My Experience with Han Shi Yiquan, By Matthew Valle

Articles by Master Hans Students

My Experience with Han Shi Yiquan
When I discovered Han Shi Yiquan I thought it was a similar stepping-stone on the
journey of martial arts I had already found myself. I learned Wing-Chun Kung-Fu for
two years and during that time was introduced to Tai-Chi and a mixture of other
internal arts. Wing Chun was initially new and exhilarating to me because I had not
been involved in combat sports before and I enjoyed training to become stronger
and the rush of sparring. Tai-Chi introduced the idea of softness and using internal
strength to make the techniques work. Up to that point these styles fit into my
existing paradigms of what martial arts were. Even as a westerner I had been
introduced to ideas of qi energy and amazing feats of Shaolin monks so the
accomplishments of the internal artists were impressive but not incredibly farfetched. What I discovered was that Han Shi Yiquan was much different from what I
had previously learned and introduced information about the state of my body and
my life that was foreign to me.
There is an analogy that Master Han used recently that touches on the difference
between Han Shi Yiquan and other arts and that is the wild horse and the warrior
horse. Traditional martial arts teach how to be the warrior horse, to fulfill our
desires to be strong, valiant, and victorious. This is not what Han Shi Yiquan
teaches. It teaches how to be the wild horse that has no pre-conceptions of what
he should be, and is only himself.
On two occasions I have heard Master Han ask a different question with the same
answer, the questions were: What is the most beautiful thing in your life? And what
is the most terrifying thing in your life? In both cases the answer was the
unknown. The element that distinguishes between the warrior horse and the wild
horse is the common denominator between all natural lives and that is the feeling of
the unknown. In Han Shi Yiquan we grasp this feeling in order to restore our natural
life that we have lost by living in society. The feeling that anything can happen
makes the body light and the joints supple, it is invigorating, as if preparing to move
in any direction, at any moment, unaware of which direction the danger will come.
We only need to look at the difference between a domesticated animal (ourselves)
and a wild animal to know that there is something fundamentally different between
them. I can say that through all the mysticism I have read and different disciplines I
have been exposed to I am incredibly happy to find an art that allows me explore
myself in this way that is so simple but also something I could have never imagined.
Like many people, I came to Han Shi Yiquan from a traditional martial arts discipline
in order to enhance my fighting ability. After what I have written however, it almost
seems contradictory, why would one who wants to know how to fight train to be

natural? If the purpose of the art is to seek the natural state then why are Yiquan
practitioners such as Wan Xian Xai famed fighters? When we frame this in a martial
perspective, it is natural to fight as animals must fight to protect their life, therefore
fighting is a natural state and martial movements are natural. We must make this
distinction, it is not necessary to give up societal goals, but that occurs when we do
Zhan Zhuang, which restores the natural state, and nothing else.
With intentions of honesty,
Matthew Valle

2015