hapkido

Evolution of a blog pt. 1

Every day, for quite some time now, I have been writing and publishing a short blog post for my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog. I’ve been doing this for several years and, other than missing a day or two here and there, and a couple of longer periods where I thought I had quit altogether, I have been faithful to this practice. I honestly can’t even remember how or why I started, but I do know that I got the idea of posting daily from listing to an interview with Seth Godin who has been writing and publishing a daily blog post for well over a decade.

My blog didn’t start out as what it is now. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was posting on an entirely different site than the one I’ve been using for the last few years. The name has also changed over time. At first, I don’t think it had a name. Then, it became Holistic Budo. 

Sometime before my first martial art teacher, Joe Sheya, passed away, I had started doing a form of qigong, a mind-and-body movement practice for developing so-called internal strength, to supplement my hapkido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu practices. Upon hearing that I was studying qigong, Joe said to me, “That’s good, but don’t make the mistake I made by thinking your qigong practice is separate from your martial art practice. Find a way to integrate them.” 

The name Holistic Budo was meant to embody this idea of the integration of the holistic arts with the martial arts, with budo being the Japanese word for ‘martial arts.’ I thought that I would use my blog to document my journey through the arts, but art tends to have a mind of its own and the idea we start with is not always the art we end up with. In spite of my intentions, Holistic Budo evolved into my writing short philosophical posts wherein I shared experience, wisdom, or advice for living a better life. 

Sometimes I wrote about something I had experienced throughout the day. Sometimes I was writing to myself, basically giving myself advice for how I could have handled a situation or experience better. Other times, I imagined that I was leaving a trail of literary breadcrumbs for my daughter should she need it someday if I were no longer here to talk to. Eventually, wanting a name that better reflected what the blog had become, I changed the name to what it is now, Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

I might have never started jiu-jitsu

I might have never started jiu-jitsu if it weren’t for my little brother. In fact, I had never even heard of Brazilian jiu-jitsu until he told me that he was doing it and asked if I wanted to go to a tournament he was competing at.

In spite of having practiced traditional Korean hapkido for many years, it was the first tournament of any kind I had ever been to. It made an impression on me, not all good, but not all bad either. I loved watching Matt compete and I loved being there to cheer him on (I was the idiot yelling “Hold on!” to something that probably should have been let go of), but the idea of competition was so far outside of my comfort zone that I didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Fast forward a couple of years and I earned my black belt in hapkido while Matt was in Korea. He and I would email back and forth and, somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to learn how to grapple, mainly to get out of my comfort zone and primarily for the sparring. I asked him if he could recommend any BJJ academies near me. He pointed me to a Pedro Sauer affiliate near my house and, after much procrastination, I went to a class.

It was so foreign, so difficult, and so humbling that I went back again, and again, and again, determined to master this thing. After my hapkido teacher passed away, I made the difficult decision to resign from hapkido and to focus on jiu-jitsu and my other holistic practices.

It’s often easiest to forget those closest to us, especially when you are as self-centered as me, but, whether he knows it or not, I owe a lot of where I am right now to my brother because, if he never invited me to watch him compete, I might have never started jiu-jitsu.