Understanding lineage, and the traditions that have been passed down over generations is valuable and meaningful, but remaining too faithful to tradition can be a problem.
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Blindly following tradition can lead to staleness. Protecting tradition is to go forward. The part you protect and the part you innovate has to move in parallel. Otherwise, a hundred years from now, you will still be doing exactly the same thing.
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Ultimately practitioners who become teachers themselves, who put in the training hours over many years, with the right teachers and mentors, end up adding their own ’take’ to their practice and teaching.
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While different approaches may exist within ‘styles’, the actual divisions between them can be quite minor. In the end it is still karate. Different styles merely serve to generally help others understand the origins or foundations of a person’s ideas and principles.
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To do your ‘own’ karate means that you have internalized what you have learned and in that sense it’s a part of you; you have made it your own. This does not necessarily mean that you are doing a different ‘style’ to your teacher(s), or doing something new.
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The different styles we have today were developed by people who took what they had and added a different ‘flavor’, or combined their experiences, forming something that was their own thoughts and ideas.
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If we were to take all the accumulated martial knowledge in the world and put it into a single library, I doubt if anyone today is creating a technique or a principle that has not been previously explored (although not necessarily shared). An analogy of this maybe the question; Do we need to add any additional letters to the English Alphabet? The answer of course is…. No. But, can we convey something unique that has never been expressed using that alphabet?… Yes. The same idea would be true for a martial system. New martial systems are not adding new techniques that have never been created before, but rather repackaging those techniques, strategies, concepts and principles in a different way.
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Most martial arts developed in the last couple of hundred years are merely adaptations of other martial arts. With modern equipment, and understanding of kinesiology, physics, and other sciences, you’ll find that we know what works and what doesn’t.
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Practitioners and teachers who truly do their own thing don’t really create it. They evolve into it, they explore it and they train or study their way into it. Most accomplished martial artists reach a point when they centre their approach around their strengths, their natural characteristics and focus their time on methods that fit their particular situation and objectives. Their movement and strategies become personalized and different from their teachers.
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Everyone who practices, who teach long enough with good experience, ultimately create their own ‘style’, their way of doing things. It’s the highest expression of your training. Whether or not you codify that and call it a system is another matter.
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“To be bound by traditional martial art style or styles is the way of the mindless, enslaved martial artist. But to be inspired by the traditional martial art and to achieve further heights is the way of genius.” – Bruce Lee “Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee’s Commentaries on the Martial Way”
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