The Great Escape

The title of this post suggests that this is going to be very deep.  Yeah, that's probably true.  In October 2013 I spent the last 7 days learning a number of different disciplines from Grandmaster Nick Gracenin.  For those of you living in Washington DC, I hope you realize how lucky you are to have a martial artist of Master Nick's ability living in your city and actively teaching.  I have learned such an incredible amount from Master Nick that I really need to take some time and reflect and absorb all of it but I feel that I have to share this one tidbit with the folks who might read my blog because it does relate to how we live our lives not just martial arts and not surprisingly has a lot to do with the overall theme of this blog. There is a concept of harmonies in Tai Chi.  There are external harmonies which refer to the kinetic harmonies within our bodies that we need to understand.  The internal harmonies refer to the part of ourselves that we can'...

So I've been studying martial arts for quite a few years.  I started to study Chinese martial arts when I was 37 (in September) and I'm now 44 so that means I've been doing this for... holy!  Seven Years?!?!  Well, there were a few breaks in those seven years where I didn't go to class for several months at a time but just for the sake of keeping the story straight in my head, we'll say I've been doing this for seven years.  Two of those early years were spent studying Wushu  but after a back injury and some time away from practice I decided to start studying the internal martial arts.  Most of you will probably think of Tai Chi but the world of internal martial arts is much bigger than that.  Since I seem to have a bit of a passion for martial arts and people like to ask me questions about Tai Chi I thought I would include a few posts on my blog about Tai Chi from my perspective.  Keep in mind that I'm a student and will be for life so my underst...