Via Community News Service, in partnership with Vermont State University Castleton for the Poultney Journal.
Terry Bergen is as comfortable in his Poultney martial arts dojo as he was in the psychology classrooms at Castleton University. He trained under 10th-degree black Wayne Renfrow and now teaches and operates martial arts to students of all ages. The 76-year-old has done it all and now passes the ancient teachings of philosophy and martial arts to those who step inside his classroom.
Q. You were at Castleton for a long time. How were your first few years, and how did it change over the years?
A. The first few years are difficult because you’re trying to prepare to teach. Almost no teacher preparation occurs in school, and the first few years can be rough. Rough on you. Eventually, it’s rough on the kids, but if you stick with it and work hard at it, you can get pretty good. Castleton used to be a great place to work, dealing with the issues of educating students and all kinds of latitudes, and your decisions could be carried through.
Q. Do you have any hobbies outside of teaching and practicing martial arts? A. I love to build, so I’ve been building here for years. I love to landscape, and I’ve done landscaping on the property and my garden.
Q. What do you get out of teaching martial arts and why?
A. Well, for a purpose. For life. It gives my life meaning and makes the time that I spend important because I’m passing on ancient knowledge and wisdom to new generations that can be passed on to the next. It’s a way of preserving the wisdom of the old times through the modern world.
Q. While researching you, Wayne Renfrow came up as your mentor. What was the first or best teaching you learned from him and why?
A. He would say, to be specific, that he meant not to pay attention to what’s right in front of you but to understand as much as I could about what you are attending to. Still, I see not just your eyes, but I see the dilatation of your pupils in your eyes and your nostrils flaring as you breathe in and out. Not just to know that your lips are there, but to see how they are and to see how much blood is in them and how much is being squeezed out by tension in the set of your jaw and which way the head goes one way or the other, and on and on.
Q. Do you have any shows you are binging currently?
A. Well. Last year, I watched “Shogun” on Hulu. It was very authentic, not like the earlier ones. The early versions were made in Japanese Western style, but this one was authentic. Of course, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” all the space westerns.
Q. Taking it back to your U.S. Navy days, do you have any memorable stories? What was the average day like for you?
A. An average day is marching around boot camp to go from one class to another. If you were in the yards where my ship started out, it was get up; then it was get up and clean and paint and go to bed. Once you get to sea, then it’s a life of watches. Every four hours, you’re on watch and eight hours off. And so, you were always sleep-deprived. It was a time of stress. But being at sea was phenomenal.
Q. After a long day of training and teaching, what’s your go-to spot to refuel or indulge in tasty food?
A. I go to Clucking Chicken. I love that place. Loaded mac and cheese at Clucking is a good treat.
Q. What was your dream when you were growing up?
A. Olympic Athlete. I could run fast. I was a sprinter in high school, grew up in New Jersey, and was in the state championship meets with Olympic sprinters. They left me in the dust.
Q. What’s one thing you wish more people understood about you and why?
A. I’m here to help. When martial arts are used, you think, oh, yeah, “Oh, what is it?” It’s not just punching or kicking. It’s about living. And there are lots of people who are struggling with living. This community has a lot of people in it, like any community in the world. A lot of people struggle to live. We could do all kinds of stuff to help out with that.
Q. People talk about how hard your classes were and that you were a strict teacher. Do you have any lessons you could teach in the classroom and the dojo?
A. Almost all of them. I taught them to understand the world as a scientist does, and I taught them the aptitudes of science. You have to stop looking at the world as this one massive entity and start breaking it down into its infinite number of parts. So yeah, it’s the same lesson for the 6-year-olds at the dojo and the 20-year-olds at the college.