Since before I can remember I have had a deep interest in the martial arts. I’m still not sure if it should be a point of pride or embarrassment that one of my first true memories is the last scene of The Karate Kid. I was raised on films such as these. Norris, Segal, Van Damme and more. These men were my heroes, my idols. Their stories inspired me to become more than the rest of the world told me I could be. Many people used to ask me why in the name of all sanity I even cared about the subject. To truly answer that question is easy. I was born with cerebral palsy, which meant that I was in a walker, on crutches or a cane; it also meant that I had horrid balance and underdeveloped muscles. Any time I would ask a doctor if there was anyway for me to learn martial arts, the doc would kindly look at me as though the physical body were not the only thing affected by my particular condition. Over the years this reaction became more and more tiresome and at some point I simply stopped asking their opinion, no matter how my physical condition changed. To be blunt, thanks to a major defiant streak, I wanted what the world said I couldn’t have. When I was eleven I finally got my wish and started training tae kwon do at a local YMCA, however the class was highly modified and I actually had to do the classes in a pool because of my lack of muscle control outside of water. I liked my instructor but found the classes limiting, not due to any lack of effort on his part but simply the fact that an art consisting of 80 percent kicks just wasn’t working for me. So after nine months I quit the classes and almost lost my interest in the subject, doing nothing more than reading the occasional book on Karate or TKD, or whatever art caught my eye.

     With the onslaught of the hell that is life between twelve and nineteen however, I found the need for something more. I was picked on verbally and on rare occasions physically so much that it nearly destroyed me, causing me to place no value on my life at all, since regardless of my temper or desire to lash out I could never fight back with anything other than weak sarcasm. It was at a church camp of all places at the age of fourteen that I met the man who would set me on what is now jokingly sometimes called a path of pain. Soular Mills was an Ex gang leader who had found religion, reformed himself and generally took life with a smile and a goofy joke. When I met him I was a scrawny kid in a wheelchair who had just come out of a hospital stay three weeks prior. I found out he had a great deal of martial experience and when he began to show me what he did I learned an interesting fact. FACT: 330 pound black men apparently can fly. I had never seen anything like it, movements that were so fast I couldn’t follow them at all, a fluidity I didn’t understand. I know now that most of it was basic but at that time I was floored. He sat down with me later and showed me a few basic hand exercises. As we began what I now know to be a chi Sao drill (he studies many styles) I found that all I knew about the art to be useless. I asked him what this was and he simply said kung fu. I had thought this art to be a pathetic showy excuse for a fighting style….did I mention I was a moron at fourteen? Nearly two years and many talks with Souljar and a few other friends behind me I was back in a martial arts class, this one designed for those with CP in mind. For three and a half years after, I was a student of the art of Kajukenbo, and while I love and respect those who taught me and challenged me, after a point it simply wasn’t what I was looking for. I needed something that would more directly challenge my limits. I began to look for something to train along with my other class, at that time very much wanting to stay with it but raise above my limitations, such as kicks and balance, issues that still plagued me. My time in Kajukenbo had made me aware of the confidence and lifestyle changes that come with training. It had also exposed me to many martial arts. In addition to this, I had found many of my friends were martial artists as well, and often we would meet in the backyard of a buddy and spar, cross train and generally have a good time of it. What this meant for me more often than not back then was hitting the dirt in many new and inventive ways.

     My final decision on what manner of art try came from a mix of prior training and in all honesty that which had sent me flying the most: Chinese Kung Fu. When the Shaolin Lohan School of Kung Fu was recommended to me by Souljar himself, honestly I expected one thing-rejection. What I found between two appointments was unreal, the only thing that was done to attempt to stop me was Sifu, trying to talk me out of the classes and that was simply to see how badly I wanted to be there according to what he later told me. In the time since, though my progress has been slower than many, to an almost maddening degree at times, I have come closer to mastering my mind body and spirit while among the teachers and students of this school more than any other time in my life. I stay because every time I’m ready to give up one of my fellow students, Dai Sihings Sears, Talbert or Sifu himself seems to be around to point out something I’ve gotten better with that I didn’t notice. I’m currently a 5th chamber student but I assure anyone reading this that I will go much higher within our art. The cane is nearly done with, my leg braces left me after class number 1 and if I have learned anything in my time here its that we all have the ability to follow the virtues of the dragon: to ride the winds and do the impossible.

     -Ben Barret-