Do you really advise people to suppress their feelings?

Dear Author, I find your latest book is once again incredibly worth reading, and I recommend it to all my sporting friends because it is such a cut above normal self-defence books.
However, as a psychology student I do not agree with your advice on P. 8: “The ability to recognise and suppress the beginnings of our own impulses should be as strong a characteristic as our ability to put ourselves in the position of others in order to understand their emotions.“
I fully agree that recognising emotions in good time is indispensable. Putting oneself in the position of others also makes good sense, but in my opinion it is always wrong to suppress feelings.
Karl Gebhard, Hamburg

Dear Mr Gebhard,
You have quoted from the Foreword to my book, and I really must beg to be excused because I should definitely have explained this statement more closely in my subsequent remarks to avoid any misunderstanding.

If a reader is unfamiliar with my techniques, or if my terminology is perhaps understood or used differently in modern psychology, philosophy or another specialised discipline, he or she might take me for a proponent of "positive thinking at any price" and thoroughly misunderstand me.
My own student years are now well behind me, which does not prevent me from taking a passionate if amateurish interest in such topics though I am first and foremost concerned with their practical application and relevance to WingTsun. I should have expressed myself as follows, though lack of space precluded this: I see it as good practice (but only for people with a healthy self-esteem, and definitely not for those who are unable to show their anger, even if they want to)not immediately to give habitual and mechanical expression to every negative emotion. By way of an exercise this means e.g. not automatically groaning about bad weather or being bored, and it particularly applies in the case of unpleasant and energy-depleting feelings such as aggression, envy, jealousy, anger, an offended sense of justice etc.
In referring to “suppression“ or ”non-expression” in general terms, I did not mean the denial, concealment or repression of negative emotions. Showing one’s emotions is taboo in certain countries and social circles, but that is not what I meant at all. My point is not that negative feelings should be repressed, ”bottled up inside”, e.g. by convincing oneself that one is not angry about something. On the contrary, the technique used in the inner battle not to show negative emotions should lead to the person concerned being particularly aware of them. To quote the Chung Yung, the favourite philosophy of the late Grandmaster Yip Man: what we seek to conceal is clearest of all (to ourselves)! It is not our intention to push negative emotions into the subconscious mind (though I cannot help remarking that by definition, a subconscious must assume the existence of consciousness). It is more consciousness that is important to us, and for somebody who accepts life as his teacher, every unpleasant event is a favourable opportunity to become conscious – if only for a brief time. By doing our inner strength training and not giving way to the impulse, and neither ”suppressing” nor ignoring our anger at e.g. a lost parking space, we become clearly conscious of our inner condition and can monitor it as a witness and observer by quietly looking at ourselves as if studying some exotic animal. In this way we see ourselves from a distance, divide our attention and see both the situation and ourselves together with our anger. But we can then no longer become one with the anger; we can no longer identify with this emotion and become the anger ourselves.
Whenever things are not going the way you want them to, use every opportunity to transform what seems to be unpleasant into an inner exercise, not expressing emotion and not giving way to it, but feeling the irritation all the time. You should also feel it as physically as possible, perhaps as a slight burning sensation in the stomach. Follow this burning sensation, focus on it, and after a while spent looking inside yourself you will feel the irritation consuming itself and not merely disappearing, but instead being recycled within your system as new energy. You will have burned off the anger and do not need to carry it around with you any more!
This is only a superficial explanation of the technique for combating negative feelings and not at all my discovery. There is much more to it of course, for as always in Taoism we are talking about energies, and in this case about firstly plugging the energy leakage and secondly transforming negative feelings into positive energy.
But even an esoteric technique such as this is a technique, and can be learned under qualified instruction. At the beginning you will only be able to observe yourself when the impulse has already passed. Later, if you practice diligently, you will already recognise the impulse at its inception.
I would like to be able to claim that this is exclusively a WT technique belonging to the 3rd level, i.e. the highest, inner level, but it is also known to me from other inner (esoteric)teachings. In the case of the alchemists, the “lead“ of normal experience was to be transformed into the “gold” of consciousness. Only exoteric, i.e. superficial alchemists believed in a physical transformation of lead into gold. Heat is required for a transformation into energy-gold, and it is not without reason that the Chinese refer to firing the oven up with bellows when it comes to performing the ChiKung Siu-Nim-Tau form and generating Chi. Here too, the legs tremble and there is an effect similar to the friction that occurs during the inner battle against irritations.
In this connection inner Christianity also refers to “fire“, and in the Revelation Chapter 3, Verse 18 Christ says: ”I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich.“

K. R. Kernspecht