Claes taught stick this morning and we spent the first hour working on body movement playing on Fred’s spine program from yesterday. My back is super sore after the parkour conditioning and I’m happy to be twisting and turning in the morning. We moved from this into double stick with playing around with known sinawallis, but with different chambering and therefore some “odd” twists. Two hours went by in a flash.

James entered the room and we did some breathing exercises before we did sun salutations. The latter are pretty known stuff, but as any teacher he has his thoughts and it was interesting to pick up some of his ideas on alignment and shoulder work.

Pool, shower, breakfast, relax, training again at ten.

Claes started with the advanced group after breakfast and we ran through five count sumbrada. It’s a set pattern used in many Filipino martial arts. We started playing with re-chambering to move in and out of the drill.

Fred had the second class for us and we went into the evil side of knife play. I’ll leave it at that. Your imagination is nowhere near what funky stuff we did.

After lunch there was another great bath and we finally got a couple of blog posts up. A quick power nap and wouldn’t you know, it’s time for more training.

James did once again an hour of Silat and I believe his’s about half my size and are five years older. He moves like a twenty year old with the precision of a sniper. With focus on internal martial arts and not on muscles and size, he takes down people my size like we’re paper figures. Impressive.

We played with different entries and made the floor slippery with sweat as we took each other to the ground.

After an hour of this we spent the last hour with Taiji Quan. Slow beautiful movements that turns into vicious attacks when performed at full speed.

Another training day’s at an end and we break for dinner.

After dinner James has his personal development conference and talkes about Taoism. It’s deep. Very deep. James made it in French and Fred translated. That made sure nuances in the language did not get lost.

After that we retreated to our villa and called it a night. Time flies fast here! We’re already three days done with the camp and the beautiful villa. Did I mention it has a private pool?

Tomorrow is half day with no planned activity after lunch for me. Katja will try a class of Tahitian dancing that I look forward to get demonstrated afterward.

Do you really want to be happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you’ve got.

– Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh