“Don’t think. FEEL.”

When I was a kid Bruce Lee was the one who inspired me to start the martial arts at fourteen years of age, while still at school. “Emotional content”. A small scene in his classic film ‘Enter the Dragon’.
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It all starts when Bruce discovers a young student walking around the temple. Upon seeing the student, he asks the boy to kick him. After a moment of apprehension, the student obliges and, needless to say, Bruce was less than impressed.
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He calmly walks up to his student, and says, “What was that, an exhibition? You need emotional content.”
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The student kicks again and Bruce says, “I said emotional content not ANGER! Try again, but this time with me. Don’t think, FEEL.”
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When Bruce Lee says, “Don’t think,” he means, “Get out of your head.” When he says, “FEEL”, he means really feel into the situation and sense what is happening. When you are kicking you are kicking a person who is present, you are not trying to perform the perfect kick. That is what Bruce was saying when instructing the student to, “Don’t think, FEEL.”
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Often we are not fully ‘present’ or fully aware of what we are doing, because we are instead trying to analyze, calculate, perhaps think of the next five steps in the kata or drill.
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When you “FEEL,” what you are doing, you are turning your body into a sensing system. What you are feeling in that moment becomes useful information about yourself.
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The moment we stop analyzing and let go, we can start really seeing, feeling – as one whole, truly feeling the whole experience.
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Doing something for the sake of doing it isn’t good practice, you have to put feeling behind your actions in order to achieve the intended outcome.
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Bruce introduces the idea of feeling more than thinking, even for something that comes off as very simple, like basic movement, or a kick in this example, you need to be able to generate feeling.
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Whereas the beginning karate student may only ‘see’ the technique or movement from the outside, a more experienced karate student should aspire to ‘feel’ the integration of those techniques and movements from both outside and inside.
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“Don’t think. FEEL.” 👊🥋
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