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Coming Soon to a Beta Form Near You

Less than a week until our beta forms are due and I am feeling both excited and nervous. I got a good start on my forms this year and I was having a ton of fun revisiting the broadsword, and working to build a hand form for the first time. Sadly some part of me saw this early progress, patted itself on the back and said ‘ you can ease up a bit, you’ve got lots of time ’ so with me working on them more sporadically, and the due date soon approaching I am starting to feel the pressure of the deadline, especially since I have two forms I need to work on. But I am starting to more progress on them again, and I am trying to not allow my focus on the deadline to influence my creation of them. I don’t want the pressure to keep me from exploring initial ideas, or falling down certain rabbit holes; I don’t want to make something that is ‘good enough for now and can be changed later’. I want to keep making something I’m proud of and can’t wait to show everyone on the 18th, so I am trying to find...
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Long Weekend, Lots of Gratitude

Not taking a break, but having some time away from the school always gives me a new perspective, it can be so easy to take my ‘norm’ of doing kung fu for granted when it is woven through so much of my life (i.e. because kung fu is so present in my day to day, it can be harder to appreciate how it is shaping me within each of those days. A disruption to that normal can actually allow me a glimpse of what my life would look like without the school)   On the opposite side of things, sometimes getting to do something that does not often occur within my daily life also allows me to appreciate those things more. So that’s what I wanted to talk about in this blog, all the things I’ve been grateful for lately. I got to go to three Easters this weekend I had a lovely time with my family I got some good news from my job I get to eat delicious food I get to make people laugh I get to spend time with my friends I get to tell the people that I love, that I love them I get to watch four hum...
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6 Harmonies V4.7

Last Tuesday’s class Sifu Rybak described the 6 Harmonies in a context I’ve never thought of them in before and I wanted to start to explore it in a blog to try to solidify my idea of it.  When I think of the 6 Harmonies I usually think about them in terms of the end of a move, how I can sync up my wrists, ankles, knees, elbows, shoulders and hips to generate maximum power, how they may all move at different speeds along different vector lines but then all come together to support one idea/motion.  What she described was how each piece  influences all the other pieces.  Depending on how I move my shoulder, dictates the potential/possibilities of my ankles, depending on how I move my wrist allows me to utilize my hip differently, ect. I used to think about the Harmonies as 6 pieces serving the whole. Later in my training I started thinking that hips and shoulders, the pieces closest to my center, had more influence over the final outcome of a technique than the others...
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An Absence of Responsibility

Tonight a student got hurt. I was leading the students. I was looking after them. And I completely froze when it happened. I panicked. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, or what the next step would even look like. The other instructors jumped into action, getting the rest of the class to turn and take a knee, running to get Sifu Rybak, and I panicked. Brain completely shut down, it wasn’t even that my thoughts were running around scrambling or grasping at the thoughts flying around my head, there was nothing, Just waiting for someone else to come along and take over. I had no sense of responsibility for one of my own students, and this absolutely cannot continue if I am to call myself an instructor. Afterwards Sifu explained that all we had to do, was calm them down and call their mom. Extremely logical. Extremely simple, and I realized through writing this blog that I was worried about doing The Proper thing, not The Logical thing. I wasn’t thinking about what to do with an inju...
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Lion Dancing//Sparring

The other 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 yo...
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