This past weekend was the annual USA TaiKai and Kunoichi Kai in Atlanta, GA. A lot of great instructors came out, and there were plenty of friendly, skilled people to meet and train with. The theme for the seminar was "Cutting Through the Illusions," playing off the two-fold theme for the year: sword and kaname. The idea was that we would be trying to cut away the extraneous and unnecessary to get to the kaname.
There were several points made that I'll be chewing on for the next few weeks at least, but the one that kept getting repeated by almost all the shihan was kamae. (Some other things they harped on were position, waiting, "short, sharp, and violent" attacks, and knowing the body you've got.)
Kamae is important. Everybody says so, and in this case "everybody" is right. Kamae is at the base of just about everything, and it is present in every efficient movement. I have heard on a number of occasions that Hatsumi Sensei can move the way he does because he's practiced fundamentals like kamae for so long. He understands how they work, and so they don't often look like the formal kamae we're used to. His "soke magic" stems from decades of practicing kamae.
Because so many of the instructors placed emphasis on kamae, I was able to see just how lacking mine are. There was one technique we were working on that seemed very simple: all you had to do was drop back into hira no kamae and let your fist collide with the other person's jaw. Aside from an unfamiliar wrist movement to make the collision more effective, the concept could not have been more straightforward. And I had a ridiculous amount of trouble with it. I almost never practice hira no kamae, and executing it required a great deal of focus.
For something to become intuitive and [relatively] easy, you have to practice it about a jillion times. A story I recently read says 50,000 times. Would you be willing to practice the same movement over and over? It's a daunting number, but if the movement is essential...
Mr. Miyagi had Daniel-san doing all kinds of repetitive movements to ingrain them into his muscles, so that Daniel would be able to bypass the mind when he needed to actually use those movements. You don't have to go sand the wood floors or wax all your cars and your neighbor's cars (though I'm sure your neighbor would love that), but I do think it's important to be able to execute movements like jodan uke, the various kaiten, and kamae without thought. The less you have to think about these fundamentals, the more attention your brain can give to the rest of the situation.
I have high aspirations for my future skill level, and getting there means first having a firm foundation in the fundamentals, particularly kamae. Establishing that means I'll have to get off my rear and start practicing and drilling. I sometimes joke that it would be better if the technology in The Matrix were real and we could download skills and information directly into our brains, but I'm not sure I would actually take that option. Nothing worth having comes easily, and hard work builds the character necessary to go with heightened power and ability. Practice doesn't make perfect, but practice does lead to perfection. What higher aspiration is there than that?
No comments:
Post a Comment