Welcome to the rum soaked fist. Please introduce yourself

[Fubo]

fox797,

Check your pm.

[Mart]

Hello everybody!

I'm Martin, 26 now, started practicing Qi Gong and Chen in Canada shortly after high school. For other reasons find myself residing in China now, however, continueing the training here under the guidance of ZouZeQun. Currently practicing XinJia and am interested in the practical application of the system.
Looking forward to the online discussions!

[ambergirl]

Hi i am Amber and i am a vixen your all grow to love me and my opions.
ambergirl

[Syena]

Hi. I live in the US (California) and have been training Yang style Taiji for a couple of years.

Angelo

[taichibum]

My name is Sonny. I have been living and training in Beijing for about 3 years. I do mostly Liang style bagua and shuai jiao. Anyone in the area or visiting feel free to get in touch.

[celtic9]

Hello there!

My name is Erikson, and I am from Brasil. I have been practicing martial arts for around ten years, and have settled with Hung Gar for the last four. But, interested in the internal arts, I started searching the net and came to know this forum. I have being crawling here for a while, but decided to introduce myself - I guess it's more polite. =-)
If anyone know a good XingYi, BaGua or TaiJi teacher here in Brasil, specially in the southern region, please tell me! I am still searching for a good internal teacher around here.

[chud]

Hi i am Amber and i am a vixen your all grow to love me and my opions.
ambergirl

Your profile says "Tai Chi 32 years". Can you elaborate what particular style(s) of Tai Chi that you practice? Thanks and welcome to RSF.

[Craig.M]

Hi,

I practice xingyi and taiji in Belfast N.Ireland. Only for 3 years so not very good yet

[Zvika]

Hi Y'all

I'm Zvi. Originally from Atlanta but currently living in Israel. Been in the martial arts since 1994ish - was a kid back then. I've done a mere pittance of Shaolin Kung Fu (4 years), Ku Chi Wai's "Hop Gar" (4 years; Don't get me started about it), and 5 years of Xingyi with a smatter of Bagua and Western Boxing along the way. Since I haven't found any decent Xingyi in Israel yet, I just practice Xingyi in the evenings.

[yfaway]

Hi all,

I've been doing a Yang-modified form for about 6 years, purely for health. I am in Ottawa, Canada.

[evolvingtradition]

Hi all practitioner of Bak Mei Pai under my Sifu John Kuo of Hong Kong, twenty five years plus.

[J R]

Hi Everyone. Glad to meet you. I have not studied much in the area of IMA, however I recently found a teacher of Cheng Bagua and Yang and Sun Taichi. I started MA way back as a teenager studying taekwondo in Minnesota, in which I earned a brown belt (whatever that means). I then studied fujian white crane in Houston in my early 20's. This is when I gained a great appreciation for CMA. Now I'm middle-aged in Seattle and looking forward to "internalizing" it all.

Anyway, hope to see you all on the boards and share in the dicussions.

[parena9090]

Paul here, recently started to study shenmentao. Previously I studied hungarkuen for a number of years, and learned a few other shaolin forms. I look at the Martial Arts as a way of life...

[kungfumartialartist]

Hi everyone,

I subscribed to this forum a while ago, but am just now starting to post.

My name is Patrick Bourassa, and I have been studying at the Shaolin Wing Chun Nam Anh Kung Fu school for 8 years now.

Looking forward to some interesting discussions on the vast topic of martial arts!


Have a nice day,

kfma

[xingyijuan]

All right then.

Just to see if we can start off with a clean slate and we don't come back to the dirt digging of the locked thread, here is my story (once again) with that jolly old lad called Eyelom:

I started kung-fu after a serious Matrix overdose (I saw the movie about 17 times in theaters). It made me think that, if Keanu Reeves could do it, so could I. It also came after I noticed that my work consisted mostly of sitting in front a computer all day long and that it was degrading my health progressively. I subscribed in that sports center in a local University and got pretty much hooked since the first session. I realized that what they were teaching as Wing Chun was actually a Vietnamese blend of the art, and that the teacher (Eyelom) was a student of a Vietnamese Grand Master here in Montreal who made off-the-wall claims as a marketing device. That didn't bother me that much. What did bother me later, after I started to invest myself more to the system and to this Grand Master's school, I found out that was power/money hungry. To this day, I haven't found anyone in that school that was taught directly by him. Never the less, his classes are the most expensive one's in the city with the only justification that the teaching comes from a Grand Master! So, when Eyelom decided to leave him, I followed. So did ALL of the student under him.

After we created our new "school", I began to progress quickly in the system and life was sweet. Then, we got wind of rumors that our beloved teacher was molesting the girls in the group. At first, we, the guys, didn't take those rumors seriously. We often joked about it. I personally got to believe that it was a big misunderstanding of my teachers clumsy attempts to seduce some of the girls. From what I gathered, he seemed a lonely man. His own comments only supported what I believed. He often said that this or that girl had issues. Surely enough, the girl he spoke of stopped coming shortly after, only perceivably proving to us that she wasn't putting up with the discipline we all followed. This went on for a while until one day it hit closer to home. We got wind (again) the one of our dear friends was harassed by our teacher. By that point, there was no way of denying the fact that the rumors were persistent and real. We approached our teacher to try and clear most of the claims. He merely told us what we wanted to hear. He went on and on about how he was only human and that he had faults like others. He bitched on how these girls treated him unfairly since he was being warm care-giving friend to them. That evening ended with a big hug and we, the main assistants of the group, felt closer to our teacher than ever. We felt like a family.

Later that year, that girl left the group. So did a couple others. The teacher told us that she had spread rumors on him that made those other girl leave. At that time I was single and there was this other girl who did everything to attract my attention. I was trying hard to avoid her since 1) she was pretty young, 2) She seemed problematic at the time due to her apparent immaturity, and 3) she was at the center of another controversy regarding my teacher. I was the head assistant to the group and I took my role seriously. I felt that it was my duty to care for my kung-fu brothers and sisters so I took it upon me to get closer to her and help her the best I could. The closer I got to her, the more I found out that she wasn't as bad as she was presented in the group. The more I also got to understand the problematic of the controversy she was in. By early 2005, she finally got to me and we started dating. By that time, I got to know the truth of the story: she had been sexually assaulted by the teacher. Adding up what she knew and what I knew, we discovered that this guy, our teacher, wasn't what he led us to believe he was and that his scheme was going on for quite some time. We decided to leave the group, but not before we alerted the remaining girls. I also had a talk with the other assistants. The reception of the news was rather cold and incredulous. They probably were fed misinformation from the teacher anyways.

After the initial shock, we started asking questions. We started contacting a lot of girls that left the group in the past to see how many went through the same thing. We contacted more than 20 girls and received over 12 positive answers, ranging from psychological harassment, to sexual harassment to rape. Why this guy was never brought to justice is only a showing of his manipulative skills. He knows the law and knows very well the limits of his game and successfully stayed out of trouble. We found out he was already being investigated by the police who had an eye on him but could not do anything about him. An official complaint was issued to the police and to this date it hasn't come to any result...

After we left that group we still wanted to do MAs and we started looking for another school. The options were to find another Wing Chun school or to try something completely different. Since the only viable Wing Chun alternative was a school were the girls from our old school attended, it seemed like a social faux-pas to go there. I was also pretty curious of this internal style called Xing-yi, which most of the texts I read on showed it as a style similar to Wing Chun. After a brief search on the internet, I got a couple of addresses. Steering away from any school promoting "Shaolin+Wudang+What-have-ya" and visited one that only promoted internal styles. Providence had it that it was Master Yang Hai's school. At my first visit, I was impressed by the teacher and his students. For all that time I thought internal meant slow and soft. Yang Hai's Xing-yi is fast, direct and strong... and fearsome. No need to say that I was very interested in joining in. My girlfriend got tired of the whole kung-fu thing and went on to learn Iai-jutsu. She also went on to become my wife! The only thing I have to say is that I'm doing Xing-yi because I know it is a solid style that realy sculpts your body, from the inside out into a lean, mean, agressive war machine! Now I train so that one day I can kick my old teacher's ass! ... No, not really... As I've said before, I've learned more in 6 months doing Xing-yi than the previous 5 years doing... whatever shit it was, and that is enough for me.