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2024 has been one insane year.

We are all thrown challenges in our lives that call for us to step up and shoulder a burden that we may not have expected, or if we expected it, you can guarantee that you didn’t expect it to “quite turn out like that”, well 2024 has been one of those years.

As I look at the dates on the posts here, I see I last wrote something in January. It’s now October. Go figure…

In that time, we have moved location, established Tauranga’s only donations-based kempo karate dojo, established a community-focused non-profit organisation on a mission to make martial arts affordable for everyone, grown our class to over twice as large as it was in 2023, helped build and guide the development of a number of people and many other things I can’t even begin to remember.

We didn’t get it right all the time. There are a few situations which I wish I had handled differently. There are situations which we did get right too.

The road less travelled

When you study and practice martial arts properly, you will travel a journey which teaches you how to deal with life’s little challenges and life’s big ones too.

My martial arts journey is the sole reason I made it to 53 years old. Without it, I would have ended up like so many other people I knew when I was younger – in jail, or dead.

I would never have bene able to navigate the hardest and darkest parts of the financial and personal challenges that life throws at us.

We take these lessons and we look at ways we can present them to others, ways we can repackage them to help people learn to navigate their own lives.

This is part of the journey of Life Protection.

We get to teach other people how to protect not only their lives, but the lives of all the people they come into contact with. We get to help them protect the people around them by teaching them how to protect themselves, not only from physical harm, but from mental harm, emotional harm and almost any other kind of harm you can think of.

We build strong families and strong people through the challenges we face in the dojo, and then in life.

As 2024 begins to come to a close, the question I will ask you is;

“What will you do in 2025 to make your life, and the lives of those around you, better?”

People often think that learning Martial Arts is all about the physical, kicking, punching, throwing, getting kicked, punched and thrown…

Or, they go to another end of the scale and think that there’s some mystical deep, arcane knowledge which can be learned – some kind of Jedi stuff.

Not true.

There’s a thing called Occam’s Razor. It’s a philosophical concept that says (in simple terms) “the easiest explanation is often the right one”. Martial Arts fits into that. It’s about finding the simplest solution to a given problem.

Sometimes the solution needs to be kicked, punched or thrown. Sometimes it needs a clear head to see the answer that’s right in front of you.

Having something that keeps your “monkey mind” busy allows the deeper part of the mind to speak up and you’ll often see the answer clear as day.

There’s nothing arcane or deep about that – it just makes sense.

As part of our changes in 2024, we require all students returning to 2024 classes to complete a student details form.

This form is not a full membership form – all students will also be required to complete a full membership form. This simple form is to collect contact details for notifications.

If you’re unsure if you need to complete this form, talk to an Instructor for more details.