I would have to say yesterday was more intense than the previous day. I think it's safe to say most of us got a little bruised up. On both days there there were a good number of people there...I'd say about 20? The drills were different but were built off of the previous days drills. For example, we did something called "environmentals" where we take that "one-step" geometry exercise I spoke of and applied that to different locations at the dojo (where the workshop was held). So each of the groups rotated with being on the stairs, in an office, in the bathroom, and down in the parking garage. The point was: use your environment to aid you and against your attacker. Another cool and very useful drill was "plastic mind". Basically, you take the one-step exercise and both people are either given or told to make up a particular kind of mind-set to do the drill with. It's almost like role-playing but the point was to get you thinking outside your box and to understand that the mind plays a much larger role in combat than physical skill.
Something interesting, weird and important came up for me yesterday as well. It has to do with wanting to be "recognized" by the teacher. Rory Miller is someone who, after reading his books, I realized that I could connect to what he was saying (even though I'm not even remotely close to the field he works in) and who I wanted to learn from. I can't tell you how cool it is that someone like that has been coming to Oakland regularly. And how cool it is that I am actually here to partake in all of it. Who the hell knew I would be moving to Oakland after Detroit?! But basically this weird thing is that I'm still seeking outside validation; still wanting to be acknowledged by the teacher as a "good" student (like with my Sensei in LA). But the thing about Rory is that, he's not teaching us to be clones of his "style". He's not interested in teaching us to be like him. He's teaching us to be the best that we can be, using the knowledge that he has. And even Rory himself admits that he doesn't know everything. I mean he knows a few things more than most of us who don't have that kind of experience (which is huge actually). But Rory's not teaching us to be students of him. He's teaching us to be our own teachers. Our own students. He's teaching us to look for the possibilities ourselves. And that is how I think martial arts needs to be taught. Not just martial arts of course. But I think that's just a really good way to teach. That is true empowerment. I think perhaps the reason why Okinawan karate is not taught that way today (for the most part) is because most of it has become so divorced from reality ("Newton is my Shihan"....get it yet?) that it has come to exist in its own special universe with its own special rules. Read your history and you'll know that karate developed from the instinct of self-preservation. It developed amongst the Okinawan aristocracy into an art form that was engage-able at the civilian level of violence (as opposed to a battlefield). Because perhaps most teachers and practitioners have no real substantial experience with that kind of violence, we start to get caught up with the little details that make our art "more special" than other people's. In other words, we're totally losing the point of why something like karate even developed in the first place. We no longer become concerned with what works and what doesn't work (in accordance with the laws of physics applied to violence) and more concerned with what makes me more special than someone else. Remember, karate as we speak of it today never used to have an official name. It was just "Shuri-te", "Naha-te", etc.; labels to signify a particular geographical region where "te" was uniquely practiced.
Let me end this post (because I need to eat lunch and get ready for tonight's play date) with a quote from Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science (from which the term "Quantum karateka" is inspired from). For anyone reading this, try to understand how this applies to karate and other modern martial arts in general:
"In fact, information is an organization's primary source of nourishment; it is so vital to survival that its absence creates a strong vacuum. If information is not available, people make it up. Rumors proliferate, things get out of hand - all because people lack the real thing." (pg. 107)What is the "information" that nourished this thing we call "karate"?
We need to get back to that.
Thank you Rory Miller.
Elbow SMASH!
- Hiji Até
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