I no longer train in a traditional martial arts school. I no longer go to a place where I take my shoes off and line up with my classmates. I no longer take belt tests to advance my rank.
Instead I have a teacher who lives a ten-hour drive away. She offers me and her other students a brilliant and simple martial system, which I am certified to teach. I am now at the point in my martial arts career when I may open my own school and start my own teaching practice.
I want to start a school of sorts, but I don’t have the framework that people in traditional systems have. In a way, I feel like not having a framework offers me too much freedom. For my own school, my teacher has made it clear that I can pretty much offer our system any way I want. She has offered to support me however she can, but it’s up to me to build whatever I like.
And so I’ve been thinking about and planning my school for the last three years. During the beginning of Covid, I realized it would be near impossible to start a school, so I used that time as my “hermit/monk time.” I meditated, I practiced, I pondered the nature of the martial arts. I asked myself deeper questions. Did I want to be a teacher? Did I have what it took to be a teacher, emotionally and energetically? Did I deserve to be a teacher? I pondered whether or not I related to myself as a “warrior.” I paid attention to the ways my training is different than my male counterparts’ training.
What I found inside myself was a ferocious beast of a martial artist. A beast who has become ferocious to protect her fragile heart. I’ve found that all of the martial artists I know are sensitive people who train to protect that sensitivity. We build our personal armor out of strikes and kicks. And then, at a certain point, if we keep training, our sensitivity itself becomes our armor. We become so attuned to nuance in fighting that we hardly have to actually fight anymore. We see and feel ways around fighting.
The big question I’ve asked myself over and over again is: What counts as a martial art? During the spiritual deep-dive of my covid meditations, the sentence came to me:
“A martial art is any art that can be used to cut through illusion.”
In my art, I’m seeking truth. About myself, about others, but at the core of it, I’m seeking true movement. Clean, efficient, effortless movement that seems to come from within me instead of moves that are being “done by me.”
Connecting into that true movement has sort of become my religion. When my body does some inspired move I didn’t expect, it’s the closest I feel to a higher power, and the closest I feel to my training partners. The feeling is a loss of ego — where there once was ego, there is simply wonder and delight.
Michelle Folk Johnson 