I have been a martial artist for more than twenty years. After ten years of running my martial arts centre, Grandmaster Prof. Keith R. Kernspecht appointed me Sifu, and today I am very fortunate to learn directly with Sifu Sergio Iadarola. After my husband died, I carried on running our martial arts centre and teaching.
My boys were small at the time, and I was alone with them. In the afternoons I stood in the hall looking after other people’s children. My own were there with me, and still I had no time for them.
I buried myself in this work, because there everything had meaning and because I did not have to feel the pain as long as I kept moving. From the outside it looked like strength, and to some extent it was. But at some point I no longer knew whether the path I was walking was still mine, or whether I was only carrying on because I had once started.
For two years I then learned with Mira Michelle Crosby to listen inwards again. Nothing lofty, but among other things very practical guidance that brought me back, piece by piece, into my own feeling. I did not throw my path away afterwards. I examined it and readjusted it, and then I could walk on with strength again and give more to others again.
There is a sentence I have been telling my students for years: You are the only one who can really change something in your life. It does not matter at all whether others are “to blame” or not. Complaining will not get you a single step further. Take responsibility into your own hands, and off you go.
Then came Corona, my school collapsed financially, and one day I heard myself complaining. About the circumstances. Exactly the sentences I had never let others get away with.
That was the moment. It could not go on like this.
I did what I had been asking of others for years, and decided to dare a new beginning with my two boys. Madeira, alone, without a safety net.
I teach nothing I have only read about. I have needed every part of it myself.