The Way of Least Resistance

This morning we filmed an application of the last two movements in taijiquan, "apparent closure" and "cross hands".  As a joke, my students filmed one application with some " hopping " - à la the " fajin fantasists ". I belong to various Facebook martial interest groups.  One in particular is a skeptical internal arts group called The Fajin Project. After uploading the video to my YouTube channel, I posted a link to the group.  The conversation that followed has to be read to be believed! The internet is indeed a strange and wonderful place. Copyright © 2015 Dejan Djurdjevic

I've prepared this short sampler video for promoting my new text "Essential Jo". Please share. Copyright © 2015 Dejan Djurdjevic

Okay, so I talk a lot. I mean a lot . All my family, friends and students know this. Reading this blog, you would also know this because I write as I speak. So we (my friends and I) laugh about it. That's the way I am, and I cannot change, any more than a leopard can change its spots. Nor do I believe I should try. As John Fowles' character "Conchis" said in "The Magus" : "Be true to yourself". I used to wonder what that expression meant, but in recent years I've come to understand what Fowles (speaking though his character) was trying to say: you can't be somebody you aren't. Not only would this be futile (because, logically, you can't be someone else ), but it would also constitute an attempt to lie to yourself (which is also, ultimately, impossible). That's not to say that you shouldn't try to improve yourself, the quality of your work and/or your general behaviour; we should all strive to do this. But you shoul...

I get lots of comments on the web, some good, some bad, but rarely are they so full of vitriol that they make me react. Mostly I just brush the bad ones off. A particular "merchant banker" (rhymes with...?) calling himself " 12THEANVIL1 " decided to post needlessly nasty comments on my bagua montage , and then went over to (of all things) my video about the striking surface of the uraken , voicing his "disgust" at my "lack of internal power" and saying that I "should not be teaching". Ironically he speaks of " internal power ", which I suspect he envisages as some kind of mystical force that is the centerpiece of his delusional belief system. That I wasn't trying to demonstrate power (of any kind) in either of the videos he watched seems to have escaped his pea-brain. Granted, my technique is not ideal (especially considering my arthritis which had flared up very badly just before this seminar, making me feel like I was wa...

By now many of you will be aware of the video below, apparently taken on 13 December 1984 1 at a karate dojo in Dumfries, Virginia. It shows a brutal, unprovoked and totally reprehensible bashing of a young mentally disturbed man who claimed to be a kung fu practitioner "taught by Jesus". The video has gone viral. Possibly the only good thing to emerge from this is the universal outrage and condemnation it has provoked. 2 That people should have such a sense of outrage in this day and age of "ground and pound MMA" and other media violence which has a "brutalizing effect" is surprising, but also gratifying. It restores a little bit of my faith in humanity. The now infamous video of the bashing at a Virginia karate dojo in 1984. Warning: this video contains highly disturbing footage. For those who would rather avoid watching the video (I include it for the sake of completeness, but don't advocate anyone watching it) I can provide the following p...