Below is an excerpt from a longer interview found here of the now sadly deceased Mike Martello, I think it sums up my attitude to teaching and learning exactly:

Wang approaches his students as training partners. All he wants to do is practice and by practicing he gets better. So by building and growing together we foster this intense dynamic of teacher and student, where really there is no teacher or student, everyone is the teacher and the student. Wang Laoshi is the first to tell anyone that he is just a student practicing, and will be forever. I have never seen the man tell someone how to do something, he is there showing them how to do something! It is inspirational to get tossed around by an 80 year old man with this outlook on training.

Once you start teaching people there is a real danger that fear can start to creep in, fear of looking bad in front of your students, fear that you won't live up to their expectations of you. I go out of my way to break that illusion as much as I can, I have a certain level of knowledge and skill otherwise I wouldn't feel I have the right to be teaching, but I'm forever going to be a student and because of that I'm always trying to push myself, to try out new ideas, be honest with my failings and most importantly sometimes cock things up. I'm sure that I've lost some students because I don't try to cultivate an air of mystique, but any teacher that does that is lying to his students and more importantly lying to themselves.

So things have been a bit quiet on the blogging front for a bit, but I'm going to try and get back to making regular posts. The videos below are of a contempory of mine in the Zhong-Ding traditional chinese martial arts organisation, Ken Mead, I reccomend them to any of my students who're trying to remember any of the warm up exercises we do or the beginning of the form.