ABOUT ME
A few words about me!
Martial arts have always been a part of my life. I wasn't even 10 years old and I was already in a white gi throwing my classmates on the floor at the Judo academy and at the school playground, at a time when bullying was nothing more than a small day-to-day disagreement. I always had the impression that everyone was bigger and stronger than me... and they really were! It gave me the feeling that I lived among giants and that I was David, and Goliath wanted to punch me every time I walked away from the teachers' skirts. I was small and sleek, so grasping anything that would put me at an advantage, would usually work, but it wasn't enough for those concrete walls with legs! Hence, the experience in Judo was good enough when the world was reduced to children's fantasies and a few swats at home because of these fantasies!
Things went to a whole new level when I was older than 10 so I thought it may be handy to deliver a good pair of punches before things ended up on the floor, which was always the case! Karate fit like an old glove and for a few good years, it was my dance partner. Then my transition to Taekwondo felt like a little sparrow's hop, but my scene was really Kung Fu: Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan were my saints at the altar. A decade after the end of the dictatorship, Portugal was a northern European country just above Africa; far, far from where all the action was! I was always under the impression that Kung Fu was like MacDonald's: to enter a country, it was necessary to have a minimum set of requirements, and of course, Portugal did not live up to those standards! Hence, Spain was a simple solution since I lived glued to the border. Lucky me.
In these times, and thanks to Kung Fu movies, there was a huge misconception that any Chinese citizen who could cook was also a Kung Fu expert. I never understood this relationship between cooking and Chinese martial arts, so I walked away from this fantasy as fast as the devil runs from the cross. Between Chinese Kung Fu's creative minds and sophisticated greed - much like mixing oranges and apples or crossbreeding a zebra and a monkey into a zonkey - there I was, dodging raindrops until I finally found what I was seeking.
Sometime in the middle 1980s, I met the late Dr. Gaspar García Lopez. This was a defining moment in my journey through martial arts because with him, I started to learn real Kung Fu, Taijiquan, and also Chi Kung mixed in. Much like me, he lived life with the wonder and amazement of a kid in a candy store. His noisy and generous personality was also incredibly inspiring.
Every morning training was an inspiration. The white walls of his home in southern Spain were invaded by bright light from the blue sky, that pushed me for another day of hard and rewarding training. I trained there intensely for years without prejudice or taboos and this defined what would become my path in the art form of martial arts. It wasn´t the most forceful or lethal martial art, but it provided the foundation for my sporting, ethical, emotional and creative aspirations - it gave me a strong boost to my martial sophistication. And these are good qualities to live by, are they not?
We were in the golden age of Kung Fu, which would continue until the turn of the century. This was the height of an ancient legacy of human knowledge, in a time when there was no Instagram or Facebook. Back then, home-cooked food still smelled good, with an occasionally burnt aroma. Communication between people was more like in a tavern instead of behind a computer screen. Things were more tactile and you could feel it to the bone! There was dancing to the sound of the Abba, dreams of owning a mini-Morris, and smoke from a few slender Kentucky's. It was a good strategy to finish smoking an hour before entering home so that no scent would be detected, or else suffer the consequences - which was a good whooping. I think at this point everything had a certain physicality and it was a more tangible, sensate experience, which created good candidates for future martial artists.
Everything intensified three years later when a still little known master named Chen Yon Fa visited Europe for the first time. He came to Spain at the invitation of Dr. Gaspar and excited both kids and adults with his exquisite ability. He had a careful and focused education in Kung Fu and embodied the quality of Chinese Kung Fu we all knew and loved from the movies. We loved the Kung Fu movies because they were so refreshing after the aftermath of agrarian reform and Portuguese cartoons of Vasco Granja on TV! He soon came to Portugal, and history was made with such an illustrious figure, who inspired and galvanized hundreds of enthusiasts and practitioners. This gave a helping hand and cemented real Kung Fu into concrete reality and away from an insipid and patched peculiarity of any Chinese cook or zonkey creative mind.
At the beginning of the 21st century, I had a singular experience of becoming a disciple in the most traditional style that can be imagined, in an old-fashioned ceremony with witnesses. This tradition then ceased to exist as it was because it adapted itself to the modern times, and to the pyramid of business, or the business of pyramid…! From that point on, it was cruising speed with a lot of sweat and injuries, shared with joy with those who, like me, were stubborn about not giving up!
Also, from Chenjiagou, came the most crystalline wisdom of light and subtle art form known as Taijiquan, after already having a long walk through other similar experiences. I settled for an authentic Taijiquan, a noble and ancient art form, stationed in a small village in the northern interior of China. So between the art of struggle and the struggle with art, I have been processing within me these thousand transformations of the ancient Chinese wisdom and, like the ancient Taoist alchemists, transforming the changeable into immutable and again the changeless into ever-changing, that is to say, in a perpetual cycle between Yin and Yang, which gives signs of not wanting to slow down!