Despite the issues on my first day at the kung fu retreat at the Qi Alchemy Loft, I decided to soldier on. Mainly because I was optimistic about what the rest of the week would bring, despite evidence to the contrary. All in all, I can’t really say the kung fu retreat was a bad experience, nor was it a good one. It was somewhere in between, with both high and low points.
Before signing up for the retreat, I had checked out the sample schedule that was posted online:
- 08:00 – 09:00 Qi Gong
09:15 – 10:15 Tai Chi
10:30 – 11:30 Brunch
12:00 – 14:00 Kung Fu
14:30 – 15:30 Lunch
16:00 – 17:00 Philosophy
17:30 – 18:30 Yoga
19:00 – 20:00 Dinner
20:30 – 21:00 Meditation
21:30 – 23:00 Movie
For someone who is interested in learning about the martial arts or improving their meditative practice, this is a very full but doable schedule, which was part of what enticed me to sign up. The reality is that we trained for less than 5 hours per day on average. We met in the morning for a little qi gong and tai chi, both of which are slow moving styles designed to help improve your internal energy flow and your balance and focus. After an hour or two of that, we took a break and regrouped after lunch. After lunch, we’d train for an hour or two, usually with someone else. The instructor, Ever (she recently changed her name from Tiffany), had several martial artist friends who would stop by to train with us; I found out later that they were paid for their time and weren’t just coming by to hang out and train. In the evenings, we would either train at the loft with other students or go to a class taught by someone else.
When I was training with Ever, I felt like I got very little benefit out of it. Because of her physical stature (5’1″, less than 100 lbs), apparently her instructor didn’t teach her how to attack (seriously). She learned to defend and evade and, unfortunately, that’s what she was trying to teach me. Since I weigh literally double what she does, my movements aren’t well suited to backing up. I am however, pretty well built to stand my ground, so the material that she was trying to show me wasn’t really working for me. She also had a tendency to rush through techniques; rather than perform them slowly so I could learn the movements and make sure I had my body position and balance right, we’d race through it and do the same technique again, (just as fast) or move on to another technique entirely. At one point, we were doing some tai chi push hands drills that rapidly devolved into a wrestling match. She was trying to squirrel around behind me to gain an advantage and I was trying not to pick her up and throw her to the ground (which I ended up doing anyway).
On my last day of class, she was showing me a new form and said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Let’s start with step A, then we’ll throw in step B, then step C…” followed by a few more steps. Then she said, “OK, let’s do it again. Step A. Now step C.” I stopped her and asked what about step B. She said, “Sure, we can do step B if you want.” I said, “No, that’s what we did last time. It’s hard for me to learn the form if we never do it the same way twice.” She replied that this was how her teacher taught and that my mind doesn’t need to remember the techniques because my body will. This wasn’t the first time that she’d changed up a form on me while I was trying to learn it, but it was the first time that I called her on it. At this point, I gave up on wondering what she was trying to teach me. I just went through the motions and kept an eye on the clock. By then, I had decided that I had learned as much as I could from her and there was no point in antagonizing the situation.
Even though I don’t feel like I got much from the 1-on-1 training with Ever, the sessions that we had with other people were good and very educational. At times, other martial artists would come to the loft to train with us and, at other times, we went to a class that was taught by another instructor, with me and Ever in the class as students. In both cases, I learned quite a bit from watching the other practitioners and from their instruction. I was exposed to several different styles that I had no familiarity with, and I got a chance to play with a mook, which is a wing chun kung fu wooden training dummy. It’s a stationary dummy that’s designed to mimic an attacker with limbs, on which you can practice blocks and attacks. I worked a few drills on it for a few minutes, stopping when my arms started to feel bruised from the hits (which didn’t take long). The instructor whose garage we were training in then took a turn and showed me how hard the strikes should be. I left that session with a much greater appreciation for the strikes and power that he was able to generate by using better body mechanics than I was, despite the fact that I had a lot more muscle mass to work with.
The yoga instructor who lived at the loft, Jessica, was also very good. The yoga that we did wasn’t very physical, but was more in keeping with the ‘traditional’ interpretation of yoga, in that the physical asanas are to help prepare the body for extended periods of meditation. Jess was an encyclopedia of knowledge about energetic techniques, finding commonalities between Indian yoga, Daoist techniques, and Kabbalistic practices. I don’t know nearly enough about the subject to be able to discuss it at her level, but she was able to explain it in a way that I could understand, which is usually a good indicator of someone who knows the material well.
The thought behind doing a week long retreat was to try to get a lot of good training in over a short period of time and learning the basics of a new style. In the end, I got maybe 1-2 hours of good training per day with the other students and instructors, and I got some familiarity with the material that Ever was trying to present. It wasn’t a bad experience, but I could have gotten just as much by taking a one hour class at a local dojo each night. Many martial arts schools have intro programs that allow you to check out a class or two for free or they allow you to sign up for a week or two without a long-term contract. Finding a few schools like that and going to class each night would have yielded better results for what I was trying to do.
In the end, I definitely learned some things from Ever. For example, I learned that vegan food won’t kill me. And I learned that I still enjoy the camraderie among martial artists. While they come from varied backgrounds and pursue their arts for different reasons, they are, for the most part, fun people to hang out with, with the training being all about sharing knowledge so everyone benefits and improves. There’s no winner or loser in martial arts training; just self-development with good people. You get battered and bruised, but you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and you get back into training. Then you go out for beer. It’s a good life.
