Xing Yi Quan's Bear Form. The Embodiment of Close Quarters Brutality and Belligerence by Kevin Wikse.

A grizzly bear erupting from its cave, representing Xing Yi Quan’s Bear Form and close-range authority, featured on the Martial Arts Repository by Kevin Wikse.

I’ll be leaving Portland, Oregon in the next couple of days. Southern California is technically on the horizon, but the foreseeable future belongs to Idaho. For those paying attention, my time in Portland was productive—though not without its curiosities.

Which brings me to a necessary travel advisory.

During my stay, I observed a number of strange, glittery frogs crushed deep into the cracks of the asphalt, as though they’d been run over by an 18-wheeler with a personal vendetta. The highest concentration appeared near the ICE deportation center—an objectively bizarre location for amphibian activity, unless the city has recently revised its zoning laws to include ritual mishaps.

Portland might want to revisit its cleaning and sanitation policies. Those streets are slick, and not in a charming, rain-soaked, noir sort of way. Someone’s going to slip, fall, and blame the wrong thing.

Speaking of blunt force and concussive power: my living situation didn’t exactly accommodate my preferred Baguazhang circle walking. Tight quarters have a way of discouraging circular thinking. However, the long, narrow walkway just outside my room was ideal for Xing Yi Quan—a brutally efficient Chinese internal boxing system derived from Northern spear fighting.

Xing Yi Quan doesn’t negotiate.
It doesn’t compromise.
It advances, straight through anything in its way. 

It’s your drunk, surly uncle—
If your uncle was also a heat-seeking missile with excellent monkey body posture (body relaxed, shoulders and elbows dropped, upper back rounded forward, head lifted and tilted forward, knees comfortably bent, and tailbone slightly tucked) and a sadistic sense of humor.

Xing Yi Quan doesn’t skimp on options. It arrives fully loaded. All ranges covered—long, medium, and close—regardless of terrain or circumstance. Whatever the situation demands, Xing Yi Quan answers without hesitation.

Its Five Element Fists, and the Twelve Animal short forms built upon them, offer a curt, blunt, and devastatingly sharp response to any question leveled in your direction. There’s no flourish, no excess, and no interest in looking flashy. 

Xing Yi Quan doesn’t argue.
It replies with an exclamation point that rattles teeth and ruptures spleens. 

Portland’s terrain and circumstances? Wet. Cold. And packed shoulder-to-shoulder with violent junkies, unruly paid shills, and authentically unhinged individuals loudly auditioning for yet another chance at a failed collectivist state built on top of mass murder. Density changes the equation. Space evaporates. Politeness becomes theoretical.

The remedy is not elegance.

It’s no sense crowd control.

Maximum impact generated inside the smallest possible footprint. No wind-up. No romance. Just decisive, sense-dulling, skull-shaking blunt force—the kind that shuts down bad ideas mid-sentence.

That particular flavor of reality correction is where Xing Yi Quan’s Bear form thrives. Heavy. Pressing. Unapologetic. It doesn’t scatter energy or negotiate angles. It occupies space, collapses structure, and ends stupid conversations...quickly.

The primary Bear form of my Xing Yi Quan lineage—there are variations, and they’ll be addressed another time—is composed of two major techniques.

First: Big Bear Charges Out of Its Cave.
Second: Surly Bear Barrages Through the Door.

Both are unapologetically direct. No ornamentation. No excess movement. Each exists to overpower, overwhelm, collapse structure, invade and occupy space, and remove obstacles with extreme prejudice.

The Elemental Fist underlying Bear is Water. Not the poetic kind. Not the babbling stream. This is water as imploding pressure, immense undertow, and crashing tidal force. It advances, fills space, and crushes whatever lacks the structural integrity to withstand it.

With sufficient training—and training done properly—that includes nearly anything made of flesh and bone.

Big Bear Charges Out of Its Cave is Bear’s opening salvo—a sudden, abrupt movement carrying the unmistakable spirit of ambush hunting.

It is the bear erupting from its cave to seize a deer.
The crocodile collapsing its jaws on an antelope that chose the wrong watering hole.
The trapdoor spider lunging forward, yanking its meal underground, never to be seen again.

The front arm explodes outward as what could pass for a jaw-breaking lead hook, then immediately transforms into a covering, hooking snare. Its purpose is not finesse, but entanglement—seizing the opponent’s attacking limb or lead guard and dragging it downward into failure. That collapse is answered by an incoming rear-hand uppercut, driven with full body mass behind it and delivered on an upward forty-five-degree line, aimed at the throat, chin, mouth, or nose—those reliably fragile places where hard, jagged knuckles do their best work.

Bear operates within confined space along the front-back and right-left planes, but it exploits the vertical axis without hesitation. Up and down is where Bear feeds.

Big Bear Charges Out of Its Cave can be chained—right side, then left—smothering the opponent’s guard and attacks, replacing them with your own penetrating offense until the opposition crumbles.

Surly Bear Barrages Through the Door follows immediately. This is the only moment Bear might be described as refined—and only barely (yes, that was intentional).

It begins as a compound circular block and deflection, driven by the rear hand in a rising, wiping motion. That action allows the Xing Yi Quan practitioner to rotate the body just enough to convert the uppercut into a forward-spearing leading elbow, delivered with unmistakably bad intentions.

More than once, I’ve jackhammered the mandible of a sad, miserable soul, wiped away whatever defense remained, and stepped through with a driving elbow—either into the chest cavity or lancing into the temple of an unfortunate companion standing too close to the problem.

That same rising, wiping deflection can also be used to parry incoming attacks, opening the opponent for what Ralph Kramden so eloquently described as: “Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon.” In practical terms, this means a sudden, short-range, fully powered uppercut—or, when circumstances allow, a savage, wrenching qunna / chin-na: tendons snapping, and bones breaking. The messier the better.

Surly Bear doesn’t bust through the door.
It obliterates it, Kool-Aid Man style. "Ohhhh Yeah!" 

Xing Yi Quan’s Bear exists to assert unyielding, uncompromising authority in packed streets, crowded bars, cramped back rooms, and narrow alleyways—environments where space is scarce and hesitation is punished. Like infrastructure in Japan, when you can’t spread out, you build upward and drive downward. Density requires vertical solutions.

There is, however, a caveat.

Xing Yi Quan demands steely resolve. Anyone looking for a Bear form that performs on reputation alone is already behind the curve. Bear only becomes fearsome through relentless, disciplined training. Without that, it is just empty choreography.

Xing Yi Quan is the art of a legitimate hitter—a system built for those willing to shoulder responsibility for decisive action. Street soldier. Enforcer. Call it what you will. Its fearsome reputation is earned, not granted, and it only manifests when the practitioner does what is required.

No less than 300 rounds of Bear, performed with speed and fighting power, daily. 400 to 500 if you are preparing for violent engagements. 

This is repetition to the point of structural transformation. The form must be built into the body and encoded into the nervous system through sustained, demanding practice—rapid fire, explosive, and unglamorous. Repetition. Power. Endurance.

This is how you win fights, crush opposition, decapitate leadership, dismantle organizations, and disable foreign-funded weaponized ideological engines. 

Mayhem? Check. Chaos? Check. Destruction? Check.

My work here is done. 

-Kevin Wikse, founder of the Vimana Vajra martial tradition.