(Soulbonding) Lessons of fire and air

What basic thing Zuko taught me last night was a reminder, that fire was not just fire. It is made of air and fire – the fuel and the effect. He actually told me what firebending really was. It was bending energy around a funnel of air, using air to both fuel and trap the energy between two layers as a sort of direction.

That was pretty logical.

What confused me was the internal energy of bending itself. According to the wiki page on Avatar, the Fire Nation’s martial arts style was based on Northern Shaolin kung fu.

I have absolutely no experience with that form of martial arts. What I have learn intensively are simply taekwondo, and taichi – one hard form, and one soft form. So I was taught to visualize and combine both of them in a sense of energy direction. I probably couldn’t replicate it in the real world (for now?) but it did achieve something: it focused my mind a lot more than other techniques I’ve learnt or been taught.