Brent Graber
A friend showed me this quote, and my first thought was, this is how budo training should feel. After all, the piece of art you are working on in the dojo is yourself. What we are doing in the dojo is working on ourselves. We are are refining and perfecting what we are.
Budo training is a process of both adding on, and taking away. From the first day in the dojo, we are adding to ourselves by actively trying to learn new skills, ideas and ways of thinking. We are creating a new, better self by adding skills and confidence, strengths and flexibility, and we are acquiring power. When you learn a martial art, you are literally learning ways of power for dealing with the world. Some budo, such as judo or aikido or karatedo are clearly about forms of power that can be immediately applied to the world around us if we wish, while others such as iaido or kyudo are more distant from the world outside the dojo. They are all about the use and application of power.
Each day in the dojo, especially in the early years of training, we are working to add to our store of techniques, our ways of dealing with physical conflict. We have to work really hard to get the steps for the technique down, to overcome ingrained instincts and reactions and to train new instincts and new reactions in their place. At the end of a good practice, the body should be sweating, sore, and exhausted from the work learning and polishing new skills. The mind should be just as sore and exhausted from working on new ways of thinking, and from pushing itself to learn lessons that sometimes require giving up old ideas and beliefs so we can grow beyond them.
Early on we are learning to respond fluidly to a threatening situation rather than with blind instinct. We learn to move out of the way of a strike calmly and smoothly, instead of flinching away. We spend time learning proper footwork and posture for best moving out of the way, and then we practice putting our hands in the proper position for receiving the strike depending on how we want to deal with it. This takes time and sweat. It also takes restructuring how we see the world. If we are used to being strong and unmoving and letting the world crash into us and standing against it’s force, we have to learn to be soft and pliant and let the things go flying past us. On the other hand, if we are accustomed to ducking and avoiding conflict, we have to learn to be strong enough to stay close so that we can actively deal with the conflict.
In the dojo, we should be constantly working on lessons like this. And it should make us tired. It should also prepare us to practice these lessons outside the dojo in the world where we live. It is here that the practice is the most difficult. We have all learned many lessons about how to act in the world. Some of us are very good at letting the world crash into us without being moved, like a huge boulder on the seashore. Some of us are good at diving out of the room or giving in at the first sign of conflict. Others push too hard, or attack when it’s not necessary, or any of the other traits and strategies that can be taken to an extreme.
Training in the real world is really hard and takes a level of effort that can make training in the dojo seem easy. These are the attempts that no one realizes you are making as you develop yourself. So you’ve learned to get out of the way of the attack without fleeing or giving up your own position of strength in the dojo. You are strong, but you’ve learned that you don’t have to meet every attack head on. Or you are not strong, but you have learned that you don’t have to avoid conflict by fleeing, but that you can control how you move and where you go. Now that you can do that in the dojo, can you do it in life? When the office bully comes looking for a fight, and knows that you are always ready to stand unbending and give him one, can you flex enough to not meet him head on, but to let his arguments go rolling on past you without expending any more effort than it takes to step to the side? Or, can you have the strength to stick around and not be driven away or simply acquiescing in order to get him to leave? Can you learn to move to a position that he can’t easily attack, and to push back at his weakness?
This is the tough stuff, and this is the training that counts. Because this is the training that applies every day at every level. Conflict is all around us, at all different levels. In budo we are learning to deal with conflict in the most fundamental way possible, with someone trying to hit us. But it’s budo, bu-DO. We are training ourselves for life, not just some sort of physical fight. This is why it’s so hard. We’ve got patterns and ways of doing things that we have learned, but one of the fundamental lessons of any Way is that we can always be better than we are now. My teachers still train, they still work to polish their technique and themselves. They haven’t stopped learning and improving themselves. Just because Kiyama Sensei is 88 years old, don’t think that he is only teaching and not learning anymore, only training others to become better and not training himself.
We are working on perfecting ourselves and the lessons go on and on. Once the strong and stiff has learned to be more flexible and mobile his training may circle back. He may find himself working hard at learning to apply his strength as effectively as possible. And the timid one may develop enough skill and confidence that he has to work on not deploying that skill every time, and sometimes just get out of the way and not connect with the conflict.
I spent the morning alone in the dojo today. I’m trying to polish some techniques that require more patience and less speed. Part of me always wants to fly through these techniques because, well, this is budo, combat, and if I don’t move fast, I’ll be defeated. My teachers have shown me over and over though, that speed is not the key to great technique. The point I am struggling with is that the key is not strength or speed. The key is to do the right thing at the right time. I’m work on being aware enough, calm enough, relaxed enough, and confident enough that I don’t rush in, but wait and fill the opening as it occurs. I’m sweating through this, swinging the sword, swinging the staff, pushing my legs until they quiver with effort so that I can do this without effort.
Now I’m applying this same effort to being me. There are things that I want to do better. I want to interact with people in a better way. I used to have a deep seated need to be right, even when being right was wrong thing to do. I had to learn to let go of the argument, let the conflict fade away by not holding on to it. This is something I’m still working on, though I believe I’ve gotten better at it over the years. One of the lessons of budo is that you can lose by putting too many of your resources into one course of action. You might even succeed in that action, but then lose because you don’t have any resources for anything else. I have been working practicing and applying this lesson to myself, learning a new skill, and hopefully I am a better person, a nicer work of art to be around than I was.
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