Zaine

I hope everyone had a relaxing time!

I think that a tenet of life is to be happy and find happiness. Is that the meaning? Who knows? I would certainly like to believe that the meaning of my life is to find happiness in myself and others.

That's awesome! Where are you doing HEMA?

I think that there is definite use in understanding and being able to interact with the "traditional" way that a kata is done. It allows the martial artist to then make their own assumptions and changes where necessary. As a teacher, I teach the traditional way of doing a kata but, in my own practice, do it differently to fit my body and encourage my students to do the same.

Just rest. There is no point in overtaxing your body. Some people say that it is good to "sweat it out" but there's no evidence that this does anything but make you feel more miserable. It's okay to take rest days when you are sick. The progress will still be there when you get back.

I would certainly argue this point. The meaning of life is to live it. Good, bad, or somewhere in the middle, it is our life to lead. We can focus on the bad or we can uplift the good. In searching for the meaning of life, we often lose the plot of it all. We focus so much on the future that we forget to enjoy the now and it sours our memories of the past. There is no one answer. For Tesla, the meaning of life might have been to invent the things he invented. Perhaps Davinci felt that the meaning of life was in his paintings. For me, the meaning of my life is not in either of those. It's in my family, my writings, my martial arts, the world around me paints the picture and I get a chance to be one of the artists.

I definitely think that you should talk to a therapist about this, if you haven't already. Death is complicated for the survivors and simple for those that have passed. We all struggle with the end in one way or another and coming to terms with that end is something that not everyone can do. To quote Hamlet: I do not have a good answer for you as to how to accept death, nor can I give you the ability to do so. It is something that I still struggle with from time to time even though I feel that I have accepted my own mortality. There is not secret to accepting death, it's something that we don't have a choice in. I would say, perhaps reductively, to make your life worth living. Take part in things you love, learn from the things that cause you pain, try to make the world around you, whether immediate or otherwise, a better place. Worry not about the future, but focus on the present. Life is difficult and it is easy for us to focus on the difficulty. Find those things that make life easier and create a habit of surrounding yourself with love.

Congrats!

I'm not a big horror movie fan, I don't find them very entertaining nor scary. However, I do really like camp and B movies. So generally, if I choose to watch a horror film it's a bad one.

Last year I went as Sailor Jupiter. This year I'm going as Link from The Legend of Zelda.

My oldest son has been playing that. He seems to enjoy it. I hear it's quite a vast game.It is very vast. I'm not sure that I will be able to see everything this game has to offer, though not for lack of trying.

I am playing the Xbox version. You can find a good priced refurbished series s at GameStop, that's how I ended up getting my Xbox and I've had no issues. However, if you've got an adequate computer, then it's probably better just to do it on PC. I will say, as someone who loves Skyrim and considers it to be their comfort game, Starfield scratches the itch in a lot of ways. It isn't quite as good, in my opinion, and there are things that I wish that they had done differently, but I have over 60 hours into it as of right now and I could easily see myself putting in another 100 at least.

You make a good point here, Brian. I find that I am much more interested in how someone approaches karate and kata than how it was traditionally done. I am learning from someone, not from some metaphysical concept.

I have been playing a lot of Starfield instead of D4.

I can't speak exactly for Chito Ryu, but I can offer some theories based off my research and own experience. My guess is that these kata have a similar root, and diverged based on the needs of the practitioner. I practice a fairly standard looking Seisan, but I've seen versions of Seisan that, if I hadn't been told that it was Seisan, I never would have guessed it was Seisan. It was explained to me that they had a similar root, but diverged as it was developed by different people.

One of the reasons that I joined was because I was getting bullied, and I've met plenty of people who joined for the same reason. I can't speak to how common it is, but my anecdotal experience says that it isn't exactly uncommon.

Congrats Danielle!

It's good to remember your blessings. That's something that I struggle with. I think that it's easy for us, as humans, to get so focused on what needs improvement that we forget to look back to see how far we've come. However, I think it's important to understand that, while there are people out there who have it worse, that does not invalidate our issues. You're allowed to focus on something bringing you down. I would advise against doing it so much that it becomes an anchor, which is something that I struggle with often, but it's okay to feel bad about a situation that you are in.

For me, as Bob likes to say, the proof is on the floor. I want to see that they are effective, have a good breadth of knowledge, and are still excited to learn. In this, it generally helps if their background is solid (e.g. they come from a good lineage), but I'm happy to throw away concerns about their background if they're legitimate in the present.

I learn kata from the internet all of the time. Of course, it is always better to have a teacher who is working with you to learn a kata as they will be able to correct inconsistencies and bad technique. However, if you're confident in your ability to learn something online, then I don't see why we shouldn't do it. Some of my favorite kata came to me from a video. Further, you can often find someone breaking down the kata to help you learn it online as well. Overall, I wouldn't recommend learning a kata online to a beginner, but someone advanced to black belt should have no issues learning kata online if they don't have someone around to teach them a specific kata that they wish to learn.

That's a good way of looking at it. I don't think I've ever really considered martial arts as an investment into myself, though that is what it is when I break it down.

You were making money learning karate?

This is really cool! Thanks for sharing!

I'd be interested to hear cases of this as well. My guess is that the answer is that it does not often happen to do internal politicking and the reason that there are disparate organizations in the first place. My original school didn't even associate itself with my sensei's sensei.

It's something that I have been thinking a lot about recently, especially in terms of Bunkai. I watched a tiktok of yours talking about Muchimidi in Naihanchi and it got me thinking about all the ways in which bunkai from other kata employ the concept.