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Lion Dancing and Sparring

Last night we were working on our lion dancing and Sifu Brinker said something that I had never really thought of before, he said that lion dancing is a great way to develop our sparring and application skills. At first this made sense, then it didn’t, and then it did again.  Initially I thought about the usual ways lion dance can supplement and strengthen my kung fu in general, it improves my stamina, and my stances. But then I realized he specifically mentioned sparring and applications which confused me, but thinking about it more tonight I think I see one facet of what he was talking about and it all clicked because of what he added at the end of class, that sparring relies heavily on empathy, and the lion dance specifically can be a tool to develop this. He was talking about how we perform the lion dance, how we need to adopt the personality of the emotions we want our lions to portray, and how this same idea happens in sparring where you are “performing” what you want your op...
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Hand Form

As promised, this is going to be a blog about my hand form for the year. For the first time ever I am creating my own hand form to be my focus for the year and I couldn’t be more excited! The hardest part so far was creating the first technique. Having no previous motion and no following technique left me in a place of no context and infinite possibilities, it was very daunting. I also felt a little pressure to define the style for the whole form within that initial motion; with a weapon form I usually let the weapon guide me, I try to follow it’s strengths and my weaknesses to lead me through each thechnique, but with a hand form all I have is me. This has been a double-edged sword (ha! ironic since there’re is a distinct lack of blades!) because on the one hand, I can allow my vocabulary of motion to guide me to what should come next, often the movements come with way less active thought and planning than I usually employ in my form creation, but on the other hand without the gui...
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Broadsword II

My weapon for this year is Chinese Broadsword… again. I have decided that every time I have a grading year I will choose this as my weapon, and I will add a new section to my form, so this go-around it will be Kayley-Broadsword-II (definetely need to workshop the name). I think it will be a really cool way to measure my growth in between each grading, to see how the way I build forms changes: what motions am I doing, where am I generating my power from, what things am I paying attention to during the building process? Additionally how has the way I’m doing the form changed (especially when doing the older section): How has my timing changed, how am I doing the transitions, has my intent changed?  I started building out some of the sections and already there is a huge difference compared to Kayley-Broadsword-I. When I made that form, it was my first year on the I Ho Chuan team and my first time EVER making my own form.  It took me ages to try to string together sections and I ...
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Changes

I’m not sure how to start this…  I am so out of practice in my blogging, and everything that I want to start off with is either negative, or an excuse. But I want to use the changing of the Year of the Horse as a clean slate, a way to leave behind the guilt from last year, from the last seven months, from yesterday, from 5 minutes ago. In the absence of my blogs last year No. The past is trying to slip out again, and I said I wanted to use this as a clean slate. I need to shift my focus from who I was, to who I am, and who I am trying to become during this upcoming year. I am very excited to be on the very first Kao Shi team, I am also daunted by the weight this holds. I know that I want to really strive to push myself this year and that brings the same feelings of anticipation and fear. Those two feelings are so similar, a quickening heart rate, shorter breaths, that buzzing feeling at the base of my rib cage, vibrations in my bones, but they stem from different perspectives. My e...
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As Promised

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I was SO sure I was going to blog after Sifu Rybak’s last prompting for us to write something  over the weekend, or to even at least check when the last time we posted a blog was, but I did not do either and somehow all that time has slipped by me without my notice of how long it has actually been or how many ideas I have lost because I did not capture them, explore them, or share them. But that’s not what this blog is going to be about, a blog about holding myself accountable, about what I have been doing wrong in my approach to blogging this whole year, and what I am going to do to fix it. That blog needs to be written, and soon, but the thought of writing that big self-critical and completely honest analysis of my year sounds daunting, and when compounded with the guilt from missing the last prompt, and having not written anything in that time, writing that blog right now would be detrimental to my progress. The pressure would stop me before I could even open my laptop. So inste...
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