A holistic method designed to teach
mindfulness principles and
classic martial arts.
Outline of the Method
Mindfulness practice is more than meditation, it is a commitment to being present in every moment of your life. The trend toward five-minute breaks guided by a smartphone application is profitable for the silicon-valley set but does little to create real mindfulness.
Knowing Yourself
In the late summer of 1993, I was working for a convenience store chain in Wichita, Kansas. During a shift change, I kneeled to open the safe and there was a loud pop from somewhere below my waist. It was so loud that both the manager I was relieving, and the customer he was serving asked, “What was that?” “I don’t know,” I replied, “but tell you one thing, I really need to start exercising.” “Exercise. Don’t you guys get enough…
The First Practice is Attention
Before you start physical exercise, take a moment to consider if you can engage in the motion requirements of that activity. You never consider your physical condition when you bend down to pick up a dropped piece of paper or grab a suitcase from the baggage carousel at the airport. During these innocent movements you will hear the back crack, or the hip pop, and you find yourself in the doctor’s office seeking relief. It was no…
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the foundation to understanding a subject. Martial art practice is filled with words that have similar meaning or are used interchangeably. When forced to put my practice into writing I discovered that in a single paragraph I would skip between form and posture in the same description. Is the Taijiquan a sequence or a routine? Is a static position a posture or a form? The interchange of the words forms, posture, and stan…
Pinyin
The Pinyin system is the accepted standard for the romanization of Chinese characters. Pinyin means spell sound and is used to teach the standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese. It is also the standard system for entering Chinese characters on computers. Because of this standardization, it is the method I use in my lessons. You can be confident that if you pronounce the words as I present them in these lessons, you are close to t…
Martial Arts in Anger
In my software development career, in anger was a phrase that meant you were developing a program or a process out of frustration with what was available. I share my mindfulness martial art practice out of a similar frustration. The trend in martial art practice is to stress combat effectiveness. Publications, videos, and teachers stress the art’s brutal nature, claiming that it was born in combat and violence. For certain, martial…
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