Who Are You? Who Will You Become?

River Valley Taekwondo is one of the remaining places where people seeking authentic martial arts training can find both practical self-defense and the potential for life-changing growth in body, mind, and spirit.

Before Covid, RVTKD convened a small group of head instructors from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean martial arts schools in the Valley. We discussed how the phrase “martial arts” used to summon one clear image: a discipline from East Asia where a community of resolute people comes together to practice difficult, elegant, beautiful, and formidable techniques for self defense. Not just the mechanical trade of breaking bones, but a promise that training is a path to certain kinds of physical power, and a way to become gentle and wise in the process.

We agreed some elements of traditional martial arts training seemed universally understood and appealing when we started, but are unconvincing or missing altogether in the popular imagination now. Some of these were:

• a sense that there’s something larger to seek and find through the study of martial arts, that it’s not just about fighting
• a feeling that this larger and more powerful idea has something to do with the East Asian spiritual traditions that framed these martial arts—elements of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian thought—and also in the nonwestern cultures where these traditions took root
• people come for self-defense but stay for personal growth, which thrives among like-minded people who journey together, day after day, on a meaningful Way

We lamented that these ideas often seem to be missing from contemporary conversations around the martial arts, or are given lip service but never seriously undertaken.

Through confrontation with difficult challenges, every martial artist learns how to overcome the obstacles we face in our daily lives.

If you went to a liberal arts college and majored in English, or Philosophy—any of those subjects people study for the pure intellectual joy of it, despite the total lack of financial rewards promised after graduation—you’re probably used to this question from relatives, first dates, and job interviewers: “Why did you major in this [insert your major here, i.e. your seemingly futile pursuit of choice]?”

Sooner or later, we English majors (and all the rest of our impoverished fellow travelers) learned the standard answer: “Of course I don’t use my knowledge of Chaucer or James Joyce in my everyday life, but studying English taught me how to learn. Having learned how to learn, I can figure out how to do anything. Not only that, I have confidence, based in authentic knowledge, that I’m doing it right.”

I tell this story all the time, not just because I was an English major, but because martial arts training is exactly the same. We learn a certain body of knowledge, and through the process, we see how things that seem impossible and awe-inspiring can be broken into manageable pieces, put in the right order, solved.

Any given step of a journey may be hard, but we see trusted friends who have done it themselves, and who inspire us through their example. With each success we gain strength to spend in handling the next, until solving problems becomes a question of “how” instead of “if.”

Through confrontation with difficult challenges, every martial artist learns how to prevail over the obstacles we face in daily life. Obstacles like:

• dealing with difficult people
• being tired or discouraged but having to perform anyway
• being stuck in a routine and having to get out
• troubleshooting intractable or hopeless situations
• solving one problem to be faced immediately with another
• being afraid and having to walk towards the source of the fear
• understanding and coping with an aging body
• trusting that sometimes you can’t always get the outcome you want, but by keeping a clear head and making the right choices, you can make the best of whatever hand you’re dealt
• understanding when you’re in an emergency, must act decisively, and how to take firm and immediate action
• giving a challenge everything you have, and having no regrets about the outcome, because you couldn’t have done any better

Put some thought into where you’re headed, and with this knowledge, choose the right martial art to help you get there. People often choose a martial arts school without thinking about what they’re really looking for, or without even knowing what their choices are. Unlike picking a restaurant for a night out—where if you have a bad meal one day, the next meal might be great—martial arts training takes years, so the decision is crucial. When you choose a school, it’s smart to keep your destination in mind before you set out on a journey that takes a long time, and where you will have to invest sustained effort and determination.