What is that other guy doing?

There are lots of different budo styles, and they each have their own way of doing things that is internally consistent.  Rennis Buchner, a fine budoka and excellent budo historian, writes about problem of assuming that you understand what another person or style does just from watching a little bit.  Rennis doesn't write often, but when he does, it's worth reading.  His essay is at
http://acmebugei.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/watch-what-you-say/

Budo and Ego

All the classical “Do” 道, or Ways, of Japan strive to achieve a better understanding of the world and the self.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing tea ceremony, flower arranging, sword fighting, incense smelling (kodo 香道), calligraphy or any of the other common activities that have been organized into form Ways.  You study codified ways of doing things that have roots going back generations, and sometimes centuries.  The goal is not just master one esoteric art form, but through the focused study, master the self and gain a greater understanding of the Way of the universe.

As people practice and study and refine their art, they naturally move up within the art’s hierarchy.   This is the natural progression of beginner to senior student to junior teacher to senior teacher.  There is always the risk that a person can misunderstand the respect that they receive as their skills and status increase.  There are plenty of people who become recognized for the mastery of a particular skill, who someone conclude that because they are skilled and respected in one special field, they should be respected and lauded in every aspect of their lives.  Their egos seem to take over and they get upset when people don’t acknowledge their superiority and innate greatness.

This can happen with anything.  It’s a not uncommon human failing and it is found even in the Ways of Japan where one of the key things we are supposed to be mastering is our self.  To really advance in any of the Ways, whether martial art or one of the more peaceful Ways, we have to achieve a certain mastery over our self and the voices in our head.  All those stories of the serene tea master, or the calligraphy teacher who calmly looks at the paper for a few minutes and then with a sudden flourish creates a marvelous work of art, these all require that you master the voices in your head so you can concentrate well enough to be serene and peaceful and creative.  It’s true of martial arts as well.  If you can’t learn to quiet your mind, you’re never going to figure out how to get out of the way of that incoming sword cut or jo strike.  And trust me, when your mind wanders and you don’t get out of the way in time, it hurts.  Which brings on a different kind of mental focus.

We have to master parts of ourselves to master any of the arts or Ways.  In mastering a Way though, we don’t have to master one important part of ourselves.  We don’t have to master our ego.  It’s easy for the ego to grow even more quickly than our skills do.  It’s amazing how powerful a fertilizer for the ego a little praise and respect can be.

If a Way is to be more than simply mastering the base, physical skills of the art, then we have to do more than just learn to quiet our mind for the time it takes to perform the skill.  We have to apply the lessons broadly to our whole selves, and not let the mastery of one skill enhance our ego to the point that it prevents further growth.   This is a risk for anyone studying any skill.  In a Way, it is a sad thing, because it prevents a student from achieving everything that the Way can give.

For all this, few arts and Ways have the inherent hurdle of budo .  Budo practice actually makes the practitioner more powerful, which can feed the ego with the thrill of the power and the desire for more.  If acted upon and followed, the path of the ego is completely odds with the path of budo, but it is an easy path to start upon, and difficult one to abandon once you have started treading it.

The power taught in budo is real power in the most basic, literal sense.  A student learns raw, physical power over others.  This is a huge trap for some people.  The ability to physically dominate and intimidate the people around you is an alluring drug. In most modern societies, this power is even more seductive because it’s one we avoid socially and culturally we play down the realities of physical power.  We suppress discussion physical power within social dynamics because people aren’t supposed to use it.  We’re wired to react physical power even if it’s not supposed to be a dynamic of polite society.

Power dynamics are a part of most social interactions, and physical posturing is a part of it, even if people aren’t aware of it..  There are people who use aggressive posturing to influence and dominate the world around them.  This works on lots of people, but not on those who are unusually strong, or who have great confidence in their physical skills.  People who do budo don’t react the way untrained people do, and they can in fact become quite dominant because of their skills.  This is another ego trap.  It feels good when people defer to you and let you do things your way.  That’s fine if it’s for a good reasons, but if it’s just because of your martial skills, then it’s probably a bad thing.  Letting this sort of thing feed your ego, and using it to get your way, is another dangerous detour from the budo Way.

Intimidating people, power posturing, and even physically abusing people is an especially dangerous trap in the dojo, because we are supposed to be using and practicing our skills there, and senior students and teachers are expected to demonstrate superior skills.  The lure of power over others because you are physically capable of it can be subtle.  It is easy for senior practitioners to edge from demonstrating superior technique over the line to abusing juniors.  The throws can become unnecessarily hard and brutal.  Joint locks can be go from controlling to inflicting uncalled for pain to physically damaging.  Just because the senior can do it, and they like the feeling of being able to make the juniors react.  This is a subtle trap, because it can start out with simple things, like a throw that’s just a little harder than it needs to be, or a joint lock that is painful when it’s not necessary.  The senior likes how the junior reacts, and more throws become extra hard, and the joint locks get more painful.  From this point, things just get worse, as the seniors ego needs more and more signs of his power and dominance from those below him.

Juniors can unintentionally encourage this behavior by showing greater respect and deference to the person being abusive, because they see this as evidence of the person’s superior skill, rather than as evidence of abuse.  This just makes the ego trap even bigger.

Power is drug for the ego, and in the dojo there is the danger that people will reward you for abusing the physical power that you have.  Just because what you are studying has “Do” 道 in the name, doesn’t guarantee that you will become a better person.  There are pitfalls along the way, and the one labeled “Ego” is perhaps the largest and most dangerous.  This is because it can be so subtle that you don’t even realize you are falling in.  Worse, it feels good.  Having your ego stoked by the people around you feels wonderful, and can be quite addictive.  It feels good to receive compliments and praise, but if you start trying to improve because you want the praise or the power, rather than improving to discover more about the art, yourself and the Way, then you have left the Way and are plunging into the pitfall of ego.

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.