Liquid Tai Chi Chuan & Kyudo Injuries

A clear body of water moving through another clear body of water. Floating, gliding, being the flow of nebulous movement. Stasis does not exist, but is washed away, spiraled into the next infinite swirl. No stopping, no flexing, no trying, no fighting. Just movement, and that movement is nice. It smells like natural perfume and soft bright colors shifting into each other. It's just water, always has, always will, nothing needs to be here. It isn't strong, it's invincible. Or rather, immortal. Not not-mortal, but simply is.

This is my tai chi today, and it's what I want. It is a practice only for me. Nobody sees my tai chi but the inside walls of my apartment and classrooms. Nobody feels my tai chi. Because of it's lonliness, I often neglect to visit, and so it hides in these spaces. Why would I forget it such? Tai chi isn't what it simply is, but whatever I want it to be. I can use that most powerful weapon of the mind, and mold tai chi to be exactly what I want it to be. But no, I don't always see that.

I've been away to war in kyudo, and aikido as well I suppose. I don't know how it starts, but all of a sudden I'm smashing my fists against the wall demanding the power I desire. They are bloody now, and useless: weak. I had to have it, but I couldn't, so I cried and scream and fought. I still don't have it, and so I'm disappointed in myself, the world. My failure reveals my weakness, thank kami I didn't actually get what I wanted, those false declarations of success.

That need is not strength, and niether is a stance. The movement, seeing, flowing, understanding, not-understanding, contentment: these are signs of strength.

Quite literally, I have hit kyudo hard enough lately to injure my left hand that holds the bow. When you hold the bow with your left hand, the bow turns slightly in your hand, and you focus all of your energy into a single point in your hand near the base of your thumb. I've been doing kyudo lately to the point where I've got pain when I push with that point against the bow. If it hurts, you shrink away from the pain crumbling your kyudo form to uselessness. No longer is that single point in your hand winning against the bow, but the bow beats you, and that point becomes some smudge of broad contact, putting pressure in your shoulder, your right hand holding the string, caving in your chest, and imploding upon release instead of expanding.

I suppose this happened due to an upcoming tournament. In order to hit the target as much as possible, I have been training harder and harder, putting more pressure into my kyudo practice. It's fun at first, but when the pain begins, it all falls apart, and my mind is always one step behind when I put on the blinders like that.

If the choice was to die or shoot an arrow, I could pull that bow, but I don't think that's the purpose of what I'm doing.

Training to the point of injury:

Weak.

Time to rest and remember the flow. Maybe when I go to that tournament I will hit the target everytime. The truth is I don't know. In that darkness, anything can appear.

My Martial Art: The Amalgamation

This is something I've been working on for a very long time.

It's been something like ... forever.

I'm serious! What is "my martial art", is something I've been practicing as long as I've been formally practicing martial arts. It's been something I've been working on as long as I've been using my body and mind. It existed in the seed of my body and mind from my mother and my father since before I was born; that seed which can be traced back all through my ancestors ... Irishmen, mainlanders, cavemen, monkeys, fish, single celled organisms, stardust, and beyond!

If my budo is something I've been working on infinitely into the past, then I've also been working on it in the future. The entirety of existence has been the "when" and "where" of my honing of my martial art. Not before, or after, but the actual, it of budo.

Congratulations! I've made it, and I've always been here!

Enough of the very serious jokes. I do have a more concrete point I want to address here in this post, and it has to do with being a person who has formally practiced different martial arts over a period of 10 years. I really don't like using time as measured by years when talking about martial arts. It always turns into a game of comparing numbers. It is a silly game that doesn't necessarily lead to clarification. Actually, in the absence of a holistic explanation of the situation, numbers of years just make things more confusing. But, I will put my ten years here because ... it is a time within which I have been able to go through many phases of training. Years earlier, I wouldn't be so good at ignoring glaring details and I wouldn't be able to see the commonalities. It's given me time to see other martial arts that have broadened my experience. This is one of the first times I've been able to see such a thick and fuzzy singular current through it all. Ask me again in ten years, and I'm sure I'll be able to tell you infinitely more.

As for the different martial arts I've practiced and how they contribute to my martial art, I think the clearest way to discuss the specifics is through a list of each martial art experienced in chronological order. I haven't put equal time into each martial art, and I haven't even included all I consider "having practiced." To name two, boxing and hsing i have helped me out a lot, but they just don't quite compare to the others in the list. There are many overlapping points between the arts, but I will try and mention each specific point in the category of the martial art which reveals its quality most clearest to me.

Hawaiian Kenpo:
-Use what works.
-Use what is most convenient.
-Use what is fastest to accomplishing your goal.
-Using your environment to your advantage.
-Not fighting as an option to solving issues.
-Doing anything possible to win.
-Being in physically good shape.

Tai Chi Chuan:
-Whole body utilization for individual techniques.
-Rooting.
-Blending with a partner.
-Using a partner's strength to your advantage.
-Learning from oneself.

Ba Gua Zhang:
-Limberness of body and control of movement (balance, etc).
-Practicing various forms to learn one thing.

Aikido:
-Positioning.
-No "fighting stance".
-Timing.
-Only expending necessary energy.
-Controlling an opponent/setting them off-balance.
-Relaxing throughout movement.
-Finding positions to be strong in, and others to give way.
-The need for good training partners.

Kyudo:
-Seeing everything.
-Maximum effort/focus towards a specific goal.
-Everything is "the point".
-Prioritizing attention to various matters in a movement.
-Appropriate patience.
-The need for a good teacher.

The listing above is meant to dissect my martial art with specifics concerning experiences in activities that are generally called "martial arts." But, all of the specifics I mentioned above are existent in all of the martial arts listed above. I utilize them all, all the time, but each practice allows me to notice them a little better. I don't need to practice these martial arts to have these abilities, I don't have to be aware of the abilities for them to exist. However, being aware of them, and practicing these different arts allows me to improve my technique. Why is this important if I've already forever practiced infinitely into the future and already mastered them, thus being perfect the way I am as is right now? Because that infinity is the honing process of martial arts. That that completion of all goals in the future is another version of this eternally perfect/imperfect honing.

So we have me: the body. "My martial art": the skeleton. The different martial arts I have practiced: the organs. But there are still a couple ingredients missing to bring this beast live.

First, there are my veins and arteries: the things that I do to connect all that exists within me. These are the things that make the art real. Some of these things are:

Health
-Healthy diet.
-Sufficient rest.

Stretching
-Making my body limber so that it can perform at it's greatest potential.

Meditating
-Specifically, standing. This is to clean the mind of unnecessaries, shake up and settle my body at the same time, and strengthen my tendons. Actually, trying to list this process takes many many more posts. I believe this is arguably, the single most important part of my martial art.

Learning
-Getting new material and inspiration to supplement the regular training, be it reading, videos, or seminars. Martial food for the artistic mind.

Then comes the last piece. The blood. The breath. The movement of it all:

Practice.

Without this single aspect ... the "honing" process, which is the defining characteristic of existence, changes dramatically. It slackens. It becomes wasteful. It becomes weak and distracted. Practice is the sword to our warrior. The path and the intention. If there is something to do with our conscious effort in life, it is for a honing which is benefitted by practice.

...

But then again, my martial art is as ancient as anything else, and there is no such thing as practice.

...

So there you have it, my martial art. I look forward to taking a look again at this later to further see it's defining characteristics. I wonder if there is anything I've forgotten. I wonder what kind of qualities that are usually regarded highly in other martial arts are not included in mine. What does your martial art look like? I urge you to investigate, because you do have one, and it's probably pretty cool.

Tension in Kyudo

(picture found at http://www.japanese-archery.org.uk/kyudo.html)

 

This was one of the first riddles to get over in practicing kyudo. What's with all the tension?

For a few years practicing tai chi chuan and then aikido, the number one thing I was trying to do was learn to relax my body in movement for maximum results. Relaxation, of the body as well as mind, is also important in kyudo ... but there's also a lot of tension.

I first noticed it in just watching my teacher walk to the target in the traditional fashion. It wasn't necessarily rigid, but tense. Then in preparatory motions and non-motions before the shot; he seemed the taut string itself strapped on the bow, pulling the wooden ends back. Then actually pulling the bow, the subtle sound of it all puts tension into the viewer. He stood there at full draw, eyes focused on the target sharp as his body was frozen, so frozen it shook it a bit, holding the arrow back, and then SMACK! The arrow was gone, and he walked away just as he had approached, tense.

Tension is not the exact word, but the best one I've thought of.

In Japanese it's way more ... difficult to explain. In Japanese they tell you to maintain a certain amount of kinchou, 緊張. When you look it up in the dictionary, it translates as "nervousness, mental strain", and more accurately to this point, "tension." It says tension, and it is also what I'm saying, but it's a little different. Maybe it's exactly the same, but I think it's a little different. Tension has too much of a negative connotation; like it's a description of a symptom, instead of a painting or a musical note, which it seems more like to me.

The first time Sensei told me to maintain the kinchou, I automatically thought of the "nervousness" translation, because it's all I knew. It's the common word for "nervousness".

"I should be nervous?!"

Thinking of it now, between English and Japanese, I almost think "nervousness" is closer than just translating it as "tension", though it has nothing to do with the English "nervousness" and most exactly as "tension." Is that weird? That may be just me. There may be some truth there, of the difficulty in translating the feeling between English and Japanese. I don't know. But it's how I feel, and in budo that's a very important thing.

Anyway ... tension.

After experiencing the tension of kyudo while watching sensei, I felt it first-hand when gripping the bow. I held the bow in the right posture, but Sensei told me to flare out my elbows, creating kinchou. He told me to do this by haru-ing. 張る. This is a verb that translates as "to stretch". (I can't help but notice a resemblance between this kanji and 引く which means "to pull".) It's not just "stretch" though in English it is, I feel. It's a stretch that creates tension, much like a taut string. Yes, "taut" is another important word in English. So I flared my elbows out to make my triceps taut, while stretching my spine vertically (just like you should in other martial arts and meditation, as if the bottom of your spine is reaching down to the center of the earth while the top shoots through the crown of your head to the sun), and then Sensei also told me to flex my buttcheeks together, turning my pelvis up (much like I've learned in tai chi chuan), which makes you more ... tense.

When you pull back the bow, it's tense. I learned the tension of the string very thoroughly when feeling it slap my face when it pre-released. There is a lot of tension in kyudo which can be built up and used for good; releasing, seamlessly shooting the arrow straight forward into the target. Or for evil; as it warps your posture.

Perhaps that last bit is the biggest trick in the art: learning how to deal with the tension so that it helps your shooting instead of inhibiting it. Your placing tension in the right places, while erasing it from the wrong. Perhaps there is tension in tai chi chuan and aikido, but it's different.

Back to walking. Before you even begin drawing the bow back for the shot, you must walk. When you walk, you slide your feet across the ground, making sure to not lift your heels. The steps are shorter than you would expect. Your body weight is ... forward. The complete opposite of kyudo walking is sliding your foot forward with no weight, and then following it (perhaps what you learn in ba gua!) you push your weight forward, like you're falling. But you don't push with your upper body, you push with your tanden, your dantien, your center (2-3 inches below your belly button). You walk primarily with this part of your body, and apparently walking is one of the most difficult things to do correctly in kyudo. They say learning to do ... something (can't remember) takes one year, learning tenouchi (left hand grip on the bow) in three years, and walking in ten. You walk with your tanden.

Your tanden is arguably the most important part of kyudo, and something you need to keep tension in.

Interestingly enough, my teacher says one should do reverse-breathing while practicing kyudo. (When you inhale, your stomach comes in, pushes out with the exhale) which certainly deals with tension. (Go ahead and try it!)

So you keep this tension when you walk up to shoot, while you shoot you maintain this tension with your breath. After you shoot, it is a great release of pressure, but you don't let it all out. You maintain some tension.

Or else you'll die.

Or something like that.

(No one has ever said you will die if you don't maintain tension after your shot, but there is some truth in the statement.)

There is lots of tension in kyudo! I'm learning, but not sure yet. Stay tuned for more revelations on tension in kyudo.

The Freedom of Capoeira

About one month ago, I was required to go to a two-day Mid-Year Seminar for my job as an English teacher where I along with the other ALTs (assistant language teacher, aka, English speaking dancing monkey) presented and watched various speeches and classes on teaching English in Japan. There were many informative and interesting bits, as well as boring and awkward ones, but perhaps the most interesting part of the whole seminar was an hour class that was given about capoeira, a Brazilian martial art. This hour class was in a list of other "fun" seminars at the end we got to choose from, and I jumped on this one immediately.

The class was taught by a man in his early thirties from Hawaii, who had lived in Brazil where he practiced capoeira. Somewhere along the way, he fell in love with a Japanese girl, and now lives here in Toyama where he has a kindergarten, and teaches capoeira classes. Because this was only an hour class to introduce capoeira to a bunch of English teaching gaijin and get them moving, we could do little more than just that, but it was very refreshing. I've never formally practiced capoeira, but in my hometown there are a few guys who like to play around with it, and I ended up joining them from time to time, so I had a leg up on most of the other people in the class because I had already been introduced to it.

Capoeira generally consists of a group of people that make a circle and clap to music while two capoeristas "spar" in the middle of the circle. The players move to the music for the most part, and base their movements off the ginga (back and forth movement characteristic to capoeira). Depending on what capoeira circle you're in (pun intended), there can be an emphasis on the dance aspect of the art or on the martial art side of things; or I guess ideally where both are given their appropriate emphasis. Our instructor described all of the movements in the guise of martial technique (you move here or are in this position because you want to attack/evade effectively, etc), but was sure to present capoeira as a fun game to enjoy. It sounded like a healthy balance to me. (If this article is your first experience with capoeira, I highly recommend you look up some information on the web and search some videos on youtube. If you have heard of this beautiful and strange art before, I highly recommend you look up some information on the web and search some videos on youtube.)

If I were to put my impression of this experience into one word, it would be: "refreshing."

The older I get, the more I realize how important physical movement is to my life. As a child, my favorite thing to do was run around in the woods. As a middle school and high school student, sports were arguably the single most important thing in my life. And ever since I first walked in a dojo at 17, my life has been arguably best enjoyed while practicing martial arts. In this latter more recent stage of martial arts, I've noticed that I've developed some very restrictive ideas concerning body movement. Emphasis is always made to further refine movement to be "most effective" (whatever that means exactly). In every movement, the finest of details concerning weight placement and angles and directions are investigated and adjusted to some "most effective" state, but in doing so, one can start designating all movements into "good" and "bad" categories. (I'm now remembering a huge epiphany I had when first practicing Hawaiian kenpo when my Sensei said that it wasn't a matter of "good and bad", but "good and better.") This session in capoeira greatly helped me to curb my movement-nazi tendencies, and just move. (This is pretty interesting considering my last post on where exactly the knee needs to always be in martial arts.)

In fact, this was a concept that the capoeira instructor used to describe the movements to us. He said that while practicing capoeira with a partner, the most important thing to do when an attack comes your way, is to get out of the way. That's it, it's easy! Just get out of the way. Amidst the ginga movement, if an opponent sends a kick your way, all you really have to do is step back; that's it! But as you can probably tell, that can be a bit boring. So if a partner sends a kick your way, instead of stepping back, you can crouch down, move to the side, or spin out of the way allowing you to counter-attack while your partner is exposed. THAT seems to be good capoeira. After hearing him explain this, and then show us some physical examples of how it worked, it flashed in front of me how capoeira really can be a legitimate fighting art, and one that contains a lot of the same characteristics as Hawaiian kenpo, and especially tai chi chuan, and aikido.

Does that sound strange? It did to me at that first moment of realization. After having a tiny amount of experience in capoeira maybe 7 years ago and practicing these various highly acclaimed far eastern martial arts, I found myself with a lot of judgements and reservations about capoeira that weren't necessarily true. Beware all of you practicing martial artists with your calculating investigative minds! We are ideally searching for some objective truth, not self-constructed delusion.

One remarkable characterstic I found to be similar between capoeira and these other martial arts I have practiced is the tendency to avoid meeting contact with contact. I think the benefits of this theory become especially obvious in capoeira because a lot of the attacks are momentum powered wide arching kicks; one of the most painful attacks to receive directly! To have one of these catch you on the side of the head would surely knock you out and send you to the ground at least! There are also many sweeps that would easily send you head over heels if they were not avoided. With a constant barrage of these kinds of attacks encountered in the capoeira ring, you would have to by necessity learn to avoid power, and like the instructor said, "get out of the way". One great parallel with this kind of competition is push hands practiced in tai chi chuan. One learns quickly it is a bad idea to try and fight back against a skilled push, and rather begins flowing with the push and directing it elsewhere, or becoming empty so the push really ends up pushing nothing. However, it would be hard to find a more different practice to capoeira than push hands, because push hands is often practiced with a fixed-step rule where stepping movement becomes incredibly limited, and you are mostly dealing with hand and arm attacks as opposed to mostly leg attacks in capoeira. While one practices honing one's physical movement to be as small and effective as possible in push hands, I feel it can turn you into a movement-nazi chaining you to the ground. Furthermore, I can't help but think of so many well-experienced martial artists who have practiced for a great many years, that would maybe have a really hard time just moving in the basic ginga movement.

Perhaps aikido works as a bridge between movement-inhibitied tai chi chuan and movement-excessive capoeira. In aikido we practice flowing with an opponent to avoid force on force interactions, but do so often with wide arching movements of the body. I often find myself in aikido asking questions pertaining to the exact angle or direction of a move, and receiving an ambiguous answer that decreases it's importance. Even in ukemi (rolling out of throws delivered by a partner), we are given specific directions on how to do so initially, but after a while, each of our bodies will automatically find their own ways to balance out all of the small unattended-to details performed by the joints and muscles (and mind?). Perhaps a lot of movement in aikido is "just getting out of the way". Also, there is a tendency in tai chi chuan to practice things very slowly and carefully, but in aikido, we move at the actual speed things would be executed the majority of the time. The same can be said in capoeira I think. Therefore, training sessions in aikido are vigorous and constant, which satisfies a lot of my personal preferences in the martial arts. This session I had in capoeira at the Mid Year Seminar took this freedom of movement a huge step further, and was refreshed to just move instead of critically examine everything so much.

Perhaps capoeira is more "natural" than aikido or tai chi chuan! I have grown so annoyed at the contradiction of practicing all of these movements that are supposed to be "natural", but having to spend so much time disciplining myself to remember them and program them into myself. In capoeira, it seems a lot of the smaller details of movement naturally fall into place as you are avoiding and delivering your attacks amidst the movement of ginga.

The capoeria seminar was delivered as simple and easy as well as difficult and complex. Anyone can play capoeira, but only those who practice constantly with strength will be any good. The session was accompanied by kids (the teacher's kindergarten students he brought to help), the music characteristic of capoeira, and with a lot of smiles and laughter. Right now I am putting all of my conscious effort into aikido, but I hope one day to be reacquainted with other arts such as capoeira, because it will help my study of budo, but even more importantly, make me happy.

To finish the class, the instructor ended with some capoeira philosophy that may be able to help us through the tribulations of real life: When met with adverisity, we can ginga out of anything. No matter what happens in life, we have the freedom to move as we like, be it getting out of the way by stepping back, or maybe utilizing some more tactful way.

Weighted Step Tendencies

"Weighted step": In this circumstance I mean turning or stepping with a foot that is already bearing most of the weight in the middle of a movement. I just realized the other day while correcting papers, that it seems Aikido uses this very often while Tai Chi Chuan from my experience usually doesn't ... but then does in some styles of movement.

In my Tai Chi Chuan experience, with formwork and push hands, I started internalizing and developing a pattern of movement that would rock back and forth between feet; rolling back while yielding, and moving forward for a push. I think this tendency reflects the yielding soft side of Tai Chi Chuan, but it is not by any means a law or requirement of TCC. At a seminar a year back, we were working on Ward Off, starting from a stance with partner who had their hands on our Peng for a push, and we would deflect that push with our Peng and bring the other arm underneath the armpit for another Peng or Parting the Wild Horses Mane. However, we could do this in generally two different ways. One, is shifting our weight to the back leg while neutralizing the push and then coming forward, or two, we would keep our weight on the front foot while deflecting the push to the side, and progress forward. In the latter movement, there is no movement of your weight to the back, and progresses straight forward (Hsing-I people would probably prefer this). That is the "weighted step" I'm talking about. At the time I was confused when I asked which one was better, because the answer was both "There is no better", and "It depends on the situation," and I ended up settling on the non-weighted turn with the roll back because I thought it adhered more to TCC ideals, and it was easier for me.

Well, a year later, and now in Aikido, that weighted step has come back to haunt me as its present in so many movements. As Aikido emphasis yielding and opposes using force against force, I thought my freshly acquired "yielding" experience would give me a head start; but it didn't. I would naturally always put my weight back when yielding, but that is just not done in my experience here in Aikido. When yielding and neutralizing, it seems always to be done with footwork that moves you forward and to the side or a bit underneath your opponent. If you move back, which sometimes is the case, you move your whole body back, but keep your wieght on the front foot (in my eyes sometimes looking like a bow stance, but I hesitate to make connections between Karate bow stances and Aikido movements).

I'm getting better at this, and see a great advantage to this ever moving forward movement, and see how my TCC teacher a ways back at that seminar would employ the wieghted step Roll Back. And actually, I now remember that teacher preffering the weighted step Roll Back.

I have to say though, I miss that shift of weight to the back in push hands, because I think it allows you to make big movements, or fully neutralize someone without even taking a step.

Weighted step: What do you think!? Especially for those Aikido people, I'd like to hear your experience.