way too many commas

Pre-Tiger Challenge Thoughts: I am quite nervous when I think about tomorrow's tournament. But I don't necessarily think that it's a negative thing. Looking back on the previous year, anytime we had any sort of showcase  I remember not being all that nervous. I thought it was because after the stress of grading year that I could handle anything, or that I had grown as a martial artist, as a performer to the point where I didn't really feel the nerves, but now I think it's because I wasn't pushing myself anymore. Lion Dance Board Breaks  More involvement with judgin g These are all things I have never done before in the tournament. I have felt a sort of stagnation in my training for a while, I think it might have happened as my focus slowly shifted to teaching, I began to neglect my own training. Or mediocrity had wormed its way in and convinced me that where I was was fine, and what I was doing was enough. Thankfully I have started to recognize it so I can s...

Last Friday I attended a one-hour intro self-defense course here in Stony Plain. My friend had invited me, and I thought it would be interesting to see the overlap with our own teaching, and I was eager to do some kung fu adjacent work with my friend. Since I talk about it all the time, I was excited to see how she would act and re act to the techniques.  Right away there were lots of similarities to some of our own techniques: elbows, palm heel strikes, and wrist escapes but the way the instructor approached them was quite different than our own. With each explanation she was focused on application, rather than technique as well as showing us how to use momentum to generate force rather than timing and skeletal alignment. She said something as she was setting up the context to do a donkey kick (a low back-kick) That really illustrated the difference for me. She explained that kicks should probably be a last resort since as soon as you lift your foot you're at risk of compromising ...

I have recently been trying to focus on our behavioural management program at work so that I can get my whistle and start learning how to train behaviours with our animals. This is a really essential part of zookeeping because the behaviours are for medical care, or enrichment and they give us a way to really communicate with the animals in our care and I'm really excited to start learning more about it. In reading through our written documents and doing coursework I have noticed several connections to kung fu and I wanted to explore them in a blog. 1) behaviours are altered by the consequences that follow them -> this is why it is so important that we pay attention in our training, because if we're not improving our technique with every repetition this will alter the course of our trajectory. We want to ensure we are creating a positive experience (i.e. progress) so that we are motivated to continue to pursue it  2) Successive Approximations: small steps that move in the d...