Here’s a YouTube video that explains the art I study.

A few weeks ago, I went on vacation in Santa Barbara visiting some family. I was able to meet Master Jang who is a high ranking Sa Bom in Soo Bahk Do. I had the privilege of training with him for a full week and learned many principles during that time. I hope to be able to record some of the insights I received from him.

One of the concepts taught to me was correct breathing or ho hup cho chung. Everyone with a good background in MA will tell you the importance of breathing. However, I believe most practitioners, including myself, knows one, and possibly two types of breathing–slow and fast.

Jang SBN taught me that your breath needs to reflect your action. You’ll see slow movements performed with very loud, aggressive breathing—HAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!–but does this really reflect the action? The complete harmony of your body is essential to any technique and this includes breathing. Slow techniques should utilize slow, passive, relaxed breathing, whereas fast techniques should use quick, explosive, aggressive breathing. The actions are two polar opposites and your breath should be a reflection of that.

Now before training with Jang SBN, I pretty well understood this concept. What I didn’t know, is that different sounds give off a different energy. He spoke of the Yuk ja gyol 六字決, or the six natural sounds. Each sound utilizes a different part of your body and will allow your technique to have a different feeling. When performing a front kick, for example, you will probably make a sound similar to “Shuuuuu!” whereas other times you will use a “Chuuuuu!” sound. The difference will reflect your intent. As you make the two sounds, ask yourself what emotions are released and how does your body react? The Sh sound seems to be generated higher in the chest and gives a more deliberate feeling. The Ch sound is generated lower in the abdomen and is more quick and spontaneous.

Those are some of my initial thoughts any way. I’m sure others have more knowledge on the subject and I know I will continue to explore this section of moo do training.

I’ve been working on this for a long time.  I get this error when trying to work a sql statement like so:

@names = CommonGivenName.find(:all, :conditions => [ “common_given_names.name LIKE                                   #{params[:descendant][:given_name]}%’”])

I keep getting this error:  malformed format string.  I couldn’t figure out the problem, but apparently, Rails doesn’t like the % sign.  After adding a second one, the query ran just fine.  If anyone has any ideas on this, I’d be interested in learning.  I just know it works this way.