Jisnu Dowsett had kidney problems since he was 18 months old, was continually having surgery as a young child and eventually had to have a kidney transplant to save his life when aged 28. However, he tells Kristian Hatton, the strength and purpose he found in kung fu, the martial art he now teaches children in Lismore, helped him survive and prosper.

I was born on the first of November in 1978, at Stanthorpe Hospital, across the border in Queensland. When I was seven my family moved to Nimbin and I went to school at Nimbin Central. I moved to Lismore four years ago and now live in Lismore Heights with my wife Molly Magahy and two children Cedar (six) and Kye (15).

I’ve had kidney issues most of my life and it started when I was 18 months old. I had kidney reflux, which is where it kind of backs up from bladder to kidney, which puts pressure on the kidney and causes them to fail and can cause infection. That resulted in me having chronic renal failure (or chronic kidney disease (CKD)).

All it takes these days is a relatively simple corrective surgery to fix things, but back then I had to have multiple surgeries. They still didn’t fix the problem and I had like seven surgical procedures up until the age of six or seven. The thing is about CKD is that it affects hormones and everything like that too. I was anaemic and iron-deficient, quite short compared with other kids, low on energy and breath, slow in development and had difficulty concentrating.

In 2004 I had full kidney failure and was on haemodialysis for two years. I felt like I was slowly dying at that time, and had infections and hospitalisation and so on. In 2006, I had a transplant which was donated by my father. After that, I got well quickly and I’d never had more energy.

It was kung fu that helped me recover - it enabled me to develop my endurance. The art of kung fu has helped in many areas of my life. An important aspect in that development was more of a mental thing, very important when my physical health was deteriorating previously. The arts gave me the feeling that I was achieving something, when I had to focus on my training in the moment, in the zone.

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Jisnu Dowsett had chronic renal failure and needed a kidney transplant to live.

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My whole focus was on learning the new material I was given in any one moment of training. It might be the same with any sort of hard work that’s rewarding, and for me I needed that thing of being in my body and mastering myself. It’s a sort of synthesis that works within the principles, that in turn govern actions and overall well-being.

I had started training kung fu with Sifu Gavin Cook in 2002, shortly after the masters for the area’s school – Sifu Bob Margotts and his wife Stephanie – started their school in Ballina. I was in the same Southern Cross University class as Gavin, doing Naturopathy. We loved it and never missed a class after we started.

The real journey and challenge for me started after the orange belt grading (which takes longer than other arts to access) when I started learning to teach classes. We set up a kung fu class in Lismore in 2004, in the classrooms under the Lismore City Hall.

Students and teachers develop their own unique style and approach to the (kung fu) arts, and Gavin is more into the physicality of his art. He insisted on a physical grading to obtain the degree of Sifu, whereas normally you’re graded on how you have applied the six principles of kung fu within your overall teaching and perspective of the art. He likewise does very physical gradings as a practitioner of the arts, and is into that aspect of developing the local schools.

I guess some of my favourite stuff is technique over force, like with Hsing-I where you journey through someone’s arms and you find the entry zone and range. I personally find I have a gentler approach to the art, and I love training weapons through Hsing-i arts. I also love teaching even though I’ve never been much one for rules. I would rather see that my students get their results and come to their conclusions through their own guidance and understanding of their kung fu.

I don’t really think there’s any sort of big success stories of obtaining your belts and doors (which are like Dans) and so forth, it’s more an accumulation, progression and discipline of all the hard work you put in over the years. It’s something you have to keep up with, and you get further insights as you go along. When you obtain the actual belt or door, it’s more like something you already have, and you just gain a recognition from the outside of that.

Kung fu is scientific but in a progressively intuitive fashion of insight after insight, which you get with constant practice of smaller things like stepping. Then maybe one day you can do those amazing superhuman things like the one-inch punch or being able to launch someone across a whole room, but by then you’d never need to use anything like violence because you’re more in tune with things and there’s always alternatives to physical combat.

The martial art kung fu

A lot of people think about kung -fu and they immediately think about all the flashy moves that they see off the movies.

There’s a lot more to it than that, and The literal translation of ​Gung Fu​ is "hard work” and Wu-Chi Tao means "journey (or) art to perfection” There’re also principles, morals, ethics and operating within your community to aspire to. In China, young monks train from six years old for hours and hours every day and work their whole life to achieve self-mastery and it never stops. Kung fu is something you aspire your whole life to perfect – it literally is hard work.

Our school, the Wu-Chi Kung-Fu school of arts #4, adheres to six overall principles of respect, love, honesty, truth, purity and contentment. Kung-fu ​Si-fu ​(eldest brothers) in China were sages who were sought for wisdom and life advice when people have lost their way, rather than being fighters to be feared. There’s eight arts of Kung-fu within our school - ​Wu-Hsing, Tan-Tui, Hsing-I, Chi-Kung, Nei-Kung, Shuai-Jiao, Pa-Kua a​ nd ​Tai-Chi​, some of which (like ​Chi-kung​ and ​Tai-chi​) utilise underlying energetic principles and breathing techniques – but it’s nothing mystic or esoteric.

Our students start their Kung-fu journey with ​Wu-Hsing ​(five elements or bodies)​, ​which is more about strikes and movement. It’s more of a flowing art where 12 positions can "load” from either left or right side to enable delivery of 18 different strikes. This allows flowing combinations of hundreds of hits.

The art of ​Tan-Tui​ operates within these beginning classes, which is about stepping and kicking. We get into ​hsing-i​ (body-mind) along the way, which is about movement. It’s about lining up your opponent, moving through their hands/hit zone and applying your own hits.

You eventually learn to direct your opponent’s flow based on "asking a question” about how they will move, then they give their answer and you give your response. It’s like learning to have a conversation with your body and learning how to articulate yourself properly.

The school and its New Zealand origins have a pretty amazing story, but that’s another story and you can look up the history at our website. However, there’s a lot of speculation about our school, Kung-fu and concepts behind it. The only real way to understand it is to be there training it, there within the moment. It’s something that has to be learned with the body, although mentality has a lot to do with it, but that sort of comes back to being in the body in the moment too.

There’s a lot of physical training and conditioning involved, and it’s all personal stuff where you find more about how you operate internally as well as externally, based on the six principles of Kung-fu.

You sort of develop your own art that’s unique to you, after some time of going through basics. That’s why it’s an art, it’s an individual and creative thing, but one that always requires that you work hard to get results.

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Career and the future

I ended up doing my Bachelor of Nursing for another three years at Southern Cross University, and completed my education in 2010. I have been working as a mental health nurse at the Tallowwood ward (formerly Richmond Clinic) at Lismore Base Hospital four days a week. I’ve been working there for nine years now.

Around 15-20 nurses have retired or left since I started there. It can be a difficult job at times. We work with people who are in a very unwell and vulnerable state at the time they come in.

There’s people who come in from the court, like those who have committed some sort of crime and are in for assessment. They can become progressively threatening and we have to call in the police when that happens, which is really sad for everyone.

However, those are the most challenging times. Generally, the picture is good. The job is rewarding for me to see our patients come through to the other side of their journey and have that deeper understanding of themselves and life that not many have. The north coast is as popular as ever for mental illness, and we have more patients than ever. It’s really something that doesn’t stop and there’s a lot of problems out there. We try as best we can to manage things in a difficult climate.

Health-wise, I’m doing great now, better than ever. I’d rather not focus on the past aspect of when I had the kidney issues, and be thankful I have good health now.

As so far as my family goes, my wife Molly and I met in 2001, at the time I was at uni and starting kung fu. She comes from Melbourne and was friends with someone who lived in the same share house I was in, and is in the same health industry as me as a psychologist. We got married in 2017.

My fifteen-year-old son Kye goes to Richmond River High. He is into street skateboarding and has been ollying (jumping) off this 13-stair up in Lismore Heights. He’s also interested in pursuing a career in legal defence, so he can help people. He endures school and is in the high achiever’s class there. He’s also a pretty good writer.

My six-year-old boy Cedar goes to Lismore Heights Primary School, loves running and has been training karate for six months.

Jisnu Dowsett, Kye Dowsett (15), wife Molly Magahy and Cedar (6). Photo: Supplied

Today, I’ve just been doing some repairs on my boat and trailer. I like being on the water rather than in the water, because I have a bit of a shark phobia. I just like how the land looks from the sea, so I thought it’d be nice to learn how to sail. I got a twelve-and-a-half foot boat, and been sailing around four times on the Ballina river. It's been going pretty good and it's always something I wanted to do.

Currently with kung fu, I’m learning the lance or spear, and I’ve been teaching the Chinese broadsword out with students. That utilises the arts I learned from the beginning with Wu-Hsing.

There’s a lot of guys out there who want to be Bruce Lee overnight but it doesn’t happen that way.

There’s not just training but all that life stuff as well for people who have been (doing kung fu) for years too, but the arts and principles help in day-to-day life too.

For me, it’s mostly about being healthy in body and mind. People take their health for granted, but when it craps out then everything else in life becomes irrelevant. If you’re not well, you can’t do anything in life. Health comes first, really, then you refine. That’s about it.

**The Lismore class of Wu-Chi Kung-Fu school of arts #4, is currently run by Si-Di Dylan Clark at the Silver Cloud Studios on Thursday evenings from 6:00pm-7:30pm, where they’ll always welcome new students and give a free introductory lesson. I don't make it to classes too often myself now, maybe once every six weeks. I usually attend Shaomen (teacher training classes) once or twice during a six-week period.