PSP (Pencak Silat Pertempuran) was founded for a few major reasons. Firstly, the politics, pride and ego of most of the martial arts community is not where I wanted to put my energy or fight my battles. My goal was not competition but personal growth and becoming physically adept at protecting myself and my family. To that end, I chose to move myself forward by cutting my own path through the jungle of the martial arts world.
This allowed me room for growth and change and freedom to adapt to where my life needed to go. Secondly, I have always pursued movements and ideas that were suited to who I was personally, including physically, emotionally, and psychologically. They needed to represent things I could do while maintaining a job, raising a family, and generally pursuing life. They needed to make sense for a 6’1″ 200 plus pound man and nobody else. Basically a working man or woman’s system.
There’s literally no reason for me to learn how to do a no handed cartwheel beyond the athleticism of it, like one of my guru silat could do. And even if I could… what would really be the purpose for all that time and energy? Third, I think differently. I like things to be as simple and meaningful as they can be. Fourth, I wanted to study something that represented my understanding and experience—not someone else’s. Fifth, I wanted to create a space for others that they could use to represent their understanding and experience and help us all evolve together with a more current perspective to the outside world. I definitely did not want to study something stuck in a time warp.
PSP has been exactly what I stated above and more, a path, a journey. It has grown and changed and adapted accordingly but the stones of it have stayed the same. The organization and overall materials have changed some and been reduced over the years to what I believe gives the broadest, most essential use from the least amount of material. That has always been my process. I spent years fighting people of different disciplines. All different sizes and abilities and where it is now represents that experience.
It is all meta. The entirety of PSP can be summarized in the Gerak and Langkah and I will be posting more about this in the future.
