As an instructor and lifetime student of the martial arts I have failed more times than I would care to admit. However, with each failure lies the birth of valuable experience and newly found wisdom, both critical pieces that can be used to build and decipher our own martial art puzzle. What is the martial art puzzle? It is our understanding of the art or arts we practice, the piecing together of all our martial art techniques, concepts and principles and the re-evaluation of our perception and approach to our martial understanding. The truth is that the puzzle is infinite because there is always room for improvement, refinement and obtainment of new skill. As an instructor, my responsibility to my students is to share all my failures, success and new insights and view of my martial puzzle, to give them an upper hand so that they may benefit from my own experiences. I tell my students that my job is to make them better than me, that is what I strive to do through my instruction. GM Art Gonzalez used the following analogy to explain the idea of working to make our student better than ourselves, “my job is to reach down and pull you up and thrust you above me and you in turn do the same with your students”. GM Art shared stories of how SGM Gilbert Tenio, would share keys of our DeCuerdas art with him and how his mind would be flooded with new information to the point in which he would become overwhelmed by the realization that his understand just rose to a new level. For me, I too have had these moments of epiphanies after GM Art spends a few minutes or a couple of hours with me, refining my martial art knowledge. These epiphanies usually happen when I try and lie my head down to sleep and while I am thinking about a martial art lesson I just had, or a lesson I have seen. A couple of days ago I had a similar experience/revelation, while referencing some of my notebooks and many loose slips of papers containing martial art notes and scribbles. However this time it (new pieces to my puzzle) was more than I had ever experienced in the past. The only way I can describe this epiphany is like that moment when you are looking at an “autostereogram”, which in laymen’s term, is a specially designed picture that has a picture hidden within it which is only revealed after you stare at it for some time. After looking at all my notes laid out before me the end result was a cascade of information that changed the entire way I viewed our system which will now change my method of instruction. I know that I cannot be the only martial artist that has experienced something similar, the bewitching feeling of a new insight, that Archimedes moment of “Eureka”, a new revealed idea that send a shiver you’re your spine and one that immediately adds a dozen more pieces to our never-ending puzzle! I suppose the point of my verbose rambling is to say that if we are not constantly sharing, reviewing and re-evaluating our thoughts and ideas about the arts we practice we miss out on this eureka moments. The more I share with my students I have found that they too are teaching me and contributing to my puzzle, I have said on more than one occasion to a student while observing “what the hell did you just do” and then follow up with “wow you came up with that, that’s a good technique and it’s a keeper”. So as we approach the end of 2018, perhaps it is a good time to re-evaluate our martial art principles, concepts and basics movements, hidden within them you may find a significant revelation, a hidden jewel that will further add to the development of your own puzzle.
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