Nate's Blogs

 For the past week, I must admit that I have been dropping the ball when it comes to an online presence. As Sifu Rybak pointed out in her most recent post, I haven’t been active on kwoon talk for almost a week. This implicates the idea that I may not be training, but I have been training. I have been training mindfully, but in a bubble, alone. This means that no one knows what I’m doing. They don’t know if I start to slack. They can’t even be inspired by my training. I realize that this is not a quality of a leader. A leader has to take consistent action, inspire others, and most importantly be a presence. You can’t be a leader from the shadows. I realize now that being a leader has been my biggest struggle this year. Leadership starts with blogging, by letting people know what your current status is in your training. This is one of the many benefits of blogging that I have missed out on in the past couple weeks. Blogging about my journey has been a struggle for me this whole year ...

  A reoccurring struggle that I have been facing with my kung fu is being prepared for anything. When it comes to grading for a black belt, I have been guessing on what will be on the test rather then preparing for what could be on the test. It took me some time to realize that this approach is actually just crossing stuff off on a check list. Although I thought I wasn’t aware of crossing stuff off of a list, I subconsciously was. That relates to the concept of staying in the moment and where am I and what am I doing? Now that this was brought to light, many concepts that I have heard are finally making sense. Not only new concepts but old ones too, ones that I thought I had a good understanding about I now understand even better. It’s little things like this that increase the value of my training and what keeps me motivated and involved. 

  For the past month I have been studying a lot of the lineage and I must say, it is so cool to learn where silent river kung fu and the knowledge that we all possess originate from. There is a web of knowledge that involves many people and many different styles and organizations. It is important that we keep our knowledge about our lineage. If we were to loose our lineage, silent river kung fu would become like any other martial arts school out there. Without our lineage we would be missing a lot of valuable things in our training experience, like the altar for example