Mori-Gari 14
12:00 o’clock at the Augustinum, Dortmund south.
Winter Mori-Gari
Fiiiinaly we managed to put up a new Mori-Gari appointment. After very busy weeks opening up our new center (www.meintempel.de) we have some time to return to the forest.
Hope you join us. Don’t stay at home, enjoy the icy woodlands, and move your body before getting fat at Christmas!!! 
Mori-Gari 13
Sunday 12.12.2010 12 o’clock
Augustinum, Dortmund South
Ultimately: Mori-Gari 10
Wow, this will be the 1oth Mori-Gari in the great history of forest fighting! So get your Hanbo and mark this Sunday in your calendar!
As we switched to another game-setting last time, the great 1oth Mori-Gari will be the promised
Special Mori-Gari “Protect the Daimyo!”
This time its the glorious duty to protect your groups Daimyo as his elite protection guard, while he has to cross the whole forest to get to his fortification. So we hopefully see more sneaking, more hiding and strong teamwork this time.
Everyone is invited to join the adventure! Tell me in advance and get your own Hanbo!
23.Mai, 12:00 Uhr, Parkplatz Augustinum an der Bittermark
New Projects!
The coming times I’ll be very busy working on new plans and projects. So there is not much to talk about yet, except from some teaser information about the future development. We want to push our Dôjô further on and expand the things you can do with Asia, the art of fighting and moving, and healthy living to a new horizon. We will need a lot of help on this exciting journey and hope we can use and develop a lot of synergetic power with our friends and like-minded people. So everybody is invited to share his ideas and think about going some of the way along with us.
To prepare and bolster the future ideas we soon want to start the following:
1. Expand our martial-arts training with a totally new and exciting concept of kids and youth training. It combines traditional Karate-training with useful everyday knowledge, adventure, concepts from Connys expertise as school psychologist and many more that strenghtens the kids self-esteem, social competence, health and stamina, and is by the way a lot of fun.
2. I will start searching for products that fit in our agenda of a healthy, holistic and enjoyable way of life from Asia and all around the world. The first bits from this product line will be available in a new online-shop system I built up together with my mothers company and our partner from the Netherlands. Later this will be combined with our future plans of an Asian center in the middle of Dortmund.
3. From now on we are keenly searching for a real estate in the center of Dortmund to start realizing our plan of a place that combines the arts of Asian health methods, martial arts, culture and education. For this endeavour we will need a lot of help and cooperation.
So there is a lot to do. And my dream is a big project that incorporates a lot of people with their special abilities and skills. As supporters, full-timer or freelancer. Hope to work with you too!!
Sascha
Mori-Gari 9 “Protect our Daimyo!!”
Indisputable its time for fighting, for the deep forest and heroic deeds again. So we decided to start the new season with a Special-Mori-Gari. This time its the glorious duty to protect your groups Daimyo as his elite protection guard, while he has to cross the whole forest to get to his fortification. So we hopefully see more sneaking, more hiding and strong teamwork this time.
Get your Hanbo, your warm clothes and tell all your friends, its time for Mori-Gari again!!
Update complete
The last days I worked on the extensive renewal of our Hakutsurukan-Dôjô website. We decided to change the home-site and incorporate all the important specials of our school there at the main page. Additionally our “teachers” page got some references and particularly we are now connected with facebook. There you can read and comment our news and comment on our photos. You can even upload your own Training or Travel photos.
So have a look at the new information on www.hakutsurukan.de, and support us on facebook by becoming a fan of Hakutsurukan Kampfkunstdôjô.
Ryu-Shukai
Next weekend I will once again teach at our annual big Karate seminar “Ryu-Shukai”. This time Qi-Gong, history and long staff (Bô). It’s always nice to be there and meet all the friends from different styles and martial arts. More info here…
7 amazing weeks
My Asia-trip and Nora and my time in China are over now. This was one of the best trips I ever had in Asia and I learned a lot and could gain so many wonderful contacts.
The last days in Wudang we made another trip up to the Wudang mountain. It was misty again and we walked up to the top in thick fog. For me the best weather conditions you can get on this mystical mountain, even though you miss the panoramic view that is said to be breathtaking. But you can’t have everything…
Finally our time in the Kungfu temple was over and I was invited by the master to have a conversation with him. He told me that he hoped for a good relationship in the future, and that I should teach what I learned in Wudang in Germany.
Our last days we spent in Beijing visiting the famous tourist attractions like the Forbidden city, the Summer palast and made a trip to the north, hiking a lonely segment of the Great wall. All of these spots are breathtaking due to their sheer size and beauty.
Here are some last pics from Wudang and Beijing:
8 Immortals
Now finally a story from China. I arrived in Beijing and met there with my dear old travel friend Nora, who came from Paris and had also been on the road for some weeks before. We stayed in Beijing for some days, had a lot of wonderful vegetarian food, some old market shopping and tea houses. But not enough time to see most of the main attractions cause we already had to leave for the Wudang mountains. That takes you, at least you are not going by plane, some nice and surprisingly pleasant 22 hours on the train. 10 hours of sleep, some eating, reading, conversation and making fun of the weird habits of the natives, and you arrive in the small town of Wudang Shan, which is just near the mountains and the school at the food of the mountains.
We were picked up by them and brought to the school, and from that on felt very welcomed by this nice people.
Wudang is said to be the birthplace of Tai-Chi and the center of the inner martial arts of China. It has not been opened for long, and it was impossible to learn these arts as an outsider, even for Chinese people, some years ago. During the Cultural Revolution most of the temples on the mountain had been abandoned. Nowadays the Chinese government heavily supports the tourism to Mount Wudang and therefor also the martial arts and the Daoist monks got a boom in the last years. After the Cultural Revolution some old monks teached a new generation of practitioners in the Wudang martial arts, Qi Gong and Daoism. These were the 14th generation of monks after the founding of the San Feng branch of Wudang Daoism. The headcoach of these first generation after the long break in turbulent times of modern Chinese history, now recently started to send out his pupils from the 15th generation to teach their arts to outsiders. They are all trained in the mountain monastery and now teach in various places around Wudang. Two of these brothers from the 15th generation teach in our school here, which is located in and beside an 600 year old temple. We train every day between 5-6 hours depending on how much you want to do. The first time I learned the Wudang longstaff form of the 8 Immortals, who are important figures in the Daoist world. The form depicts and mimics their typical behaviour or appearance and is quite hard to master. It was one of the secret forms of Wudang Kungfu. Only 2 hours of this form are enough to exhaust you completely. After many days of relentless training I learned the basics of the form now. And I‘m told to continue the training on my own in the future. Nora and I are teached Tai-Chi and Qi Gong now, while we still continue doing our forms (she learned the Wudang Tiger Form. Apart from training it is wonderful to go up to the mountains. Sundays are free so you can go for a hike at the weekend. The Wudang mountains are full of old temples and all in all are a great and mystical landscape. The first time we went up there it was misty and most of the tourists just stayed away. It had a very special atmosphere, which was just the way I imagined it to be up there. During Chinese history this place was always known for its seclusion and magical connection to heaven. The Wudang martial arts are just like the landscape and the landscape is like Tai-Chi, it really fits together…
Secret pathways
I am now under the oppression of Chinese internet control, so I can’t reach my own wordpress blog. But I really wanted to tell at least the framework of my adventures here in Asia, with some help from good old Germany. So here comes my last episode of the great time with O-shio-san in Japan, before I will get to Wudang in the next article.
I had to get to Kyoto after my time in the temple, cause there I had an appointment with my friend Chieko. So O-shio-san told me he would have to go to Kyoto as well for some official reasons, and one day we toured trough Honshu for 5 hours by car. We were accompanied by his friend the brush maker, who was an exceptional funny escort for that trip. I had no plans for the next day in Kyoto, but was really surprised when O-shio-san offered me to come with him. That next day was really marvellous and too much to assimilate in that short time. In the morning he had to visit his home-monastery in Kyoto where he had been trained, so we had an official reception in the part of the monastery you can’t enter normally. It was indescribable insight this complex, gardens and ponts, open rooms and passageways which directly face them. We three sad in front of one monk in one of these rooms and O-shio-san and he exchanged news and some presents. Everything was handed with great care and the highest concentration, even the way they open the doors they serve you tea and slip off their shoes. I have never seen such a place before, and I saw a lot of temples and shrines in Japan. I’m really happy that I had the opportunity to experience that; but as this wasn’t enough for one day, we then went to the headtemple complex of this whole brand of Rinzai-Zen worldwide. There was some kind of conference for the temple priests of Japan, where O-shio-san spent the rest of the day. But for me, or precisely for his friend, he had organized a meeting with one of the highest monks there to promote his handmade brushes. So I found myself in a sales conversation about traditional brushes, with a famous monk, a funny brushmaker, and in Japanese of course. We sad on one side of a meeting room in a great modern bureau building run by monks, and the priest sad n the other side. I could understand a bit of the conversation, but my friend constantly involved me and asked me about the advantages of his brushes, so I nodded a lot and said some nice words. But most of the time I just wondered how I could have got into this strange situation. After that the priest personally gave us a guiding tour in this citylike monastery complex, and once again lead us into some buildings that are not accessible for the public;In the end of that perfect day, we reunited in a nice restaurant and I finally had to say goodbye to O-shio-san and his friend. After that I had another wonderful day with Chieko and Sattchan, we cycled around the city, which is a great idea in Kyoto and did Shakyo, which means to handcopy the heart-sutra, which consists of really a lot of old Japanese signs. We also visited a wonderful garden, that had been created for one of the leading politicians of the Meiji-period.
Of course it was impossible to take pictures inside of the monastery, so I will have to keep that alive in my mind. But here are some pictures of my time in Kyoto:
