The method of control becomes nothing more than filling the void. This method is a combination of unconscious response and fluid motion. The void that is being filled is a gap in both space and time. It is very difficult to describe and really must be experienced. The difficulty in discussing it is that sensitivity to touch and spatial relation is a necessity.

The void in space is the place where your opponent's structure is weak. We are bipedal hominids meaning we walk upright on two feet. When we move to take a step we shift our weight to one foot and extend the other covering ground and moving forward. When we stand still our feet are generally shoulder width apart with our weight distributed equally on both feet. Our structure is given to us by the feet's position and our muscular and skeletal systems working to hold us up against the pull of gravity. If you keep your feet at shoulder width and lean your torso forward or backward too far you will fall down. The reason you fall is that your structure is not in a position to support the change in your upper body because you have moved your center of gravity without supporting it. By understanding how your own body keeps balance by having proper structure you can understand how to manipulate the structure of another.

Filling the void of your opponent is as easy as stepping to a gap in his structure. To do this have a partner stand in front of you with his feet shoulder width apart and weight equally distributed on both feet. Then you take a step in-between his feet with the toes of your front foot pointing in the same direction as your partners heels. You should be sure that when you enter, your head is above your pelvis and your hip is rolling forward like you are sliding your butt down the side of a bowl. This will cause him to take a step backwards because you have shifted his center of gravity and his feet can no longer support him in their original position. If he doesn't move his feet he will fall down. Apart from the obvious positional advantage your partner will have trouble using any of his upper body effectively because it is no longer supported by his lower body. After getting the feeling of the first exercise you modify it by asking your partner to take a step as you move in and modify your position so that you can fill the void no matter where he steps. This is a very valuable training tool to help you get and maintain positional advantage over your opponent. The key to making this work is to experiment. Try different foot positions. Shift your weight from one foot to the other as you enter. Set your front foot down perpendicular to your partner's foot. Check your partner's leg both inside and out. Use your imagination. What you are looking for is a feeling of filling a void. As you practice you will feel the void and there will be an urge to fill it.

Closing your eyes while going through any version of the drill mentioned will help you sense the void or space that I'm talking about. If you can't "see" or feel the void you will not be able to fill it.

Another view of filling the void in the spatial sense is when and where to strike. As you are practicing the above exercise try throwing a strike and let your partner intercept it. Do this so that you can feel the timing of when to strike. If you strike too early your partner can intercept it before you disrupt his structure with your lower body. If you throw it too late your partner will have moved and set up a new structure to absorb your strike. The optimal time is to throw your strike at the same time you have completely filled the void with your structure. When this happens you can feel that your partner has no structure to fight or absorb your strike. This allows the strike to be magnified by the lack of structure in your partner.

Timing and feeling are the most important aspect of striking in the void. You cannot make it happen, you have to let it happen. The strike cannot be a strike in a conscious sense; it must instead be an extension of your movement. This method of striking is very difficult to achieve because most people will focus on the strike being a strike. The problem with this is that on a conscious level you will anticipate contact and thus unconsciously tense your body to overcome the resistance. This tiny bit of tension will throw off your timing and flow and will cause your strike to not be as effective as is can be. One way to overcome the anticipation of contact is not to look at your partner. Try looking over his shoulder instead of at your target. This tricks the conscious mind into believing there will be no contact so it won't call for your body to tense up in anticipation of that contact. You are then able to penetrate deeper because of the relaxation and coordination of your entire body.

Where to strike is another key component. You need to let your partner tell you where to strike with his movements. As he moves to intercept you he will create voids that you can fill.

Streamlining his body will help you find and fill the voids. The voids created by your partner's movement will not always be visible. Remember your eyes can fool you. Feeling the voids are the best way to find them. Let the voids be like a vacuum sucking you into them. If you try to make holes in his defense you may or may not be successful. The problem with making holes is that you need to be very fast and strong. Filling the void requires you to only move as fast as your partner or sometimes slower. Strength is not needed because you are not confronting his structure directly you are going around it. When you find the voids successfully they tend to lead to reaction points so again you magnify your attack by striking weak points.

When to fill the void is just as important as how you fill the void. In a temporal or time sense you need to move in the space between your partners thought and his action. To accomplish this you need to understand the concept of shooting the gap. Shooting the gap is a lower level version in which you understand the time you have to respond to your partners' action. If your partner is a step away and strikes at you it takes fractions of a second for the attack to reach you. In that temporal gap is the time to respond. As you understand the existence of the gap your perception of it changes and it seems longer and longer the more experience it. In the Soft style of Shen Chuan the gap becomes more narrow, in that you are blended into your partner so keenly that you can sense the void between thought and action. Entering this thought-action void is like catching a wave. You cannot be too early or too late. You also cannot force your way into the void.

Entering the void is like being a liquid poured through a funnel. The size of the funnel is based on the type of gap and experience of the person. Once the void has been entered you ride it like a train on a track. If you stay calm and relaxed, you can ride the track through any movement. The direction you take on the track is based on your partner. If you try to go in a specific direction you will derail yourself. This happens because you have left the gap and tried to create your own. When you try to make your own gap you will lose your connection with your partner and be reverting to earlier styles of Shen Chuan. The big difference in this as opposed to the harder styles of Shen Chuan is that you are no longer imposing your will. You are accepting what is offered and following it to your partners disadvantage.

There were some in those days who had picked up what were then called Japanese "tricks", and because of this, traveling about, he had picked up a few throws and holds and ground techniques from them. His specialty was leg locks and head cranks, old style wrestling moves that hurt so bad you wanted to slap your mama.

I wasn't being picked on when I started martial arts and self-defense, that came later and I was glad for the training. What started me were Batman comics. I was a Batman fan. He was my idol as a kid. I liked him because he was a normal guy who built his body and mind and became a crime fighter; he did boxing and wrestling and martial arts. An early cross-trainer, something I think settled into my thinking early on. This led me to finding what few things I could find on martial arts and believe me, it was a limited field then. Few books, no such thing as videos or DVDs, or the internet. Anyway, this interest led me to seek out more and more about the martial arts. And then one day my mother explained to me that someone I should talk to was my own father, that he had more than a little experience in this kind of thing, and she had seen him in action, and she told me some of the stories, and I thought: Here I am, in the hot bed of it all, and I didn't even know it.

My father's experience wasn't stylish, nor was it all precision technique, except for leg locks. He had some hairy leg locks and some nasty head cranks. His boxing was rudimentary, and his wrestling skills were good. He had something else on his side. He was prodigiously strong. That's why Ive worked away from that as a major requirement, and tried to be more of a technician, but his early influence has stayed with me.

My father, Bud most people called him, had grown up during a very rough time and in very rough places, but I'll save that for another article. Suffice to say, he was my first instructor, and had, in fact, been instructing me without me really thinking about it for years. As a very young child we watched boxing matches and he always told me what punch they were throwing and how it was thrown. He told me the names of wrestling holds, but I never quite put it together that he knew what he was talking about until later. The whole self defense thing, it was practically in my DNA.

Anyway, it dawned on me that I had an instructor in my house. My dad worked many hours as a mechanic, so when he came in it was sometimes late and he was often tired, but he went out of his way to teach me a bit here and there. Not regularly, but enough that I now realize he was truly my first instructor. He gave me the basics, and the main thing he gave me was a philosophy of self-defense that was practical and pragmatic. He had been in real situations and had the scars to prove it, so his experience meant something, and I still turn back to it today and have passed on things he told me to my students, especially that "inner circle" of students who have been with me for so long.

But the thing is he started teaching me. He begin to show me what was what and how it was done. I was hooked in my head before, due to Batman, but once I learned how I technique worked, it went to the bone; it was in me like blood and tissue. I mention this about my father, something I haven't done a lot of in print on the matter, because at this point I want it on record how much I owe my father as far as martial arts goes, and many other things as well. He loved self-defense the same way I did, and had he been younger, he would have loved to have gotten involved in things like Judo and Karate. But he gave me my first instruction, and two years later, when his time  shrunk even more, he enrolled me in Judo at the YMCA, which led me to Hapkido, Tae Kwon Do, and Kenpo. I was also exposed to a number of other arts there, but those were the first I studied. This early flood of martial arts enriched my interest and excited me even more, leading to it becoming a major and valuable part of my life.

Years later, after many hours and lots of money to train, I have arrived short of 58 years old at a very nice place with 47 years of experience under my belt. I am not retiring, not by a long shot, but I have some very special students who are going to carry on what I have taught. Primary among them are Coy Harry and Eugene Frizzell (I'll talk about him later) and Billy Jack Worsham.

As founder and Grandmaster of Shen Chuan, I believe it's time to recognize formally the next Grandmaster of the system, Professor Coy Harry. I suppose that places me in the position of Senior Grandmaster, and though it does not retire me, last October I chose to officially pass the torch at a gathering we had after Camp Lansdale.

I still have my hand in Shen Chuan, because unlike so many systems, I didn't want to wait until I was so old that the person I passed it to would not have the joys of being grandmaster for enough years to really have their personal impact. Coy is forty, and he is just right, and he has been the student I have trained the most and the closest. I knew when I met him, he was the man. He had trained in two systems of Karate when he was younger, and had taught self defense out of the manual in the army. He loved the stuff, and in the fifteen years he's studied with me, he has easily acquired more knowledge than the average student due to his attention and dedication to the art and philosophy of the art. His fifteen years are easily worth thirty of most martial artists.

He's ready.

I'm hanging onto the handle of the torch for a few more years, gradually giving a bit more of it to him as time goes on. I like to think this is the perfect way to do it, pass the torch while I'm still young enough and fresh enough to teach him the ropes about how to keep the system fresh, how to hold it together.

Couple, three years from now, I'm backing out.

I'm not leaving martial arts. I'm going to be there in an advisory role, and I'm going to continue teaching to a select few. I may even revamp the system in my direction, but I want to give a good man and a great martial artist his moment to do what he can do with the system now, as it exists, carry it forward with the changes he thinks will make it better.

As for me, this is what I want. No more worrying about big classes or maintaining a school, just teaching to those who really want it, and who will further the system, not only under me, but under the new 2nd Grandmaster of the Shen Chuan, Martial Science, assisted by Professor Billy Jack Worsham, who we refer to as the system's Right Hand, even if he is left handed; and in fact, it has been debated that we should call him The Left Hand and leave that as a tradition. That's an idea we're still tossing around.

Joining me when I do depart, and again, I'm not gone yet, and I'm only stepping sideways into developing a new program, will be Professor Eugene Frizzell, who has managed through training with me and others, and through his own attention to technique, to find his own expression of the system. We will be joining together to teach and to push this new angle on the art forward. It's time for the old art to have a fresh coat of paint. In one room by me, and in another by Grandmaster Coy Harry. The walls will be the same, but the paint may vary. When I think about doing it this way, I'm reminded of the very fine Professor V, who in his lifetime created at least three versions of his art because he kept learning new things and changing as he went. I am much the same way. Grandmaster Harry will do much the same, I'm sure. It's all Shen Chuan, and it's all good stuff.

 That's the beauty of the art. Certain things in the art remain the same, but Professor Billy Jack Worsham has developed his own expression through the harder striking of the earlier system, to the finer locking skills of the middle period, to the better understanding of balance and pressure points of the current incarnation.

Shihan Paul Britt has his own expression of the art, which dates back to the early system, which was harder of technique, with bits of the newer expression, mixed with materials drawn from other arts. Sensei Norma Almanza is very close to the middle period of the system, and will be starting her own school soon. As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, And so it goes. Or to put it another way, things change, and in some ways remain the same.

Moving on. Growing. Improving.

Grandmaster Harry, I salute you!

Senior Grandmaster and Founder, Soke Joe R. Lansdale