Not Much

At this point  I am at quite a loss for words. Lots going on this last little while and many things on my plate. I don't want to fall into the same groove as last year of not blogging because I have nothing to say or I don't feel anything is revelant. Any type of word or communication to the team is revelant and is the bare minimum requirement.  I can say the energy was high in the kwoon last friday and a huge assortment of weapons which should make for some pretty cool weapon forms and fight choreography. It was also really cool to see some new and some familiar faces this year. I look forward to training with you all. I also look forward to training and preparing for grading this year.
Brian Chervenka

Snakes and Ladders

I guess in some ways last years kick at the I Ho Chuan could be compared to this game. For me and the many great people I met on this journey. You ascend up the ladder, feeling good about things and getting that much closer to your goals. The excitement of looking down at how far you climbed. Seeing the carnage of all the challenges you have beaten, only to move ahead farther than you thought you could. Growing into a smooth steady climb and making all the right turns and avoiding those snakes. Pulling off huge accomplishments and starting to pick up momentum in your goals and increasing the numbers in a steady almost tranquil frame of mind. Forms are looking good, getting in some distance, really starting to become one with your weapon. Push up reps and sit up reps increasing everyday. Achieving that state of organic humanity by evolving more and more into your empathy and rolling back to how things should be by focusing on doing the common good for anyone that is within your kindness radius. Then an injury occurs, whoosh down you go. A few more rolls and you discovered something cool in your form. Back up you go. Getting in good reps and a fairly descent routine. Life came into play and yep, down you go. But this time your back at the bottom of the board only a few feet from where you started. So next roll you take a different path, thinking that way didn't work so lets try with the shorter ladders. Thinking that if you play it safe you will make it to the end. Confidence is back up so you take a chance and shoot for that long ladder. Two moves later you drop down half way, then back up, and down. Pretty soon you have a melt down and toss the board in the air and punch it in two. Thinking to yourself this is a dumb game anyway and who in their right mind puts themselves through this mental and physical yo yo of success and failures. Just to give good measure you give it one last kick and move on to something you know you can win all the time, every time. Like the alphabet or counting backwards from a 100. Then you and your brain are becoming boarder line moosh. You think to yourself I need more, I can't let a challenge beat me. So you go back and find all those scattered pieces. Dig out that darn board and duct tape it back together. Find your favourite color and give it to your most challenging opponent. Life. Find your second favourite color and give it to your other opponent, training. Take the color you hate the most and roll with focus. This time you are going to make it to the top because you have an idea of what to expect and what it is you need to do for recovery. What you don't know, you take the risk and accept the outcome. Because its the risk takers that prevail and learn from failing. The challenge becomes the addiction and losses are another form of challenge not defeat. The balance of it all that leads to the accomplishment. Being one at the top of your game.
Brian Chervenka

Let them be

My little one has been in Kung Fu for a little while now, and I was ecstatic when she said she wanted to try it out. I have always taken the position to support and let her try whatever interest she decides to partake and let her discover it on her own. If she enjoys it and wants to excel, then all the power to her and I will help no matter what. If she wants. Not because I feel it is my right to. If she chooses not to, so be it. I have no interest in forcing my daughter to continue something she doesn't like. I also don't think its healthy to stand over her and constantly bark out what she is doing wrong, forcing her to practice and then of course the lecturing all the way too and from class. I feel that would stunt the creativity and remove the life lessons of discipline,challenge, defeat, triumph, self confidence, and of course setting her own life path that she absolutely needs in order to evolve and mature properly with out me taking that experience away or shielding her from it. I also did not want to install a type of resentment towards me because perhaps I lacked patience or smothered her when she was trying to learn and out of my own selfishness and not letting a kid be a kid regardless of the interest she observes. I mean shes 8 years old and has a long road of discovery ahead. But what a better tool could be introduced than Kung Fu to help her see ahead and handle obstacles. Although this interest was a little different because her Dad practices it too, but I still wanted to keep my distance and see what transpires. I felt that the only way to really see if she takes to Kung Fu or not was to let her find the bug and learn on her own and patiently see if she would approach me for help. Sometimes there were moments of struggle to not tell her what she was doing right or wrong or pay attention and stop jack assing around. In other words, stop being a kid and you will be a little satellite of me. Not cool. So the only intervention I really imposed was the praise of what she did do, and did you do your Kung Fu homework. A few times I did ask her if she was really that interested or are you doing this just for dad. She told me she still liked training but may want to go back to being a cheer leader. She missed it. So I thought well lets see what happens. Much like Sifu Masterson's observations of her son, I thought perhaps I should just pull her out because she was fooling around and didn't really seem that interested, then something changed. As I watched her I seen she was trying alot harder and you could see progress in her form. She was telling me how very excited she was that she was going to be in the banquet demos. She started to practice more at home. Cool the installation of a goal. One night I heard this little voice coming from down stairs shouting every step of Hsiegh Chien, and then the moment I was waiting for, my little one looking up at me asking if I would come see how she knows the whole form and would I help. I couldn't help but beam with pride. So a few nights here and there we are practicing our forms together with the goal of doing our best for the banquet. Throwing in push ups and sittups and some other training. I still tread lightly but am grateful for stepping back and witnessing young discovery. For letting her be.
Brian Chervenka

Two wheel training

When the weather gets like this in the month of January, I can't help but become frustrated because its a tease for spring. Warm weather means get on my bike and ride. Its very similar to the state of euphoria that we feel when we set foot in the kwoon and train. So many different senses are awakened and yes even with a motorcycle there is still the quest for center. I spend whatever time I can performing regular maintenance and check fluids, revamp or replace certain parts. Researching and checking out new parts and deciding what upgrade will make it go faster, handle better, and impose constant and concrete reliability. Observe and ponder the mechanics of it all and use every moment I can to educate myself on all aspects . Honing the skills I know and diving into the unknown, the challenge of taking worn out or expired components apart and putting it all back together to make it perform like new or beyond. The importance of recording in a maintenance journal of all I have done and what I have learnt so the option to always look back and have the reference of mistakes  I made and ended up pushing my bike home or just before bringing the beast alive to look down and see a leak or return from a ride and discovering a bolt I may have missed. To track all the different fluids that have gone in and when its time to change a filter. After all the trial and error is experienced and the understanding of the mechanics is understood, I can now become one with the void of riding. Smelling the different scents of nature, being sensitive to the different temperature changes, and of course the risk of it all. You and a space of less than a foot from the asphalt at speeds much faster than we're meant to be. Steering the bike with your hips and not just from your shoulders but basing all off your center. navigating a corner and just when to let off and set up and when to gun it. The calm and then the immediate reaction it takes to steer around a deer, or head butting a sea gull at about 120. ( that almost knocked me out). Some times its just a casual ride on a back country road and then next thing you know someone doesn't see you and rolls out of a drive way right in front of you. You experience an incredible adrenalin dump but deep down you know, if you don't stay cool and in control, you are going down or you might freak out and seize up and ride straight into a tree. Not panicking are the only way to not lay down your bike. But there may come a time when the only way to survive is to lay the bike down and hope for the best.
What does this have to do with Kung Fu?To some, not a damn thing, to others, if you change some of the words too training, forms, kicks, journalling, techniques, sparring, diet, stretching, break falls, confrontation, triumphs and let downs, it may be deciphered as a code of relation to Kung Fu.
Brian Chervenka

A different application of Kung Fu

Not quite sure exactly how to start to journal about how things have been going lately but the relevance of putting something down at this point is imperative. Over the last two months and now into the new year, it is quite full. My days start at 6 a.m. and on a good night I'm at home by 6:30. every day. But the work doesn't stop. emails, phone calls and planning and paper work continued on until ..well there goes another email notification and its now 9:30p.m. Trying to fulfill my responsibility's as a father and husband and then get some training in was tiring to say the least. So too manage, I had to sacrifice some of my training. As much as I would love to be a machine, I am not. My family will always be first and they didn't see much of me. There wasn't enough time in the day to make classes and it was too a point where I wasn't going to make it in time to pick up my daughter from her class. Before the Christmas break  there were nights that I didn't get home until 9 p.m. and then back at work for 6 a.m. How are you supposed to train like that and still maintain all responsibility's. In the span of the first two hours at work one day I answered 27 phone calls, 14 emails and was in the middle of spotting a truck load of steel while delegating and running a job with 4 crews and 37 men by radio. Then came the brilliant idea of "Hey, I know, lets start a night shift, that will help everything" said one of the idiots that would be of more use as a wheel chock than anything else. Now I'm at the job until 7 p.m. to delegate and set up the night crew foreman and my own work is falling  behind in a job I am new to. I think if it wasn't for Kung Fu and how much it has amplified my determination and showing me to not think of things as stress or grating but a view that all things are a challenge and this is all part of true mastery, I would have told everyone that was in my path where to go and how to get there in fine detail. For example, when a clown that has absolutely no knowledge or concept of well, anything, is asking me over and over how long will this take, after I have basically ran him through every stage of a said procedure, I probably would have responded as " Well, lets see if you pound your head up your ass and tried to roll to the city and back to the job, we'll be done in half the time it takes you to get back. Oh sorry, I see you already have your head in place, but we'll still finish long before your back."  Since I have been training I don't talk like that anymore, although at times its hard not too. I have learned to deal with people and situations with a more diplomatic approach. Leaving emotions or irrational responses where they belong and viewing it as a challenge, maintaining a solid disposition and solving the problem swiftly and displaying professionalism in its finest form and setting a good example to those that work with me, working on mastery in my chosen field. This is one of the ways I have taken my Kung Fu to work. I didn't have alot of time to do many follow ups on my physical training with the exception of sneaking in push ups when I could, but worked on mastery in a combined form of my occupation and my Kung Fu. Everything I have taken on in my life I have wanted to do well and do it with integrity and pride. I can't do things half way and call it good. If I am putting my heart and soul into it then that's where my solid focus will be, and that's where my determination will be until its being done properly and is up to the standard that I have witnessed from those before me. My approach to my Kung Fu is the same and that's why, although yes damaging, I had to slow it down a bit. But what is there is concrete and will not take too long to pick up where I left off. As time goes on I am starting to get a better handle on this level of my work and its all starting to get a little more manageable. As I am learning to plan ahead more and figure out easier ways to get more things done in one shot the more I am finding time to get back into the physical end of my Kung Fu. See you at the kwoon.
Brian Chervenka

Merry Christmas and to all a recognition

Just wanted to take this minute to wish all of you a healthy and happy new year and a well deserved christmas break to you and yours. It has been a year of great things witnessed and many great challenges defeated by some of the coolest people I have met in a long time. I am grateful to have had the pleasure of training with all of you and we should hopefully see you all soon. All the best to the Dragon team and to all the instuctors and students of Silent River. Merry Christmas!
Brian Chervenka

Advancing from a distance but the hearts at home

I look at the date of my last blog and can't believe how long its been since I journaled and shared my latest thoughts, and said to myself "that just sucks". As far as things are going in my journey its challenging and in some ways sacrificial towards my family and kung fu. Although as I stated before my heart and dedication towards both is concrete. I have been putting in a lot of hours these last few months to better myself and of course challenging myself to beyond my capacities. Which tells me I am practicing kung fu and working towards mastery full bore. Kung fu means hard work, kung fu teaches discipline and respect in the form of always a constant evolution that is never mastered but ingrained into the depths of our souls.  Ingrained into us so deeply that at times it would be so easy to say to hell with this. But I find the more I apply the deepest roots of our kung fu, which is internal, the more I crave the challenge of working harder and the more  I can work towards the balance of leaving emotion out of my thoughts, especially dealing with the items I don't quite understand or in the learning stages of the unknown. I guess in a way the installation of automaticity sets in and gives an individual a look at practicing life in the void.

As far as training goes I have been working Dah Mu Sinh. I have been trying to work on the over extension of my punches and my heel coming up in certain areas of the form that has never occurred before. Forms are one of my most favourite parts of kung fu because if you can't get in time to train, you can do a few form reps  and cover alot of basics in your training. Especially in this form because it is the base for all of our training pyramids. I also get very frustrated with forms because they are a constant evolution in perfection and correction. The never ending quest for balance. I have also been working on my kicks which need a lot of work. I have the basis down but have discovered the route of all my problems. Flexibility. If I kick low they're pretty good, but as I try to kick higher my center is lost and I am throwing myself all over the place. I have set up a stretching aid that I have learnt from reading Bruce Lees' fighting method. It consists of a rope and two pulleys that help pull the leg up in a stance. Once you have reached a certain height you slowly release the grip on the rope and try to hold your leg up, but continue to use the rope as an aid until you can hold your leg up on your own. We'll see how this works out. It like muscle building and stretching in one exercise.

One last thing I would like to share is my absence to the team. I am sorry guys I am not there. It bothers me alot that I don't have my hands on the rope. Right now I have little time with my family and usually jammed with extra work that requires, well, extra time. My focus is my daughter, she needs her fathers energy and the reassurance that I am dedicated to all her interests. My wife needs my help and my time as well. They both have a good solid understanding of what I am trying to accomplish both at home and with my training. My girls are tough and understand the sacrifices I have to make towards both and support me ten fold. Right now its a little different, I am at work everyday and spending very little time at home. Those of you that know me, know I mean no disrespect and I am fully committed to everything we are trying to accomplish this year. If I could make it work I would. See you soon hopefully and I will try to respond and make my presence known better than as of late. Once again sorry guys.

Brian Chervenka