Small steps

I am a black belt in Isshinryu through the Tom Lewis and Charles Murray Lineage. Especially from Charles efforts the entire Isshinryu system as he knew it was forced into my system. Then too soon I was alone in Scranton, no instructor, no training partners, it was where I worked and lived. The paradigm of Isshinryu I was taught was a powerful one, but having no training partners made it difficult for me. I began to use tournaments as a way to polish the apple so to speak.

I also began a program to teach the young of Scranton. And almost everyone I knew from every system thought I was crazy to do so. But Charles had beat into me that I should trust myself and so I did.

During that time I became curious that kata technique could be applied in self defense. That was not a focus of the Isshinryu paradigm I had learned.  So slowly I worked out the underlying principle how things worked. But I did not go further at that time.

Instead I used the free time I had to train everywhere I could. No matter what was offered, good, bad or ugly, I learned something. I would have been quite content to do Isshinryu exactly as I was trained, But I had to do something else.

And everywhere I trained, there was one constant force, none of them cared about my Isshinryu, They did care about me,  but only from their perspective. I was grateful for whatever they shared, but it only pushed me  to better understand my system.

So for a decade I learned as much as I could, especially from two gifted instructors. I learned a lot about their system paradigms. Especially how technique applications could be used. Very important skills, what actually worked and how those techniques worked.

Then about 1988 I began to work on my own paradigm about how to apply Isshinryu. But not jumping in and working out kata application after application.

Instead I selected themes and located techniques that fit that theme. My then students (the adults not the youth) assisted, but the resulting studies were for me, I did not teach them for my program.

Let me present one of those studies. I wimisically called it “Etude in Empi and the Arm Breaks”

Sounds more than a little gruesome, but both those instructors cautioned about techniques to be practiced softly, because serious pressure would break an arm. The theory is someone is attacking you and you can break their arm, they could not continue to attack you with that arm. So I gathered some examples for my back pocket, on that day I needed to focus students on breaking arms. A day that still has not arisen.

https://isshin-concentration.blogspot.com/2015/05/etude-in-empi-and-arm-breaks-early.html

After completing a number of such studies, I moved on to a larger study on the potential uses of Seisan kata technique.

But it began with small steps.