Nadja KOTRCHOVA sensei - Taikiken, Taijiquan and Qigong
Nadja’s first contact with martial arts was in 1985 when she started judo training in Prague (Czech rep.) After fighting in some junior judo competitions she decided that judo was not exactly the martial art she was looking for. Her interest was more focused on Oriental philosophy and Chinese traditional medicine, so she started to read books about it. Life in Czech was strenuous in those days, and it forced her to concentrated on working instead of personal development. It was after the Velvet revolution in 1989, (the end of communism) that she got the space for more personal freedom.
Basically it was her second velvet revolution in the form of Taikiken which got her the training with the philosophy she was looking foor.
In 1998 when Ron Nansink was teaching Taikiken en Tai Chi Chuan in the Czech rep. he invited Nadja to join his classes. She liked his Taiki concept of training and started to have very good results from it. They become partners and Nadja started to travel up and down between Holland and Czech. In Holland she practiced Taikiken, Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong. Soon she started to assist Ronduring Taikiken workshops and management training.
At the end of 1999 Nadja together with Ron traveled to South East Asia and China, for an eight months training's trip. Nadja visited many places, often not long enough for intensive training, but long enough to pick up the feeling and basic techniques of a local martial arts.
In Thailand were they stayed a few months, they did hang around in the Muay Thai boxing gym having an inspiring time with the boxers who were happy to show her their tricks of the trade.
On Bali she trained with weights and joined the Bamboo Kunning (a spiritual form of pentjak silat) training on the beach. In Malaysia, she visited the Wong Loo Sen See Chee Choong Temple in Kuala Lumpur, to learn more about Taoism and its rituals.
In China she stayed on several Taoist mountains to taste the real atmosphere for meditation and spiritual development. In Shaolin she stayed in Dharma hall to experience the overwhelming dedication of the shaolin monks and students. And in Beijing Nadja learned a more extended form of ‘Eight-length Brocade’ baduanjin.
Nadja studied internal martial arts since 1998 and personally experiences, that life can be lived in many different ways. She feels that she is picking up the right intuition for training and teaching and started a new personal career in promoting and teaching martial arts.