The May Seminar with Chief Instructor Steve Rowe will be held on Sunday 20th May 2012 11am – 2pm at the Shi Kon Martial Arts Centre, Chatham Hill,  Chatham Kent ME5 7BB.  Costs are  £20 for Dojo members £30 for everyone else.  Casual sportswear to be worn and training is barefoot.  The Seminar is suitable for any adult, any grade and any martial art.

The seminar will cover how the ‘health’ Shi Kon Principles are subtly applied in Martial Arts meditation, neigong and qigong training and how they are ‘layered’ in the Shi Kon training system and highly effective for mindset, mental and physical health and psychic self defence.  

The Seminar is open to anyone from any art, style and any grade.

I have yet to see anyone identify or address where the real problems are in the Martial Arts.

Most Martial Artists are too close to the problems and view them  subjectively, forcing their ideas of standards, what should be taught and how they should be administered, but this has only added to the confusion because Martial Arts truly are a broad church.

We need to take a good few steps back and take a much broader view and see how they can fit safely and effectively into the structure of society.

I will lay this out as simply as I can.

The problems are structure, safety and honesty.

“I’m really trying…”

This can have more than one meaning – and therefore what’s in your head is really important.  Are you ‘trying’ to attempt to do something with failure already written into it?  Are you seeing it as difficult and frustrating?  Are you ‘trying’ because you think it’s difficult or hard’?

These are all responses that we commonly get from students and the problem can lie with our upbringing, as a child we are constantly told that we must ‘try’ and are told off for ‘not trying’, my school report often said ‘must try harder’, meaning that I needed to put in more effort and often, as long as we put that extra effort in, we were rewarded whatever the result.

And so it goes on, in sport and in Martial Arts, the harder we ‘try’ the more we are rewarded for effort.  So much so, that in some Martial Arts the students end up moving like a car with the handbrake stuck on, agonised expressions on their faces and desperate ‘spirit shouts’ sounding like they are about to vomit or screaming like a Banshee with a wooden stake up its backside!

We reopen on Tuesday….

Use this weekend to get outside and do some ‘catch up’ training on those points you know you need to work on. Martial Arts and nature go so well together and no opportunity should be missed!

Remember, there is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing!

- Steve Rowe