Before I get into my testimonial I think it would be best if I explain some things about myself first. According to my mother I came out of the womb angry at the world. From a young age I started getting into fights with neighborhood kids, kids at school, and my siblings. For this reason at the age of six my parents decided to put into Tae-Kwon-Do. I was not there long, but had gotten my first taste of martial arts.
My thirst for knowledge caused me to read many books on various styles and schools of thought, but I must admit, I had not read anything about Chinese Kung Fu. During this time a friend of my father, Mike, noticed just how interested I was in leaming all I could about different methods of fighting. One day Mike brought me a tape he had rented from a local movie store. The title of the movie was " Kung Fu The Movie" this was my first glance into the way of Shaolin and Chinese boxing. Mike started to share with me what knowledge he had on the subject. We talked about Bruce Lee and Jet Kune Do as well. At the time there was only Tae-Kwon-Do, kickboxing, and one Karate school in town. As the years passed, I looked at many schools but nothing really fit what I was looking for.
Several years passed and I got a little older and started to think more about girls and cars and less about fighting and leaming to control oneself. After high school I would periodically look through the phone book to see if any new schools had come to town. A couple months after my twenty-first birthday I was Ripping channels on the T.V. I came across a show called "Kung-Fu the Legend Continues" and once again looked in the phone book in search of a school. But this time things would be different. I saw a number for The Shaolin Lohan School of Kung-Fu. I immediately called the number to inquire about classes.
I remember feeling really nervous as the phone was ringing. As it turned out they had been in open in town for a year. I spoke along time with one of the students. Every question I had was answered directly and in a sincere caring manner. While on the phone, I was asked if I would like to setup an appointment to speak with one of the assistant instructors and go through a screening to see if I be able to join the school. Without hesitation I agreed. Bob, a Sihing of the school, meet me at a local Saint Louis Bread Co. the next day. We must have sat there for two hours talking most of the time was spent with Bob answering all the questions I had about kung fu.
A week later, I received a phone call. The call was from Rob a Dailo of the school calling to tell me that I had been excepted and that he would be my teacher. The following Wednesday I showed up to my first class with no idea that I had taken my first steps into a whole new life and way of thinking.
I showed up early enough to watch the last five minutes of one of the advanced classes. I was impressed with what I saw. The students were jumping straight up in the air and just as they were reaching their zenith flipping their heads toward the ground landing on their hands and rolling out to stand strait up on their feet again. At the time the idea of doing such things seemed completely crazy to me because they were not using mats, just the hard floor beneath them. Standing in the front of the class was Sigung Vincent Cabais. After watching five minutes of him teaching and speaking to his class, I knew that I had found just what I had always been looking for.
What I have learned from Sifu is that the only boundaries we have are the ones we create for ourselves. We can do anything we want through believing we can do it and rigorous practice. Through realizing this, you find that you are capable of having more freedom than you might imagine. You start to look at things that might have scared you in the past like a back flip and decide to try it out because you are no longer going to allow fear to control your actions. Believing in this I have started to see things in a whole new light. I started to apply these ideas to my day to day life and it works. It improved the relationship with the people I care about and how I perform at work just to name a few. In some cases by doing something that I was not comfortable doing before.
Sifu has used kung fu to help me to learn how to control my temper. As Sifu would say, "To learn how to control ones environment is easy, to learn how to control one self is the real difficulty". But not impossible. I have learned that before you can control something, you must first understand why it does what it does and what it is. This is how ever something that does not happen over night. It takes practice and concentration. You must not just look at things for what they appear to be at face value, you need to look deeper. Pull back a layer and study it then pull another layer and so on and so on to find out the truth.
When I was young I thought martial arts was movement and a mastery of fighting. Through Kung Fu I have come to learn that martial arts is not just knowing how to defend yourself, this is just a by product of what its true purpose is. I believe that martial arts is a vehicle to mastery of ones self and environment. I think that the main reason I have found a home at this school over others is that the "Shaolin Lohan School of Kung Fu" is a school that teaches self-improvement rather than a sport or just a fighting technique.
-Brad A. Davenport-