DIDI-CATION
This month we interview Chief Instructor Didi Goodman, Yondan (4th degree black belt), who has thirty years' experience in the martial arts, and regularly teaches at regional and national seminars, and also has work on the Martial Arts published internationally. Prior to dedicating herself to Cuong Nhu, she earned a black belt in Taekwondo and a brown belt in Aikido. We discuss Didi’s thirty-year career in the martial arts and what it really takes to be a quality instructor.
MARTIAL EDGE: Didi, when and where did you get involved with the martial arts?
DIDI GOODMAN: I was a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1976. One holiday weekend I saw some friends practicing their kicks in the dormitory living room, and I simply had to try it. I joined their class at the next meeting. It was a Taekwondo class, taught by a fellow college student who had earned his black belt as a teenager in Thailand before going away to school. The discipline, the hard workout, the beauty of the movements, I was simply hooked! But this fellow stopped teaching after a semester, so a friend and I sought a place to train off campus. We ended up at Karate for Women, a school run by a tough and wonderful instructor named Pauline Short, in the style of Wu Ying Tao karate. Pauline founded the school in 1965, after enduring the sexism and condescension of coming up through the ranks as a woman in that era, and yet attaining a high level of skill and becoming a well-known tournament champion of the time. Again, it was an excellent, hard, disciplined workout. She had very high standards and I loved it. When I moved to California to attend graduate school, I once again took up Taekwondo, and my path in the martial arts continued from there.
ME: Who have been the inspirational figures during your thirty-year career?
DG: Thirty years? It’s hard to believe it has been that long. You use the word ‘inspirational’ and my first thought is that when I was starting out, what inspired me and some of my friends were figures from books and stories, the kinds of things young students talk about in their spare time: The Taekwondo master who fought off five bat-wielding muggers, sent them all to the hospital and broke all their baseball bats. The Aikido master who could dodge bullets, or subdue any number of armed opponents without harming them. It’s not that we believed we personally would attain these mythical abilities, but we were inspired by the idea that, through a serious, disciplined, devoted practice, we could achieve some sort of transcendence, and somehow transcend our physical, personal, or perhaps societal limitations.
But let me talk about specific people who have inspired me. There was Pauline Short, whom I already mentioned. At the University of California, Berkeley, there was Dr. Ken Min, who, in a program with hundreds of students at any given time, somehow managed to notice each one of us, and push us to build on our particular strengths. There were many instructors in the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists (PAWMA), a group that has been hosting an annual multi-style training camp for many, many years. I began attending as a ‘young’ black belt, and it had a big influence on me at the time. It’s that period in your training when you’ve earned that belt, you think you know quite a bit, but you’re also beginning to see how much you don’t know. And the women who taught at those camps were wonderful role models. I would single out the late sifu Coleen Gragen, who brought to her classes not just technical skill, but a thoughtfulness and intellect I truly admired. Also, Sifu Michelle Dwyer, whom to this day I point to as an exemplar of what a martial artist should be: someone whose devotion to teaching and training is effortless; whose physical skill is so deep it looks completely natural; and whose personal demeanor is of utmost modesty and equanimity. No ego at all. I should also mention Jamie Zimron Sensei, whose beautiful Aikido demonstrations inspired me, finally, to begin the study of that art. She had a really contagious joy in training.
All this, and I haven’t yet gotten to Cuong Nhu, the art I now consider mine and teach at my dojo. I first met O’Sensei Ngo Dong, the late founder of Cuong Nhu, at a time when I was no longer training in Taekwondo, but unsure about wanting to ‘start over’ in a new martial art. This was around 1988, I believe. I was working out as a guest at Sensei John Burns’ Cuong Nhu school in Berkeley. Sensei Dong (as we called him back then) came to town to give tests and seminars, and that was enough to convince me to take off my black belt and put the white one on again. He had such a generous and inclusive concept of the martial arts. There was no arrogant tone of ‘this way’s right, that way’s wrong’ in his approach; instead, he had an ability to respect and appreciate the value in whatever was before him, and find how seemingly disparate approaches were related by underlying principles. He also saw Cuong Nhu as a language that lives and grows through the people who express themselves in it; I remember him saying this during a particular discussion about why he had declined to let someone videotape him performing Kata. He’ wanted his students to master a specific curriculum, but he also wanted them to find unique, individual self-expression through the art, without being limited by a single person’s point of view. This is both freeing and challenging, if you think about it; most of us are more comfortable believing one way is right, and everything else is wrong! (Hence so many problems in the world.) And a lot of people want to be told which way is right, rather than discovering it for themselves. Anyway, I became convinced Cuong Nhu was something I’d be able to pursue for a lifetime.
Of course, a major figure has been my main teacher in Cuong Nhu, Master John Burns, who welcomed me into his dojo even before I was willing to make a commitment to the style of Cuong Nhu, and who, through his own subtle, quiet, demanding persistence, made me into a much better, more disciplined, more precise martial artist, in spite of the fact that I thought I already knew quite a lot when I joined! Many of my best insights about teaching have come from looking back and realizing how he tricked me into learning, over the years.
ME: With such a busy schedule with teaching how do you keep yourself in shape?
DG: Well, it isn’t easy, as everyone knows who does a lot of teaching. One lucky thing is that, for the past seven years, I’ve taught a cardio kickboxing class at Master Burns? Berkeley dojo twice a week. It’s an aerobic kicking, punching and bagwork class, done to music, designed for non-martial artists (but great for everyone with lots of repetitions). I figured out early on that if I stopped moving, the students would stop moving, so I can’t stop! I get a good workout; it has kept me in pretty good shape. (I also enjoy picking the music and choreographing the combinations for it.) It’s tough, though, to make it to any traditional workouts on a regular basis, yet it’s essential, both because I love to train, and because one must avoid the complacency that comes from always being in the instructor’s role. I practiced tendo-ryu naginata for a time, with Miyako Tanaka Sensei, it’s a really intensely focused, exacting art, but the schedule finally proved impossible. Lately, I’ve been trying to keep up one or two hours a week of Aikido practice at Berkeley Aikikai (I. Shibata, Shihan), not enough to count me as a good student, but the best I can manage with my schedule. I might as well admit, too, that my body has endured some wear and tear over the years, and I simply can’t train as hard as I used to. I have a stationary bike as a backup, in case I can’t get enough exercise at the dojo.
ME: What is the story behind Redwood Dojo and in particular the style of Cuong Nhu?
DG: Let me start with Cuong Nhu, which means ‘hard and soft’ in Vietnamese. O’Sensei Ngo Dong founded Cuong Nhu in the 1960s in Hue, Vietnam, when he felt the karate school where he was teaching wasn’t doing enough to serve the moral and spiritual needs of young people in wartime. He put an emphasis on personal development and public service, and began teaching a blend of techniques and principles drawn from several Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese martial art styles he had studied when he was growing up in Vietnam: Shotokan Karate, Wing Chun kung fu, Judo, Aikido, Vovinam, Tai Chi, and western style boxing. But we have to be careful when we define Cuong Nhu this way, because it can give the idea that we’re dabbling in all these arts, and not really practicing a single, coherent thing. Sometimes I give my students the kids, that is an explanation I borrowed from another instructor: It’s as if O’Sensei Dong had made a cake, he took sugar, milk, eggs, flour, and so on, mixed them together and baked it, resulting in something quite different from the ingredients he started with. The cake that is Cuong Nhu acknowledges its ingredients, but is different from them. Yet it expresses in its own way their essential qualities: sweetness, smoothness, cohesion, density, and so on.
We’re eclectic in the forms and techniques we practice, but they are just a medium for exploring the underlying qualities and principles that were important to the founder of our style (as is true of any martial arts style). And our approach and emphasis in training brings changes to the original ingredients. So for example, if you saw us perform a kata that is recognizably derived from Shotokan, or from Wing Chun, you would see that our style of body movement is somewhat different, and our interpretation and application of the moves is different, due to the influence of all those other ingredients. Likewise if you saw us using wrist locks or throws that look a bit like Aikido, you’d also see that the context, application and method of practice are quite different from what you find in an Aikido dojo. They are all expressions of Cuong Nhu, which is (broadly) about the soft power at the heart of hard style, and the hardness that tempers the edge of soft style, and of course, the application of these principles to self defense.
As for Redwood Dojo: It’s simply a stroke of good luck that has gone on for 14 years! One day I saw a new building being constructed at the nearby Redwood Heights community center. I learned the center would be expanding its programs, so I put together a resume and talked the director into letting me open a Cuong Nhu class. I started out with about ten kids and a handful of adults, and we grew in a few years to having, at any given time, 80 to 100 or so students, ranging in age from four-and-a-half to adult. Redwood Heights has many great programs, and we’re lucky to be part of it; there’s a strong community feel to it. For training purposes, we behave like a traditional dojo, but we share the building with other activities, and are officially part of the City of Oakland (California) Parks and Recreation department.
ME: You have some advanced ideas with regards teaching, what do you think makes a successful martial arts instructor?
DG: First, a commitment to teaching martial arts, not just martial techniques. The best instructors appreciate the value of tradition, and understand that the practice should lead somewhere beyond the acquisition of a repertoire of kicks, punches and throws, toward development of the whole person. I’ve noticed a trend toward schools advertising, ‘no uniforms, no forms to memorize’, and that appeals to a certain kind of person, but a school that dispenses with traditional discipline and only teaches what’s ‘practical’ ends up cheating its students out of the greatest benefits of training. And those people might never realize that traditional methods would ultimately deepen their mastery of the techniques they’re so eager to collect.
Second, the successful instructor must love what they’re doing so much that they’re willing to do the same thing, over and over, day after day, year after year. Because mastery of a physical art is all about basics, all about repetition, no way around it; and teaching is all about conveying these basics to wave after wave of newcomers. Of course, creative ways to disguise repetition are always welcome, but inevitably it comes back around to basics. Too often, instructors are afraid to ask students to keep practicing the ‘same old things’ for fear of boring them, or from a desire to cater to people’s constant hunger for new material. But, again, if you do too much catering and don’t attend to the basics, you’ll cheat your students out of what’s most important, and they’ll build on weak foundations.
Third, a successful teacher cares more about the students than they care about themselves. What I mean is, when they walk into class, when they move around the room giving instruction, they should be looking at the students, paying attention, trying to see where the students are and what’s needed to help them progress. They should not be thinking about how much they know, what clever things they have to say, or how they’ll look doing such-and-such. And their attention to the students should be mainly of a positive nature, that is, not so much ‘here’s what they’re doing wrong,’ but more, ‘what kind of practice will get them to do this better’?
I remember writing, in Carol Wiley’s book, ‘Any eight-year-old can point out other people’s mistakes.’ Another thing young kids are really good at is telling you all the things they know’on any subject, relevant or not! They have that much in common with inexperienced (or self-absorbed) instructors. (No disrespect to eight-year-olds.) Teaching isn’t about pointing out mistakes, nor about sharing how much you know; it’s about pointing the way to improvement through practice. Practice is the key, and a good teacher will create an atmosphere for training, then get out of the way so their students can practice. To sum up: He who speaks least, teaches best.
ME: As an instructor what are the core principles you try and instil into your students?
DG: I guess number one is the importance of simply showing up to practice. And then: to keep showing up. And to find a way to show up, even when you’re busy, even when you’re tired. The only difference between the person who makes it to black belt and the one who doesn’t is, the one who made it kept showing up and didn’t quit. Next, I try to get them, not to love progress, but to love practice; and to trust that progress will come with practice. It’s nearly impossible, because students are very goal-oriented, and the belt ranking system absolutely caters to this. I admit the goals do help them keep going at times. Still, kids and even adults are constantly wanting to know when their next test will be. I try to get them to understand that it’s bad manners to ask about testing, and what they need to do is to keep coming to class no matter what, and keep working hard no matter what. Even the best, most dedicated students will have trying times, long plateaus where they don’t feel they are advancing, and if they have the gift of loving practice over progress, it will see them through. And that’s certainly of value outside the dojo as well.
Finally, I hope I am able to convey the fundamental importance of respect. This has many meanings in the dojo. One has to do with a seriousness and reverence toward what we are learning’toward the art. I want people to enjoy training, to have fun’and it is fun’but at root, martial arts is about matters of life and death, and we must remember that it’s not just another sport on a par with football or T-ball (do you have T-ball in Britain?). Our training must be pursued with this sort of seriousness. On another level, respect has to do with courtesy and consideration toward others, which is absolutely necessary for training with partners, but then, so necessary in all of life! And then there’s respect for elders and tradition, which I’ve come to realize is in part a way of teaching humility, the idea that no matter who you are, you don’t already know everything, you must be open to the wisdom of others. I’ve noticed people of all ages in my culture are very quick to assume they know better’than their teachers, their colleagues, their classmates and elders. They really thwart themselves from learning sometimes. Traditional dojo rules and rituals serve to guide people, sometimes against their will or without their knowledge, toward all these kinds of respect.
ME: With regards the Redwood Dojo, what are the long term plans?
DG: At this time, my only plan is to keep on teaching until I can’t do it any more, and to keep urging my students forward as best I can. Like any teacher, I hope some of my students will one day teach classes of their own, and if that develops, I will certainly support them in any way I can.
ME: You have been involved with some interesting literary martial art projects, is there anything we can look forward to in the future?
DG: Recently I’ve been looking over all the essays I’ve written in the past for various newsletters’ revisiting and revising, from my ‘older and hopefully wiser’ point of view. And I’ve been opening up all the little files on my computer where I’ve written a few lines, intending to turn them into essays someday. I’m working on finishing those pieces, and I have ideas for several more, so I’m going to follow that where it leads. Another project I started years ago and had to put aside, is a training manual for kids. I’ve pulled that out again, and I think it would be great fun to go forward with it. So I’ve put that on my ‘to do’ list for this year.
If you would like more information on the Redwood Dojo or seminars with Didi Goodman please visit on the web at www.redwood-dojo.com, or email Didi via
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
For more information about O’Sensei Ngo Dong and the style of Cuong Nhu, go to www.cuongnhu.com.
Didi Goodman was in conversation with Peter Mills.
Interviews 
(0 vote)
