Ken Gullette's Internal Martial Arts

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The Best Part of Teaching Online is the Relationships You Build

September 21, 2022

With Michael Rosch (center) and Nancy at a restaurant during his visit.

I began doing live online classes for members of my website when Covid hit in 2020. Finally, an app like Zoom made it very easy to do.

One of my favorite aspects of doing live classes is the relationships and friendships that I build with the people who attend. I am blown away by the fact that I can be in Ilinois and do a class with people who are in Germany or Sweden or anywhere, with the advantage of being able to see each other move and provide instruction and feedback.

One of the friends I have made through these classes is Michael Rosch. He lives in the German city of Essen and began attending my live classes in 2020. He has a great sense of humor, and I tend to enjoy laughter in my classes and tend to crack silly jokes, so we hit it off pretty quickly.

Michael works for Bayer, and last week he came to the U.S. for a conference in St. Louis, about a five-hour drive from my house. This past weekend, he drove up to meet me, hang out and practice.

It was a great weekend. We had meals together, practiced Chen style Taiji, and met my friend John Morrow, who lets me use his school to shoot videos for my website.On Sunday, he practiced with me and Colin Frye, who Michael had seen in many of my instructional videos.

Michael Rosch shows Colin Frye some of the Taiji method he is studying with Falk Heinisch in Germany

A couple of years ago, after he had begun learning from me, Michael wanted to begin studying Taiji in a school in Essen, but he was unsure where to go. He said there was one school doing Chen style in the lineage of Chen Yu. I urged him to check it out. He enrolled and began studying with Falk Heinisch, whose teacher is Nabil Ranne of Berlin.

After a few weeks, Michael suggested that Nabil would be a good guest for my podcast. I contacted Nabil, we did the podcast (listen to it via this link) and I was so impressed with his humble personality that I did two private online lessons with him. I had been very curious about Chen Yu. It's clear by watching him that he is doing something different than what I have been taught, but I couldn't identify what it was. As a disciple of Chen Yu, Nabil taught the method. After the two private lessons, I enrolled in his online live Yilu class. Since that time, I have studied Yilu and Erlu with Nabil, and I am trying to improve in his method. It is giving my Taiji a new dimension.

It's amazing how things happen. Covid forced a lot of martial arts teachers online. Because of that, I met Michael Rosch and he helped me discover Nabil Ranne and begin learning the Chen Zhaokui/Chen Yu method.

It was wonderful meeting Michael last weekend and showing him around part of the Quad Cities. Nancy enjoyed meeting him, too, even though our home is still a mess as we have our collapsed ceilings repaired.

It was a lot of fun and very informative to practice with someone who had been able to receive so much hands-on training in this Taiji method. I was honored that he would want to visit me, but in the end, I think I learned more from him during his visit than he learned from me. Keep that just between us, okay?

I started my online school because I received messages for years from people around the world asking how they could study when their were no teachers of Chen Taiji, Xingyi or Bagua in their area. I started my website many years before Zoom, and the live online capability has made the website even stronger. I love seeing people improve, often during a live online class. But in the end, it is the deep, positive friendships I have made that gives me the most satisfaction. What a great guy Michael Rosch is, and what a fun weekend! All I can say is "danke schoen," and I'm sorry we couldn't order any Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte in the restaurants we visited.

-- by Ken Gullette

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Posted at 10:36 AM in General, Podcast, Tai Chi, Taijiquan | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tags: chen style taijiquan, chen taiji berlin, chen taiji essen, chen yu, falk heinisch, michael rosch, nabil ranne

50 Years Ago Tonight the Amazing Kreskin Gave Me a Lesson in Critical Thinking

September 05, 2022

The Amazing Kreskin

50 years ago tonight, on Sept. 5, 1972, the Amazing Kreskin helped me improve my critical thinking skills and become more of a person who needs real evidence before believing something. You know, a skeptic.

Kreskin was very famous at this point. He appeared on major TV shows doing his act as a mentalist and a "mind reader." I was on the student newspaper at Eastern Kentucky University and I arranged an interview with Kreskin after his performance.

I was 19 years old and believed in ESP, all kinds of psychic phenomena, channeling the dead -- I believed it all. When my buddy Eddie told me his karate teacher could slice his arm with a knife and not bleed, I believed it. But Kreskin helped change that.

In his performance on stage, he would read the minds of people in the audience, or so it seemed. He called people on stage and claimed to hypnotize them. He called a group of students up and I was one of them. It was really exhiliarating to be part of the show with Kreskin and about nine other students.

"When I clap my hands," Kreskin told us, "you are going to begin clapping and you won't be able to stop until I say stop." He then clapped his hands and we began applauding. I looked at the other students on the stage. We were all clapping our hands. This went on for about 20 seconds. The audience was laughing and enjoying it.

Then I realized, "Wait a minute. I'm not hypnotized. I can stop if I want."

So I stopped clapping. All the other students onstage continued to clap and I realized that I was going to be the only a--hole up there who wasn't clapping. So I started clapping again, and I kept it up until he commanded us to stop.

It dawned on me that nobody who went onstage was hypnotized. If he called someone onstage, and suggested the person would bark like a dog when he snapped his fingers, he was giving them permission to act out. So they did. Every time. They were in the spotlight.

So when I realized onstage that I wasn't hypnotized, I stopped clapping but the peer pressure, all those students in the audience staring at us had an impact on me. I also didn't want Kreskin to look as if he had failed at hypnotizing me. So I began clapping again.

After his performance, I went backstage to his dressing room and interviewed him. It was a short interview, and when I asked if he would read my mind he said he was too tired. At one point, I cracked a joke, and he laughed and slapped my leg so hard it left a red hand imprint. It wasn't so much a brush with greatness as a slap with greatness. I walked away that night to write my story with a new perspective on belief and manipulation.

When I began studying the internal arts, I encountered a lot of the same type of thing. The teacher tells the class they are going to do a certain thing because of his qi power and they do it. One of my teachers stood in the middle of the room and said as we ran at him, he would drop on the floor, draw a little circle in the air to control our qi, and we would fall over him instead of being able to stop and pound him.

One by one, we ran toward him, and each person rolled over him when he ducked. When my turn came, and I was running at him, I knew it was another Kreskin moment. When he fell to the floor and drew his silly circle in the air with his finger, I could stop and pound him. But could I do that to my teacher? And make him look like he didn't have qi power? No way. So like all the other students, I dived over him and did a shoulder roll on the other side.

No martial artist wants me to be his partner when he is faking qi powers these days. It would not go well for him. Homey don't play dat anymore.

It was the beginning of the end for me and the teacher who did this. And when martial arts magazines began showing "qi masters" knocking down students without touching them, or making them bounce and hop away just by touching them, my $5,000 Challenge was born. All because of what Kreskin did to me 50 years ago tonight. Kreskin is still alive. I wish him the best. Thanks for such an important lesson all those years ago. As a martial artist it has been very useful.

--by Ken Gullette

Posted at 02:27 PM in General | Permalink | Comments (0)