Community Concepts (May 2023)

05/06/2023

Dojo Philosophy for Everyday Life

The First Code of Ethics of Cuong Nhu tells us to improve ourselves in order to serve people, and then the Second Code of Ethics explicitly calls us to practice what we preach and to fortify the younger generation.

When I first began to take martial arts as a 10-year-old in 1983, I was told that I could participate as long as I could keep up with the adults since there was no kids class. Martial arts schools were just beginning to accept children as a student body which would soon become the foundation of commercial martial arts, but many traditional arts hadn’t caught the trend. At the time, the “younger generation” referred to in the Second Code of Ethics was usually identified as college students and young adults. Traditionally, martial arts was only taught to fully grown students (often starting around 15 or 16). By this age the student was expected to be more focused and driven, and their bodies ready for the challenges and hard knocks of old school training.

When I first taught kids a little over twenty years ago, it was for a 12 week after school program at an elementary school. By the 10th week I wasn’t sure I wanted to renew the program for a second quarter. They hadn’t progressed a tenth as much as my adult students had in that same period of time, and they were all over the place during class. In the same week that I was ready to give up, two different parents called to tell me that their kids’ lives had been dramatically changed by my class. I was floored. I almost blurted “your kid?” into the phone. But those two calls made me take a step back and look at these unruly students more closely.

Much of what I interpreted as disrespectful lack of focus was actually excitement over my class. Much of the delay in their performance was because they were working on complicated movements and difficult challenges for the first time in their lives. More importantly, kids learn very differently from adults, and once I learned how to connect to them I never looked back.

Now at Unity we have the privilege to take all the time we need to help kids become the best versions of themselves. Often kids that start as five or six-year-olds are still training with us through college, helping us run summer camps, and checking in even after they move away. Our imperative to spread our ideals to the younger generation is not only because they are in need of guidance. It is also because by putting our energy into them, it is returned to us magnified throughout our lives, and echoes in the way they develop communities and people around themselves wherever they go.