Sage advice for any endeavor, particularly useful for us silly martial arts people and a great movie line to boot, the title to this article is.
Chances are you probably arrived at this course with experience with other training methods. Perhaps you have even have extensive time practicing some form of Jam Jong? If so you are going to come to this work with a number of ideas, habits and biases that will interfere with your training progress if you are not careful.
So my first challenge as your guide is to help you identify where your thinking is interfering with your practice. These things usually fall under the mis umbrella. There may be concepts you are missing. There may be ideas you misunderstand. There may be tools you are misusing. There may be areas in which you are misinformed or you may just be making some fundamental mistakes in how you are training.
I speak from experience here. At some point or another I've missed just about everything and had to learn lessons the hard way.....where the method forces you to change or quit out of exhaustions, frustration or injury.
For some reason I tenaciously hold on to my precious misconceptions even in the face of clear experiential contradictions and repetitions admonishments by my teacher. With a lot of hard work I was eventually able to see my folly, see where my thinking was stuck. Once I began to see my shiny knowledge apples for the turds stuck in the shoot they were, I started to make rapid progress. Why? Because I finally start doing the exercises the way they were intended.
Fortunately there is an easier way forward than dropping your precious(es) into the flaming fires of Mordor. We don't have to make all those things wrong, we really don't have to deal with them much at all. We just put them aside for a while, step back a bit and have another look. This way we open the door to a new understanding of rooting and we get another chance to understand why double weighting is such an issue. We can worry about reconciling babble and methods later.
When we change our mind about our practice, we inevitably change our practice. Changing our practice leads to different results. For Yi Chuan purposes this means tissues begin to elongate, the six surfaces begin to unite, our control over our structure increase as we begin to be able to consciously control it by feel. Remember that tendon changing and marrow washing are at the core of this Method.
Sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly - how your practice feels will change and that change will soon change your mind again about how you practice. That new change in practice will fuel further changes in the tissues and structure leading to yet more insights that will change your mind yet again.
Don't get me wrong, its not always a gracefully spiraling staircase up. It's messy. Sometimes you get stuck, sometimes you go down a few floors. However, if your willing to question what you think you know and you have a good Method, your ass will indeed follow where your mind takes you.