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The Art of Balance
Profundizar en objetivos si se necesita y los estudiantes hacen el club
Maria founded Carrera's Studio in September 2010 under London Fields’ railway arches, but she had started thinking about it and imagining the club a few months earlier. She wanted to create a club where she could bring out the best in everyone and create the same feeling of community she had experienced at the gym where she had trained and worked in for many years, in Viladecans, Barcelona, before moving to London. She wanted to share her passion for martial arts with her students.
She liked to see her students not as numbers or clients, but as individuals. The majority of them would spend years beside her, practicing, sharing special moments, sharing sweat, tears, joy, helping each other, in the tatami and outside as well, sharing lives, in some cases creating strong ties and building a long term friendship.
She liked the idea of starting as a small club and gradually growing at the same time as the students. She was convinced that all she needed to do and give was her best self at all times, and the students would come. She decided to rent a couple of places and started teaching for a few hours. At the same time, she started offering her services as a kickboxing and self-defence instructor to local communities allowing her to reach people that wouldn't train if it was in another way, as she was spreading the name of Carrera's Studio. her to spread the name of Carrera's Studio. For most of those students that was their first experience in martial arts.
Maria wanted to offer two things. First, she wanted to ensure that the students had a solid curriculum to progress technically whilst strengthening their bodies and minds giving them a solid foundation to be able to train for life. For her it's very important to train in a correct, conscious, and clever way.
Secondly, she wanted to offer her students the chance to compete. If someone wanted to be a champion, she was determined to facilitate the way. For this reason, one of the first things she did was research who was the most important organisation for kickboxing tournaments at that time, she found WAKO GB, the current 'Kickboxing GB', who are responsible for this sport in Great Britain, and contacted them. From the beginning she was sure that she wanted to be with the best.
Children grading 2012
The last thing she needed to decide was the club's name and logo. For the name, Maria opted for "studio" because it resonated with her idea of a place of learning and proximity with people. "Studio" sounded like something small, of quality, and specific.
And she called it martial arts studio and not kickboxing studio because she wanted to remark the martial art aspect of kickboxing not just as the sport. In martial arts a deeper inner work is cultivated. Quality had to be above everything. She wanted to teach something that could bring some useful skills to her students in time of necessity. She decided to teach Kickboxing classes, although also enriching them with her knowledge of Karate and Mugendo, where she came from, and later on Systema.
For the logo she opted for Fibonacci's golden ratio used among others by Da Vinci as a divine proportion. This balanced equation is represented by the number Phi, whose symbol is the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet. For Maria, the meaning of things is very important, even in names, like the one she gave to her daughter, which means “forest water” in Cherokee.
In her logo there is a representation of the letter Phi in the background with her in front doing a kick. Maria found in Phi one of her main values: that there must be a correct proportion in everything for it to be balanced. For her, there must be a balance between the physical, technical and mental aspects. And these three aspects must grow proportionally.
It saddens her to see people who have been training a martial art for a long time, but can't get through challenges not only in martial arts but in any aspect of life because they have forgotten to work one of the three aspects.
Martial arts have the aesthetic part, the beauty in the performance of a technique, and the martial or military part of preparation to face a defence situation. That includes physical and mental work. As a teacher she aims of contributing to the creation of healthy, confident, and happy humans, and to take these values from the dojo to their homes.
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