Travel and Training

I’ve been traveling for work to areas where I don’t have access to dojo or gyms.  It can make training challenging.  I am training though.  The trickiest part is taking a sword with me when I fly.  I’ve got a nice, hard-side gun case for flying.  

I get stared at going through the airport by every security person in the place, but I’ve never had any problems.  I check the gun case and carefully explain that it contains no firearms, only fencing equipment.  Sometime I have to open the case and show the airline folks, but they take one look at the sword and get bored.  After the airline staff tag the case, I drop it off at the TSA inspection point.  I’ve got TSA approved locks on the case so the TSA can unlock and lock the case whenever they please.  In 15 years of traveling like this, I haven’t had any problems.

The trick is finding a good place to train when I get to my destination.   Weapons training is best done discreetly.  I really don’t want to make the local folks nervous and have them call the police about the crazy guy with the sword.  It would be great if there was a nice iai or jodo dojo near every place I have to travel to, but the world isn’t arranged that way.  At least in Japan I can usually find a public dojo to rent on an hourly basis even if there is nothing else around.  I’ve resorted to doing sword practice in my hotel room.

It’s an interesting exercise working out exactly what I can and cannot do in any given room.  I can’t practice everything anyway.  This results in the location determining what I’m going to practice instead of me having to think about it.  Fortunately, most hotel rooms are big enough that furniture can be rearranged to make room for sword swinging.  Sometimes the ceiling is even high enough to stand up and do tachiwaza.  That doesn’t happen too often though, so I usually end up doing waza and kata from seiza and tatehiza.  

Since I’m rehabilitating my knee, I need lots of work in seiza anyway.  I’m rebuilding the muscles, and they have a long way to go, so enforced seiza practice is a good thing.  A few weeks back I mentioned that I couldn’t get all the way down into seiza.  The results of all the work in the hotel since then has made the effort to drag my buki with me on a business trip more than worth the effort.  The need to make my knee bend far enough to get into seiza has driven a lot of my practice.  I also have to make my leg strong enough to get me out of seiza once I’m there.  At this point, my right leg is still only half the strength of my left leg, so working from seiza is challenging me.  I can’t rely on the strength of my legs to automatically hold me steady.  

Doing the first kata from the Kendo Federation’s Seitei Iai fulfills all of my requirements for rehabilitating my leg.   I have to get into and out of seiza once, and then I do a further body raise, lower and final raise.  It turns into a real workout for my legs very quickly, and that’s what I need.  Right now I’m working to recover strength and ability that I had prior to April 22.  It’s going to take a few more months, but I will get there.  I get to do kata from seiza until my leg just can’t get me up and down.

While I’m doing all of that I have plenty of time to consider all those other aspects of the kata.  It’s never empty repetition.  I’m not just sitting in a hotel room doing mindless reps.  Like any time I do kata, it is supposed to be the mindful execution of a kata that is unique every time I do it.  This makes it endlessly interesting because there is always something to learn or work on every time I do it.

Doing my training in a hotel adds to the number of things I have to consider. Training in a confined space means I really have to be aware of spacing and distancing in a way I don’t have to worry about in a nice, roomy dojo. It is improving my spacial sense.  Exactly how close will my sword tip be to that curtain at the end of my cut?  I won’t spear that bedspread when I do the next tsuki, will I?  

The best part of training in a hotel room is just that I get to train regularly even when I’m far from home.  In rural Georgia, koryu dojo just don’t exist, and I haven’t found any place that I can borrow.  So I move the furniture in my hotel room and do the best I can.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s how it’s done.

So even if you don’t have a perfect dojo to train in all the time, you can still get your training in.  Travel is no excuse.

Just train

Just train. A couple of things brought this in mind today as I sit in a conference room waiting for the big meeting to start.  One is how nice I’m feeling today after getting up a little early this morning to do iaido in my hotel room.  Training always feels so good that afterwards I am amazed that I ever skip a day.  Even when, like today, setting the alarm forward another hour and slipping back into the arms of Morpheus was so very tempting, the energetic and smooth, well calibrated way my body works after training is just so good that the extra sleep really doesn’t compare.

Just train.  Training makes me feel good throughout the day.  My body and mind are forced to integrate and work together efficiently and effectively by the training, and the effect lasts throughout the day.  As much as I pontificate about how we can change ourselves and the long term personal development that is possible through training, it is even more about today’s training.  My training gives me benefits now.  I doubt I would stick around long enough for the long term benefits to develop and blossom if the training wasn’t good right now.

Just train.  I learned something this morning about how I move and how I want to improve my movement.  I’m rebuilding my legs after surgery, and even more than the exercises the physical therapists have me doing, I find that budo training is helping me recover more quickly than I had imagined.  I just go and train each day.  My legs develop new strengths and new abilities.  I find little areas of balance and control that I need to work on. Today I discovered new things about how to train for the best results.  This is today.  I apply this epiphany to myself, and I can share it with my students on Saturday.  Every time I train, I learn things.  I love learning things.  The discoveries leave me eager to find out what else there is learn.  I do that by training.

Just train.  Life is not always great.  Training is always great.  The dojo is a place I can go where issues of the world don’t reach.  I’m just training after all.  Work doesn’t affect that.  I’m training.   Arguments don’t change that.  Training has trained my mind to be still and focused on what I’m doing so I can just train.   I can shut down the noisy parts of my mind and get to work.

A lot of people worry about their rank or what level they have reached on the philosophical discussion of shu-ha-ri, which is just a distraction from the point of training. (Wayne Muramoto has an excellent discussion of shu-ha-ri here.)   Just train.  The act of training should include a lot of consideration and experiment.  It’s not mindless repetition of the kata.  It is mindFUL repetition of kata.  Don’t worry about how you compare to others, or whether you are at one level of training or another.  Mindful training will nearly always have you practicing at the right level.  The important thing is to do the training.  Don’t worry about the outside stuff.  That’s not training and it won’t help your training.  Just train.

Just train.  All the benefits of budo flow directly from the training.  As much as I love to talk about it, I don’t get that from the talking.  Every time I train I get a workout.  I teach my body to work more effectively and efficiently as a single unit rather than each part working against the others.  I feel better.  My mind is clearer and calmer.  I can relax and put things in life in better perspective.  Sometimes I even improve my budo.  Just train.

Injuries and training

About 18 months ago, I made a couple of bad moves at judo practice and messed up my right knee pretty well..  It was quite painful at the time, but I didn’t realize how much damage I had done.  When I finally gave in and had an MRI done, I found out I had completely torn my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).  At that point, the only real option was ACL reconstruction surgery.  The surgery was at the end of April, and it really messed up my writing routine, among other things.  I have discovered that budo training, post-op rehab and writing have a lot in common.  All the habits I have for good budo, regular practice, review of what is working and what isn’t, conscious repetition, and getting an outside perspective are all critical to successful, steady, ongoing improvement.

All those lessons from judo and iaido are applied regularly to my post-op rehab.  The week after my surgery, the doctor and the physical therapist gave me a set of exercises, stretching and icing to do 3-5 times a day.  There were exercises for regaining the flexibility  in my knee and starting on the long slog to get the strength back in my leg.  The first time I tried to bend my knee, I was sweating from the effortn by the time I got it to 15 degrees.  And the simple exercises to tense the quadriceps in my leg were amazingly frustrating.  I could will the muscle to contract all I wanted, but it just laid there.

Over a few weeks of doing all the exercises the physical therapists could think up, I eventually got enough strength back that I could go back to the dojo and start doing some simple standing training in iaido.  This is when I started getting some interesting lessons.  Things which had been quite fundamental for me, that I didn’t even think about doing anymore, had become nearly impossible. Just walking properly required all of my focus.   I have no idea what was happening with my sword when I was trying to simply walk and swing the sword at the same time.  My concentration was so heavily invested in simply trying to walk smoothly and with strong movement that there was no awareness left over for whatever it was my hands were doing with the sword.   I am sure I was swinging it, but I have no clear memories of it.  I’m not sure I want to know what I was actually doing.  I’m quite sure it was horrible, and I don’t need independent confirmation.

Eventually, I got wise and stopped trying to swing the sword and just focused on basic walking and footwork.  My feet needed a lot of work.  After the surgery, the knee swelled up like a grapefruit that had lost a bar fight, but I was expecting that.  The really difficult adjustment was to how weak my leg had become.  The leg muscles atrophied almost immediately, and even now are a little more than half their pre-surgery strength.  

The sudden disappearance of the strength in my legs has given me an instant appreciation for many of the difficulties my beginning students go through.  The leg muscles are used in a rather unusual way in iaido, especially in the suwari waza sets.  The body has to be absolutely stable and solid, with the movements smooth and fluid. I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t remember how I felt when I started, but I can see my own struggles with trying to get my legs to do good iaido now whenever I look at beginners.  One of their biggest issues is simply that their body doesn’t have the strength in the right areas to support what they are trying to do.    

I’ve long been a fond of breaking apart iaido kata to find simple sets of movements that students can focus on to build the strength and stability in some of the unusual positions that we deal with in iaido.  My current condition is teaching me just how really useful and important this is for students.   One of the simplest things we do in iaido is sit down into, and get up from, seiza.  This is even more basic than how we hold the sword.  There are thousands of ways to get into seiza that are clumsy and off-balance with posture so weak a two year old could easily knock you over.    There is only one way that is the strongest and most stable based on the human bodies structure: back straight, quadriceps screaming with the effort of holding you up and supporting you while you look relaxed as you lower yourself into, or rise from, seiza.  I often have students just practice the movement from seiza rising up until the legs and torso are a straight line, and then going back down, keeping the back straight the entire time..  Now I am doing the same thing, because my quads really don’t like this movement anymore.   Another one they don’t like is the lunge-like movement at the end of some suwari kata where we drop down to one knee, and then come back up.  So my students and I are doing both of these as a warm-ups / calisthenics to strengthen the legs and practice doing the basic movement correctly without having to worry about what to do with the sword or anything else.

I am finding it really helpful for me, and I hope my students will as well.  I am reteaching my body to do fundamental movements on its own, without having to be directed by my mind.  I am drilling these basic movements in my hotel room, and using them as a warm-up when I do full iaido keiko.  By warming up with them, I am getting my body used to doing the motions correctly, so when I move on and do the kata, I can focus on other aspects while my body does these motions correctly on its own.

The motions are fundamental, and the more I isolate them and focus on getting them smooth and strong in isolation, the easier I am finding it to do them properly when I go back to the kata and do them in conjunction with everything else that is happening in the kata.  My legs are still recovering, but already I can feel the improvements in strength and control.  I have always thought of the techniques and kata as the basics in budo practice, but now I am looking at the kata with an eye towards isolating even more basic movements and drilling them.

If I can come up with simple drills students can do at home without little no equipment, I think beginning students will be able to improve much more quickly, and get more out of their training.  Instead of developing the strength in their legs and hips during class, they can work on developing the essential strength away from keiko.  

A few simple exercises that can help them develop the strength to move smoothly and effectively quickly, will also enable them to start smoothing out other common problems faster as well.  Integrating the complex and wholly unnatural movements required for suwari waza  is difficult.  There is nothing natural about gliding over the floor with one knee up and the other down while swinging a sword around.  My new goal is to isolate basic movements that can be practiced outside the dojo in a hotel room (since I’m spending a lot of time in hotel rooms for work) that students can drill until they become habitually correct, so we can spend our training time together working on integrating the movements and then go on to more mind-bending things like rhythm.

A pointer from Rory Miller on training and violence

Rory Miller is a remarkable martial artist with an amazing background: modern Judo, koryu jujutsu, and decades of experience in police and corrections.  This interview is fascinating and insightful.

"I once had someone tell me that those throws were worthless in a real encounter because "you never turn your back on an enemy" and it made sense at the time.  Thing is, though, that real enemies jump on your back.  Not only was something that was deemed 'worthless' actually effective, the part that was hardest in training was given to you in real life."

The whole interview is at
http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/

I can't recommend Rory Miller's writing enough.

I once had someone tell me that those throws were worthless in a real encounter because “you never turn your back on an enemy” and it made sense at the time. Thing is, though, that real enemies jump on your back.  Not only was something that was deemed ‘worthless’ actually effective, the part that was hardest in training was given to you in real life. - See more at: http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/#sthash.fOyGXS8O.dpuf

I once had someone tell me that those throws were worthless in a real encounter because “you never turn your back on an enemy” and it made sense at the time. Thing is, though, that real enemies jump on your back.  Not only was something that was deemed ‘worthless’ actually effective, the part that was hardest in training was given to you in real life. - See more at: http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/#sthash.fOyGXS8O.dpuf

I once had someone tell me that those throws were worthless in a real encounter because “you never turn your back on an enemy” and it made sense at the time. Thing is, though, that real enemies jump on your back.  Not only was something that was deemed ‘worthless’ actually effective, the part that was hardest in training was given to you in real life. - See more at: http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/#sthash.fOyGXS8O.dpuf

I once had someone tell me that those throws were worthless in a real encounter because “you never turn your back on an enemy” and it made sense at the time. Thing is, though, that real enemies jump on your back.  Not only was something that was deemed ‘worthless’ actually effective, the part that was hardest in training was given to you in real life. - See more at: http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/#sthash.fOyGXS8O.dpuf

Training On The Road

I find myself recovering from knee surgery while spending weeks traveling far from home and living in a hotel for for work.  So for this 2 week stint, I hauled along a jo and an iaito so I can train at the hotel.  The hotel room has enough space that if I move the furniture out of the way I should be able to do iai kata from seiza fairly well.  The jo is not nearly as likely to cause people to panic and call the police, so I’ll take that out in the hotel parking lot and train in a quiet, back corner of the lot.

This evening I tried doing iai in the hotel room.  I will admit that it worked better than I expected.  My knee is still quite stiff, so just practicing getting into and out of seiza is very good for it.  At the beginning of practice my buttocks are a good 2 inches (5 cm) from my heels.  By the end of a good practice session they touch.  I still can’t get down far enough to relax at all in seiza, but that I can get down this far is great progress.  And going down into seiza while still holding all my weight with the muscles in my legs is great training for my legs too.  Really strengthens them and makes them much steadier.

One problem I had not expected was how much friction the carpet would cause.  I have to exaggerate my movement a bit in order to prevent myself from getting a rug burn.  I am working at doing the forward movements without dragging my knee at all.  I have to lift it off the carpet and move it forward.  This is changing my body mechanics in a way that I suspect will be helpful because it eliminates the possibility of leaving my leg behind and just dragging it forward.  It forces me to lift to drive my leg forward strongly.

One thing I hadn’t thought of that I am finding useful is that the hotel room has two large mirrors in it for dressing.  They are nice for checking my form.  It’s been 8 weeks since my surgery, and I am just beginning to train again.  I can see lots of places where my form is weak from a combination of not training for a couple of months and having my body messed up from knee surgery.  The mirrors are great for spotting and correcting some of these problems.  Unfortunately, I got excited about a point I was working on with my furikaburi, and stood up to try it from that position.  This is a problem because the hotel room doesn’t have cathedral ceilings.  I do hope the folks in the room above me hadn’t gone to sleep already.  I also hope the hotel staff doesn’t mind the nice line I cut in the ceiling.

Training in the hotel is not ideal, I will agree.  But since I must be on the road for several weeks, it is the best option I have.  The drawbacks are limited space and a concern that I will damage something in the room.  I would love to be able to move more freely and to have a nice, smooth, dojo surface to train on, but since I don’t, this will do.  The up side is that I have more than sufficient fundamental points needing work and polish that not being able to do a lot of full kata really won’t hold me back.  I can certainly work on moving from seiza, getting into seiza, furikaburi and kirioroshi for quite a long time.  They all need plenty of polish.

Focusing on the basics like this is something that can be easy to forget when I’m healthy.  I’ve reached a level where there are quite a few different things I can work on, and the basics, the fundamental stuff, is not always the more fascinating stuff to practice.  However, they are fundamental to everything else we do, and time spent improving the basics is immediately reflected in everything else I do.  My legs get stronger and more steady, more capable of correct movement and supporting good posture (even when I misstep).  Furikaburi and kirioroshi appear in almost every kata we do, so there is no way I can imagine time spent polishing them will not be reflected in improved performance when I do the kata.  And of course, since I can’t quite get into seiza, practice that gets me closer to getting into seiza and and not being in extreme discomfort while I’m there can only be a good thing.

For all these reasons I dragged a sword and jo in a big black gun case along on a flight across the country for a 2 week business trip.  Just picture me in my hotel room creaking into seiza and then moving across the floor taking great care not to drag my knee on the carpet or to let my kissaki drop below horizontal, and then trying to make the big, fluid, powerful cuts required in Shinto Hatakage Ryu.

What unusual places do you train in, and why?

Will Budo make me a better person?

Will budo make me a better person? Not necessarily. Maybe. If you want it to. If you train properly..  There is an old idea that training in a Way (budo, sado, kado, etc) will make you a better person.  It’s wonderful story.  A lifetime of training has made the grizzled old teacher wise, kind and gentle.  If we study the art we too will be transformed in wise, kind, gentle people as well.  

If only it were so.

You will become what you train.  It is entirely possible to study and master the techniques of an art and completely miss it’s essence.  This is perhaps most visible in international Judo.  If you watch international Judo competitions you can see some spectacular and subtle application of judo techniques and physical principles.  The throws and techniques are incredible.  The  behavior of the contestants is no better than in any other sport though.  There are good competitors who treat everyone with respect.  There are bad sports who throw temper tantrums when they don’t like the referee’s calls.  There are glory hounds who dance and shout and put on displays when they win.  There jerks who are disdainful towards everyone around them.

With as many years of Judo training as it takes to becoming a competitor at the international level, if just training in Judo was going to make you a better person, all of these people should be fabulous human beings with grace, kindness, respect and dignity for everyone, especially when on display in an international event.  Instead the behavior you see is no better than at any other sporting event.  We can see clearly that spending years practicing a form of budo will not automatically transform you into a great person.

The focus of training in the dojo is usually on technique.  It is entirely possible to study the techniques of an art, become extremely good at the techniques, and never touch the rich principles that animate the art and make it applicable throughout life and not just in the dojo or in a fight.    Focusing on technical practice is appropriate, since the techniques are there to point you in the direction of the principles.  

Chuang Tzu talks about the finger and the moon.  The pointing finger directs us to the moon, but once we have found the moon we forget about the finger.  If we fixate on the finger we will never move beyond it, and we will never find the moon.  In budo, the techniques are like the finger.  They point us towards the principles, but it easy to become fixated on the techniques and miss their connections to deeper principles and ideas.

We train techniques.  That’s how we learn budo.  Techniques and kata teach us the fundamentals of the art and how to apply them.  The techniques of an art are powerful.  In Judo, the throws, joint locks and strangles are powerful and impressive.  In other arts there are strikes and weapons to study and be fascinated by.  It’s easy to get caught up in learning these techniques.  The deeper, more subtle principles that make the techniques work can be forgotten in the race to master the techniques.  This is especially true in something like Judo, where victory in competition can become a goal that eclipses and outshines everything else.

The techniques alone can seem powerful.  Victory in competition brings glory and personal satisfaction.  But these are not the principles of the art being studied, and they have nothing to do with becoming a better person.  In fact, they more often lead in the opposite direction.  The techniques of budo dangerous and powerful.  It’s easy to get caught up with learning how to be dangerous and powerful.  Knowing those dangerous and powerful techniques can give a person confidence.  On the other hand, a person can become focused on that sense of power and become obnoxious and bullying because they have some power.  In arts with a competitive side, such as Judo and Kendo, the focus on winning competitions can consume a person’s focus, so they forget all the other parts of the art.  They can stop respecting anything but victory, and cheerfully ignore and belittle any aspect of the art that doesn’t directly contribute to victory in competition.

In both cases, a person can study an art for a lifetime and that study will never make them a better person.  It might even make them less of a person.  They can become proud, arrogant, rude and unpleasant to been around.  Pretty much the opposite of what a well-developed budoka should be.

So the first step to becoming a better person through budo practice is to avoid the pitfalls.  The pitfalls are inherent in the practice.  Fortunately, the lessons for becoming a better person are there too.  If you are willing to work at them to learn the principles the techniques point us towards, you can do a lot with yourself.  You have to be willing to work at applying these lessons not only to how you fight, but to how you live.

Each art has a few principles that drive it and give it unique characteristics, but they all have some unavoidable similarities as well (the optimal use of the human body being something that doesn’t change).  In any budo you develop stamina and endurance and the ability to suffer through tough training in order to improve.  These are certainly not bad character traits.  But they are more like a foundation, since they can also support all of the negative traits mentioned earlier.

The big questions are what do you want to get out of your training, and who do you want to become?  Budo training will make you a better person if you actively direct your training and apply it to being becoming a better person.  If you leave your training at the dojo door every day it won’t have much effect on you.  If you take it with you, look around and see the similarities between budo and the rest of life and apply the dojo lessons about dealing with conflict to the conflicts in life, then you budo can be tool for becoming a better person.  

Budo isn’t passively effective.  You have to actively work at it.  It will make you more patient, and less liable to lose your temper, more peaceful, and much calmer, if you work with it.  These are all lessons you can pick up in the dojo.  You know you can’t tense up when practicing with someone who is attacking you with a big stick.  It just creates opportunities for her to whack you and slows you down.  Now, can you apply that lesson when you are being attack verbally?  Can you keep calm and choose the best response, rather than tensing up and girding for a fight?  Can you breathe calmly and peacefully?

Keeping your balance and maintaining a solid foundation from which to act is critical in budo.  Keeping those physical lessons in front of you, can you teach yourself to maintain a good mental balance and not go rushing into arguments and not reel back from non-physical aggression?  Can a judoka learn to apply the lesson of ukemi and roll with the attack and not stiffen up?  Can the aikidoka remember to get off the line of attack and realize that a counterattack may not even be necessary?  Can the kendoka lightly deflect the incoming attack so it goes off into unoccupied space?

When you can start to do these things, you’ll be on the path to applying your budo lessons to life and becoming a better person.  Learning to apply these fundamentals can lead to the discovery of other budo lessons that you can train at in everyday life.  

One of the lessons of budo training is that you become good at what you practice.  So, will budo training make me a better person?  It will if that is what I train myself to be

How hard should you train? How good do you want to be?

I really like Rory Miller's stuff.  He's a former prison guard, judo man, and koryu jujutsu teacher.  Here he talks about how hard you have to train to be good.  I wish I had said it.
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2013/04/thats-gotta-hurt.html

Practice Easy and Hard

There are lots of things about practice I don’t like.  I don’t like cleaning up afterward.  I don’t like all the little nit picky preparations.  I don’t like getting up earlier than would be otherwise necessary.  I used to hate practicing the boring old fundamentals.  I still hate practicing the parts that I’m not good at.  Those are the parts that I need to be practicing though.  

As with everything, we like to do the parts that we are good at, and we tend to avoid the parts that we aren’t so proficient at.  I do train in budo in large part because I enjoy it, I like how it makes me feel, and because I like what it teaches me.  I don’t always enjoy the lessons though.  I hate discovering that I’m really bad as some aspect of practice.  I hate learning that my ego is bigger, more involved in what I’m doing, and has more influence on me (I love to tell myself that I’m beyond that, but practice keeps teaching me a different lesson).

It’s easy when we start.  We’re lousy at everything, so all aspects of training are tough.  As we progress though, we don’t progress at all things at equal speeds.  Of the various style of budo that I practice, I’ve been doing Kodokan Judo the longest.  I’ve gotten reasonably good at certain aspects of it, such as groundwork, especially chokes and arm bars, while my standing techniques have not improved nearly as fast.  This creates situations that my ego is all too happy to exploit, but when I let that happen, I don’t learn anything.  

My groundwork is much better than my standing techniques, so in Judo randori (grappling sparring), I can “win” much more often and more quickly by taking things to the ground. Unfortunately, if I do this, I’m not practicing and improving my standing skills, and those need the most work.  This is one of the traps of ego.  It’s more fun to do stuff we’re already good at.  I’ve been doing judo for a while now, so it takes a little bit of courage for me to say, “Hey, there’s this whole section of judo that I really need to work on.  Will you help me?”    I’m used to being the sensei, the guy in front with all the answers, and climbing down off that pedestal can take some work.

I learn a lot more when I work on the parts that I’m not good at though.  Lately, my personal focus at Judo has been Uki Otoshi.  It’s probably the most difficult and least used throw in the entire Kodokan Judo curriculum.  It requires perfect balance taking, timing and execution. That might make it the best throw to practice.  I also noticed that Kano Shihan and the other greats who created the Nage No Kata put right there are the front of the kata, so you can’t miss it.  My theory is that I will learn much more from studying something that is extremely difficult, than I will from practicing the more popular, and frankly, easier throws.

To do uki otoshi, you have to do everything correctly, so when I practice it, I become more aware of my partner’s balance and of the timing and space connecting us.　　I’m forcing myself to extend my abilities and my understanding and my awareness.  And as these skills expand with practice at something I’m still really bad at, I find that my awareness and understanding of balance taking, spacing and timing are better when I’m doing other things where I’m not as inept as when I’m doing uki otoshi.  That’s improving my Judo as whole.

This practice is just about anything but fun though.  I can’t begin to count the ways of not doing uki otoshi that I have discovered so far.  Every one of these inept variations teaches me something.  I’m slowly dialing in on my target, a smooth, clean uki otoshi.

As I’m writing this, I had a small epiphany.  This is the throw my teach Hikkoshiso Sensei used to toss me around with the first few years I was in Japan.  He would wave his arms a little and I would go flying.  I’ve always felt that I started to get good at a Judo when he couldn’t throw me with that technique anymore (it didn’t stop him from throwing me around like a rag doll, it just meant that he wasn’t doing it with uki otoshi).  I still can’t execute a decent uki otoshi, but I can see already I’ve learned something, because suddenly I understand what he was throwing me with all those years ago.  Of course, if I had focused on the tough stuff sooner, I would have understood this that much sooner..

I’m never going to be a great judoka, I know that.  But if I only ever do the parts I’m already proficient at, I’ll never get any better than I am now.  If I just want to have some fun at practice a couple times a week at practice, I guess that’s ok.  Judo offers so much more than just a some fun exercise, that if I don’t work at learning something every practice I feel I’m wasting a great opportunity for learning, improvement and growth.

Practicing the hard stuff is frustrating, tiring, annoying and sometimes disappointing because I don’t achieve the results I think I should.  It is also far more gratifying over time.  Doing what I’m good at is a reliable bit of fun, but that feeling doesn’t last. Practicing hard things isn’t fun, but it is so much more satisfying every time I figure out something new or discover that I can do something I couldn’t do at the last practice.

It really doesn’t matter what art you are studying, it’s always easier and more fun to do the bits that you are best at.  If you can set your ego aside though, and give up on the fun of being good at something for a while, you’ll learn far more, and make more progress by working at the bits you don’t understand yet.  Unfortunately, we rarely make huge improvements by repeating things we already know how to do.  The leaps in understanding and skill come when we work on something we can’t do yet.

Do we know what "self-defense" really means

Most of the techniques we teach in budo, whether it is karate or judo or aikido or anything else, are not simply dangerous.  They are extremely violent.  Many of our students want to learn budo for self-defense.  For a long time I didn’t think about the meaning of self-defense.  The term was thrown around so much everyone in the dojo just assumed we knew what it meant.  I’m quickly coming to realize that I don’t have a clear enough understanding of what self-defense means legally to be sure I won’t get myself in trouble if I’m ever in a situation where knowledge of exactly where the line is drawn is important.

I’ve been doing a little bit of reading by a couple of different writers and one term that comes up is “the Monkey Dance”.  This is used to refer to the social dance that revolves around social violence, which usually falls outside the circle that includes self-defense.  Part of learning the skills of combat, is learning when it is appropriate to use them and when it isn’t.

I’ve heard too many people say “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”  This seems to demonstrate a willful ignorance of the law.  If you know the law, it’s not too hard to figure out what the appropriate response is.  If you don’t know the law, you’re likely to get yourself in a lot of trouble.  Even the military has rules of engagement.  

The best resources I’ve found so far for understanding the rules we operate under are

http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/legal.html

http://www.useofforce.us/

Teaching budo means we are teaching skills that people can apply in life.  If we teach these skills, we have the responsibility to teach people when it is ok to use them, and when using their skills could land them in jail.

The Artist and the Artwork

My friend and colleague, The Rogue Scholar, did me the honor of responding to my post about Creating A Work Of Art.  I had argued that we are each a work of art that we are crafting, and her very well considered reply argues that we are the artist, not a work of art.  I hope I am not misrepresenting her view when I say that she sees the martial artist as expressing herself through the performance of the kata.  She also makes a good point about self-improvement by itself not making one a work of art.

There are a lot steps along the way, and I may be using the idea of the self as a work of art more broadly than the term can support.  I’ll try to unpack my meaning and intention and see where that leads.  I agree that that are many paths to self-improvement, but I would argue that the goal of budo training is not simply moral improvement, but refinement of all aspects of one’s self.  Developing one’s moral understanding of the world is a fine, but limited goal.  Budo 武道 teaches, as do the Daoists, a goal of refined simplicity.  It is not just a moral refinement, as Cook Ting demonstrates.  The Way transcends the physical, but is manifest in physical action.  The Way of Budo is not merely moral improvement.

I have to admit that my use of the term “art” runs very closely towards what the Rogue Scholar is talking about when she describes the classical artist.  The Rogue Scholar says “a classical artist creates something that is unique but also serves her tradition.”  My view of what is happening with budo training is very much in this line of thought.  We are creating a work of art in the service of our tradition.  To me, the work each of us is creating is our self.  

No matter how beautifully we can perform the kata, no matter how expressive we can be within the boundaries of the kata, this is not the art of budo.  The kata are like the finger pointing at the moon in Zhuangzi’s writing.  It is a tool that directs us where we want to go, but if we focus on the finger, we will never see the moon.  If we focus only on the kata, we may never understand what they are pointing us towards.  The kata teach us proper breathing, posture and movement.  Budo practice also teaches us to relax our minds and bodies and to respond to the world as it is rather than as we want it to be.

Mastery of the kata, no matter how beautifully it can be demonstrated, should not be the goal of budo training.  The kata are teaching tools.  The question then is, what are they tools for teaching?  Kata are tools at the most basic level for teaching us skills useful in a particular sort of combat.  They are not tools for learning to do kata, though I admit, simply learning to do the kata well is a wonderful experience and feeling.  The skills necessary to perform the kata well should be the same skills necessary for success in that particular type of combat. They are also skills that are wonderful to have in regular day-to-day life.  It is not what we express when performing the kata that is goal for me.  

For me, the goal of budo training is to be able to express what budo teaches in the kata in everyday life.  At the physical level this means that I move in a manner that expresses the principles of my budo all the time, not just when I am in the dojo.  I want to move with the same control over every bit of my action, with the same fine balance and controlled, relaxed power that I use when I am in the midst of a Shinto Muso Ryu or Shinto Hatakage Ryu kata.  I want to eliminate the unnecessary tension from my body and present the world with a presence that expresses and displays all that my budo is.

At a mental level, I want my everyday mind, my heijoshin 平常心, to be as relaxed as my body.  I don’t want to meet the world with a mind that is stiff with preconceived ideas and expectations,  rigid with assumptions of how things are.  I want a mind that is calm and peaceful as a forest stream.  I want there to be not a ripple the surface of my mind that will distort how I perceive the world.  My goal is to be as peaceful and calm in my readiness to greet the world as I am standing in tsune no kamae as I await the actions of my partner in the dojo.  

I don’t want to keep my budo in the dojo.  The dojo is where I practice what budo is.  Outside the dojo is where I actually perform it.  I know I’m not very good at it, but I try to express my budo in my everyday life.  Most of the time I don’t need the extreme level of readiness that I train at in the dojo, but there are times when even in everyday life I reach moments of intensity similar to the levels I reach when I am training in the dojo.  I’ve been in intense negotiations with people pounding on the table and trying to intimidate me.  I’ve had to deal with crying and screaming and yelling.  If I can draw upon my budo training at these times, and keep my mind calm and body relaxed, then my budo training is showing signs of success.  If I lose my temper, or become rigid with tension and stress and aggression, than my budo training hasn’t been successful yet, and I need to spend more time working on it.  

For me, what we do in the dojo is always practice, even the big demonstrations.  Budo only happens when I am outside the dojo, moving in the world.  It is in the world that I think of myself as a work of art.  In the dojo, The Rogue Scholar is entirely correct.  In the dojo, I am an artist, working to craft my heart, mind and body into something beautiful.  In the dojo I am working on learning to calm my mind, to respond as things really are rather than as I would like them to be.  I am training my body to stay relaxed under the pressure of having someone far more skilled than I am trying to hit me with a really big stick.  The dojo is the place to practice and refine, just as the ballet dancer practices and refines in the dance studio.

The difference between a classical Western artist and an artist of the Way is that the art of the Way is what we do all the time.  It’s how we sit down and how we talk to people and how we eat dinner and how we are gracious and gentle to someone who is verbally attacking us and how we walk down the street and how we eat breakfast and how we deal with that unpleasant fellow at work and how we treat our family even when we aren’t feeling very nice and the million other things we do throughout the day, every day.  Budo is the martial way, but it is only really budo when it informs and transforms every aspect of who we are and how we interact with the world.  If it doesn’t do that, then it’s not budo.  It may still be bu, martial, but it lacks the Way.  This is what I mean when I talk about being a work of art.  Since this is a Way, and not a destination, we are always works in process, but hopefully we become more refined and more polished with each day.

We go into the dojo to train.  What are we training? Our self.  We are using budo to train and refine and polish our self.  In the dojo we sculpt and and polish and refine ourselves.  Outside the dojo that incomplete work of art that is us is on display for the world to see and interact with.  The better the our budo, the more beautiful the mind and body we show to the world.  We are the artist and the artwork.