I should have known better.  When I was learning pressure point techniques, I had been with the master for around 10 years, + or -, that's one thing i didn't keep in my diary, dates. I just wrote the technique. I was foolish enough to ask upon being hit with the eagle's beak strike, "does that really hurt". I must have been playing dumb that day, so I was shown that part of the technique again, with a little more force. It hurt, a lot. That was the one time and only time I ever asked "does that really hurt"....

I was wiping down the mats after training tonight and remember being at the World Headquarters when it was in L.A., on Wilshire and Vermont, Korea Town.  We still did the old school thing, training, then all the students would get on the mat and wipe it down.  A task, dirty, but a sense of responsibility, loyalty, respect, and completely absorbed in the act of cleaning.  A lesson in of itself, a zen moment, to focus on the task at hand and block everything else out.  Where the importance, or level of status, of the act was unimportant.  The lessons of being humble, serving, loyalty, and to focus with conviction and commitment to whatever the reality of the moment was.  

Did this get across to all students?  Am I being over dramatic?  No, and perhaps.  A lot of students didn't get it, they thought of it as a bother.  For me, it was just duty, part of being my master's student, and I made the best of it, however, humble or insignificant the matter was.  People forget the "martial" in martial art.  It translates to military, war, battle.  Martial arts were designed for combat, battle tested and proven over hundreds of years of combat, to kill, maim, destroy, literally fighting for your life.  We live in a different age, we are not on a field of combat, but our personal and professional lives are a battlefield nonetheless, and the lessons from training are perhaps even more relevant for us, today, in our modern society, than ever before.  Morality, ethics, integrity, respect, honor, and discipline, transcend time, space, and cultures.  

How fortunate we are, to be able to continue in the legacy, through training, of the martial arts, of Hapkido, benefiting from the sacrifices made by our ancestors, our masters.  Those men that contributed through blood, sweat, and tears.

Martial art is not the result of one man, it is the accumulation and culmination of the history of a people, nation, and culture.