WHO AM I
Many of us will search lifetimes to work that out.
I grew up on a post war council estate in southeast London, the kind of place where every neighbour knew your name and shouted hello from their doorway. There was a real warmth to it. Old solid cars lined the kerbs, Ford Escorts and Ford Capris that never seemed to move unless someone’s uncle finally fixed them. Inside the houses you would see those big box televisions humming in the corner, the sort that needed a proper slap on the side, and the early computer games that loaded on tapes for what felt like hours. Posters of footballers or cartoon characters were taped to bedroom walls and every bit of it carried that unmistakable glow of the eighties. Life felt wonderfully simple. After school I was out the door straight away, tearing around the estate, riding my bike, or at the weekend disappearing into Abbey Wood where we climbed trees and jumped from one branch to another like we had no sense of fear at all.
But mixed into all of that freedom was the other side of growing up in a place like that. I was always scrapping with the kids on the estate and with my cousins, and for a long stretch I was an easy target for one or two of the local bullies. They did some horrible things to me. I remember being thrown down a big hill full of stinging nettles while wearing only a pair of shorts, and having someone roll a skateboard down another hill straight into my shin. The pain was unbelievable. Little by little I had to toughen up. I had to learn how to stand my ground and protect myself. Years of fighting with the kids around me, mixed with the growing pull of martial arts, slowly changed something in me. I learned resilience. I learned technique. In time I was no longer the boy who got pushed down hills. I became someone who could meet those challenges head on and overcome them.
I was thrown into the world of martial arts before I had the words to explain what it meant. At the age of four or five, I found myself in a crisp white gi, being taught to roll, fall and grapple in the art of Judo. I remember the mats, the discipline, the early sensation of what it meant to learn something ancient. But Judo never quite sang to me. It was a whisper, not a calling. I later studied Karate and in time Kung fu and Kickboxing but I never felt at home in the disciplines, something was missing.
Many years later, as an adult I found yoga, or rather, yoga revealed itself to me. I started online classes through a mobile application that allowed me to turn my selfie-camera either on or off and I enjoyed that invisible boundary between myself and the rest of the group. Eventually I attended live practices; what a humbling beginning that was. The quiet intensity, the postures that exposed every tight corner of my body and the emotional unravelling that came with breath, stretch and the necessary and inevitable softening, on every level, of my being. Yoga didn’t just bend my body, it revealed it. It invited me to listen to and rediscover it; the limitations, the boundaries, the layers. The strengths and weaknesses.
It is through that journey, that discovery, that rebirth again and again over hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours, that I was exposed to Muay Thai; a development of my yoga practice, an inevitable progression, a collosal side quest that became entwined with the Main storyline.