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Chu Shong Tin could send younger, stronger people flying across a room while feeling completely relaxed to the person in contact with him. I couldn’t reconcile the softness I felt with the force coming back at me. He was doing something I would have called impossible if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of it.
Chu Shong Tin was one of Ip Man’s Wing Chun (詠春) students, and he spent decades developing what he called “Nim Lik” (念力): mind force. His instruction was to use focused mental intent, originating at the tailbone and projecting upward through the spine and out through the body. The words are easy enough to repeat. Learning to do what he meant is another matter entirely.
One of his students, a doctor, arranged an MRI scan to see what was happening in his brain when he entered this state. By Sigong Chu’s own account, the readings shifted so dramatically that the doctors stopped the scan. In his telling, the cerebellum was the part drawing their attention. That is the story as he gave it; the scan itself would be needed to establish what was measured.
The cerebellum interests me because its work extends beyond the motor-control role most of us learn about. A 2024 review examines its role in social and emotional learning.1 Ito was exploring internal models of mental activity back in 2008: the possibility that some of the machinery used to anticipate movement also helps us think intuitively.2 That gives the idea of embodied intuition somewhere to go beyond a pleasing phrase.
Sigong Chu used to attend tea ceremonies with other top masters in Hong Kong - tai chi, baguazhang, and other internal styles - where they compared how they generated force. His account was that he was doing something fundamentally different. Where they described power travelling through the body in a wave, Chu described expanding the joints themselves. No wind-up, no weight shift, nothing an opponent could read in advance. That is what he meant by Nim Lik. I trained with him in Hong Kong and with his students for many years, and being on the receiving end of it is one of the strangest experiences of my life.
State, Not Shape
Even among the internal martial arts, there are degrees. The language of rooted stances, structure, relaxation and waves of momentum gives you ways to think about what a body is doing. Chu challenged the picture I had built from all of it. The internal arts fascinate me because they make a bigger, stronger person confront how little their idea of strength explains. Nim Lik is the purest expression of that I’ve encountered.
The internal arts deal in “concepts” and “ideas” that can be applied in the body to transfer and deal with force. To learn these ideas, the student must feel them physically - not understand them intellectually, feel them - and train them until a single thought can call up what once took all their concentration. The hard thing to reconcile is that the idea doesn’t live predominantly in the head. You learn what it means through the body.
When talking with the masters you hear the same phrase over and over. It’s never the posture or the choreography or the hand position. It’s the state.
This distinction - between state and shape - is possibly the most important idea I’ve ever encountered. And I didn’t encounter it in a classroom or a textbook. I encountered it through years of getting thrown around by old men who weighed half what I did.
The Body’s Hidden Network
So what is happening in a body that feels so soft and produces so much force? Fascia is one of the places I’ve gone looking.
Fascia is the connective tissue associated with muscles, organs and other structures throughout the body. Think of what gets lost when you imagine it as packing material: the tissue carries load, contains nerves, and participates in the body’s sense of itself. A 2022 systematic review brought together 23 studies of fascial innervation.3 There is far more going on in the wrapping than the name suggests.
Proprioception concerns where the body is and how it is moving. Interoception concerns what is happening inside it. Position and condition. Research into fascial sensation brings those questions together with emotion and the felt sense of self.5 When the masters insist that an idea has to be felt in the body, this is the territory their instruction sends me into. I stop looking only at where an arm is and start noticing what changes in the contact.
In 2021, researchers described a network of nerve fibres in the deep fasciae of mice.6 Human superficial-fascia studies examine a different part of the picture.4 Neither is an experiment on Nim Lik. What they do is make the tissue itself harder to dismiss: a structure with sensation as well as mechanical work to do.
Now think about Chu’s instruction. Tailbone, spine, upward through the body. The thoracolumbar fascia lies around the lower back and connects with the structures and muscles around the spine. Its innervation and role in transmitting force have been studied.78 Could changes in how that region is loaded and sensed help explain the coordination Chu was teaching? That is the connection I want to investigate. Declaring that the pathway has already been proved would stop the inquiry at the point where it becomes interesting.
The mind–body connection runs the other way too. In one study, researchers compared the myofascial tissue of 40 inpatients with depression and 40 controls. They found differences in stiffness and elasticity, then separately tested a single-session intervention in 69 patients.9 Those are preliminary findings, not a treatment established by the paper. But they make a question about mental state and physical tissue much more concrete. What changes in the body when a condition becomes habitual? What changes in the experience when the body changes?
A broader 2024 review brings fascia’s mechanical, sensory and regulatory roles together.10 I am interested in what those roles might explain about the state the masters train. I don’t need to pretend that a paper about connective tissue has proved a martial tradition right. The experience is already extraordinary. It deserves an explanation that can survive being examined.
What Practice Lets You Notice
There is a danger in knowing the anatomical words. You can read about fascia, the cerebellum and internal models, fit them into a convincing explanation, and feel as though you’ve understood what Chu was doing. You can do all of that without changing anything about what happens when someone puts a hand on you.
The instruction has to survive contact. “Relax” can sound absurd when you are trying to resist force. If all you know is how to brace, more effort feels like the only available answer. Training gives the words something to refer to. You begin to distinguish conditions that used to feel like the same thing, and the distinction becomes useful because you can act on it.
That is also why copying a demonstration tells you so little. A position can be photographed. The attention, timing and coordination that make it work have to be learned. Change the partner or the direction of pressure and the gaps become obvious. The practice keeps asking whether you can actually do what you think you’ve understood.
Infusing the Spirit into the Spirit
Most people who practise Siu Nim Tao learn the movements. They stand, they move their arms through the positions, they build patience. What I care about is whether they develop the Nim Tao itself - the “small idea” that the form exists to cultivate. The form is the vehicle. Without the idea, you’re just waving your arms around.
The texture of contact changes. It becomes jelly-like, simultaneously soft and alive, as if the muscular system has gone offline and something else has taken over. When Sigong Chu projected Nim Lik through this state, I could feel pulsations moving through his body. No obvious bracing, no muscular effort I could recognise. Just waves of force moving through flesh that felt like it had no bones.
This is how I understand Chu’s phrase “infusing the spirit into the spirit”: consciousness intensifying itself until the body responds as a consequence. The Nim Tao establishes the conduit. The Nim Lik is what flows through it. Being stronger, being braced, being ready - none of those gave me an answer to the softness I was feeling or the force coming back through it.
References
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Van Overwalle, F. (2024). Social and emotional learning in the cerebellum. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 25, 776-791. ↩
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Ito, M. (2008). Control of mental activities by internal models in the cerebellum. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 304-313. ↩
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Suarez-Rodriguez, V. et al. (2022). Fascial Innervation: A Systematic Review of the Literature. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 23(10), 5674. ↩
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Fede, C. et al. (2022). Innervation of human superficial fascia. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 16, 981426. ↩ ↩2
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Schleip, R. & Jager, H. (2012). Interoception: A new correlate for intricate connections between fascial receptors, emotion and self recognition. Complementary Medicine Research. ↩
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Fede, C. et al. (2021). Evidence of a new hidden neural network into deep fasciae. Scientific Reports, 11, 12623. ↩
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Innervation of the thoracolumbar fascia (2019). The linked anatomical account concerns the innervation of this tissue. ↩
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Willard, F. et al. (2012). The thoracolumbar fascia: anatomy, function and clinical considerations. Journal of Anatomy, 221(6), 507-536. ↩
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Michalak, J. et al. (2022; published online 2021). Myofascial Tissue and Depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 46, 560-572. ↩
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Slater, Barclay, Granfar, and Pratt (2024). Fascia as a regulatory system in health and disease. Frontiers in Neurology, 15, 1458385. ↩