Author Archives: mv138059

Nine out of every ten girls who start practicing martial arts will quit before they get to the high-ranking black belt and beyond. Michelle Gay is not one of them.

Now 46 years old, Gay has been practicing Japanese full-contact karate for over 20 years and is now a karate Shihan, or a master teacher. She is currently a fourth-degree black belt and started her own karate school, the Society For Martial Arts Instruction (SFMAI) Karate-Do Kenwakan.

“You know, it’s just tremendously fulfilling,” said Gay at her west 18th street studio, “Like it’s a really great life to who I get to be for people as a leader and as someone who empowers people and actually provides an environment for them to discover the innate power that they have, the innate beauty that they posses, the grace, and to just have them take wherever they are to the next level.”

Apart from being a Shihan in her own karate school, she is a Laban Certified Movement Analyst, Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist. She’s given many self-defense classes in colleges and universities like Baruch and NYU to demonstrate that boys aren’t the only ones who could get tough and have some butt-kicking fun.

Gay has won multiple tournaments, both nationally and internationally. In 2001, she took party in the Canadian Kyokushin Knockdown Division and came in 2nd place. In 2002, she received the Fighting Spirit Award at the Seidokaikan “Knockdown Kings” tournament in New York City. Not to mention, she is a 5-time World Oyama Knockdown Champion, named after karate master Masutatsu Oyama.

After so much triumph throughout her martial arts career, Gay is brought to tears when she thinks about what her particular practice has taught her after so many years.

“It’s taught me that I can belong somewhere,” she said, “Just to really be myself and to have a place to really develop myself and it’s taught me that it’s possible to be powerful without being forceful. It’s taught me that I’m way, way, way more powerful than I ever thought I was. That I can take way more than what I thought I could, that I’m more than my feelings, my body sensations, and it has had me go beyond that almost right from the beginning.”

One thing about martial arts though that gets Gay frustrated is when people say that karate, like most sports, is a “man’s sport.”

“Oh my God!” she groaned, “Well it’s predominately male so that’s just what’s so right and I have had the experience for many many years that I was a woman in a man’s world called martial arts. And I’m not that anymore. It’s not a conversation anymore. It’s crazy talk!”

Currently, Gay has many female students, some of whom have completely dropped off the radar and very few who have made it to the higher ranks of a black belt. She hopes that those women she’s had a privilege to teach continue to make it amongst the best.

“I just want women to be fully self-expressed in their bodies and not have to be nice and polite,” she said.

And although she’d never had a physical confrontation outside of class, she has the same mentality as she does within her class.

“Who you are on the mat is who you are in your life,” she said.

After 20 years, Gay has two words to describe her practice.

“Karate Love,” she said with a smile.

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