Teaching

TEACHING

Teaching is definitely also an amazing form of learning. I was fortunate enough to start first helping and then teaching independently at a very young age. I had not yet turned 18 and already had my first group of students. Many of them were 20-30 years older than me. This situation helped me to grow in a dimension where the teacher is not a character who imposes his authority but someone who genuinely tries to share his experience. Without hiding his own doubts or weaknesses. I was young and it was easy to accept that my experience was still work in progress. And this was clear to my students as well; we grew together. Many times when they asked me questions I would respond, "I don't know, but give me time to look for the answer." It has been 25 years since the first "I don't know." I have answered so many questions and today the "original group" is still with me. Certainly my view of martial arts is much different than it was in the beginning. But my relationship with students and my relationship with the study has not changed.

By the time I was 25, I was teaching 10 hours a day. It was a great period of training as far as teaching was concerned but I could increasingly feel the weakening of my personal practice. I was training with my students but it wasn't enough. I needed to immerse myself in a dimension with a different intensity.

After so many years of traveling, when I decided to move to China it was in part to get out of the relentless teaching loop I was experiencing. I wanted to reverse the proportion between practice and teaching. I organized myself to be able to study and practice 9 months a year China and then return to the West to teach 3 months a year. At the end of the day, the job of a teacher is first and foremost to be a practitioner and what you teach must be the result of your own practice.

Yet over time, even in China, a group of students gathered around me. I never voluntarily promoted my teaching in China but in a natural way people started knocking on my door. In a way in the most traditional and natural way.

In these two years of pandemic I have, unexpectedly, been stuck here in Italy. Together with the whole school we have continued to build many things but I cannot deny that I miss my home in Shanghai.

For those who may have missed it, I repropose this documentary of the Chinese national TV that tells about my life, my teaching and the research project DECODE. Looking at the faces of my students in Shanghai made me feel nostalgic.