After a hiatus, I am once again teaching martial arts. It has been a while since I put my thoughts, philosophies and insights into a blog. I am once again in that period of limbo when in between jobs I have some time on my hands. At times like this, my mind starts to wander as a deluge of memories and nostalgia comes pouring in.

Teaching children’s martial arts class today I had one youngster ask me whether I had hurt anyone in sparring or in competition. Two instances that spring to mind are when my axe kick popped my opponent's shoulder and another time when someone fractured their wrist trying to block my roundhouse. I have also suffered injuries with the most serious being a broken arm in a state tournament. Injuries I guess are inevitable, however, Taekwondo is a fairly safe sport considering the objective is to score points with full contact kicks to the body and head. In Taekwondo most of the time if one gets hurt it is normally the result of an accident.

Korean terminology flows naturally off my tongue after hearing the same words for years from a Korean master. My school’s Taekwondo programme is pretty much based on that of my master. A lot of care went into breaking the art down into easy to learn hand-techniques, one-step sparring, basic forms and kicking exercises making it a winning school formula. From the syllabus down to the design of our school brochures I have used much of my master’s style and methods in running my school.

Watching my students go over their patterns in my Taekwondo class one would give me a tentative glance another would let out a cursory ‘err... ’ as they would perform the exercise. I advised my students that martial arts are not a team sport, to never worry about what anybody else thinks but focus purely on the execution of their flow. Glancing at a judge in a patterns competition is almost always an indication of uncertainty; likewise when facing an adversary in sparring the winner is the one who focuses on his own attacking strategy and dictates the pace of the bout. Martial arts are one of those activities which are all about you, where the focus of the training is on enhancement of the self.

This week one of my Maori friends came to visit and was playing on my computer when we got into a heated conversation about which civilization invented the Special Forces. My friend told me that way before the white man even conceived the use of Special Forces his people used key warriors tasked with eliminating enemy chiefs and messengers. These men would attack using a flexible and independent command infrastructure. There were also Maori berserker units, matataki-a-whiro, who would carry out suicide missions with no regard for their own personal safety.