Mind 2: Ma

I was fighting today, giving pointers.  My mokuso for today was eyes - gan - and I tried to see holistically and peripherally.  I tried to feel what was coming, but the thrill of battle - it's so easy to get swept up in it and give in to old (and bad) habits.  Watching someone's fists...it's sounds stupid to even say...but so many of us do it.  We did it when we were white belts and we do it now.  The only difference is: I know better.  Something to work on.

I was in front of this kid, a green belt, maybe 10 or 12 years old.  He should have been in the kids class.  Except for one thing.  This kid had an amazing, instinctive, preternatural sense of the combative distance.  He could sense ma-ai to within a half-step...perhaps even more precise than that.  I'd circle and shift feet, I'd shift stance and step back.  But the moment the distance shortened, even a little, he sensed it.  Even when he had no frame of reference, even when I was circling trying to sneak up on him, he'd know.  I've never seen anything like it.

You see people who can sense danger, and people who move back by instinct.  But this kid only moved back hard the moment I was entering ma-ai.  I told him how great it was and that when he feels that distance rather than move back he should strike.  I came in hard thinking I had him.  His fist came up into my jaw.  I wasn't sure if I was ashamed or proud.  It was surreal.

I could keep him off of me with range - or just overpower him in close.  But between Toma and Chikama, this little kid was owning me.  I couldn't tell him - I didn't want it to go to his head.  But he could be something.  This fat, goofy little kid.  I love it.

I have so far to go.  The only thing that gives me hope is that I'm learning from everyone.

Body 1: 45 d 8 h 33 m

My brother went to Montreal and saw Cirque du Soleil.  He was amazed by the feats of strength displayed by the men and went on and on about this one guy who was supporting his whole body with one arm.  I shook my head and smiled – it was always such a strange thing to hear Kareem offer praise, so when he did it couldn’t help but be impressive.  I had looked into bodyweight training and balance and static holds a few years back and pursued it with enthusiasm.  But distractions and injury reared their twin heads and my training on that front waned.

It strange to hear someone say something like ‘I’m working out’ or ‘I’m going to the gym’ when what they mean to say is that they’re training.  It’s important to understand that we are always learning, always in training.  We are in training sitting down and standing.  We are in training lying in bed.  Our minds and bodies are never static – it is ever-changing, always in flux.  Every moment that we are alive we are internalizing our behavior and the world around us.  People who smoke become expert smokers.  Persistent couch potatoes become world-class obese couch potatoes.  When you say you’re working out, you mean to say that you are going to exercise to become stronger.  But without commitment and dedication working out is still training, but not to be stronger.  You are just training in mediocrity.  Training in half-measures.

I was watching Kareem going on the gymnastic rings set and I showed him some of the people training in commitment and dedication on Youtube, and some of the skills their training has brought them.  Kareem was amazed.  And I was…blasé.  There was no fire in me, to push myself, to reach for excellence.  Maybe it was fear…of disappointing myself again.  Fear of giving up.

I’ve been training in letting go a long time.  Now I have to train in holding on.  I have to train in commitment and dedication, train in discipline.  And I needed an example – something, anything – that I could point to and say ‘Look, I did that!’  I put the time in and look at where I’ve gotten.

And then I was looking at my playing time on Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer.

45 d 8 h 33 m.  45 days’ worth of sitting and staring at a screen.  Of shooting and being shot.  Of killing and dying.  Of winning and losing.  Winstreaks, losestreak, deathstreaks, killstreaks – I kept coming back.  10 minute games at a time…for 45 days. A month and a half of non-stop training in Modern Warfare 2.  Wow.

And it’s not to say that I’m not good.  I can hold my own.  But imagine what my body would be capable of if I spent that time, 1088 hours, not sitting, but working out.  Would I be able to do some of those things that Kareem swears to do one day?

Modern Warfare 3 is coming out November 8th.  I’m going to match play time with gymnastic time 1 for 1 until I get back to that 1000 hour threshold.  And then I’m going to see which 1000 hours paid off the most.

Mind 1: I did a strange thing with my mind just then...

I've been injured for some time now and I thought that my recovery was nearly complete.  Then, on Father's Day, I was playing basketball and my hip nearly gave way again.  So I'm still recovering.  I think of the things that I can do in the meantime: writing, rehabilitating...and I find that my karate is actually not that bad.  It can be fluid or rigid, strength or leverage, swift or slow.  I'm starting to finally make some small progress in making it more mindless, more mushin.

I've been working on different meditation schemes with varying success but I did want to mention one breakthrough.  I was on the bus, working with opening my senses and breathing, closing and opening my focus.  I'd start at the immediate - the sensation of my body, pulses, itches, the feeling of clothes against skin.  Then I'd move outward: scent of perfume, sound of the wind outside, the traffic, a woman talking on a cell, the pages of a book being shifted, the driver ripping a transfer, the coins being dropped in the farebox.  Then I opened my eyes and tried to clear my mind enough to take in as much as I could without dwelling on any one detail - fidgeting in a chair, itching an ear, a look, an expression, the sunlight, someone checking the time, the guy next to me making the sign of the cross on his chest after looking at a girl's rear as she stood.

And then...I woke up.  I roused myself from...I'm not sure really.  Was I sleeping?  I could have sworn I was lucid...and when my eyes opened the bus was basically exactly where I remembered it being.  Time hadn't past, yet I'd lost a sense of time.

I was in that place between sleep and awake.  I hadn't just dozed off, because my mind was still aware of the things that I'd been observing in an unbroken flow.  But the feeling of just having been dreaming was unmistakable.  My lucid observations had dipped me into a dream state.

Now: can I do it again?

No Way and Empty Hand

I was reading a blog entry just now on Bruce Lee and the writer was being very verbose, and I think what they were trying to say was that studying Bruce was difficult because there is a separation of the man into separate and dissimilar fields of discourse: Bruce the actor, Bruce the philosopher and Bruce the fighter. The writer poses the interesting question:

In short, a question rarely posed by those who would discuss Bruce Lee’s ‘philosophy’ is that of whether it was a ‘philosophy’ or an ‘ideology’: a retroactive justification.

To me, this is a question that I've thought of many times. How many people actually come to a clear and internally consistent worldview? Did Bruce really have it down pat or was he just muddling through like the rest of us? Did the cohesiveness of what he thought exist when he was alive and dealing with real problems in the real world, or did it come afterwards when people looked at what he was and tried to make sense of it?

Then, if we are to consider philosophy as liberation and ideology as subjugation, the former as encouraging thought and the latter as demanding obedience, doesn't a philosophy too define itself by means of exclusion? That is, what makes a philosophy special, even though it deals in the realm of thought, is what it gets right that others get wrong? Doesn't philosophy also become too restrictive a word for a living breathing person forced to adapt to an unforgiving and unpredictable world?

To my mind, to know the philosophy of Bruce Lee, someone would have to know what he'd say to any question that was ever posed him. You'd have to know his mind perfectly to say that there was a philosophy of the man. Who'll ever know me that well? Hell, I don't even know me that well! I wouldn't imagine that I'd answer a question the same way now that I would ten years from now, or ten years ago for that matter.

The best and longest and most helpful compilations of wisdom ever written, from every discipline and every culture, are united in one quality: their capacity for self-contradiction. The Bible, the Hagakure, the Art of War - each of them at one point say one thing and then later say the exact opposite. Men are no different. We contradict ourselves all the time to roll with life's punches. To try and find some unifying cohesion afterwards can quickly lead to folly. We seek to simplify and distill, to improve our understanding, but we'd do well to remember that great saying from Einstein that things must be made as simple as possible but not simpler. Simplifying things too much - Relativity, violence, Karate, Bruce Lee - robs that thing's essence entirely, leaving you feeling like you know when you profoundly don't.

Some simplifications are helpful and some aren't. Equivocation, yes. False, no. Sign of an open mind...perhaps? One particularly unhelpful simplification with regards to Bruce, at least as far as I've read of the man, is this idea that a good martial artist dabbles. A good martial artist tastes different meals and then takes the best ingredient from each and puts it on their plate. Use what is useful and discard what is useless and make something uniquely your own.

It's a compelling argument. But even Bruce himself addressed it's main flaw. How does someone judge what is useful? How do you gain the insight and critical eye necessary to deem something worth discarding? Someone jumping from Tai Chi to Muay Thai to Judo to Brazilian Jujitsu to Kali to Karate to Wing Chun and imagining themselves becoming comprehensive in the fighting disciplines may well gain a great many insights into the methods of fighting. But how are they to judge which methods to take and which to lose?

This task is accomplished not through experience with many fighting disciplines per se, but through Experience, period. It is not acquired from a martial art or many martial arts but rather, by a martial artist. That is to say, all the techniques of many styles or one style for that matter won't give it to you. You have to get it for yourself. You teach yourself what is useful by usage. But you don't have to go to 20 different dojos to learn. So long as you leave no stone unturned and keep your mind open, a true martial artist can be made from one style or many. You just need to be honest in your preparations.

In this I feel that what Bruce was trying to say has become a simplistic appeal to superficial dabbling into different arts. "Using no way as way" has been taken to mean, "Don't stay!" Don't stay in a discipline, don't examine it, don't seek to become part of that heritage. When really what he means is, "You study Karate and know all the reasons why you shouldn't grab someone's legs...but his legs are where he's most vulnerable...Grab his legs!" Don't confuse what is right in a style with what is right in a fight. The style should reinforce your freedom to act, not restrict it.

Shin Kumite

An attempt to reconcile the contradictions between ippon and jiyu kumite, between tournament karate's dynamic athleticism and karate's defensive application, Shin Kumite seeks to bridge the gap between combat and contest.  Com-test!  Or maybe Conbat.  Combative contest.  Shin Kumite:  win the Moment!

Iain Abernathy's thinks Kudo may hold the key, but I think mine is even better.

Stance

Karate has this concept, dachi, which are concrete and discrete standing positions that you learn and are the basis for the kata.  At first, a person might think the concept of how to stand would be a pretty unnecessary thing to know in a fighting system.  We all know how to stand, we learn from very young.  Moreover, fighting is less about standing in one place and more about getting in and out of the way of something.  Anyone who ever watched a boxing match, a fencing contest or two people dancing together would assume that the footwork of motion would be more beneficial to fighting than the mechanics of being stationary.

And this first assumption is, to my mind, mostly correct.  Moving in combat is essential.  Stationary objects tend to get hit pretty easily.  Moving out of the way of something, putting the hand up to swat a fly at your ear - these are natural reactions that some karate training tends to deaden within a student.  Whereas in an untrained person, an object on a trajectory with their head would instinctively cause back to bend, hands to go up, head to go down, or feet to shift place, undoubtedly some karate training cause people to think about the right thing to do, when they should be doing something straight away.

But the essential question is: Where are you moving to?  Are you moving out of the way of something to a position and place that gives you the advantage?  Or are you moving out of the path of a punch and into the path of a knee?

Place and position are keys to the concept of stance.  The main reason why the way you stand in Karate is of great importance is because of Karate's underlying assumptions.  First, karate does not assume a fight.  Karate assumes an assault.  Karate doesn't assume two people at high noon in a ring with gloves.  It assumes one (or more) person(s), coming at you from behind, with a knife.  You shouldn't have time or opportunity to dance and feel the other person out.  You shouldn't have a chance to jab to get the range.  You turn, square yourself with the danger and act.  Karate assumes that when you defend yourself it will be on a relatively small area of space, covering a relatively short distance over a relatively short space of time.  Karate assumes that one or two shifts of your feet will be all the chance that you get to gain control of a situation. Either you'll shift to good position with good footing, seize a hand, a shirt, a neck, drive a fist into a face, a finger to the eye, a knee to the groin, a foot to shin, an elbow to the sternum or ribs, wrench a wrist, maneuver into a clinch or drive your attacker off balance...or you'll get knifed seven times and left for dead.  Your murderer won't be looking at what your feet will be doing.

How you stand (and move to stand) on that small space of real estate as the space between you and your enemy vanishes is the first tool that you have.  And if you lose your footing and go to the ground - scared, alone, attacker poised above you, cold earth beneath you, unable to run - Sayonnara!

So we have to make the most of this first tool.  That said, certain ways of standing make it easier to do certain things.  Widen your legs and your weight lowers, making it more difficult to lift you off the ground.  Crossing one leg behind or in front of the other allows you to turn and pivot quickly on the spot.  Squeezing your inner thighs together makes it more difficult to strike your groin from below.  Placing more weight on one leg than the other makes it easier and faster to kick with the less weighted leg.

So based on the urgency of when the stance will be important, you'd think that karate training would put a great emphasis on getting in and out of stances and less on simply standing in a stance.  You'd think this for the simple reason that the transition to a stance - moving from crossing legs to face your opponent to dropping weight to control your opponent - is what makes the stance valuable in the first place.  What difference does it make whether you can sit in shiko dachi (low stance) for hours if you can't drop your weight faster than someone can tackle your knee?  What difference does it make if your neko ashi dachi (cat stance) looks good in the mirror if you can't close your legs faster than a kick to the groin?

Instead of serving a purpose, the stances are relegated to being dead postures practiced, at best, to strengthen the legs and at worst, because that's what your teacher told you to do.  They aren't taught as something that will help you during the worst ninety-four seconds of your life.  They are taught as a piece of artifice, something that has an outward appearance, a standard by which you can be judged for your next belt color.

Stance - dachi - is another one of these things in karate that causes us to spend a lot of head time and not enough body time.  That is, many karate teachers will tell you how a stance should look in the mirror but not many will ask how it feels to you.  Do you feel stable?  Do you feel balanced? In what direction is the stance strong?  Weak?  Could you fall into this position if someone punched at you?  If someone grabbed your shirt and tried to stab you?  Can you be easily lifted?  Can you move quickly from this position?  Would it come naturally to you or would you resort to something else?  Why?

Form follow function but function does not always follow form.  The best criteria of whether your stance is good is not whether someone can push you over or if your knee is over your toe but rather whether the stance gives you advantage over another human being.  A stance of a good visual form can work well.  But if it doesn't, no matter how good it looks, then you ARE practicing how to stand and lose.

Go and Ju

I see things at the dojo on Curlew that make my blood simmer sometimes and sometimes I feel guilty that I'm being a karate snob.  But it's so difficult to tell if I'm being too hard and expecting too much and assuming too much or if I'm in the right and my instincts are sound.  One of the major lineages of karate, Goju-ryu, shepherded to the modern time by Chojun Miyagi and later Morio Higaonna, embodies karate's commitment to mind-body balance in its very name:  Go is Japanese for 'hard', ju japanese for 'soft'.  The hard-soft style, don't be always tight, don't be always loose.  The hard part, obviously, is knowing when to be one and when to be the other.  When the matter is a punch, effectiveness holds the key.  Effectiveness in life is sometimes harder to determine.

So at karate tonight, I was doing the same go, san, ippon kumite that I absolutely loved doing last class.  Except this time I was paired with a female yudansha, maybe a 4th or 5th dan.  She's was middle-age, and her training has likely imbued her with the vitality of a younger person.  She had pretty good eye contact and pretty good control.  Is she a nice lady?  Absolutely.  Did she offer me pointers in a humble and discreet way?  Yes, indeed.  Was she sincere in her efforts to help my karate grow? No question.  Should I expect the same sort of intensity in a 50 year old that I would in a 20 year old?  No, and I don't.

Would I be afraid of this person, who has probably trained in karate as long as I've been alive, if we were to fight and one of us had to live and the other had to die?

This is my conundrum.  Am I being too hard on this woman?  Are my expectations of her unreasonable?  Isn't karate supposed to imbue a fierceness within the meekest of people, a will to do what it takes and live or die with the consequences?  Karate training should have enough toughness to it to give anyone a moment's pause when they look into your eyes. It isn't fear you project.  It should be confidence.  It should be Go, hardness, solidness.  It should be certainty, the certainty that whatever the future holds, if you try to hurt me, you're in for a fight.

When I never see that in someone's eyes, it's hard for me.  It's difficult for me to take their advice, or heed their counsel, when I know in my heart they wouldn't even put up a decent fight. These are the people that know a lot about Karate but don't know Karate.   They know technique, but could never execute them with blood in their eyes.  And they've never wondered whether or not they can.  They can show you what to do, but not why you do it.  They come to class, 3 days a week for years, and go through the motions, never pushing themselves, forever remaining Ju, soft.  But if you don't reach down inside for that hardness in class, it won't appear out of nowhere when you need it most.  The body that betrays you...the body that runs away, as Ushiro-Sensei says.

We're doing go hon, san bon and ippon kumite, and she punches and I'm blocking and she winces in pain.  And since I'm not a monster, I ask if I'm going too hard (go), and she politely mentions that I am and I soften (ju).  And she mentions it again. And I soften (ju).  And she mentions things that I can try to soften (ju) more.  And soften (ju) some more.  I soften (ju) the motions so much that I'm not really doing them any more - I'm not trying to block her punch, I'm trying not to hurt her arm (And it wasn't a very good punch...people afraid to get hit are almost always also afraid to hit you and therefore pull their punches, which obviously, helps you both).

And this, sadly, is happening everywhere.  Except in MY dojo.  The owness is not on the person blocking to not hurt you.  The owness is on you to either deal with the pain, learn to avoid getting hit there or get stronger.  Especially when your partner is deliberately trying not to hurt you.  I'm trying to be true to the exercise while being as gentle as possible and she's complaining I'm too rough, uncoordinated, out of control.  But I could go really soft (ju) and it wouldn't hurt her arm at all - I just wouldn't be blocking the punch.  Next we have to go to the opposite extreme.  Imagine if I was trying to hurt her (go).  If my best efforts at not hurting her can't succeed, how many punches would it take to down her if I punched her like my life depended on it?  One?

In the oldest karateka in the world, I feel that that number should be two at the least.  If you can't deal with, endure, withstand, deflect, avoid, or control two of someone's best punches before being overwhelmed, what is all this for?  What was the 30 years of training for?  Just to get into shape?  Run marathons.

On top of all of that is the reality that the hard (go) blocks of karate - Jodan, Soto, Uchi and Gedan, - are supposed to be both defense and attack.  Higaonna is fond of saying that if someone punches at you, your block should be able to break their arm, ending the affair in one motion.  If you wanted to dance, dance.  If you wanted to deflect, slap their hand away with a parry, like in boxing.  This isn't dancing.  This isn't boxing.  This is karate.  You are a weapon.

So there I am, being meek and respectful to a black belt with 10 years more training than me, who is telling me my blocks should be soft (ju).  I don't want to compromise my beliefs and be disingenuous but I also didn't want to offend my sempai.  I felt like asking her: Who should I listen to...you or Morio Higaonna?  When Ushiro-sensei says to be soft (ju), it's softness wrapped around hardness (goju).  His softness (ju) can toss (go) people.  I've felt that softness that can toss people.  This, was not that.

It would be one thing to say that you're block can be soft to grab someone or hard to hurt someone depending on the use.  But that's not what she was saying.  She was saying that what I was doing was wrong.  When it wasn't.  And I'm tempted to say that the pain in her arm was more important than whether what I was doing was effective.  I'm also tempted to say that she just never took her training seriously enough to get blocked without bruising.  Well, if you're afraid of bruising, why do you do karate?  I'm mean, yeah, it's unpleasant.  But it's also honest - the key to whether you're actually doing something or pretending to do something.  Whether there was actually contact, or near contact.  I would argue that if you went through a karate class without a bruise, bump or ache, your karate won't help you that much when you need it.  How could you take karate for 3 decades and still be afraid of a punch?

Brown belts who don't know how to fall.  Black belts afraid of punches.  I really wonder what an Okinawan master like O-Sensei, who trained on grass and concrete and punched makiwara for hours and could pull his balls up into his abdomen, would have said about a couple of bruises.  Am I being too go (hard)?  Are they simply learning at their pace, in their way, all things relative, nothing hard (go) and fast, nothing absolute?  Do I actually need to soften (ju) my blocks and soften (ju) my demeanor to be like the others at the dojo on Curlew?  Do I want to be soft (ju) like them?  Is it right to demand more: to expect more of myself?  I'll meditate on these things.