predator. However, verbal boundary setting works well only when your body language backs up your words.

The clearer your boundary-setting, the less likely you are to ever need to use the self-defense techniques taught in this class.

There is a tendency for us to let our guard down with trusted family members or authority figures, making it hard to spot something in that person that may be just a little off. As you gradually become progressively more skilled at placing your mind in your center of mass, you will increasingly notice very subtle indicators in people that could serve as early warnings that certain individuals may not be safe for you to be around.

In terms of maintaining clear, protective boundaries, self-awareness is as important as situational awareness. The more self-aware you are, the greater your intuition. This is because intuition is based on the feelings you are experiencing in that moment, which then informs your intuitive hunches.
Self-defense techniques
The self-defense techniques taught in the Peaceful Warrior Woman: Protector of Your Body and Boundaries class are for use specifically with the types of predators that prey on women, regardless of whether the predator is a family member, co-worker, boss or other authority figure, or stranger. My philosophy is to teach you just a few techniques that you can confidently master, rather than to teach a plethora of techniques that you couldn’t possibly be able to call up and effectively use amid the chaos and terror of a real attack. The few techniques taught in this class are intended to hurt the attacker enough to allow you to get away. These simple techniques are learned by pairing up with your classmates each week and going through practice drills in slow motion with each other and then practicing with full power and speed on a pad.

To physically defend yourself, you must be able to move well. You need to be able to move with speed and fluidly because power is greatly magnified by speed and because your techniques won’t work if the attacker sees them coming. Aside from the importance of staying physically fit to effectively defend yourself, you will be taught how to move from your center rather than from your head. Each week you will be coached on how to more effectively move from your center of mass when practicing with your classmates.

In addition to practicing moving from your center, you must learn to read the body language of others. This will help you to profile suspected possible predators based on how they move. Learning to predict the movements of predators will give you a great advantage. Two-person drills with your classmates are designed to teach you how to predict each other’s movements and will help you to time your strikes and kicks to accurately reach the intended targets. These physical cues, when combined with visual cues, go a long way in keeping you safe.

Although this is not a traditional martial arts class with form sets, the method of movement as well as the ability to sense the intentions and movements of an attacker come out of the martial art of wing chun. For example, the abilities to connect your limbs to your center, to utilize fulcrums and multiple, simultaneous vectors of force, to coordinate your body movements, and the ability to anticipate the attacker’s movements all come from the martial art of wing chun. Wing chun was originally created by and for women, to allow them to overpower bigger and stronger men.

Concentric versus eccentric muscular force: Bodybuilders use concentric contractions because they want big bulky muscles. For quick, powerful movements and greater energy, eccentric contractions are vastly superior to concentric contractions. The techniques taught in this class are delivered with eccentric contractions, because that will enhance your ability to deploy your empty-hand weapons (hands, elbows, knees, and feet) with speed and power.

Many women’s self-defense courses include fancy, exotic techniques like this one to attract students. The technique shown in this photo won’t work in a realistic attack without considerable training. The techniques taught in my class are not exotic or fancy; they are simple and effective.

Benefits of this class in daily life:

When you practice keeping your attention in your center of mass (in the lower abdomen), you will be able to maintain impeccable boundaries with potential predators.
Daily practice in keeping your attention in your center of mass develops the ability to focus your full attention on any activity or task. It is a type of mindfulness practice involving physical concentration.
Your physical movements throughout the day will become interesting to you. You will begin to move in a way humans are capable of moving when they are not caught up in constant mental chatter.
As a peaceful warrior, you can be a caring, respectful, sensitive, and warm person while also being a person who is prepared to be violent if that ever becomes necessary, in order to protect yourself and others.
Many people think that training in how to be violent makes women less feminine and more violent, but the opposite is true. The self-efficacy and confidence that you can protect your body and boundaries actually serves to reduce anxiety and fear, making you a more calm, accepting, and warm person.
The confidence to claim your personal space leads to assertiveness without any loss of femininity.

Move when touched

Unless you are in the safety of your home or in a place where you know and trust everyone around you, learn to instinctively move evasively whenever someone touches you. If you feel a hand on your shoulder, step away and if it is a stranger, immediately assert yourself in whatever way seems appropriate given the specific circumstances. It’s important to assert clear boundaries immediately.

This peaceful warrior woman is smashing her elbow into the side of the attacker’s jaw. When delivered with your body mass behind it, an elbow strike can inflict serious injury; eventually, when you get to the advanced level, it will be your most powerful upper body weapon.

The physical self-defense techniques taught in this class:

Simple techniques to master:

Oblique kicks to shins and ankles (if about to be grabbed from the front)
Rear heel kicks to shins (if grabbed from behind)
Hard, fast, open-hand slaps to the eyes and face (deployed as soon as his attention is on his damaged shins and ankles)
Upward palm-heel strikes to the nose (deployed as soon as his attention is on his damaged shins and ankles)

Slightly more complex techniques

Combination of the open-hand slaps and palm-heel strikes (following your kicks to his shins and ankles)
Knees to inner thigh and groin (following your palm-heels to his nose and slaps to his face and eyes)

Combining techniques necessitates good body mechanics, which you will develop long before you develop the ability to have your mind in your center of mass.

Advanced techniques: These techniques may look simple but they require considerably more precision, speed, and power to be effective; therefore they are only taught when you are able to move with good body mechanics and are on your way to keeping your mind in your center of mass.

Cupped palm claps to the ears
Elbows to the jaw, throat, eyes, side of neck, back of neck, and back of the head
Chops (aka knife-hand or blade-hand) to throat or neck
Hammer fists to the jaw, throat, side of the neck, back of neck, and groin

Although all the above techniques are extremely effective when delivered from your center of mass, it takes ongoing practice to be able to find the openings to deliver your strikes and kicks to their intended targets, and to do so with speed, power, and accuracy.

Most self-defense instructors fail to inform their students that techniques that work well in class often have no effect at all on an attacker who has adrenalin or street drugs flooding his system, which make him impervious to pain. Also, in a real situation, the adrenalin flooding your own body will reduce your accuracy due to loss of your fine motor skills.

Gradually, as you develop the ability to put your full attention in your center of mass and move from that point, techniques will become less important. At that point, you will see potential threats and either won’t be in the same space as a predator or you will see the attack before it happens, giving you time to attack him as he closes the distance.

Targets

In class you will learn the most vulnerable parts of an attacker’s body, known as targets. You will also learn the parts of your own body that can be used as so-called empty-hand weapons. You will learn how, when, and where to apply your empty-hand weapons on the attacker’s body. I recommend a daily practice of looking at people (especially big men) around you and identifying (in your mind) all the vulnerable targets on each person’s body.

Self-defense techniques are learned as you pair up with classmates and practice in slow-motion each week. You will then line up and practice delivering these techniques with speed and full power on a pad that I hold for you. As you each hit the pad, you will be coached on something specific each week to improve your biomechanics, speed, accuracy, and power.

It can be a big confidence-builder to know the vulnerable targets on an attacker’s body and to know what hand and foot weapons to use on each target.

In the chaos of a real attack, many of your strikes and kicks will miss their intended targets, which is why ongoing practice is so important.

However, no matter how experienced and practiced you become in your self-defense techniques, in a real attack, you will be in a very dangerous situation, which is why you must also practice situational awareness, which develops concomitantly with your practice of moving from center of mass.

In this photo, compare her large blunt elbow with her smaller and fragile fist. The fist has a lot of very small bones and fragile joints, whereas the elbow is a blunt force weapon. Well-connected elbow strikes to vulnerable targets using your body mass may hurt him enough for you to escape. Only use your fists as hammer-fist strikes to vulnerable targets. Although boxers hit with the knuckles, their hands are wrapped and gloved.

When evasion or escape aren’t possible you must use violence and deception

When you or someone with you is about to be attacked, the primary goal should always be to escape. But, if that’s not possible, you must use violent techniques that physically incapacitate the attacker. To do that with speed, accuracy, and power, you must be able to adopt the mind-state of a warrior rather than the mind-state of a victim. That comes from regular practice over time.

Use of Deception

If you are ever in a situation where you are not able to evade or preemptively attack the attacker because he has already ambushed and overpowered you, deception may buy you time. For example, you may get an attacker to momentarily let his guard down by giving him the false impression that you are not going to put up a fight. Then, as soon as you see an opening to attack vital targets, you attack and don’t let up until you can get away.

Mind-state of a peaceful warrior woman

A peaceful warrior woman is not afraid to be assertive because she knows it will not diminish her femininity and it will not interfere with being a warm, gentle, and empathic person.

What is your intention? Although your ultimate intention is to avoid potentially dangerous people and situations, if it ever appears that you are about to be attacked, 100% of your attention needs to be on attacking the attacker until you can get away.

When escape isn’t possible you must attack the attacker

Preemptively attack the attacker.

Always assume the attacker has a gun or knife even though it isn’t visible to you.

Weapons are meant to be felt, not seen. In most cases, if someone puts a gun or a knife in your face, the intent is to threaten you in order to get something from you, not to kill you. If the intent is to kill you, in most cases you won’t see it coming.

Because you must always assume an attacker has a concealed gun or knife, you must disable him to prevent the attacker from drawing the weapon. If you are attacked by a man, he will assume he will easily be able to have his way with you. If you only inflict pain on the attacker and fail to disable him, he will then draw the concealed gun or knife that he didn’t think he’d need before you struck or kicked him. Therefore, simply inflicting pain will not keep you safe. Your only hope for a safe escape is to disable him so he can’t chase after you and can’t pull out his knife or gun. You can never half-heartedly attack; you must fight for your life until you are able to escape.

Fight for your life

In the stress and chaos of a real attack, you must keep attacking every vulnerable target that you can access and not stop until your attacker is incapacitated enough to allow you to get away. Once someone has attacked you or is about to attack you, you must instinctively identify vulnerable targets on his body and keep attacking those targets as they present themselves, instinctively choosing your most available empty-hand weapons as openings appear from moment-to-moment. For example, the lead weapon taught in class is the oblique shin kick, delivered with your body mass behind it. However, it is not one kick. You will practice kicking with your left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and continue that way. As his various vulnerable targets open up, you will deploy your fingers, palm-heels, blade-hands, hammer-fists, elbows, knees, and feet. You will know when you can stop attacking because there will be a chance to safely get away.

Theoretically, one well-placed strike to one of his vulnerable targets, such as his throat or neck, with your full mass behind it, could be all you need to allow for an easy escape. The problem is that with all the adrenalin in your system and loss of fine motor control, you will have to keep fighting for your life until you can finally land a clean shot and get away.

A ponytail, braids, a scarf, or anything a predator can grab gives him the ability to control your movements. With practice, you will learn to center yourself and then use rotational forces to launch your counterattack even in this bad situation. An example of the use of rotational forces appears in my Biu Gee video that appears on the About Me: My Life in the Martial Arts page.

Speed and power are essential

Practice drills of various types will help you learn to strike and kick using multiple wing chun fulcrums and vectors of force and to move from your center with power and speed. If you lack fluidity, your movements will be too slow. The faster you strike and kick, the more power you will have. This kind of power does not come from bodybuilding; it comes from optimization of biomechanics. The more you train to live in your body center, the more you will optimize your biomechanics. If you choose to take on continuous training, you will begin to instinctively use your most available empty-hand weapons to strike an attacker’s most available vulnerable targets as they open up. Each time a target opens up, it will only be for an instant. Once you can rely on your instincts, you will dramatically improve your chances of avoidance, evasion, and escape.

When to preemptively strike

If you master the practice of situational awareness, you are less likely to ever be attacked. However, being human, you will let your guard down occasionally. At those times, you are vulnerable to an attack. Your best chance would then be to preemptively attack the attacker the moment a potential attacker moves closer to you after you have tried to talk him down or given him your wallet or purse (if demanded). You must begin attacking him before he strikes or grabs you. By preemptively attacking the predator, he will be caught off guard, which is what he expects to do to you. He will not expect and will not be prepared for a preemptive attack from you.

Throughout your day, study how people move.

Various practices you will do with your classmates each week offer an opportunity to learn by feel how people move. These exercises will help you learn to intuit the intentions of a possible predator.

More on Situational Awareness

Situational awareness, as I teach it, is a way of life whereby you are fully present in your moment-to-moment experience, which includes awareness of both your own behavior as well as the behavior of everyone around you. You will learn how to profile potential predators based on their behavior. You will learn the dozens of warning signs evident in their behavior—many of which are very subtle and normally go unnoticed. Situational awareness also includes awareness of your intuitive suspicions and the ability to honor them.

As you practice continually returning your mind to your center of mass and originating all movement from there, you will develop the ability to know things about others based more on how they move than on their words. Words can be very deceptive, but subtle body language can be trusted, once you learn how to read it.

Because we learn to rely way too much on spoken language, we miss all the micro-expressions and other body language that communicate a person’s true intentions.

An easy situational awareness practice is to start paying attention to dogs. They tell us all we need to know about their intentions through their body language. They are easier to read than humans because with them we can’t get fooled by words.

Be sure to study the separate Situational Awareness page, which is much more detailed.

Spend some time watching animals in their natural habitats and you will notice that they are always alert to what’s going on around them, even when they are eating. Early humans were like that too. That high level of situational awareness will not only keep you safe, it will also help you feel more alive.

Someone can be very charming yet be very unsafe to be around

It is very common to meet someone who appears to be very nice and very charming, who later turns out to be abusive and dangerous. Some of the most notorious mass murderers were known by neighbors and friends as being very nice people. At some point we have all been in the presence of that type of predator without being consciously aware of the danger. One famous example of that type of psychopathic predator was Ted Bundy. You may have a family member, acquaintance, neighbor, boss, co-worker, or anyone in an authority position fitting that description; be wary of them. Learn to honor subtle bodily cues that inform your intuition. And learn to trust subtle feelings that lead you to sense that something is not quite right.

If you are not completely comfortable with someone, avoid unnecessary conversation with that person.

An extremely helpful method, adapted from Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which I taught for several years, is the following four-step process:

Observation: What objective information do I have, using my senses, on what is going on in my immediate environment in this moment?
Feeling: What emotion am I experiencing in this moment?
Need: What do I need in this moment? (Examples: space, safety, choice, respect)
Request: The request needs to be something that can realistically be carried out.

Example of the four-step process: 1.”You just stepped toward me after I stepped back.” (my observation). 2. I’m feeling uncomfortable with that.” (my feeling). 3. “I need space.” (expression of my need). 4. “Step back.” (my request, expressed assertively). At that point, if you cannot get away, you need to aggressively attack and keep attacking until you can get away.

Many predators rely on trust

Although women are often ambushed by a stranger and taken to a secondary location, one of the most dangerous situations is when a family member or trusted authority figure takes advantage of previously established trust in order to molest or rape. Those of us who were abused as children by a parent or other trusted figure are particularly vulnerable to freezing. Men as well as women who are normally very assertive will commonly freeze in a situation where the attacker is someone we know and trust. The term for this is willful blindness, but I can assure you, it is not done consciously, and it takes a lot of self-awareness work to develop an alternative. I have personally suffered from willful blindness. Predators know they can take advantage of that freeze.

In the class we address ways to break the freeze; one of the best ways is to practice just a few techniques until you master them, as opposed to learning dozens of techniques that you can’t possibly master. This prevents the confusion of what to do during a real attack. If you have mastered three techniques, you will be able to break the freeze much faster than someone who has hundreds of techniques to consider.

The Freeze

Although the freeze is common and normal for both men and women, you cannot think and reason your way out of it. It is important to utilize a heuristic, a hard and fast rule you can always fall back on. The one I like is: “Move.” As a heuristic, it will be your automatic response to break the freeze. Every second that you delay in attacking your attacker, your risk of being raped and killed increases. That’s why you will want to practice about three techniques until they become an automatic response, which will also help break or even prevent the freeze. Having to figure out which technique to use during an actual attack is very detrimental to breaking the freeze.

The most common thought that people have when they freeze is: “Why is this happening?” If you have just a few techniques that have become your automatic default techniques, you will be less likely to freeze.

Watch for any subtle behavior that is a deviation from that person’s baseline behavior or any sense that something is a little off

Women are most often attacked by someone they know. You can use this to your advantage because you know that person’s baseline normal behavior. Any deviation from that person’s baseline behavior should be an immediate warning signal to you that you could be in danger.

Situational awareness includes observing meta-communication and other behaviors in order to predict a possible predator’s intentions and whether that person is safe to be around.

Don’t be nice; be safe

You must take evasive action even when you aren’t sure if someone poses a real threat. This can be quite challenging for some people. Many rape victims have reported failing to take evasive action based on their intuitive sense that someone could be a potential threat. Had they acted on their intuitive sense of possible danger they most likely could have prevented the attack. When asked why they allowed the guy to touch them, why they got in the elevator, entered the room, or got into the vehicle, despite sensing possible danger, a common answer was that they thought they were overreacting and didn’t want the guy to be insulted. If you feel any slight discomfort with someone, whether it is a family member, neighbor, boss, co-worker, or a stranger, honor your fear and avoid anyone that triggers your fear. Sometimes that person may feel insulted, but you will be safe.

There is an expression: “Keep your head on a swivel.” Paying attention to everyone around you will keep you safe because even if a predator decides to target you, you will see him in time to not be there when he attacks.

If someone feels insulted by your cold behavior, that’s their responsibility, not yours

You are never responsible for anyone else’s feelings. The more you set clear boundaries, the easier it becomes to maintain them. If you are uncomfortable with anything about someone, act on it. Maintain your boundaries with your voice and your body language.

Yelling for Help: Anytime someone is bothering you in any way, yell for help; bringing attention to the situation is often enough to scare off the predator and attract sheepdogs (protectors).

Stalkers

As soon as you have some evidence that someone may possibly be stalking you, completely change your daily routines and keep varying the order each day. Stalkers look for a predictable time and place where they can trap you. Be unpredictable in every way you can imagine. You can even change how you look each day. Never, under any circumstances, should you ever post anything related to your schedule on social media or tell anyone where you are going when there are strangers around who can hear you.

You must always maintain awareness so that you never get ambushed

If a stranger wants to kidnap and rape you, he will most often ambush you and then threaten to kill you to get you to comply so he can take you to a secondary location, which you have to avoid at all costs. Once he has your attention, he may tell you that he doesn’t want to have to kill you and that if you go along with all his demands you will be safe. The reality is that going along with his demands will put you in mortal danger. Even if he threatens you with a gun or knife, you must get away before he gets a chance to take you to a secondary location, because once he has you isolated, it will be too late, and he will have his way with you.

Attacks do not occur without warning, but the warnings are often very subtle and usually go unnoticed by the victims. However, if you practice a high level of situational awareness and honor your intuition, and never tell yourself that you are overreacting, you will almost always be able to stay safe. In the very rare instance where someone attacks you, you will see it coming and will be prepared to effectively defend yourself.

Physical fitness is essential to a warrior woman

Although not part of class time, students are encouraged to maintain a disciplined physical fitness routine that includes strength training, stretching, coordination and balance activities, as well as daily aerobic workouts. Being physically fit not only makes it possible to move with speed, agility, quick reaction time, and lightning reflexes, you will feel empowered and confident in your physical abilities. It’s optimal to eat small nutrient-dense meals that are mostly plant-based; the normal western diet that includes fast food, junk food, and bakery foods is not conducive to health or high performance for a warrior woman.

The following books are directly relevant to this class and highly recommended

Wing Chun History

Ng Mui and her exceptional student, a young woman named Yim Wing Chun are believed to have created what later became known as wing chun, which resulted from Ng Mui’s life-long experience as an extraordinary martial arts master and Shaolin nun. Because there is no written history of wing chun prior to the twentieth century, a few variants of its history exist. Here is a brief history of this art, provided mostly by wing chun historian Danny Xuan from his book: Tao of Wing Chun. The Southern Shaolin Temple, which had existed for well over a thousand years was destroyed by the Qing dynasty in mid-18^th century. Because the Shaolin were master fighters, they were seen as a potential threat to the dynasty leaders. Ng Mui was one of only a handful of Shaolin warriors to survive the attack. It is believed that she then found her way to one of the several matriarchal villages in southwest China (near Tibet), where she trained at length in the warrior arts of those women. Unlike the male-dominated arts she had mastered at the Shaolin Temple, her training in that matriarchal village would have been perfectly suited to female warriors. It is believed that she then evolved and further improved what she had learned. Her student, Yim Wing Chun and Yim’s husband are believed to be the ones who first began to systematize the art, which continued to be refined by those who followed.

After Yim Wing Chun’s death, her husband, Leung Bok-Chao (a life-long martial arts expert) named the art wing chun after his wife to honor her major contribution to it. Leung Bok-Chao’s student, Leung Lan-Kwai would have been the first one to learn the art now named wing chun. Leung Lan-Kwai later taught wing chun to six members of the Red Boat Opera Group around 1850. Two of them (Leung Yee-Tai and Wong Wa-Bo) taught Leung Jan who later became one of the most respected wing chun masters of any time period. Leung Jan most likely further refined the art of wing chun. Leung Jan taught his son Leung Bik, who may have even surpassed his father in the level of mastery. Leung Jan also taught Chan Wah Shun, who also became a very highly accomplished wing chun master. Leung Jan died in 1901.

Ip Man (the most famous wing chun master in the history of the art) trained with Chan Wah Shun, who died in 1906. He later trained with Chan Wah Shun’s student Ng Chung So. In addition, Ip Man trained with Leung Bik, who died in 1920. Traditionally, martial arts masters taught very few students. Ip Man was the first wing chun master to teach a very large number of students in Hong Kong beginning in 1949 and continuing until his death in 1972. One of Ip Man’s students was Chu Shong Tin, who was considered so extraordinary by Leung Sheung, Lok Yiu, and Ip Man’s other top students during the 1950s that they all said they couldn’t even figure out what Chu Shong Tin was doing. It is believed that what made Chu Shong Tin so extraordinary was that he had rediscovered the internal aspects of the art that would have been an essential element in what Ng Mui and Yim Wing Chun taught. Chu Shong Tin taught my teacher Nima King from 2005 until Grandmaster Chu’s death in 2014.

The martial arts have always been practiced predominantly by men, but wing chun is a very unique art, which actually favors women. It is clear to all of us who practice wing chun that big muscular men are at a disadvantage in this art. Grandmaster Chu Shong Tin reported that of all his students, a woman named Ada achieved the highest level of the internal aspects of the art.