Sifu Pramada Wells
Sifu Pramada is a 4th Level Technician and has been instructing Wing Chun/Wing Tsun Kung Fu in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2004 to people of all ages and walks of life. In 1999 he began his study of Wing Chun/Wing Tsun with Si-Fu Simon Mayer, the founder of Bay Mountain (student of Si-Gung Grandmaster Keith Kernspecht; student of Grandmaster Si-Jo Leung Ting; student of Great Grandmaster Ip Man), until 2017 while expanding upon his Wing Chun knowledge with Sifu Martin Hofmann, founder of Art of the Warrior, from 2007 to 2021.
Without knowing it at the time Sifu Pramada fell in love with Wing Chun Kung Fu around the age of six after seeing his first Bruce Lee movie. Later, at the age of thirteen, he was informally introduced to Wing Chun and it became clear that this was the martial art for him. Thirteen years later (1999), due to his incessant promotion of Wing Chun (that he had yet to practice) a friend found a flyer of Sifu Simon Mayer’s class and so began Pramada’s Wing Chun journey.
Wing Chun’s simplicity makes it quickly effective for self defense, while its complexity makes it infinitely intriguing and both physically and mentally engaging.
Wing Chun Kung Fu is an art of self preservation and self development. Sifu Pramada once read that roughly 3000 years ago, during China's Golden Age, healers/doctors were capable of removing an organ from the body, washing it in herbal solutions to heal it and then reorganize it back into the body’s system. They later deemed this to be a primitive approach and came to the conclusion that it was far wiser to deal with the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms. In other words, the best way to heal was to stay healthy and live correctly through proper diet, practice, exercise etc.
From this perspective the issue of defending oneself from an aggressor is actually one of the more extreme applications of Wing Chun Kung Fu, whereas the healing properties of Wing Chun are equally valuable. For example, the healing art Chi Gung is prevalent throughout the Wing Chun system. Thus no matter what technique one is practicing or applying, one is simultaneously healing oneself.
"Wing Chun as an art is elegant, as a science truly intelligent, as a system of self-defense, simple, practical and ferocious. It is a martial art with the applied principles of geometry, physics and physiology along with principles of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism." Sifu Pramada Wells