The Forest Way School

This.

WOMEN AND MARTIAL ARTS

In a refugee camp in Beiruit, refugee women learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Trainer Mirella Atallah, who's Lebanese Canadian, has now taught about 1,500 girls and women in countries including Pakistan and Syria. Her classes, sponsored by aid groups, also include other people on the margins, like foreign domestic workers and the LGBT community. Her students range in age from twelve to eighty-three.

"After two weeks I felt I was changing—not just in sports but my mental health and everything," says Aisha Saqqa, eighteen years-old.

The camps are scenes of grinding poverty and the danger of attack. Atallah remarks: “Most of the women I was teaching—they don't go out when it's dark. It's like a cycle. Like, you limit the women from going out. They can't go to the gym. Their health deteriorate. Their mental health is not there.”

Too many people forget this about martial arts: it was always meant to help the people. We might talk about self-defense, but the need is real and immediate in the refugee camps. Most of all, the sense of empowerment and value should be experienced by every woman.

However you practice martial arts, remember that it’s for protection and to serve others—especially those who are oppressed and struggling.

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/25/g-s1-120826/lebanon-women-martial-arts?utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/31/nx-s1-5803006/how-jiu-jitsu-is-changing-life-for-girls-and-women-in-a-beirut-refugee-camp

Very much enjoyed meeting and teaching this group in Shrewsbury at the weekend. Beautifully receptive and a good mix of experience and relative newness in the room.

We heard today of the passing of Master Ng Ho Chim. For many of us in the UK and Ireland the version of Wuji that we practice is the version he taught us when he visited here and Europe with Grandmaster Chee many decades ago. I remember buying him the translation of the I Ching with Jung’s introduction which he specifically wanted.

A generous teacher and a kind man in my experience.

Head and Head and Shoulders.
Normal kitchen scene.

A fundamental idea of Taoism is that what is outside our self finds a strong resonance with what is inside ourselves. There is an echo between the world and our body. What is without is also within. The macrocosm and our own microcosm are essentially the same. So, just as we are alive in all our parts, so the world is also alive in all its parts.

This contrasts with contemporary western ideas of the body in which separation and mechanical or electrical ideas of how we work and of nature dominate.

In contrast, the Neijing Tua is a famous illustration of this old idea. There are detailed and esoteric readings of this beautiful painting (for another time). But the fundamental and powerful idea is the idea above. That inside us is a world that has the same qualities, same dynamics and same energies that exist outside us. And that the inside and the outside resonate with each other. Are, in fact, not separate, but the same. On this idea, much of the workings of Neigung, qigung and martial arts are built. This rewards study.