Bruce Lee Podcast

Happy New Year! To kick off 2019, Shannon and Sharon wanted to share their goals for the New Year and have a discussion surrounding creating goals, working towards them and maintaining momentum. When creating and pursuing goals it is important to have awareness, intention, clarity, and the will to take action.  Bruce Lee was a man with many goals. He had big, visionary life goals and he also had s...

Thank you to all of our listeners for a wonderful year! In this episode Shannon and Sharon reflect on the lessons that they have learned in the past year. We want to encourage all of you to look back on the year and notice your progress. It is important to not only look forward, but to reflect on what we have learned. The end of a year is a good marker to reflect back on the progress we have made...

This week we share wisdom from our podcast listeners. We've selected a few stories to share about how listeners have incorporated Bruce Lee's philosophy into their everyday lives and the impact that the philosophy has had on them. Thank you to all of our listeners who write to us sharing the impact that Bruce Lee and this podcast has had on their lives! We love reading how you all are living your...

"The autonomous individual is only stable so long as he possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual's power and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from...

Disclaimer: Some of the language in this episode includes profanity In this episode Shannon and Sharon were joined on the podcast by special guest Mike Vallely. Mike Vallely is a professional skateboarder, owner of Street Plant, musician, actor, tv personality, stuntman, professional wrestler, and FHL hockey player. Mike shares with us his philosophy on skating, how he first encountered Bruce Lee...

Bruce Lee referred to the separateness of all the martial arts styles as a "Fancy Mess" or "Organized Despair." This included the blind devotion of martial arts students who lacked a real sense of individual and personal investigation and growth. Bruce Lee created his own art of Jeet Kune Do which he called the "style of no style." He was really interested, both combatively and philosophically, in...

In this episode Shannon and Sharon sit down with Doug Palmer, a student of and close friend to Bruce Lee. Doug shares with us personal stories and anecdotes about his friendship with Bruce, including how they spent a summer in Hong Kong together and went on double dates when they both still lived in Seattle. Doug first met Bruce Lee when he was in high school in Seattle during the summer of 1961....

In this episode, we continue our discussion of Bruce Lee's cards he wrote to his friend and first assistant instructor Taky Kimura. In these cards to Taky, Bruce lays out these principles on how to be a Gung Fu man and how to own and operate a school in the best way without Bruce being there himself. In Part 1 we talked about self-cultivation, no-mind, no-thought, and following nature. Listen to #...

In this episode we discuss some cards that Bruce Lee sent in 1964 to his best friend Taky Kimura. Taky was Bruce's best friend, he was the best man in Bruce and Linda's wedding, and Taky was Bruce's first assistant instructor in Bruce Lee's first school in Seattle at the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute. In 1964, Bruce Lee left Seattle and moved to Oakland to open a second school with James Lee. When Bru...

Bruce Lee's The Tao of Jeet Kune Do was published posthumously in 1976 and the very first section is titled "On Zen." While the Tao of Jeet Kune Do is an instructional book, it is not structured that way as it begins and ends with sections on philosophy. This chapter "On Zen" was made the first section of the Tao because it is supposed to orient the practitioner to this mindset and also to infuse...

Bruce Lee had a giant library and read voraciously. He would annotate his books, and it's evident that these books helped influence his philosophies and approach to living life. We think it's important to share these books because they help illuminate the process of Bruce Lee becoming himself and how he used the insights gained from his reading and molded them to fit himself. In this episode we re...

This episode features a letter that Bruce Lee wrote to his good family friend Pearl Tso when he was 21. Pearl was around Bruce's age, and her mother was Bruce's favorite auntie who was a mentor and good friend to him. Bruce wrote this letter after he had left Hong Kong and had been living in the United States for around three years. The reason we have this letter is because Bruce Lee liked to pres...

"Be water, my friend." This is one of Bruce Lee's most famous quotes, but how did the idea first come to Bruce? In this episode we share and discuss an essay that Bruce wrote around his epiphany on the nature of water. When Bruce first had his epiphany on water he was 18 and this essay is him reflecting back on that time. When Bruce was 18, he had been studying wing chun gung fu with his sifu Yip...

This week we have one of our favorite guests back on the show, Shannon's mom, Linda Lee Cadwell! Linda joins Shannon and Sharon to talk about the making of Enter the Dragon . With rare insights into Bruce Lee's process and experience on the set of Enter the Dragon , Linda shares behind the scenes stories, discusses how important this movie was to Bruce Lee, and talks about the lasting impact Enter...

"Thinking is rehearsing in fantasy for the role you have to play to society. And when it comes to the moment of performance, and you're not sure whether your performance will be well received, then you get stage fright. This stage fright has been given by psychiatry the name "anxiety". "What will I have to say on the examination?" "What will I say in my lecture?" You meet a girl and you think, "Wh...

"The ego boundary is the differentiation between the self and the other. It is not a fixed thing. If it is fixed, then is becomes a character or an armor like the shell of a turtle. The two phenomena of the ego boundary are identification and alienation. Inside the ego boundary, there is generally cohesion, love, cooperation; outside the ego boundary there is suspicion, strangeness, unfamiliarity....

In a special gathering to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Bruce Lee's passing, Emmy Award-winning comedian and author W. Kamau Bell, Bruce Lee biographer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, Bruce Lee's daughter Shannon Lee, along with moderator and cultural anthropologist Sharon Ann Lee held a discussion on Bruce Lee's long-lasting legacy and how he became an unexpected icon for Afro-Asian unity....

What would Bruce Lee Do? This is a question that many of our podcast listeners have wondered. Over the course of this podcast, people have written us with different life questions asking what would Bruce Lee do if he were in their situation. In this special episode of the podcast, Shannon and Sharon answer listener questions based on their personal opinions, life experiences, and their knowledge o...

How did Bruce Lee become a philosopher? Bruce wrote an essay on why he got interested in philosophy and what he hoped to do with it. Bruce Lee majored in philosophy at the University of Washington. At the beginning of this essay Bruce addresses the question people kept asking him after the completion of Big Boss : "What was it that made me give up career in the States and return to Hong Kong to sh...

This topic comes from an essay that Bruce Lee wrote about how to choose a martial arts instructor, but the advice can be applied in general to mentors, teachers, or guides. "I sincerely give this advice to all who are about to take up martial arts. Believe only half of what you see and definitely nothing that you hear. Before you take any lessons from any instructor, find out clearly from him what...

The invention of an empirical self that observes itself Viewing one's thoughts as a kind of object or possession, situating it in a separate, isolated part of itself – I "have" a mind The striving to wipe the mirror These three faults are the mistakes and obstacles that we make in our seeking for consciousness. Fault 1 is about ego-consciousness and our identification with our egos and our intelli...

As we have mentioned before, Bruce Lee was an avid reader and pursuer of knowledge. Bruce had a passionate intensity around his desire to learn. He had an extensive library and would annotate many of his books. After reading these books, Bruce would write journal entries about what he had read. Bruce would read these books and synthesize the ideas, he would take the bits he liked, and you'll notic...

"Gung fu is so extraordinary because it is nothing at all special, it is simply the direct expression of one's feeling with the minimum of lines and energy. Every movement is being so of itself without the artificiality with which we tend to complicate them. The closer to the true way, the less wastage of expression there is." What did Bruce mean by the extraordinary being nothing at all special?...

"The true gung fu master aims his blows at himself, and when successful, he may even succeed in knocking himself out. The primary function of one's tools is really revealed when they are self-directed and used to destroy greed, fear, anger and folly. Manipulative skill is not the goal. After years of training, one hopes to achieve a vital loosening and equability of all powers." "In every day life...

"In the long history of martial art, the instinct to follow and imitate seems to be inherent in most martial artists – instructors and students alike. This is due partly to being human and partly due to patterns of styles. Ever since the establishment of institutes, academies, schools and their instructors, the need for a "pointer of the Way" is echoed." "Each man belongs to a style that claims to...