Category: Martial Arts

Ashe-What’s up, youtube. In this weeks’ video blog post, I’ve got a very special guest for you.

Prince-Coming up right after this.

Ashe-What’s up, youtube and welcome back to another installment in my video blog series. In this week’s video blog I’m here with Prince Bell a.k.a. Urban Acolyte. He’s got two awesome youtube channels: first one is Urban Acolyte tv and the next one is bad mofo’s movie review channel. Look at the video description below for links or go ahead and click on the i up there, I’ll point you right to those. Prince is in town this week because we had my sifu out here, Grand Master Sam Chin. And so we had an I Liq Chuan workshop, Prince came out to join us and that’s what we’re going to talk a little bit about. Just rap a little bit and get Prince’s feedback from what he thought about the weekend.

This is your second weekend.. second weekend workshop with Sifu, right?

Prince-Yup.

Ashe-So, first of all I should say thank you for coming on the channel with me.

Prince-Well, I’m a fan, so.

Ashe-One of two. So, what did you think? How did it go for you?

Prince- I thought it was pretty awesome. It’s always good to see >>>>Sigong<<<<<(?) and touch hands with him, kind of gauge my improvement. This time I didn’t fall on my face immediately after I touched him, but I liked the talk that we did Friday and getting to see sifu ruey.  I was watching him thinking, “Man, if I can move like that when I get to be Ruey’s age like that’s… that’s a bonus of studying this art. He’s still … and he’s spry and up here, the stuff he’s talking about. The tao, and zen and his insights. That.. I wish I was out here to hang with him more even though he lives in BFE.

Ashe- Practically New Mexico. So, you and I are kind of into a lot of the same things: we’re both into kettlebells, we’re both into fitness, we’re both into martial arts, we’re both into meditation. Of course I’m a fan of your channel, too, but we’ve known each other on Facebook a long time so that’s why I was excited to have you out here for the weekend and to be able to shoot a couple of videos together. Basically, what’s in it for you?

Prince-The weekend, or training?

Ashe- All of it.

Prince-Uh, well, I’m doing a real life Jedi series and when I started Urban Acolyte, the Urban Acolyte brand, the whole idea was I was out on the street working my security job I used to have and thinking I want to do something.. at the time I was reading all these Star Wars books, getting over my grandma’s passing, and I said, “I like this whole Jedi thing. How can I be like the Jedi in real life?” and for me it was the I Liq Chuan path, it was the most direct way. Somebody made a meme saying, “I used to want to be a Jedi but then I started training I Liq Chuan.” And there’s Sigong, a silhouette of him. You know, we’ve got the meditation. Sigong told me a four years ago, when people get to level 4 (well now he says 5), you can’t advance unless you meditate. You have to do the meditation, it’s part of the curriculum. And for me I was like that is what a Jedi is about. You have to do the meditation or the whole code… it makes no sense. Being one with the force and letting it guide your actions, you have to meditate. But you also have to do the physical training. You have to put in sweat equity. And I said well, with the fitness, I got that. Meditation, I need help with that. Yeah, I know how to sit down and meditate, but I need somebody or a system to help me go deeper and to give me a reason to go deeper. You want better kung fu? You gotta meditate. And then an actual system. To me this feels like the best art. I don’t need to go to China and study Yi Quan with Mandrin teachers that don’t really speak English, nothing against them, but why go to China if I can stay home, in the USA and there’s good training here. And that’s for anybody. You don’t need to look to China or any other country. There’s other people here. You just may not know about them.

Really, you know what really sold me was actually the first time I saw Sigong in person because when I’d seen him on youtube before, I didn’t understand his >>>>>Fajin.<<<<<< When I think he demonstrated on some guys in Russia and the video is not good quality, and it looked like he just tapped a guy and I don’t remember.. there’s one of you, he tapped you and you had a bruise. There were some guys in Russia, some pretty big dudes, and it didn’t really look like he did anything and I used to say… look at his size. He’s stronger than the people he’s practicing with and then when I actually saw him, how fast he can move and when I touched him. To me, he didn’t do anything. Just stood there like this and I got ready to spin and I just felt like I was falling in a hole. And he didn’t do anything and I know I’m not hypnotized because I don’t play that game. So there’s something to this. Before then I was just kind of on the outside, looking in, like ‘what are they doing?’ and ‘this seems pretty cool’. [5:58 Something about doing stuff] with you and other teachers online but never really experienced it to that degree. so now I want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Ashe- I think that was one of the things that hooked me on I Liq Chuan y’know because I said in some other videos, I wanted to do something.. I wanted the whole package. I didn’t just want to do the martial art. I wanted something that was going to have a philosophy behind it, concepts behind it. I wanted something that was going to be able to lead into or be a foundation for a whole way of life. Not just something you would just do a couple times a week and then that’s it or you just do it on the mats and when you step off, you leave it all there. So that’s why I was looking for something like I Liq Chuan and I knew that’s why I wanted to Chinese martial arts because.. go check out our Facebook page for I Liq Chuan. We’re going to have some video coming out of my Sifu, Prince’s Sigong, talking a lot more about some of this life philosophy and anyway, in one of these videos he’s going to be talking about the true purpose of kung fu and that it’s more than just fighting. So that’s why I knew I wanted to do a kung fu but at the same time I didn’t just want to be dancing, I didn’t want to be waving my hands around in the air. I wanted to do something real. And so I had questions and that’s when I heard about Ruey. I went to meet Ruey and y’know, I like to say I’m a big guy (not with a capital b, but I’m still kind of a big guy) and Ruey is little. He’s real skinny and he tossed me around like a rag doll.

So it was like I had questions, he had answers. He could touch hands and show where the rubber meets the road. So that’s when I knew that this is real. It had everything. It’s got the philosophy behind it that’s going to lead into, show you how to understand yourself, understand your life and find a little bit of peace with that understanding. If not to the full degree ‘well now I’m going to reach enlightenment’ but at least in a practical sense, like I said, it is going to help you understand things a bit better, have that better perspective that gonna bring more peace in your life. But also had the skills behind it. I knew I wasn’t going to be wasting my time when it came to ‘okay now pow. I can touch hands’. I can show. So that’s why for me I’ve been doing this for fifteen years now and no end in sight. For me, because I don’t know about you, of course you started as a young man in your 20’s, I’m 40 now so I’m not totally preoccupied with just being a badass anymore. So now that I’m a bit older, I’m not training just for fighting not that I was at the beginning, but in the beginning my emphasis was still mostly on fighting.

Now that I’m older, I’ve been doing this for a long time because it’s like really, if you’re learning something effective, right, it comes back to that 10,000 hours thing. You don’t need to be 10,000 hours just to be proficient, you only need 200 hours. You want to learn how to fight, a 6 week intensive class should teach you the basics on how to punch, how to kick, right? Some basic entries for things. Boom. Self defense; done. That fast. Then you want to be a decent fighter especially in a sport martial art context; three years. Tops. 18 months and you should be ready. Competitive at least, right, to start entry level competitiveness. So learning how to fight – done. Quick. So why am I still doing it 15 years later? It’s because it’s like, what the heck was that box called from that horror movie… with Pinhead. What the heck was it called? [Prince hasn’t seen it.] But the point is that it’s like an endless puzzle. It’s like the further you go, the more there is to go and that’s why it still interests me [ILC] because it requires such a high degree of coordination and in order to have that coordination you have to have that super high degree of attention, awareness of yourself, that concentration and then you can turn that back on yourself to study your own thoughts, your own feelings on things. Why do I react that way? Why do I react this way? And then, for lack of a better way to put it, if we want to get into the whole karma thing and the wheel of samsara that’s another thing, getting deep into the philosophy. But for my level of understanding, my level of perception, my vision doesn’t go that far. For me I’ve got right now. I’ve got one life to live and no matter what, even if we had multiple lives, like next life I’m not going to be me. I got one shot at this right now, this formation of me. I want to make the most of it. I’m trying to do it right.

Alright, guys, that’s it for this week’s video blog. I want to thank Prince for coming on the video with me. Again, if you want to check out his channel, look in the video description below or click the i for links. Thanks for watching. I’ll catch you guys next time.