Projects

I've challenged myself to two new projects this past week; one is a short-term, and one is long term.

Down over at Westview, we have a lady that absolutely loves arts and crafts.  Before she was disabled by MS and a massive stroke, she loved to make homemade cards and send them out to everyone.  Thank-you cards, birthday cards, sympathy cards, you name it.  However, her MS and the stroke she suffered caused her the loss of use of both her legs, her ability to eat, the use of her left arm, and severely impairing her right.  She is the sweetest little lady I've ever met, and her kindness and happiness touched me in a way.  So, another student and I decided to create a whole whack of blank cards for her and put them in a decorative box with her name on it; giving it to her as a parting gift before our internship ends.  I am definitely not an artistic person what so ever, but I get an overwhelming feeling of happiness when I work on this project, and I cannot wait to share pictures of it with everyone when I have completed it.

I mentioned in my last post that I've been having troubles keeping my motivation up towards my Kung Fu training lately.  So, I created another task for myself to keep me somewhat involved and experimenting with my knowledge and skills.  I've been taking the curriculum, and picking techniques (right now, it's the roundhouse kick) and looking at different things that we can do to make learning and perfecting it 'fun'.  So I've been racking my brain, and looking at past things that we have done in other classes that involve each technique and writing them all down.  Eventually, I want to be able to print off a page or two per technique that are just loaded full of drills, stations, combinations, etc. so that when you want to plan a class around a technique, you can just pop open the binder, and see a series of different ideas that could possibly be incorporated into a class setting.  It'll be the binder of creative repetition.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing really to report in the past week.  I celebrated my birthday on Saturday with plenty of family and friends; I was treated to a couple of nice dinners, and visits.    I've come to realize how grateful I am to have everyone that I do by my side throughout my life.

Work has been extremely busy.  I've been all over the hospital this week running around working in different departments.  It's quite the whirlwind.

But I love it.

I'm Still Here!

It been forever and a day since I've blogged, I know.  Bad Sifu, Bad!  But, I'm trying to get myself back into the swing of things.  I feel completely off the band wagon once school started winding up.  I completely lost my focus and it made quite the mess of things.

For the past few months, I've hit a bit of a rough spot with my training; just completely lost my motivation when it comes to actually getting my butt in gear and practicing.  I've hit ruts before, but nothing like this.  I haven't been coming to classes, and my training at home has been next to nothing.  The only bit of training I really get in is when I'm here teaching the kids classes.  However, this month I've been really keeping it in front of me that I've got to keep my Kung-Fu at its full potential to set an example for my students.  If I'm not keeping up with my curriculum, why should they?  We'll see where this takes me.  I'm taking things one step at a time for now.

I just came back from a 2 week holiday with my family.  We road tripped down to Portland, then from there drove the Oregon Coast to Lincoln City, where we got to see the Redwood forest.  This was by far my favourite leg of the trip.  I love the ocean and the peacefulness that it brings to me.  From there, we went to San Francisco for a few days, then to Vegas and back home!  It was by far one of the best family trips we've ever experiences.  My brother and I usually get along pretty good, but I feel that this trip was a real turning point in our relationship as siblings.  I think it brought us closer, and really allowed us to build trust in each other. . . I guess that's what happens when you're stuck next to each other in the car to 16 hours.

Back in May I was offered an internship at Westview Health Centre in Stony for 6 weeks in the summer.  So, that's what I've been up to!  I've been working there 5 days a week, 8 1/2 hours a day, and I love every minute of it.  So far I've spent my time down in Continuing Care, the Operating Room, as well as in the Wound Clinic.  It's an absolutely amazing experience and I'm definitely learning a lot from it.  Keeps me busy.

Watch for my blogs once a week, this is my first goal for myself to try and get over this hump that's in front of me.  I know that if I keep myself mentally involved in my training, the physical part will come with it.

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled.  For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers." - M. Scott Peck

Know Your Dignity.

Every year as part of the Religion courses at my school, for 3 days we have speakers come into our classes to do presentations and host discussions as part of a workshop called, "Know Your Dignity."  I look foreword to it every year because it gives us a chance to really reflect as who we are as human beings, and what our purpose is here on our lovely planet.

Today was the last day of the workshop for my World Religion 30 class, and we were split up into two groups, boys in one room with a guy named Mike from our church, and girls in the other with one of the youth coordinators, Gillian.  

In our group, we went through and discussed this blog post by Kate Connor called, "10 Things I Want To Tell Teenage Girls." And, number 10 really stuck with me, and I wanted to share it with everyone reading my blog.

10.  You are beautiful.  You are enough.  The world we live in is twisted and broken and for your entire life you will be subjected to all kinds of lies that tell you that you are not enough. 

You are not thin enough.  You are not tan enough.  You are not smooth, soft, shiny, firm, tight, fit, silky, blonde, hairless enough.  Your teeth are not white enough.  Your legs are not long enough.  Your clothes are not stylish enough.  You are not educated enough.  You don’t have enough experience.  You are not creative enough.

There is a beauty industry, a fashion industry, a television industry: and all of these have unique ways of communicating to bright young women: you are not beautiful, sexy, smart or valuable enough.

You must have the clarity and common sense to know that none of that is true. None of it.

You were created for a purpose, exactly so.  You have innate value.  You are loved more than you could ever comprehend; it is mind-boggling how much you are adored.  There has never been, and there will never be another you.  Therefore, you have unique thoughts to offer the world.  They are only yours, and we all lose out if you are too fearful to share them.

You are beautiful.  You are valuable.  You are enough.

This message is extremely powerful.  Every day, all over the world there are so many people that suffer from depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem because they feel that they are not good enough to live the lives that everyone else is living.  I know that I've found myself saying that I'm not good enough to do what I want, and it takes a lot to get yourself out of that funk.  Positive self-talk is so important.

For anyone that's interested, here's the rest of that post:

http://kateelizabethconner.com/ten-things-i-want-to-tell-teenage-girls/

And, there's another one called "Ten Things I Want To Tell Teenage Boys" if you want to check that one out too.

http://kateelizabethconner.com/dear-boys/

Bullying

Pink Shirt day was this week, to spread awareness of bullying.  This tradition started in Nova Scotia when a high school boy was picked on by his peers for wearing a pink shirt.  The next day, some of the football players at his school responded by wearing the same pink shirt the next day.  Cool right?

I've had my fair share of experience with bullying.  In grade 6, I starting getting picked on for being a 'Teachers Pet' for staying after school was done to help clean the white boards.  It seems silly to me now, but I know that back then it really hurt me.  In grade 8, I had a group of kids that I thought were my really good friends make a facebook group about me, posting things about me that weren't true, and trying to make me seem, literally, like a 'devil'.

Last year in grade 10, I was bullied even worse by a group of guys that were in my gym/science class.  They liked to mock me in the hallways and throw things at me as I walked by.  In class, they would single me out, and make extremely inappropriate comments towards me in front of my peers and teachers.  The disappointing part was, my teachers knew it was going on, and didn't do anything to stop it from happening; it started getting so bad, that I didn't want to wake up to go to school in the morning, and I would make any excuse I could think of to get out of class for extended periods of time.  But, I didn't retaliate.  I could have easily sat back and ridiculed them as hard as they ridiculed me; and there were times that I made that choice to say something back that I knew was wrong.  I didn't reach out for someone to put an end to it until these guys added me to their conversation on facebook so that I could read their conversation that completely tore me apart.

Why am I posting this on my blog?  It's not to try and gain sympathy points from everyone; yeah, this stuff was pretty bad, and I felt sorry for myself at the time, but I AM a stronger person because of what these kids did to me.  I realize that now, but there are unfortunately some individuals that are bullied 10x worse than I every have been, and they most likely will never reach out for help.  

As an instructor of the kids classes, I believe that it is important to make my story public so that maybe my students can some day read it and learn from it.  And maybe, someone will see that they can push through and find a safe-haven from bullying.  

Bullying hurts; and believe it or not, we have all been the 'big bully on the playground' at one point in our lives.  Bullying hurts, but there IS help out there to make it stop.  

This Is It!

Needless to say, I'm completely fired up for tomorrow.

I like to think of the banquet tomorrow as our final test as a team.  I think we've got everything really well organized, and the performance quality of our demo's are the highest they've ever been in my opinion.  We've all peaked at the perfect time!  Tomorrow is our 'graduation' as Sifu Brinker referred to it.  Let's all keep in mind how far we've come, the relationships we've formed, and everything that we have accomplished both individually and as a team tomorrow.

It's going to be a great night.

Sifu Wonsiak
www.kwonsiak.blogspot.com

Tai Chi

I've been thinking about writing about my Tai Chi for quite awhile now; but, every time that I sat down to write up a post, nothing I wrote down made sense.  But I think I've finally got something that somewhat lets you into my 'journey' with my Tai Chi, and how much it's benefited me.

When Sifu Edge was still here in Stony, I would snag rides to and from the studio with her all the time. And usually, I found myself sitting on the bench watching her partake in the Tai Chi class after we were done with the Tiny Tigers.  There was a few times where, Sifu Brinker would come up to me sitting on the bench and ask me why I wasn't in class.  I would always just shrug my shoulders and not say anything but the truth was, I had absolutely no interest in Tai Chi.  It seemed way too slow for me and I saw no benefit in it at all.  I liked doing my forms fast and as hard as I could, I loved swinging weapons around; to me, Tai Chi satisfied none of that.

After I got my Black Belt, my mom basically told me that I had no choice but to start doing Tai Chi.  I was reluctant, but I did it anyways.  I'm not going to lie when I say that I absolutely hated the first few months of attending classes; it was too slow, I couldn't understand how to achieve the same type of flow that everyone else had, and I looked like a robot with all of my limbs attached by strings.  I expected to walk into the class and just get it, like I did with some of my hand forms.  That clearly wasn't the case here, and it was extremely frustrating to me. 

After the first few months of frustration, and having to drag my butt out on the mats to participate, I had a 'burst of realization.'  It came one class when Sifu Dennis walked up to me, put two fingers under my chin and lifted my head up.  I was confused, but she then explained to me that in my Tai Chi and ALL of my hand forms, I sucked my chin down.  This was something that I had never realized before.  I rushed home afterwards and recorded myself doing every single form that I knew and sure enough, my chin was tucked in every single time.  After, I tried doing my Kempo, being very conscious of keeping my head up, and WOW! Did it ever make a difference.  My shoulders became relaxed, my flow from technique to technique improved, and I looked a lot more confident.  I can almost guarantee that I wouldn't have had this opportunity to discover this about my forms if it weren't for my Tai Chi.

I've now been actively participating in the Tai Chi class for 2 years now, and I know that I have just barely grasped the surface of what it can truley do for me.  I had a conversation with Sifu Brinker at the beginning of last week, and he expressed how impressed he was with how far my Tai Chi has come, and how much it has benefitted all of my forms.  I know that Tai Chi has served me exponentially, and I would recommend it to anyone that struggles with flow and unity in their Kung Fu.  I love Tai Chi class, and it's definitely one of those things that I couldn't imagine not being apart of my Kung Fu training.  Funny, considereing how reluctant I was to join.