White

This weekend I'll have the opportunity to don something that spends a lot of time tucked away in a drawer. (No, not my superhero cape.)

My white belt.

I wish I looked as cool as this kid.

A friend invited me to an Aikido training day his dojo is putting on, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn something different. I've taken 2 or 3 Aikido classes before, but nothing in depth. I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about it.

To be honest, I'm almost more excited about the opportunity to put my white belt back on. Training in one art for a while, it's easy to forget what it was like when I first started. How confusing everything was, how my focus was on imitating the folks who knew what they were doing (or at least more than I did), and learning all the new terminology. It will help me keep that mindset fresh both so I can relate to newcomers more readily and so I can remember it for myself in class.

I read a blog post once about how our training backgrounds give us an "accent," so to speak (no pun intended). When you learn a second language, you usually speak it with the accent of whatever your first language is. I saw a lot of this in my Spanish classes; Southerners have such a hard time getting around their accent to properly pronounce foreign words.

It's similar with martial arts. Whatever the first art you learned is, you tend to carry that style of movement with you into whatever else you learn. (At least until you've been immersed long enough in the new art, then the cycle just starts again.) But it's easier to start from scratch than to fix old habits, everyone knows that.

White blank pages, blank canvases, white walls, white belts. They all start at zero and become whatever they're exposed to. So, my goal for this event is to 1) have fun and 2) go back to zero for Aikido.


BONUS ROUND!
In the comment section below, share your experience from when you first started the art you're in now or used to be in.

I don't remember much about my first jujitsu class, but I remember being pretty out of sorts when I went to my first Bujinkan class. I didn't really know the location, I didn't know anyone, I had barely any idea how to do the rolls I was being shown, and everything seemed complex. I didn't know how to act, how to "bow in," what the rules were if any, and so on. I clung to anything I could carry over from my jujitsu training, which unfortunately (fortunately?) wasn't much. Being so new to everything might have been overwhelming if the guys there hadn't been so friendly and patient with me.

Give Up?

A couple weekends ago, I attended the 3rd Southeast Bujinkan Taikai. The instructors all did a great job, and there were plenty of things to take away for further training. The title and subject of this post is what one of the instructors, Jeff Walker, taught on. (Incidentally, it was the same idea he taught on at the Midwest Taikai, which I attended back in August. So glad I got to see it twice!)

What he had us doing was giving up. No, really, that was his section. The punch/sword/whatever is coming, and you just give up.

Not truly giving up, of course. I mean, you are, but you're not. They have to believe you're giving up, that you're not in the fight anymore, and for them to believe something like that, you have to believe it yourself. That's what's so intriguing (and difficult) about kyojitsu. It's a true lie - it's true for as long as you need it to be, and then it turns out to be a lie.

So, with this giving up concept, the point was to believe - and make the opponent believe - that you've given up on the fight. You are resigned to your death. Just that part proved to be incredibly difficult to wrap my head around. I can't speak for others, but I know I'm always in the active mindset of countering, parrying, attacking, torquing, etc. Giving up is inactive, and requires me to turn off what my mind and body really want to do. It only lasts for a few seconds, but flipping that switch off for even that long is like fighting myself. (Obviously there's a lot of practice needed here.)

Once that switch is turned off and the attack is coming in, you flip it back on and get out of the way. It's not turned on full blast, though. Keeping with the light switch analogy, it's like turning on a dimmer at minimum luminosity: you have the intent and will to live back on, but you're still keeping a low profile. For the person attacking, it's like falling into a black hole. Someone is there, and then simply not, with no hint that they shouldn't still be there.

Playing with intent and kyojitsu has always been challenging and fun, and this "giving up" definitely raises the bar. Believing one of your own deceptions is hard enough when it simply redirects intent. Turning it off? That's tough. And definitely something I'll be toying with for a long while.

Multiple Perspectives on Kaname

The teacher I'm training with right now had an interesting assignment for us a couple weeks ago in class. The theme for the year is kaname, and he wanted us to think of techniques or movements that embody what we think the kaname of this art is. Usually I hear things like kamae and kihon happo as examples of the kaname for a movement. But turning that around and looking for a movement that demonstrates the overall kaname? Definitely a nice little workout for my brain.

The yudansha (myself included) demonstrated techniques that each felt illustrated the key point of the Bujinkan. Almost all of us had our uke use the same attack to make our point (3 standard punches, tori moving backward for the first 2 and countering on the 3rd), and all the things we had to say tied into each other.

I asked the others for a description of what they think kaname is and how they demonstrated it. Below are their replies (modified for this post), as well as what I demonstrated.

1. Don't get hit; the goal is to survive, not to "win." Make sure you're getting out of the way of their attacks while making it harder for them to attack again (angling). Then disrupt their balance both physically (strike) and mentally (kyojutsu). This was demonstrated with the 3-punch attack, getting off line of the first two punches, and when the last one comes in, bend your knees to drop down while striking into the ribs. Then, because the goal is survival, check your surroundings and run if all is clear (including your attacker; if he wasn't fazed, then something else needs to be done to get you out of there).
2. Meeting aggressive "hardness" with "softness." Letting all that energy they bring you slide off, meeting them at zero, and doing something from there. My demonstration was avoiding a punch (moving only as much as needed), then doing whatever. What we did that night was an arm bar, but anything that works, works.
3. Looking at the kaname as survival. I demonstrated with the 3-punch evasion, looking specifically at the point at which you decide you can no longer retreat and have to decide to advance/move in.
4. Misdirection of intention, demonstrated from kumiuchi. Start applying omote gyaku with strong intention, then shift to some other kihon - we did mushadori in class. Only shift to the other if they focus on the first, though. If they don't react when you go for omote, go ahead and take it.

What would you say is the kaname of this art? And how would you demonstrate that?

Sanctuary

"A dojo (道場 dōjō) is a Japanese term which literally means "place of the way".[sic]" (Wikipedia)

As many martial arts practitioners have discovered, the dojo is a place of sanctuary. It is a place where we can escape the world and its troubles for a couple hours, and just train. As far as I know, all my fellow students (including the teachers), would say without hesitation that there have been nights when the dojo was a true place of sanctuary from whatever hardships they were going through at the time.

The other night, I thought about the term "dojo" and recalled its meaning. "Place of the way." The origins for that are Buddhist, but my upbringing connects it to the Way. Before the term "Christian" came about, Christ-followers were called followers of the Way. Thinking of it in that sense led me to associate "dojo" with the sanctuary of a church, where the doctrines of the Way are taught.

Once my train of thought arrived there, I discovered there are actually a lot of similarities between the two.

Both serve as dedicated spaces for deepening our understanding of the respective "ways" (which are connected on a deep level I won't get into now). Both are led by teachers who are still students. Both emphasize that this is a place of training/learning, and the practice comes outside, on your own. A sense of family grows in both "congregations." Ritual and mindfulness/prayerfulness permeate both settings. Those are just the obvious points - I'm not even getting into the specific correlations between the budo philosophy and Christian faith.

One more similarity: Both these sanctuaries are very important to me. They are places where I can connect to something bigger than myself. Places where I can be challenged, and grow better for it. Places where, for a time, the focus is not on me or my stressors. The details are different, yes, but the outline is the same.

Thank you, Lord, for sanctuary.

Yame

One night early on in my training, after I'd gotten used to the bow-in/bow-out, my teacher tossed us a little puzzle to work on. I don't remember the exact words, but he implied that there was a purpose and meaning behind the 2 claps, then 1. Some things are just too confusing to bother with, so that one's been on a back burner somewhere waaaaaay in the back. However, the thought that there's something more to the bow-in has been in my mind almost every time we sit in that line, clap, and bow.

I'm still nowhere near figuring out what those claps mean, but I think maybe possibly I'm getting somewhere with part of it. (Potentially.)

I've noticed that when we raise our pressed-together hands and open our eyes from mokuso, my eyes usually focus one of two ways: On the hands or on the world past them. The focus slides from one to the other, and where I look alters my intention (whether it's inward or projected outward). There seems to be some significance there, more so because I wasn't looking for significance when I first noticed it.

Thinking on it right now, it's a lot like something I learned working at Kanakuk Kamp last summer. One of the themes was this phrase: I'm Third. The fuller version is, "God first, others second, I'm third." About half the time I'm doing mokuso, I'm praying or in a spirit of prayer - God first. Then my eyes open, and I naturally have a distant focal point, seeing the area beyond where we'll be training - others second. And finally, my focal point will shift to where my two hands meet - I'm third.

Maybe that's something, maybe it's not. Regardless, thinking that way attaches a good mindset to something we do all the time. I've also thought of it as coming in from the world (distant focal point drawing inward) or as going outward to help better the world (close focal point going outward). Both are good things to keep in mind, I think, and they don't seem too far-fetched to me.

Anyone else have any thoughts they'd like to share about anything in the bow-in/bow-out?

Well...

It seems I'm still out of steam. I got a lot of good feedback from folks for ideas - most of which require time and research - and I've had a few half-baked thoughts, but nothing has solidified. I'll keep working on possible posts in the background, but for now, I guess I'm taking a hiatus. Thank you to those of you who checked the blog yesterday anyway, and I apologize again for not having anything up for you. Hopefully the blog will be back up and running in just a couple weeks; if you're subscribed to my posts, you can set it to send you an email when something goes up.

Until next time.

(Another Delay)

Apologies for not having something up today. I hope to have something up in the next few days to make up for it, but I just don't have the time right now. (Maybe I'll talk about timing in the next post! Who knows?? I sure don't.)

Thanks for your patience!