Investing in Loss
A member’s Story by Lan Tran from Pennsylvania, USA.
Since the age of two, my father exposed me to the world of martial arts. When I turned six, my parents enrolled me in an after-school judo program where I got a junior black belt, and in 1975, when we moved out to Potomac, Maryland, I began Okinawan Shorin-Ryu Karate. That training lasted until 1982 when I left the karate world and began my foray into Chinese martial arts, all while I was teaching American Taekwondo to pay rent.
My world revolved around martial arts, 24/7 as the saying goes: all day, every day. I subscribed to magazines, collected books, and consumed everything I could find that related to learning martial arts. I was obsessed with different martial applications and had enough martial background to extrapolate what I was seeing. Well, all of this did not prepare me for my first encounter with Grandmaster Sam Chin. By this time, all the years of training surely ought to have given me enough skill to prove to people I knew what I was doing.
The Two-Second Collapse: Confronting Grandmaster Sam Chin
That world came crashing down like a house of cards two seconds into touching GM Sam Chin. There was nothing I could do without “getting whacked,” as GM puts it. I tried again, harder and faster, but it was the same result upon contact. My skill went out the window. I found myself standing there thinking of what to do next while GM Sam Chin was asking me, “Show me your skill, where is your skill? Tai Chi, Hsing-I, Baji. . . show me something. What are you going to do?” I couldn’t shake the deer in the headlights look on my face.
Reinterpreting the Philosophy: The True Meaning of “Investing in Loss”
When I had first discovered the internal arts, the saying “Investing in loss” was often thrown around as being the key to the approach of mastery, especially for learning Tai Chi Chuan. The idea appears in a sentence that Professor Cheng Man-Ching wrote, usually attributing the quote to a translation by M. Hennessy:
Moreover, a beginner cannot possibly avoid losing and defeat, so if you fear defeat, you may as well not even begin. If you want to study, begin by investing in loss. An investment in loss eliminates any greed for superficial advanta1ges…
This statement is quite clear. Or so I thought. In retrospect, I see my grasp of it at the time—an example from my own experience of what GM Sam Chin says: that one’s own references and interpretation—one’s own ‘viewpoint’—can really distort the intended meaning. I was young, educated, and accomplished in martial arts, so I thought to myself, how off could my references possibly be? Over the years, my confusion had been compounded by other practitioners who held themselves in authority, who would explain to me their views about what investing in loss means. My training, for example, had been based on looking at what was “weak” if I was losing in Push Hands matches. Over time, this notion of “losing” or learning from this type of externally imposed conditions made me feel like I was just chasing an idea.
So, I just lived with that quote as a philosophical adage. That is, until 2014, when I met GM Sam Chin and started my ZXD_ILC training. Informed by a different framework, the curriculum of Zhong Xin Dao, I could now stand back and observe my own viewpoint, my own perceptions, my own proclivities—and how these got in the way of GM Sam’s approach to “learning how to learn”—namely, that ‘there’s nothing to learn’. I reflected on how, over the years of training various martial arts, a pattern kept happening. It was not necessarily something I was doing intentionally in my training and teaching. It was manifesting on a subconscious level, totally under the radar: my ego was distorting how I informed myself. It made me do things to keep it alive, things like only exposing myself to people who knew less than I did on any subject, thus I would sound smarter, or only demonstrating on people that I could overpower, thereby hiding my lack of skill. And the worst part? Not listening to advice given by people now truly knowledgeable and truly skilled in transmitting internal arts.
A Decade of Dropping: Investing in Loss as a Way of Being
Now, ten years later, as a student 5 / Instructor (application) 2, I experience the process of continually investing in “loss,” in abandoning concepts and “letting go” as a welcome, if frustrating challenge. At least now I have the right references to catch myself, to observe my own thoughts, actions, and behaviors.
Over the last year, the way I teach ZXD_ILC has gone through an overhaul. I noticed that I communicated to students better by presenting the foundational exercise or “lesson” under consideration not only such that they could recognize the difference, but also in a manner that pointed the way for them to realize the difference. The change of understanding and learning could not come from me, for I can only point them to observe for themselves—as GM Sam says in all his viewpoint talks. Any change in skill must come from how the students change their approach to said exercise. In a way, I had to invest in the “loss” of a teaching identity, too. In the midst my own training, it hit me, for that’s the beauty of our system, where learning and teaching about learning go together. I was leading and asking the student to be willing to “lose” their current viewpoint and invest in adopting a new one to acquire a new way of being. For those who have heard my longer story of how meeting GM Sam Chin totally obliterated my previous perceptions of my martial arts identity and skill, you may appreciate that the past 10 years have continued with that theme of truly investing in loss: dropping, abandoning, letting go. This process describes what I have done with myself over the last decade: I had to invest in the loss of my ego, my set references, even down to losing myself for a new me to flourish. That kind of change is not a comfortable process, as many of us know first-hand. Speaking to many ZXD_ILC disciples and practitioners, it seems we come to acknowledge—and appreciate—what it means to continually be willing to bring ourselves to these moments of change: of facing self, of “letting go” and “investing in loss.” These moments of ‘dropping’, at least in my experience, have been totally life-changing: a way to re-engage with the NOW. “Change with the changes in order not to change” is the embodied practice of a living philosophy.
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