Today we mark the club’s 1st anniversary of being open – we have now been open and running for a whole year!
It has been a fascinating year. I opened the club because I needed karate in my life again. I needed movement, in a symmetric fashion, without any load other than my own body. And karate is one of the best things to do to rehabilitate a body after spending too much time sitting at a desk, or – in my case – looking after a young child.
Several people have come along to try karate with us at the club. Sometimes it has just been for a few weeks, sometimes people have stayed for a bit longer, and sometimes people dip in and out as life and their schedules allow them. And that’s ok. Life gets in the way of so much that we want to do! And if there is the option of something fun to do, then people can always return to it.
Over the last year I have felt my body reversing the damage of being a parent to a young child. My elbows no longer have shooting nerve pains. My shoulders have regained significant mobility. My lower back no longer feels like a block of (very painful) wood. I’m still not quite as sprightly on my feet as I used to be a few years ago, but I’m doing considerably better than I was when I felt that I simply had to open the club!
It has also been interesting to take my own path with the karate that we are doing in this club. I chose not to sign up to any of the large national or international organisations, I wanted this to be under my own banner. And while this has maybe held us back in a few ways, it has also let me explore what I personally find so interesting about karate, without any rules of “style” holding me back. Some days what I am doing looks more like Kyokushin, at other times it looks more like Shotokan, and on other days it still looks like Shoto Budo – but I can switch between these influences and use them as stepping stones to explore karate, and I think this has helped me come to a number of insights and realisations about things.
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has come to play with me at the club over the last year since we opened. I hope we will grow a bit more and gain more people to play with, because it is always more fun when there are more of us in the hall together. But for now, my intention to is to keep plugging away, to keep showing up, and to keep exploring both the interesting things about karate and how it can heal my body of a decade’s worth of of aches and pains.
And if you would like to come and join in, you would be more than welcome!