21/06/2025
This is the final post in the Taiji for Self Defence series. I mentioned in my last post the importance of approaching whichever school you study with an open and critical mind. I acknowledge the difficulty in this approach as most of us have a good deal invested in our school, style, lineage. I would add to those comments that it is highly worthwhile examining different schools and lineages and early texts.
01/06/2025
Having examined how martial arts and in particular TaiJi got lost as a practical martial art, it’s time to look at how we can find it again. I don’t want to go over old ground and several aspects of this question have been looked at in some depth in my previous blogs, both in this (self defence) series and the previous form collector series. What I want to do in this post is to look at how you can make sense of the applications held inside your form.
11/05/2025
In this post I want to look at “how” the various arts changed and more importantly the implications for those of us that wish to better understand and utilise the martial potential of the various arts that we study. In order to avoid confusion it should be understood that when I say martial art I am referring to skills of self defence in a situation of non consensual violence, in other words when you are being attacked, not when you are engaging in a sporting competition, or as Anko Itosu (1831 – 1915) Shuri-te stylist, often referred to as the founder of modern Karate said “Karate….It is not intended to be used against a single assailant but instead as a way of avoiding injury by using the hands and feet should one by any chance be confronted by a villain or ruffian.”
17/04/2025
Picking up where we left off in the last post, what prompted martial arts to go off track? I mentioned that it wasn’t just TaijiQuan that went off track when it came to practical self defence, but other Chinese martial arts and indeed, Japanese (Okinawan) martial arts went through the same process, why was this?
The causes of the shift in focus of martial arts from battlefield skills to civil self defence to a health / fitness pursuit with martial connotations were similar though not identical in China and Japan. A little bit of history…
17/03/2025
I’ve used the sub heading lost in translation for this piece because I want to look at how many modern martial arts, not just TaiJI and XingYi are misunderstood and as a result trained ineffectively as far as practical self defence is concerned.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the issue I want to bring forward a concept in Psychology known as “confirmation bias” this is the tendency to seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs. As a result, we tend to ignore any information that contradicts those beliefs. We’ll come back to the implications of this tendency shortly.
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