It’s not easy being green, green as in the Aikido belt colour. And what if, just what if, for me, green is as good as it gets in Aikido? I’ve been worrying about that.
But I’ve decided to be positive about it and work at being the best green belt I can be. Maybe I won’t ever be able to roll well enough to train for a more advanced belt but I love Aikido and it’s all okay. I don’t need to be all type A, over achiever in all things! I’ve got a Wikipedia page that details my academic accomplishments. I’ve got a PhD. I’m a full professor. Maybe it’s okay to never have a black belt. Can I just be mellow about it?
I’m trying.
Saturday I showed up at the dojo for the first Saturday morning class I’d been able to attend in a long while. I was worried about rolling but I needn’t have been. After a few warm up rolls, we moved on the practice with weapons. I like the weapons aspect of Aikido training but it took some work to get there. See Channeling my inner warrior for my first exposure to Aikido weapons techniques and some of my initial reservations.
Here I am a white stripe ago with my bokken, wooden Aikido sword. (It’s a thing of beauty, made of Purpleheart-“When freshly cut the heartwood of Purpleheart is a dull grayish/purplish brown. Upon exposure the wood becomes a deeper eggplant purple.” Thanks Rob and Sensei Matthew.)
There was a big announcement in our class about the changing Aikido testing curriculum at our dojo, which will now include weapons techniques and demonstrations. There’s an awful lot to learn. This means that there will be a pause in testing. Big sigh of relief here. The earliest green belts can test for brown belt with stripes is the spring. Phew! I was so happy to hear that. I hadn’t realized quite how much testing had stressed me out until I heard that news.
I am also very excited to have something new to learn that doesn’t require getting better at rolling. Also, weapons techniques are very easy to practice outside. I love being outdoors and I am already planning an event with bokkens at the beach.
So expect to hear more about Aikido weapons…
Here’s the first thing we are all working on, Happo Giri, or 8 direction cut.
And here’s Steven Seagal with swords, just because.
One of the joys of having a blog is you get to see the same themes pop up each year at the same time. Oh, autumn, it’s you again!
For me there are two main parts to this autumn story when it comes to my fitness activities. I love riding in the fall but each fall I start riding my bike less on weekdays (bye bye evening light) and I find myself back in the Aikido dojo, back on the mats. Hello angry white pajamas, hello old Aikido friends. The second part, I wrote about recently. It’s my annual bout of autumn sadness.
These two story lines converge when it comes to Aikido. Each fall, along with questioning life’s meaning in general, I find myself asking why am I doing this particular thing, Aikido. I love it but maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I should just quit Aikido. It’s really hard and I’m not very good at it and I can’t roll and I go through all the angst and agony about whether or not this is something that fits in my life. (See way from way back when, Thinking about quitting: Life lessons from Kenny Rogers and Aristotle.)
I’m always going to be a Jill-of-all-sports. It’s never going to be just Aikido for me. I love canoeing, and bike riding, and weight lifting too. I absolutely have to be outdoors a lot.
And the thing is we all like narratives of success. Even when the total amount of good is the same, we like life stories where things begin bad and get better (think David Sedaris and Jeanette Walls) better than ones where things start out okay and go downhill. We like it when things get better and better . But not everything in life gets better and better. Sometimes we have to say this might be as good as it gets and that’s okay.
Back to Aikido.
What’s my issue with Aikido? Well, I’m not very good at rolling and you need to be able to do the advanced break falls in order to train for advanced belts. That makes sense. I can’t do them. I’m currently a green belt and the next belt for me is brown with stripe and to get that I would need to be a lot better rolling. I also just don’t have the time to commit to training for another belt level. I’ve got a big job with lots of travel and I’ve got lots of other things I want to do to.
Also I’ve been doing Aikido now for eight years and I’m not getting much better at rolling. The thing is though I still love it, I don’t get much better. So the other day I try to put a different perspective on things, to think about things differently. The world might not change but the way I look at it could change. Don’t lots of inspirational posters tell us this?
What I wondered was whether or not it would be okay to be a green belt forever. Would I keep coming to Aikido even if I never tested again?
Stopping progress and finding “as good as it gets” is true for lots of sports. Would you keep running if you never got any faster? What if you could never run any further? What if this is it? We talk about athletic values rather than aesthetic values but what if getting better wasn’t an option?
When Tracy and I started this blog and our fittest by fifty challenge, we wanted to be the fittest we’ve ever been at 50. That was an exciting goal but of course there’s a downside to that which is coming down the other side.
As we get older we can be training just as hard or harder and not seeing progress, staying the same, or even getting slower.
So I’m using Aikido kind of as a test case for staying the same and see if I can be okay with it.
I’m going to work really hard at being an excellent green belt and enjoy where I am without worrying about progress.
I’m not sure I’ll succeed at this goal, that is my goal of being happy without getting better–it’s been my goal for awhile. See Aikido Love from last fall. I love Aikido and I don’t want my inability to roll to take me off the mad for the rest of my life.
This might be as good as it gets but that’s still pretty great.
I’ve written before about my struggles with even the most basic of Aikido breakfalls. There are sports, and aspects of sports, that come easy to me. And then at the far opposite end are Aikido breakfalls. I struggle so much. Still, when I fall now–in real life–I fall well. I’m less scared of falling on snow and ice. And I find this demonstration breathtaking and beautiful and aspirational. Watch all the way through. They don’t all go as planned.
As martial arts go, Aikido isn’t bad for numbers of women and girls. But still, I often think, we could do better. Usually in a given night in the dojo there’s twenty people training, and three or four of us are women.
Something happened that was interesting the other night though. The gender ratio was reversed, way more women than men. What was different?
We were playing outside on the grass. Our dojo is located in a community centre and it’s under repair. The room we use is closed for maintenance. Instead of cancelling classes we’ve moved outside, practising in the park next door.
What difference does that make?
I think we’re more playful, less formal. There’s fewer people in uniform, fewer people wearing belts. Certainly we looked more approachable, less intimidating.
We’re also pretty visible, practising in the park on the corner of a busy road. People out walking their dogs stop to watch and ask questions.
We don’t do any throws or rolls. (Grass stains, stray dog poo.) Instead we’ve been doing more weapons work and more practical self defence. Last week, we practised what to do if someone attacks you in the park, in the park. Last night we worked on responses to hair pulling and grabbing.
I’m not sure if there’s a connection between our excellent gender ratio (last night, 8 women, 4 men) and playing outdoors. Maybe it was just a coincidence. But it was a lot of fun. One of the reasons I don’t train as much on the summer is that I really like being outside. Maybe next month we can take it to the beach. Aikido in the waves!
Kessler makes it clear he is not equating “masculine” with men, or “feminine” with women – he is speaking in terms of principles, which often cut across physical gender. His theme is the integration of these masculine / feminine principles to create oneness through Aikido.
Kessler sees three common mistakes preventing this integration. They are:
Polarization (identifying too strongly with one of the poles)
Confusion (not clearly understanding the difference between the two poles)
Refusing Distinctions (making it taboo to differentiate between “masculine” and “feminine”, and thus failing to understand either pole).
Kessler’s article focuses on the individual’s personal experience. But he also challenges us to think about how these “mistakes” play out more broadly, in the culture of our own dojo.
And for me, the first one really struck a chord. I’ve been thinking for a while, that because the martial arts are generally male-dominated, there are some ways in which more “masculine” ways of doing things are sometimes unconsciously valorized in the dojo – by both men and women.
This is no one’s “fault”. It’s just an expression of the way many of us have been conditioned to think and perceive. And all too often, we don’t even realise we’re doing it.
One example I’ve noticed is that inexperienced men and women often tend to be “bad” at ukemi (receiving throws) in different, gender-specific ways.
Many (not all) women start off very scared and hesitant to fall, and so it takes a long time before you can throw them properly.
Meanwhile, many (not all) men start off by hurling themselves around and crashing into the mat with force and a loud slap of their body.
I don’t believe either of these is “worse” than the other. They’re both awkward and need refinement. True ukemi is a perfect blend of hard and soft.
But in my experience, what I’m identifying as the “feminine” version of getting it wrong is far more likely to be seen as wrong – and labelled as an inability to take ukemi. While the “masculine” variant is seen as a more normal, expected stage of the learning journey. In fact it is often valorized and even encouraged in many dojos.
A second example is to do with the use of strength. We are often told that beginners tend to rely on muscular strength at first; and over time they learn to relax and use technique instead. It can take a very long time to reach this stage; and I’ve seen this over-reliance on strength in many men and women, unfortunately including myself.
But I’ve also seen another, completely different process at play. This is where a student (more often a woman, although by no means always) starts martial arts with apparently no strength whatsoever, and can’t seem to summon up any kind of power from anywhere. But over time, their strength and power start to emerge, making them a better practitioner.
Some of us may start from one pole, and some from the other. Ideally we meet in the middle. In theory, I can’t see any advantage to either path – only the fact that they are different.
But in real life, an over-strong beginner is often likely to be instinctively evaluated as more competent and promising than an over-weak beginner. Again, learning to temper hardness with softness is often seen as the “normal” learning process for many martial arts; while learning to temper softness with hardness may not be recognized in the same way. The subtle expression of this (probably unconscious) judgement from teachers and peers may then contribute to the first student persevering – and the second giving up.
But if we can value and support both starting points equally, we may find those weak and timid students doing as well in time as the strong ones . . .
It would of course be very wrong to slip into uncritical gender essentialism. But the idea that some women might sometimes travel a different path to some men is not new. Carol Gilligan challenged Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, because it apparently “proved” that men were more highly developed than women. Gilligan argued that this was only because Kohlberg’s stages were male-oriented; and that women’s morality generally developed in a different way. [1]
Maureen Murdoch adapted Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey, and developed an analogous roadmap for the Heroine’s Journey, to address the specific psycho-spiritual journey of contemporary women. [2]
So with all the emphasis on integrating yin and yang through martial arts training, and perhaps especially so in Aikido, it’s possible that there may be scope to think in terms of different starting points, different experiences and different journeys – all on the way to the same ultimate goal of integration.
Kai Morgan is a martial arts blogger, with a special focus on women’s experience of and participation in the martial arts. You can find her blog at www.budo-inochi.com and like/follow her facebook page:www.facebook.com/kaimorg
We have a brand new student who’s only been coming to classes for a couple of weeks, and at a class last week he did the warm-up and then stepped off the mat and joined me where I was sitting, watching class.
He asked me in halting English (he’s Korean) if aikido helped teach how to be calm.
Well.
Let me tell you, this has been a subject very much at the front of my mind for months – not only as I’ve been dealing with my cancer diagnosis and treatment, but also as I’ve been struggling with some huge ups and downs in my working life. And a couple of months ago, when I was going through a really rough few weeks with the latter, it was something I thought about almost every waking moment. How could I use my aikido training and practice to deal with emotional and psychological distress?
Last night I looked the new student in the eye and without missing a beat said, “Yes!”
The trouble was, I didn’t quite know how to explain it to him so that he would understand, because of the language barrier. In a flash, it came to me.
I pointed to my bald head, and said I’d had cancer, and many other problems.
Then I pointed to the mat. Sensei Therese was teaching second control – nikkajo – at that moment, and I pointed out the students who were applying the second control to the wrists of their attackers.
(In the photo at the beginning of this post, the people on the right side of each pair are applying the second control to the wrists of the people on the left, who’ve moments earlier just tried to hit them. A video describing the entire technique is below.)
I took the young man’s hand in mine just like the people on the mat, and explained that when we first learn second control, we usually grip our training partner’s hand very tightly. I made a grimace, and screwed up my face as if I were trying to do something very difficult, and gripped his hand as if my life depended on it.
Then I explained that the technique actually works better if our hands are relaxed. When we tense up, the attacker can feel it through our touch, and they tense up too, making it harder to move them. If our own hands are relaxed when we touch them, they don’t realize there’s a threat, and then at exactly the right moment we can apply quick pressure at the proper angle, and they’re controlled by us.
I changed my grip on his hand.
“Gentle,” I said, and moved his hand. I repeated the illustration one more time. Screwed my face and body up, and held his hand in a death grip. Then loosened up, “gentle,” and moved him.
And that’s when I had my aha! moment. It was the answer that I’d been looking for for months.
Relax your “grip” when you’re under attack – from someone else, or a situation, or even your own thoughts. Relax, and act from the relaxed place.
Sounds so simple.
It’s part of why I love aikido, though. Our training teaches us, through repetition, to respond a certain way to being attacked. And we repeat it over and over again until it becomes reflex, so that if we’re ever in a situation where we really need to defend ourselves, we act automatically.
When life is throwing all sorts of crap at you, ease up your mental grip. Go to your centre. Then act from that calmer place. Practice it even when life isn’t throwing crap at you, and it will become automatic.
This is a photo of me, on my first day back to aikido class after five months of chemotherapy for breast cancer. I look pretty happy, don’t I? Aikido classes are an important part of my life that I had to put on hold during my treatment. This blog post is about my personal experience getting back to aikido (and other physical activity) after chemo.
So when my chemo started, it was really hard for me to come to terms with the fact that it was probably best for my health if I stopped attending classes until my chemo was over.
Chemo kills fast-growing cells like cancer, but it also attacks healthy fast-growing cells like hair follicles (leading to the hair loss typically associated with chemo) and bone marrow, where white blood cells are made. Low white blood cell counts then leave you vulnerable to germs and infections, and if you get an infection while your immunity is low on chemo, it could become a life-threatening emergency called febrile neutropenia.
My dojo is in a busy community centre full of families with kids coming and going, and I started chemo right at the beginning of flu and cold season. Yeah. Not a good combination. Add to that the fact that aikido involves close physical contact with several others during class, and two of our weekly adult classes are held immediately following children’s aikido classes… You get the idea. So I reluctantly gave up aikido classes for the length of my chemotherapy treatment – 18 weeks in total.
Thankfully, a black belt friend of mine visited me at my home every few weeks during my chemo, when my blood cell counts were at their highest before each infusion, and marked through techniques with me for a few hours. (I also memorized the Japanese names of most of the common techniques during my practice with him – something that will be useful, since all of my future belt tests will be in Japanese.) Apart from those cherished days, however, I went into serious aikido withdrawal during chemo.
Why did I miss aikido so much? Most classes (which are one hour or one-and-a-half hours long) are a decent workout – lots of full-body movements, calisthenics, breakfall (rolling) practice, and technique practice, which involves being thrown to the ground and getting up over and over again. But aikido also engages me mentally, as I try to master and recall the Japanese names of the techniques, as well as the techniques themselves. There are so many tiny details to learn, which is why the study of aikido can take decades. There are hundreds or even thousands of possible combinations of attacks, controls and pins, and on top of that there’s an element of coordination and patience required to blend effectively with your opponent’s energy, and redirect it without using excess effort. Done well, aikido is like dancing, and makes me feel like I’m flying, both literally and figuratively.
I’ve written on this blog about some of the other ways that I exercised during my chemo treatment. Don’t think that I’m some sort of superwoman, though. I wrote that blog post half-way through the 18 weeks of chemo, and the final nine weeks were much more debilitating that I expected. By my last chemo infusion I was spending most of the first week following each infusion in bed, sleeping and feverish. Exercise was not a priority, except to increase my white blood cell counts. I tried doing gentle qigong exercises every day, and that was about it as far as exercise was concerned.
Don’t think that I immediately reached my pre-cancer fitness level, though. Aikido classes were actually a humbling measuring stick for my stamina, and I was surprised by how much strength and endurance I’d lost. That first class, I had to sit down after the warm-up and watch the rest of class. And for about three or four weeks I had to stop frequently during each class and rest before playing again.
I feel pretty lucky that I didn’t experience too much lasting fatigue from my chemo, but there’s definitely been some. (Thankfully I didn’t have radiation treatments, which can also increase fatigue.) As I write this, it’s been seven weeks since I’ve been back at aikido, and truthfully only in the last week or so has my endurance felt like it’s returned to my pre-cancer levels. I had several injuries (knees, right ankle, right wrist) that I was nursing before my cancer treatment; since going back to aikido, they’ve all been acting up again, which has also put the brakes on overdoing anything.
My dojo offers classes six days a week, and I attend them all. But right now I only get on the mat for three or four classes per week. The rest of the time I just watch. I have a belt test coming up (the same belt test that Sam did, here), and I’ve been focused on getting as much practice as I can without stressing my body too much.
In addition to time on the mat, I also help set up and put away our dojo mats for each class, which is a nice, light aerobic and weight training activity. And I’m still doing qigong as often as I can, which usually ends up being three or four times per week.
In my experience, if you’re facing chemotherapy and you’ve already been fairly active before your cancer diagnosis, using your favourite activities as rewards to look forward to at the end of your treatment can be a great way to stay motivated and quickly get back to movement after your chemo is done. I know that for me, aikido was definitely the carrot on the end of the stick that made chemo more bearable, and I’m positive that my quick recovery from chemo has been at least partly due to my regular aikido practice.
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You may also be interested in these blog posts by Michelle about her breast cancer experience:
Exalted Guru (very formal – student submits completely to their teacher)
Affable Mentor (less formal – students are more actively encouraged to ask questions)
Professional Trainer (the most informal – the focus is mainly on physical skills and fitness).
But for me, these are all kind of similar in the end. They’re all based on a one-way flow of learning – from the expert sensei to the receptive student.
And I struggle with this. Now I’m in my forties, I don’t want just a simple one-way power dynamic with my sensei.
In aikido we practise two roles equally, and in harmony with our partner – both leading (tori or nage) and following (uke). It’s pure yin / yang in action.
So rightly or wrongly, I want to relate to my sensei (and to other important people in my life) both ways – and practise both following and leading with him.
On the mat, a more traditional relationship is appropriate. Sensei’s martial arts knowledge is outstanding; I respect that, and soak up all the learning I can from him.
But off the mat, I crave ways in which I can balance this dynamic back out – by leading, and having him learn from me. You could think of it like a satisfying counter-stretch for the spirit.
I’m aware that my views on the sensei-student relationship might sound disrespectful to some, or even downright weird.
But I believe I’m learning aikido to develop and equalise my so-called yin / yang energies – not just to practise constant following and submitting to someone else’s lead.
At first I didn’t know how to get what I wanted. I just knew that the one-way role of student was too narrow and restrictive, and longed to shake it up a bit – but had no idea how to achieve this.
Then late last year, I set out to create a martial arts blog, with a focus on women’s participation and experience. It was a scary prospect, and I literally didn’t know where to start. Sensei in all his kindness wanted to help; and started to share everything he knew about training women in the martial arts. And I slipped into the familiar role of student; and was grateful for his help, as I am during class.
But as I started to research and reflect – and grow in confidence on the topic – I started to go places which were completely new for both of us . . .
And before I knew it, I’d become his teacher in this area.
To give him full credit, he’s absolutely thrown himself into absorbing and reflecting on all the new information and ideas. And over the last few months, he’s genuinely started to change as an instructor.
He’s been into the women’s toilets, and understood with a shock how nasty they were for us to change in. (The building only has one side room; and it does make sense for the men to use it to change, being in the vast majority). And thanks to him now, the ladies’ toilet is suddenly clean, mould and cobweb-free, freshly painted and has neat shelving on the wall – so that we no longer have to use the toilet lid (or floor) to place our clothes on.
He’s stopped teasing the boys and men for “kicking like a girl”.
Really importantly, he now gets the fact that many boys grow up learning to use their bodies in a way that many girls don’t, and so we often need far more granularity and repetition in the teaching. I’ve watched him totally get and engage with this; and literally master the art of breaking punching and kicking down into tiny components.
He is becoming startlingly successful at teaching timid, uncoordinated women and girls to punch right through a target with their whole body.
Because he now fully gets in a new way that women’s starting point in the martial arts is often (although not always) that we’ve never punched or kicked anyone in our life. As opposed to many of our dojo brothers who’ve often (although again not always) grown up playfighting and rough-housing.
A real turning point for me, was a lovely conversation we had, where he was very excited about a new teenage female student who’d arrived at the dojo clearly lacking confidence. He was teaching her to punch, and her punches were starting to get really strong; and she was literally bubbling over with excitement by the end of the lesson.
He said to me after the lesson: before I would just have thought she was happy because she was having fun. Now I see something else going on; and I can see that she’s happy and excited, because she feels empowered in a really new and astounding way.
I appreciate this unconventional sensei / student relationship so much.
He is basically helping me to practise the role of tori (the one who leads) – off the mat as well as on. I am getting to experiment and train on him; and grow into the role of thought leader – albeit on a very small, safe and comfortable scale.
It’s a strange and magical dynamic. If you watch aikido in action, you might just think that tori is the one doing everything – and uke is just being thrown around passively.
But in fact the opposite can be true. At its highest level, ukemi is an extremely skilled art. A good uke can actually be the one who leads tori, using the technique often called backleading in dancing. Indeed, in classical Japanese budo, the uchitachi (uke) is the more senior practitioner who helps the shitachi (tori) to understand the techniques.
So to be honest, I sometimes wonder where the roles of student and teacher start and end between us.
He teaches me aiki.
I teach him how to teach women; and so he teaches me better than he did before.
He teaches me how to teach him about teaching women, by being such a strong, receptive student (backleading).
The yin / yang energy flows in an endless, dynamic circle . . .
This may not be a model of instruction my sensei ever envisaged; and I probably never clearly foresaw it either. But for a woman wanting to learn martial arts from a man in the 21st Century, without perpetuating some kind of old-fashioned “Exalted Guru” relationship, I think it’s awesome – and would highly recommend it!
I learned a new expression today about Aikido. All that bending and folding of people. It is like origami.
I usually think of Aikido as throwing and pinning people but today our dojo was too hot for throwing. We were sweaty just standing around and so no one wanted to move much. Instead we worked on joint locks to move people around and pins for when we got them to the mat.
As usual I start out pretty stiff and have to work to relax into the pins. By the end of the class I’m a lot more bendy and flexible. My shoulders are the worst. Luckily I got to work with people who are about as flexible as me and we each gradually applied the pins giving our partner plenty of time to work with it before tapping. Likewise, when taking a pin off, you take the pressure off gradually. It’s like a good, painful, massage.
For some of the joint locks there’s no pain involved. When it’s properly applied you go where your training partner wants you to go. It’s like magic–painless but somehow inevitable.
Yes, you could resist but as they joke, resistance is futile. You’d risk breaking something or hurting a joint and there’s little temptation to try. There are times in Aikido when it makes sense to resist a bit, to make sure your partner actually has your balance for example but joint locks aren’t one of those times. We like our wrists, elbows, and shoulders, thank you very much.
But the pins? They can be painful. And some of them are painful no matter what. There’s one that involves holding a person’s hand such that they are looking at their own palm. Each time, and the joke never gets old, Sensei says “Oh, look I see pain in your future.”
I see pain in your future.
We joke about being masochists but really it’s no joke. You have to find a way to get comfortable with pain. Yes, you tap. Of course, you tap. But some of the pins hurt from the moment they’re applied and you want to be a good training partner and allow your partner to see what it feels like to have someone in the pin when it’s applied properly.
I like being able to pin people with one arm so that, in real life, the other arm is free to get out a phone to call for help. Doesn’t do you much good pinning someone in an empty parking garage, for example, if you have no way of getting help. It could be a long night.
As the recipient of a painful pin, you learn to relax into it, to breathe, not to panic, and to trust your training partner. Once you know you won’t actually get hurt, it’s just sensation, and you can learn to deal with it. It’s a good life skill to have.
Here’s me, below, smiling before doing some origami with people.
All sports have their seasons, a rhythm to their year. Outdoor soccer, brief break, indoor soccer. Cycling on the trainer for miles, cycling for speed and intensity after the base is built, training camp, and then outdoors.
Aikido too has a rhythm to the training year usually following testing. We train for new belt tests, reviewing curriculum over and over again, we test, we celebrate, and then we break from curriculum and do wild, fun, less scripted stuff.
But this Aikido club has another factor that influences what we do and when, new members. People either join our club directly or through a city recreation program. The program is for a set number of weeks and we can get as many as ten or twelve new people at a time that way.
When that happens we often start from square one. Our Sensei this week told us it was time to put out beginner pants on. He instructed us to learn like a beginner with no expectations, no bad habits, and to start from scratch. Tonight’s class, for example, focused on just a few very simple techniques. Front strike, first control pin number one and two took most of our time.
Those techniques are on the very first belt test with techniques. Everyone wearing a coloured belt can do them in their sleep. And this class we did them over and over again, breaking them down into small steps, the Yoshinkan way, stopping at each stage to correct techniques.
The senior black belts smiled.
It felt like polishing the rust off, getting back to square one, the basics. We reviewed basic movements and then practiced focusing on how the basic movements of Aikido form the foundation of the martial techniques.
The brand new people in their sweatpants and yoga pants were smiling too. By the end of the class they were pretty good at front strike, first control pin number one.
I think putting your beginner pants back on is hardest for those of us in the middle, anxious to show off what we know. I struggled a bit the first dozen times through. We worked with the same partner all night and we were both a bit out of sorts. We can do this technique. It isn’t on our next test. Let us do something harder.
Frequent corrections from senior belts though made it clear I still had lots to learn. Back to square one. By halfway through the class I was smiling too. When you do the same technique over and over again you rely less and less on muscle and brute force and more and more on taking the other person’s balance and using their energy and momentum against them.
I’d put that technique deep into muscle memory, every piece of it ready to use if needed. I’d shined off the rough edges. I’d trained with the mind of a beginner.
