How To Adapt An Art To Yourself

I often hear people talk about making an art their own and adapting the art to suit them. I hear it most often in arts like Aikido, Karate and Judo. The discussion will turn to adapting the art to suit an individual. This is a quite reasonable question. After all, every student’s body is different, with unique strengths and weaknesses. Adapting an art to suit an individual just makes sense, particularly in the modern, eclectic world we live in.

In competitive Judo, with dozens of legal throws, there is no way one person can be equally good at all of them. So people specialize in a couple of throws that they polish to perfection while giving the rest of the throwing techniques little more the cursory practice so they are familiar with what they look like and how they feel.  For a competitor, there is little use in doing a lot of techniques at a mediocre level. What they need are a few techniques they can hit from anywhere during a match. This compilation reel of people doing a number of different versions of tai otoshi gives a good feel for the ways and places one throw can be adapted for use.

I hear explicit discussion about adapting an art to individual practitioners quite often in Aikido as well. People want to make Aikido theirs. Even before the advent of Youtube, Aikido students could see many different senior Aikido teachers up close at seminars. There they could see that each of these teachers seemed to move a bit differently and have somewhat different approaches to practicing and doing Aikido. From there it’s natural for a student to want to make the Aikido they do as personal an expression of Aikido as that done by the shihan they see at seminars.

Adapting the techniques of an art to suit your particular body and personality is a reasonable idea. We all have different bodies with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, so why shouldn’t we try to optimize the techniques we study for our bodies. We can tweak and adjust the way techniques are done so they work better for us and are easier to do.  It seems reasonable that a person who is 2 meters (6’4”) tall will do their tai otoshi or kotegaeshi or iriminage differently than someone who is 152 cm (5’).

Across the spectrum of body types and shapes and sizes, students can see that they should be adapting their art to their particular body characteristics. Often they ask when they can or should start doing this. I’ve seen many comments that give a time after a student is well into dan (black belt) ranks. After someone reaches 4^th dan in most gendai arts they should have a really solid foundation in the art and be able to experiment without getting into trouble by teaching themselves mistakes. They can start making the art their own, and by the time they reach 6^th or 7^th dan, they could have a personal style that is clearly all their own.

This is great, right? You study the art, learn it and then mold it to your body.  I used to think it was great. Lately though, I’ve begun to wonder. I do both gendai budo (Kodokan Judo) and koryu budo (Shinto Hatakage Ryu, Shinto Muso Ryu). At one time I thought that koryu budo could learn many things from the way gendai budo are taught and practiced.  Gendai budo, particularly arts like Judo with a huge global competitive aspect, constantly mine modern science for the latest training methods and techniques for improving competitor’s skills and the efficiency of their training. I don’t think anyone would argue that Ronda Rousey hasn’t done an incredible job of adapting her competitive judo training to the world of mixed martial arts and demonstrated the effectiveness of it.

Competition is an exceptionally narrow set of conditions though. Conditions that can make techniques and stances that are foolish to try in other situations into perfectly reasonable responses. A classic example is the strongly defensive posture you can see in many competitive Judo matches. It’s very bent over and committed forward to block out your grappling partner.  Outside the competitive match though, the position is rife with openings for punches, kicks or small weapons attacks. This competitive defensive posture is quite effective for blocking out sporting attacks.

It would be a huge mistake to try to apply this or any of the defensive tactics from competitive Judo to a broader practice intended for budo. If you tried to use that stance while doing any of the combative Judo kata you would discover all sorts of unpleasant general weaknesses in it.  Competitive Judo has adapted itself to the rules of competition. The International Judo Federation is constantly trying to tweak the rules to push competitors back towards a classical style of Judo that is more broadly effective than just within the limited space of the competition area. The effectiveness of their efforts may be questionable, but their continued effort is praiseworthy.

Competitors only have to be concerned with the narrow range of possibilities present within the competition arena. Those of us doing martial arts as budo have a much broader world of possibilities and consequences to be concerned with. We’ve ruled out taking ideas from the rarified world of competition, but we still want to make our budo our own and adapt it to our unique body and personality. Now we can start looking at what there is that we can change without destroying the art.

Fundamental stances are essential in any art. This might be the first place that someone could modify the art to suit them. I like to look at leading practitioners of arts like Judo and Aikido and Kendo, arts where there is more opportunity to adapt an art to oneself without major criticism.  Aikido and Judo provide perhaps the best examples, because there are plenty of high level practitioners around to look at. Kendo leaves a bit less room for personalization, but it’s still there. 

Looking at Aikido, I see people who prefer to work from hanmi stance and others who prefer a shizen (squared up, front facing, natural) stance. When they have the opportunity to reset their stance, they go back to their preferred stance. I don’t see high level teachers modifying their stances or coming up with new ones. They just have a stance they prefer to work from. 

The same is true in Judo (after we ignore all the bad defensive postures seen in judo competitions at all levels). People don’t modify the basic stances and grips. Some people prefer a right side grip, some a left side grip, some higher and others lower. What you don’t see are people inventing new grips. With millions of people doing Judo, and thousands of those practicing at elite national and international levels, if there were a new posture or grip that could be effective, I’m certain we’d have seen it. What we see are people fighting from the right or the left, or even squared up.  Some big guys like higher grips, and occasionally you’ll see someone who likes to fight with a sleeve and sleeve grip instead of a sleeve and collar grip.  That’s about the extent of stance and grip personalization you see in Judo.

The problem with modifying fundamental stances is that they are just that, fundamental. If you start modifying them, then everything in the art that follows from those stances has to be modified to fit the new version of the stance. More problematic is that the stances have been chosen and refined within the art for their strength and flexibility. In any of the fully established arts I know, whether koryu or gendai, the stances have been refined to their essentials and changing them just creates a weakness. 

What could you change in any fundamental stance that wouldn’t weaken it? Body angle, hip alignment or foot position? If you change your body angle then you’re not aligned to deal with your attacker  If you shift your hip alignment you lose the connection between your upper body, your hips, and your feet.  Change your foot position and you can’t react properly when an attack comes in.

So when you’re personalizing your budo and putting your particular stamp on the budo you do, it looks like changes to stances aren’t the way for people to go about it. Watching high level practitioners shows that me while they have stances they prefer, they don’t make significant changes to them.  I should also note that if you watch any of them long enough, they are generally quite competent in all the stances of their art, they just prefer some stances over others.

If people aren’t putting their stamp on the art by modifying the stances of the art, how about the techniques? This is a tough one too.  I can’t imagine being able to monkey around with the essence of a technique like harai goshi or shihonage and being able to make some modification that would let it work as well as the fundamental technique, at least not any modification that someone else hasn’t already thought of.

I don’t even know who the guys in the above video are. The Judo world is quite large and I know a tiny, tiny fraction of it. But clearly they have worked out a lot of different ways to attack harai goshi. I remember my first Judo teacher telling us about how proud he was of a variation on a throw he had come up with. He used it quite successfully in a tournament. After the tournament one of the old guys came over to his teacher and complimented them on the beautiful technique.  This old guy said he hadn’t seen that version of the technique in ages, not since some Japanese guy had used it back in the 1930s. So much for doing something new.

The same holds true for something like shihonage. I tried to find a nice compilation video, but no one seems to have made one yet. A search for shihonage on youtube though brought up dozens of individual variations on the technique. If someone can think of a highly effective variation of shihonage that is not already represented by a video on youtube, I would be amazed and impressed.

All the various entries for harai goshi in the video, and all the versions of shihonage on youtube, work because throughout the variations the fundamental essence of the technique has not been changed.  People can change how they enter, what movement they use for the setup, what attack they are responding to, what position they start in, and a dozen other things, but the core of what they are doing, the basic technique being applied, doesn’t change.

When we see someone doing their version of an art like Judo or Aikido, we’re not seeing a fundamentally different art. We’re not even seeing an art that has been adapted to suit a particular person. What we’re seeing is a person who has mastered the art and found particular pieces of it that they like and are most comfortable with which they use more often than other parts of the art. Their personal “style” of aikido isn’t a personal style at all. You’re seeing the parts they like and are most comfortable doing.

An Aikido teacher who usually starts from hanmi stance and does a lot of shihonage in her demonstrations has not made any modifications to Aikido to make it suit her.She’s mastered it and chooses the stances and techniques that she likes best. A judoka who specializes in tai otoshi and can do it from 15 different positions and entries is still a judoka. She’s just become particularly proficient at one technique and is most comfortable with it. She’s still a judoka and can still do the rest of the syllabus.

I started out with the question “How do you adapt your budo to yourself?” The answer is, you don’t. You study your art. You master your art. Within it, you may find particular stances and techniques that you are exceptionally comfortable with and feel best when you do them. As you use these more and more, they will be viewed by others as your particular “style” of Aikido (or Judo or whatever). You’ll still be doing the standard version or your art. You may have specialized in particular versions, but it’s still Aikido or Judo. Other people see your particular emphasis in stances and techniques mistake technical preferences as personal style and modifications to the art.

You haven’t modified the art. You do the full art, but you are especially comfortable in particular stances and you find some techniques more accessible and easier to express than others.  There’s nothing new there. That sort of thing is older than humanity. Even before Sun Tsu people studied their opponents to learn techniques, tactics and strategy they preferred. 

In fact, if you are too wedded to particular stances and versions of techniques, it makes you weaker, not stronger. People will know exactly what you’re going to do and how you will do it.  It’s very easy to catch a tiger that walks down the same stretch of trail every day.  ou just keep laying traps for him. Eventually one will work, especially if capitalizes on the tiger using those same movements and habits.

So don’t try to adapt your art to yourself. Recognize a truth that is evident in koryu bugei.  You don’t adapt an art to yourself. You adapt yourself to the art. Master the fundamental postures and techniques of the art you are studying. Make them a part of who you are so you can’t possibly do them wrong. These fundamentals are the core of the art, and they are what make everything else in the art possible. They are designed to eliminate as many openings and weaknesses as possible. If you mess with them, you will be far more likely to do something that weakens you than something that strengthens you.

So how do you adapt an art to yourself?  You don’t.  You mold yourself to the art.

When It Comes To Training, Fast Is Slow And Slow Is Fast

In my last blog I was talking mistakes people make in practicing, and it appears I gave the impression that I think that hard training is always wrong. After rereading what I wrote, I can see how that happened. I spent most of the article talking about the problems with hard training, and only the bit that I repeat below about how to train hard properly.

Train slow and work up to it.  It’s easy to practice things wrong.  The temptation is always there to start practicing harder, faster and more intensely than your technique is ready for.  Don’t give in.  Practice right so you truly learn how to do the techniques and master you art.

There is an old saying in martial arts circles that “Fast is slow, and slow is fast.” The most vivid example I’ve seen of this was watching my iaido teacher, Suda Sensei, do kendo with high school students. At the time Suda Sensei was 80 years old. He didn’t have the raw speed or strength or stamina that these 16-18 year old kids did. If all it took was physical speed and strength, they would have blown him right out of the dojo.Instead, he totally dominated them while seeming to move in slow motion when compared to his young opponents. These are not just strong kids either.  A lot of these kids had been doing kendo for 10 years or longer, so they were pretty good technically too.  

Still, they would march out on the floor, and these strong, young guys wouldn’t be able to do anything against him. It wasn’t that Sensei was faster and stronger and crushed them. He was simply always where he should be.  You never saw him take advantage of an opening. That would have required speed.  Instead, his shinai was there filling the spot as the opening came into existence. He was slow, and he moved slowly (at least compared to 18 year high school athletes who train every day). He never rushed and he never hurried. He understood how his partner was moving, and he put his sword  just in the right place at the right time to make a beautiful cut. He didn’t have to hurry. He could move slowly because more importantly than being fast or strong, he knew how to move and where to be and always did it correctly.

You don’t achieve that kind of understanding, control and soft, effortless movement by spending all your time training hard. You get there by training right. Training right means not training any harder than you can while still supporting correct posture, breathing and movement. This is the tricky part. You do need to train as hard as you can while doing everything correctly.  If you are training so hard, and going so fast that you can’t maintain correct posture, correct movement, correct breathing, and correct technique, then you are training too hard.  The biggest problem with this is that you then teach yourself bad posture, poor movement, lousy, shallow breathing, and weak technique.

The trick is to push yourself right up to that edge where everything starts to fall apart, but not fall over it.  It’s easy to go to far, and I still find myself doing it from time to time.  Try as I might to eliminate it, I still have some ego about this stuff, and sometimes it gets the best of me.  I rely on my friends and seniors to help me avoid this, and to stop me when I start crossing the line into bad training.

One of the first keys to training as hard as you can properly, is to start slow. That whole “slow is fast, and fast is slow” thing starts here. If you try to rush your training, you will improve slowly, if at all, because you will be training in bad technique, poor posture, incorrect movement and shallow, inefficient breathing. Start slow, well below your best speed and your highest effective intensity level.  Whatever it is you are practicing, focus and do it perfectly. Then increase the intensity.  Not the strength or the speed. Just the intensity. Increase your focus, blast everything else out of your mind except what you are doing and doing 100%. Gradually increase the speed, but never so much that you lose control.

If you’ve got a partner, controlling this sort of thing is much easier.  It’s one of the reasons that koryu budo ryuha require lower level students to always work with a senior student who will act as the uke for the technique or the kata.  The senior student initiates the interaction and sets the speed and intensity level.  The goal is to always set it just above where the student is comfortable, but below the point where their technique and control fall apart.  That is a pretty narrow range for most us.  I know that my technique starts to break down fairly soon after we move out of my comfort zone.

The goal is to expand that comfort zone. Make you able to handle more and more stress without getting tense, breathing shallow, pulling your shoulders up by your ears and rocking back on your heels. Good teachers and seniors will feel where a training partner is at and adjust the training appropriately.  You want to spend plenty of time training out in that shadowy region where you aren’t comfortable, but you still have enough to control to move properly, maintain good posture, breathe well, and execute good technique.  This is where you will make the most progress.

Each time you train there, you will stretch your comfort zone a little further out, and the point where technique, posture, breathing and movement all fall apart will move a little further out as well.  This isn’t necessarily hard training as we are used to thinking about it.  It is hard though, and it will leave you dripping in sweat from the focus, concentration and control required for training out there in the shadow land between comfort and losing control.  It takes a long time to learn how push yourself far enough but not too far.

I think this is why koryu students seem, in my experience, to make more rapid progress than students of modern arts. It’s not that koryu curriculums are inherently better. The koryu training system is much better though. Beginners and lower level students always train with senior who’s job is to keep them training out past their comfort zone without going too far.  The student doesn’t have to worry about how hard or intensely to train. The senior sets the pace and makes sure the training is fast and hard, but not too fast or too hard. This way the students get the maximum benefit from their time in the dojo.

A problem I see with many modern budo is that people spend a lot of time do repetitions on their own, without enough supervision to make sure what they are doing are high quality repetitions that are training good technique into their muscles. Then the students are encouraged to spar and do randori with people of all levels, without any control as to how hard they are fighting.  Students push themselves too hard, worry about winning (or not losing), and teach themselves bad habits that they will be trying to undo for decades (trust me, I have this little bend at the waist in harai goshi I have been fighting for close to 25 years. And I won’t even mention how quickly I can fall into a bad defensive posture  Arghhh!!).

Don’t rush into training harder than you are ready for.  Also don’t rush into trying to learn techniques and kata before you are ready for them. Doing that does two things. It waters down the amount of time you have to develop each technique because you are chasing too many skills at the same time. On top of that, it makes it more difficult for you body to absorb any of the skills effectively because you are trying to absorb more than you are capable of absorbing. The result is you are studying more stuff, but learning it more slowly.  Fast is slow and slow is fast.  

Learn the most basic things really solidly before you add more stuff to it. I know well the desire to learn the advanced techniques. The secret is that there are no advanced techniques. There are only the basics applied so well that they seem advanced. Sensei Hiroshi Ikeda once said that “We teach all the secrets of Aikido in the first class.” It’s true. On the first day you learn about relaxing, moving properly and breathing. Learn the basics well and all your techniques will look like magic. I was at a seminar where Howard Popkin kept doing impossible things to me. He did no advanced techniques, nothing complicated. He did very basic techniques and applications so smoothly and effectively they felt like magic. And you know what? Even those of us doing them for the very first time could do the techniques effectively when we slowed down so we could do the movements properly. The moment we tried to speed things up though, everything fell apart. There is no way to learn the good stuff by rushing. You have to slow down and do it right. Fast is slow and slow is fast.

Learn good, powerful budo.  Learn techniques that are so smooth and effective people accuse of you doing magic and tell you they can’t imagine being able to do what you do.  Master your body and your technique so fully that you fill every opening you partner gives you before it has opened. Be so relaxed and move so slowly while completely dominating your opponents that people watching can’t understand how you do it.  The fastest way to get there is to slow down and go no faster than you can do the technique correctly.  Fast is slow and slow is fast.

Change in Classical and Modern Martial Arts

The classical arts of Japan (pre-1868) have a very different structure from the modern arts. The classical arts are entirely defined by their kata. If you take something like Suio Ryu or Shinto Muso Ryu, they have a clearly defined set of kata. Changing the kata is frowned upon, not because innovation is bad, but because it's really difficult to find anything in the kata that has not been boiled down to the essence of effectiveness.

Most koryu (again, pre-1868 traditions) kata are paired kata, always practiced with a partner. The reasons for doing the kata a particular way become vividly clear in a bright black and blue manner if you try to change things. The attacking partner is an immediate check to see if what you are doing is effective or not. And when it's not, you may well end up with a beautiful bruise as proof. Recently a friend and I spent a morning working through some kata slowly. Each time we tried to change the kata, we discovered that the kata form was the strongest way of responding for both the shitachi and the uchitachi. Each time we tried something different the openings and weaknesses of the new positions were clear. After hundreds of year of practice and examination, our forebears in the system had worked out the most effective way for things to be done. Our lesson was to understand why they designed the kata as they did.

The practice of the kata define the koryu traditions. Nearly all of the lore and wisdom that generations of teachers have accumulated is in embedded in the kata. It's up to students to tease this knowledge out. One way to do that is with what my friend and I were doing. You deconstruct the kata, try different reactions and attacks at each juncture and see if they work, or as we discovered, why they don't work.

Traditional Japanese systems, koryu budo, generally have very specific and clear pedagogy. Shinto Muso Ryu has a clear set of 40+ jo kata, as well as 12 sword kata, 12 walking stick kata, 24 kusarigama kata, 30 jutte kata, and I've forgotten how many hojo kata. These are very clearly defined. It's extremely difficult for teacher who hasn't been training for decades to make changes, and the kata themselves make it difficult. As I discussed above, we couldn't find any weaknesses in the kata we were exploring. We just learned a lot of options that don't work as well those taught in the system already. With this kind of situation, there just aren't many opportunities for innovation.

The most common way koryu arts change is that someone develops a new kata to address some situation or condition that is not considered by the existing kata. In Shinto Muso Ryu for example, they developed some new kata at the end of the 19th century to make use of the walking sticks that had become popular at the time. This is a logical extension of the principles of the stick that is the main weapon in Shinto Muso Ryu to a shorter stick. They didn't change old kata, or get rid of anything. They developed a few new kata to teach an understanding of the ranges and uses of the shorter stick. Systems do change, but they do so very slowly. With koryu, those changes are usually minor additions to the system rather than revolutions in the way things are done.

People sometimes wonder why koryu systems don't have lots of sparring and tournaments like the modern arts of kendo, karatedo and judo. Surprisingly, this is not a new question. Groups have been arguing about the value of sparring type practice in Japan for over four hundred years. When Japan was at war with itself, which was most of the time from about 1300 through 1600, there were more than enough opportunities for people to test their ideas, techniques and skills, so the question didn’t come up. Once Tokugawa Ieyasu unified the country and removed the last possible source of revolution in 1615, those opportunities disappeared. Soon after that sparring and challenge matches started to appear. Arguments over the value of sparring compared with kata training began almost immediately, and have continued unabated to this day. Over the centuries though, the styles that emphasize sparring as a part of their training never demonstrated significantly better records in the many challenge matches. If the sparring faction had shown consistent success the other systems would have changed rather than lose.  The systems that emphasized kata weren’t losing, so there was no need to change. Kata remained the core of training because when done properly, it works.

Tournaments are a relatively recent phenomenon. Tournaments first showed up late in the 19th century once the Japan had reformed its government and sword teachers had no way to make a living. Some people started doing matches to entertain the public and try to support themselves as professional martial artists after traditional positions working for daimyo disappeared.. These didn't last long, but they contributed to the development of modern kendo. Modern kendo equipment dates back to that used for sparring and some challenges as early as the 17th century.

Sword demonstrations and prize matches during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) popularized and contributed to the creation of a sport form of kenjutsu done with shinai (bamboo swords). Similar matches for jujutsu schools contributed to the rise of Kodokan Judo. Kano's students won a number of noted victories and the Kodokan was invited to participate in inter-style matches by the Tokyo Police. The Kodokan did exceptionally well in most of these matches and earned an impressive reputation. These matches though also drove some significant changes in the Kodokan's curriculum.

Fusen Ryu is reported to have defeated a number of Judo representatives with strong ground techniques. At the time, Kano was not in favor of focusing on ground fighting because he felt it was a dangerous place to be in a street fight. However, these losses on the ground in public matches pushed him to develop a groundwork curriculum for Judo. One of the big surprises about this is the way he went about it. Contrary to the idea of martial schools jealously guarding their secrets, at this time at the end of the 19th century, people were much more open. Kano invited the head of Fusen Ryu to teach groundwork at the Kodokan Dojo, and he did. With the help of the head of a rival system, Kano significantly strengthened the Kodokan curriculum. Kano never became a huge fan of groundwork, always believing that staying on your feet was optimal in a fight, but the pressure of doing well in competitive matches drove him to adapt his art.

In addition, Kano changed from the classic menkyo, or licensing, system, and created the modern dan rank system based on competitive ability.  The koryu systems award licenses based on a persons level of understanding and mastery of the system, up to and including full mastery of the system.  Kano abandoned this system for one in which students were ranked according to competitive ability in matches.  If a student could defeat four other students of 1st dan level (commonly known as black belt) , then he was promoted to 2nd dan (black belt).  This resulted in tremendous changes in what is taught and how students train.  Anything that is not allowed in competitive matches is marginalized in training, even if it is effective in combative situations outside of training.  The focus narrowed to those techniques which are most effective in competition.  The up side of this focus is that it drives innovation and experimentation.  Judoka are constantly looking for innovative ways to win in competition and refining their techniques to make them more effective.  The down side is, as I describe above, that anything not useful in competition is largely ignored, even if it is highly effective in situations outside of competition.

Various pressures on competitive martial systems are still visible today. For the larger systems such as Judo and various Karate styles, two of the big pressures are popularity and money. In the last 15 years the International Judo Federation has been busy making numerous changes to the rules for competitive Judo matches in order to make Judo more television friendly to maintain popularity and keep it's place in the Olympics. The matches are seen as being too slow and difficult to follow, so changes were made to speed things up. In addition, there seems to be some reservations about how well people from other systems, such as wrestling and BJJ, do when they enter Judo tournaments. I have heard complaints that wrestlers and BJJ players use a lot of leg grabs and take downs that aren't classical Judo. The techniques work though. My feeling is that in Judo, we are reacting in the worst way possible to these challenges from wrestlers and BJJ players. Instead of inviting them into our dojo to learn from them, as Kano did, the IJF has chosen to ban the leg grabs and take downs from Judo competition. To me this only makes Judo weaker and less worthy of study.

In the Karate world, I see a lot of things in tournaments where combative functionality is not even considered. People invent kata that are flashy and athletic, but have nothing to do with the rich history and combative effectiveness of the Okinawan traditions. I have seen rules for weapons kata that require a certain number of weapons releases. This means that people are required to throw their weapon into the air! From a standpoint of combative functionality, this is ridiculous. However, to people who don't know better, this looks impressive. These Karate tournaments seem to be responding to a desire to be as popular as possible, rather than as effective as possible. It is a similar to what the IJF is doing make Judo more television friendly so the International Olympic Committee won't drop Judo from the Olympics like it tried to do with Wrestling a few years back. I won't even get into the silliness that is Olympic Tae Kwon Do.

Many of the modern arts are relatively easy to change because they are competition focused and committee governed, so changes in the rules will drive major changes in training. The koryu arts are deeply seated in kata that have been refined over centuries, and I can't really imagine any pressure big enough for them to make significant changes to their curriculums. Since the classical systems are not looking for rapid growth or tv money, they are under no pressure to change except that which they have always had; to adjust their systems to they remain relevant to the world around them. Judo and Karate both have strong depths of kata, well thought out and highly refined, but these traditional, effective and functional kata are often ignored in the race to perform well in competitions. The desire to do well in competition and to be visible on the world stage will continue to drive changes in these arts. I would love to see the pressure and focus of modern arts return to combative functionality, but I doubt that will happen when it is so easy to get caught up in the ego trap of popularity.

Laughter And Joy In The Dojo

                Budo practice is intense and serious business.  After all, we are practicing techniques for hurting and killing each other.  There aren’t many things that serious.  Practice is filled with opportunities for accidents where people get bashed with sticks, their arms broken from an overzealous joint lock, seriously injured or even killed by a poorly executed throw.

               The vision of grim,dour martial artists facing off with wooden swords, giant naginata and whipping kusari makes a lot of sense.  Pure focus on your training partner so you can understand her movement, and make sure you are not where the strike lands is important.  When someone is earnestly trying to hit you with a very large piece of wood, cracking a joke probably isn’t a good idea.  

               The only problem with this image is that it’s false.  Koryu budo dojo can be filled with laughter.  A couple of weeks ago I was at a big budo gasshuku, and we were working on some fairly advanced kata.  Some people had quite a bit of experience with the kata and others among us were learning them for the first time.  We were all working out details in the kata.

               This is not to say there are any huge surprises in the kata.  They still use all the same principles and techniques everyone in the group has been studying for years and decades.   The advanced part is the subtle interplay between the partners for control of the timing and spacing.  You’d expect every brow to be scrunched into furrows with the effort of concentrating on these subtle applications.

               Sometimes you’d even be right about that.  As the teachers demonstrated various points, everyone was silent and focused.  Then we’d pair up and start working through the kata, slowly at first, and gradually picking up speed as we felt more confident in the basic patterns.  That’s when the laughter started to break out.  People would be working through the kata and some bit would go sliding out of control just as the teachers had warned.  Our best efforts would result in slips and misses and we began laughing at ourselves.  We would take turns trying to do what the teachers were patiently showing for the umpteenth time, and as the kata again slipped out our control, we would begin laughing, and the teachers would be laughing along with us.

               When we are exploring something, trying to push our understanding of things, even in something as lethally serious as koryu budo, we are playing with the techniques and the principles and the timing and the spacing.  Whenever we blow the maai or the timing, especially when practicing with someone much more accomplished, that’s when the laughter and smiles will break out.  If I blow the spacing, instead of attacking the teacher with my sword, I am likely to find the tip of his sword just past the end of my nose, and a few feet behind that, a huge grin on his face.

               We’re working on figuring these things out.  There is plenty of room for playfulness in those moments.   As we try different ideas and approaches, working to grasp the points being taught, most of our ideas will fall short and it’s easy to laugh at our own attempts.  This is particularly true when an idea’s weakness becomes apparent part way through the execution and we can see why it won’t work, but it’s too late to stop.  You know you are about to blow it, and there is nothing you can do except laugh at the results as your position collapses.

               The smiles when we figure something out are big and gleaming too.  The kusarigama has bedeviled me for years, and honestly, I think it will keep bedeviling me for years to come. For all that, when I finally made a couple of mental and physical connections recently, I was laughing with joy, and my teachers were smiling along with me.  They were thrilled I’d finally gotten at least a little of what they have been patiently trying to get through my thick skull.  It was moment of happy celebration for all of us.  And then we dove back into practice and I promptly whacked myself in the face with the leather ball we use in place of an iron fundo on the end of the chain.  This time I smiled and my teachers laughed.  Not too hard though, because it seems to be a common hazard of learning to handle the kusarigama in our style. A little gentle laughter though takes some of the sting out hitting yourself in the face.

    Koryu budo is serious.  That doesn’t mean that practice has to be serious all the time.  Any good dojo, filled with solid, mature students and confident, experienced teachers, will also be as full of smiles and laughter as it is with with quite concentration and focused practice.  In fact, if you don’t see frequent smiles, and hear occasional laughter, I would be worried about the quality of the dojo.