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August 2024

51 Years Ago Tonight I Took My First Martial Arts Class

September 20, 2024

Ken7551 years ago this evening, I walked into my first martial arts class. I was 20 years old.

The teacher, "Grandmaster" Sin The, led us through high blocks, low blocks, stepping and punching. The room was bursting at the seams with young people inspired by the Bruce Lee craze. In fact, the class spilled outside of the dojo, which had a garage door for the side wall. They opened the door to accomodate all the new students and I stood with a group out in the parking lot.

Bruce had died one month before. I was inspired by his beautiful movement. Having defended myself successfully against bullies all my life, at age 20, kung-fu was very appealing. I wanted to learn how to fight better. I just had no idea how long I would keep practicing.

I have learned from several teachers since I left Sin The's school. When I discovered Chen style Taijiquan in 1998, it was what I had been searching for, and I am still studying, practicing, and teaching it.

This week I have practiced with students, I have taken two classes because I'm still studying, I held a live online class, and today I'm doing a private online class with a member of my website. 

Fifty-one years after I began, I still think kung-fu is cool and I want to learn more and keep improving. My goal is to help my students save time. It took me a couple of decades or more to find high-quality instruction. My students get the internal information I wish I had received 51 years ago. 

The real satisfaction of studying martial arts is not in reaching a destination, it's in enjoying every step of the learning process along the path. I'm still enjoying it more than five decades later. 

Bruce T-shirt

--by Ken Gullette

Posted at 08:46 PM in General | | Comments (0)

How Easy It Is To Close Your Mind Off to a Better Way of Martial Arts

September 13, 2024
Jim Ken 1999This photo shows me (on the right) and my first Chen style Taijiquan teacher, Jim Criscimagna, about a year after I met him and began studying with him.
 
I had studied a version of Yang style for 11 years by the time I met him, but within one hour, as he explained Chen style and demonstrated some body mechanics to me, I knew I had to start over in Taijiquan. I had won medals with the Yang 24 in competition, but when I studied with Jim, new information about body mechanics and principles flew at me like from a firehose. It was overwhelming.
 
I was a "black sash," teaching the system I had learned, and now, I was learning just how empty my art was, and how little I knew about internal strength and internal movement. 
 
It would have been the easy thing to do, when faced with something of higher quality, to retreat back to what I was already doing. Wouldn't that have been easy? I could have said, "That's not my style," or, "I study a different frame." I saw this photo a couple of days ago and the memories came flooding back -- the feeling I had trying to understand these strange but sophisticated details -- a "black sash" feeling like a child, like a complete beginner. But I stayed with Jim (and Angie) and took one baby-step at a time. I'm so glad I did. Knowing them opened the door to a new world, a new depth of martial arts.
 
The moral of this story, boys and girls is this: Be open to new information and different (maybe better) ways of doing things, even if it isn't convenient, even if it is a different style, and even if it means starting over. Yes, it's the easy thing to do to ignore it. But it's a far more satisfying thing to change your course and travel a more complex, difficult, and higher-quality road.
 
--by Ken Gullette
 

Posted at 09:50 AM in General | | Comments (0)