I've slowly been making efforts to get more consistent with my practice, and it seems that things are slowly working in my favor to have a consistent schedule.
I was making a lot of effort to jump back into another situation for my training business, but after hitting so many walls, I finally decided that now is not the time for me to blow what's left of my savings on opening another studio. I tried looking into working at other gyms, but the truth is that I do not like gyms. I do not like going to the gym myself--and after getting elbow deep into Paul Chek's material, I feel like everyone should tear up their health club membership cards, and visit their local community centers only on a rainy day.
I have a few things that I would like to share here-- in my Taiji/Yiquan lineage, I noticed that a lot of my seniors were bodyworkers-- Brian is an acupuncturist, quite a few of his kungfu brothers & sisters are massage therapists. Even here-- Sifu Ben is a physical therapist, Michael is a PTA, Doc is a chiropractor, and Greg is a medical doctor.
My friend Nick is a personal trainer in San Diego, but has a background in dance,began Wing Chun 4 years ago, and is now becoming a massage therapist.
I started this conversation with Brian about 3 years ago, but I feel like alternative healthcare is more in line with my views on fitness, using nutrition to treat disease, and using internal martial arts to reduce "bad" stress and as corrective exercise. I feel like "personal trainer" implies things that I don't like-- I don't believe in "beasting" people in a workout. I've done that in the past, and have never felt good about it. I can recall interning at a big box gym, and one trainer was bragging about how a woman he trained said she could barely grip her steering wheel to drive home following her workout.
That guy is an awesome bodybuilder, but he's no longer training clients. I'll refrain from saying anything else negative about him because he's really a good kid, just not what I feel a trainer should be.
I've long had in interest in acupuncture, but no idea how to "get there" since I will need to relocate for school. When my Grandma was alive, leaving to go California, Arizona, or New Mexico was not really an option.
I'm going to think more on this, but for now, I have a full plate which I hope will lead to that end goal. I want to get through all of Paul Chek's HLC material as well as becoming a Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist. I want to be able to get a lot deeper with people's issues than I currently can-- and I believe handing them a kettlebell and kicking their butt is not the answer.
I even want to use ILC as my "work in" form of exercise-- which means I have to get a deeper understanding of the 15 basic exercises, the meditation component-- really everything.
For now, my focus is going to be on working, saving my money to get all of this training & certifications, and slowly putting together a business that will 1) pay for acupuncture school and 2) provide me with a passive income that will keep me from having to resort to "bad" decisions in order to grow a business.
I have no idea if any of this will actually work, but I can see a need for everything-- I see people developing a lot of "dis-ease" due to stress and a simple lack of awareness. The problem I've had so far is not knowing how to secure a platform to say "hey, I see you have this problem, you're trying solutions that are not working-- here's something different!"
What I've learned from a quote Elliott Hulse always says comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson-- "Who you are speaks so loudly that I can't hear a word you say." So that means I have to become what it is I'm trying to share with others.