Monday, March 9, 2009

All sizes do not fit....

 

When I think about advancing instruction for the dan student I think the most important principle I've learned is that all sizes do not fit everyone.

While training seeks to level the hills and valleys between the adepts, as time and skill increases that only occurs to a point.

We all don't have the same ablities, and those natural talents honed by our training accentuate the differences between us. This is natural for our training helps us focus the energies we generate more intensely and as a result our natural talents improve to a greater degree.

It's not enough to train, but to recognize what we do better and learn now to shape it into our personal development.

The difficulty with that is we should not neglect those things which are not as easy.

For example some find kobudo training natural, others do not. It's easy to tone down kobudo training when it's not as fun. What one doesn't realize is that the purpose of the training is what supplemental skills develop over the decades that combine with other studies.

Likewise applications that are easy to do and use too often become the choice and those that take maybe another 20 years to develop are too often set to the back burner. Doing so only guarantees that those abilities will not be there in the long run.

An instructor can only point, especially as the student advances. If the student no longer looks where the instructor is pointing, much is lost.

That doesn't mean those choices are bad ones, it just highlites how hard it to keep moving into more difficult territory.

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