Wild Goose Weekend

I spent the past weekend (11/4-11/6/11) at the annual Wild Goose camp at Shane Lear’s facility in Delphos, Ohio – the official Wild Goose Headquarters for North America. It was a great weekend, martial arts on Friday night followed by Saturday and Sunday classes that covered the Wild Goose system from all angles, both healing and hurting.

As I was watching the students and other instructors, I was reminded of the breadth and depth of this system. Friday evening included a discussion of structure, throwing techniques, joint locking and energy flow. Saturday’s class covered acupuncture point usage, qi flow and form specifics for Meditation, Meridian Patting, 1^st & 2^nd 64 Action and Dayan Palm forms. What made this unique in my experience, was the way all of these component pieces fit together - healing and hurting, each supporting the other and all based on healing qigong. A healing based system is the exception in today’s martial arts offerings. This is such a logical approach – heal and unite the body, before you undertake martial training.

In The Power of Internal Martial Arts, Bruce Franzis writes that the internal arts of TaiChi Chuan, Bagua and Hsing-I all originally included both healing and hurting components, with the healing side predating the hurting. I think this what we can see reflected in the Wild Goose System. With its 1700+ year history and relatively recent unveiling to the public, it has retained its original intent. This makes it a valuable gem in today’s offering of martial and healing systems.

So, what is Wild Goose? It is easier to classify, once you know that it predates the “modern” internal arts of TaiChi Chuan, Bagua and Hsing-i. You can see elements of all these arts in Wild Goose. To me it represents a synthesis of the root principles and applications of all these arts.

If you are in the Southern Indiana area and are interested in Wild Goose classes, please check out my web site at www.TaiChiArts.org. For a directory of Wild Goose instructors in the US, visit www.DayanArts.com.