Doing what you love
Published: Tue, 02/10/15
Another interesting question from Dan; What do you personally love most about martial arts?
An important question too, because sometimes, in the routine of practising and teaching martial arts, one can forget why one does it.
In my case I think the key thing initially was that martial arts was not competitive, I could do it at my own pace, I was developing myself and I was only competing against myself. As I child I was dispraxic (I guess I still am but have learned to manage it), I had weak ankles which I often twisted and I was very short of breath, a walk with the family would give me a painful stitch after walking just a few hundred yards, which was tough because my parents were very keen on walking and took us to the Lake district for hill walking from an early age.
So as you can imagine school sport held little appeal for me and I have never been much interested in competitive sports. You were either in a team, or you were of very little interest to the games teachers. It was supposed to be physical education but the obsession was with competitive sports. So when I discovered martial arts as a system of self-development I was hooked from the beginning. The other thing I realised was that it was good to be able to defend oneself but self-defence was not a game or competition. I would either avoid trouble if at all possible (which I have done most of my life) and if I did have to deal with aggression I would use ruthless surprise. I only recently came across the statement: ‘If you get into a fair fight then you are guilty of lack of planning.’ But essentially that was the approach I was taught from the beginning and have always used.
As well as self-development physically and gaining self-confidence I have always found Martial Arts fascinating as an activity and as a path to greater awareness and self-knowledge, I think that comes from engaging with the paradox between studying potential violence and the use of weapons (and the body as a potential weapon in itself) and finding inner peace in the process. I know saying body, mind and spirit is easy,while explaining what you mean is much harder, but I believe that martial arts training develops the whole person in a dynamic way, that has been my experience through training, it is what I look for in a teacher and it is what I encourage in my students when I am teaching.
In martial arts you meet interesting people, you can engage with them at a profound level and you have a whole vocabulary of communication, verbal and in other forms which creates levels of understanding which are hard to find in any other activity I have ever engaged in. Also there is no need to argue about stuff, you just test it and prove it works, or realise it doesn’t and work out why, either way you learn something.
One of my next projects is to get a new class started at the Stav Centre, I think it is time to do a CQC based class for all ages. I know what I want to do in the class, the issue now is how to present it to potential students.
Training on Saturday in Salisbury if anyone is interested, I will focus on the cudgel for personal training, two person drills and its potential for self defence. More information and videos showing some of what I will be teaching here http://iceandfire.org/cudseminar.html
I made a mistake yesterday, posted the next two rune pages but had forgotten to upload the graphics, sorry about that. Second Aett is now complete anyway so see. Hagl http://www.iceandfire.org/runes/7.html Nod http://www.iceandfire.org/runes/8.html Is http://www.iceandfire.org/runes/9.html Ar http://www.iceandfire.org/runes/10.html http://www.iceandfire.org/runes/11.html
regards
Graham