way too many commas

I have been doing much better with the consistency of my blogs and I don't want to lose the hard work that went into building this momentum, but I am short on time tonight, so although our class gifted me with a bunch of fantastic lessons and new tools that I want to explore, I won't be able to discuss them as in depth as I would like to with the time I have tonight, so this blog will just have to be I'm here I'm training I have a mountain of things to work on and I'm so so excited to get started. for now, I write this blog as a bookmark for these ideas and a promise to delve deeper and think more on them the next chance I can. Current Total Should Be At Push-ups 2352 2623 Sit-Ups 2010 2623 Hand Form 7 49 Weapon Form 4 49 Other Forms 5 17 Sparring 3 49 AOK 50 49 Steps 182 75 Repair Relationship 0 1 Me and White Supremacy 0 1 12 Applications 0 1 1-on-1's 1 2 Kung Fu Art 0 1

This past week doing the AOK challenge has made me realize something very important about how I carry out this requirement. Some of the prompts were no brainers, holding the door for someone, telling a joke, sharing something with a friend . These are things that I would normally do even if it wasn't an I Ho Chaun requirement. Then there are some that require almost the same "level" of energy, complimenting a stranger, let someone else in front of you in line, clean up a mess that isn't yours. These are things that I try to do as often as the opportunity arises, and I definitely notice it as an Act of Kindness (as opposed to the earlier examples that I sometimes see as just being polite). But this challenge has made me realize that I am very passive when it comes to my acts of kindness. In order to fulfill many of the bingo spots I had to go out of my way to do something, I had to set aside time in my day, or space in my brain. I wasn't just waiting for an opport...

  WOW What an amazing class we had tonight! Sifu Rybak made a spirograph reference (see shape pictured above) and now it's giving me an entirely new way to think about my forms and the way my energy is moving through each motion during a form!!! I wrote this out in my journal because I definitely don't understand this enough to describe it only using words so I was drawing lots of little diagrams but I wanted to write out what I said a bit more clearly than my frantic ravings I put in my journal so that hopefully when I come back to this idea I can actual follow my train of thought. Parsed from my writing: The begining of DMS I is )( not ][ !!! This might completley change how I visualize/conceptualize  flow! Before I understood that there was a Flow Between Techniques. 1) because I have heard instructors describe this before and 2) I can logically understand how energy and momentum could carry over from one motion to the next But thinking about things in this way  )( ma...

1) The push up circle from last night 2) First class bowing in at the front 3) First blackbelt class 4) Fight choreography practice 5) Presenting our fight choreography and hearing people laugh at our silly jokes 6) Getting a gold medal for my sword form in the tiger challenge 7) Almost getting struck by lightning doing a dragon dance during the Canada day demo 8) Sprinting through the torrential downpour immediately after the Canada day demo 9) Finally breaking that tricky board during the break-a-thon 10) Seeing the candidates progress through the year 11) Everything about The Great Lion Making Project  12) Getting to help with the mural during renovation week 13) Inputting my requirements progress in one night and deciding that is was still possible to make it to 50000 push ups this year, if I really went for it, making a promise to myself that I would keep no matter what (and I did!) 14) Doing my first (semi-)successful double stack as a lion 15) E...

With the Banquet fast approaching I have been checking over the things that will soon be put on display for the rest of the school and our extended SRKF family and it got me thinking about my forms. When Sifu Rybak asked me to be part of the second demo, doing my hand form in addition to my weapon form, it made me realize that I have been putting DMS I+II on the backburner for quite a while. I have been practicing it here and there, always peripherally aware of it, but never really spending the extended amounts of time trying to work on the issues that made me choose it as my form for the Year of the Rabbit in the first place. When we do our run throughs of the demo in class, I can still feel my back heel lifting, I can still feel myself rushing through those first 3 moves. Still not understanding to the point of being able to do it, how I can reconcile the release of energy and commitment to each move with the speed I am trying to achieve.  This is not to say I have made zero prog...