Red Belt - A Proud Day

Karate Red Belt

It was a proud day.  After about a year of training, David and I received our red belts in karate.  It was a wonderful ceremony.  We were asked to come up to the front of the room, bow in respect, in front of the sensei/instructor, remove our old belts (brown belt one), and place them folded twice on our right side, on the floor.  Our sensei handed us our new red belts, all folded and proper, ready to snap open. Everyone in our class was sitting in front of us, making a thunderous sound, slapping their hands on the mat. 

(click here or on picture to see brief YouTube video)

You can hear the thunderous sound in this tiny video above.  We shouted "break" and snapped our belts open, stood up, and waited for our sensei instructor to wrap our new belts around us.  The group stood up and bowed in our direction and then stormed over to give us a hug. 

Wow - showered with a lot of love - a bit overwhelming, but you really feel you earned it.

It has been an extremely long journey, getting from white belt to red.  This last one required special attention to a 23 movement, highly stylized set of karate movements (Polgate 7).  Conceptually it was not that difficult, once you memorized the duplicative pattern, but syncing what you know with what your body wants to do is another thing all together, but we both did it.

So another bonding ritual occurred right before our eyes, while we were preoccupied with roundhouse kicks and snapping motions, like "knife hand down".  We were becoming one with the universe - if only for an hour, and then a week, a month, and in this case another year.

We train at Ernie Reyes West Coast World Martial Arts at Santa Teresa. If you are in the area, just drop on by - but you might want to give us a call first.  In the meantime, take a moment and take another moment to see this  periodic ceremonial ritual again.  By doing so you will be celebrating this special rites of passage with us.