We all sometimes wonder… our sensei, some of them 6th dan, 7th dan. How do they train? who do they train with? Surely they must train with someone more senior to improve themselves. I had this conversation briefly with Wai Mun, on … Continue reading
I redrafted this post in response to the ‘destruction’ post. Because, after writing that post and reading it, gave me a perspective of writing from my ego’s point of view. This is my ego’s ultimate fear. The terror of a Mental Nuclear Holocaust overwhelms the ego, leaves no safe haven to shelter the ego.
Think of it this way. we are all out to protect ourselves. even in suicide, we kill ourselves because we have to protect ourselves from some intolerable experience. That protection sometimes lies in the function of the ego, our very own body guard. But what happens when the body guard runs amok? or in the context of my ‘Destruction’ post, the death and destruction is so massive that it overwhelms the body guard? What happens next? That sends the ego into a panic mode beyond any description of panic.
So that ‘nuking’ of the brain, is a sign to reboot. Let go of old ideas, whatever i have in my mind, is transient. if the ease of a mental nuke exists, why hold on so dearly to what we know? Often, what we know impedes what we are going to know. My brain’s internal ‘auditor’ is sending a strong signal to enforce liberation through a mental annihilation.
Can i live with that? It seems like i cannot, but i can.
So let the nuking comes, if it comes. Fear it and the fear becomes you. If all the concepts gets written off. Fine. Re-write it again, the entire f**king book. start a clean slate, and find liberation in it. Perhaps nuking my brain is doing me a massive favour, we all need to do mental spring cleaning at times, what better way to do that than to raze everything to the ground in a instant. and then start anew?
So let it go, if you cannot let it go, let yourself nuke you. if it is still standing after the nuking, then its probably worth something. if it burns to the ground, it’s not worth holding onto to begin with.
I went for my usual CNY visitation to Harry sensei’s house, and if i remembered correctly. this would have been my 4th or 5th visitation. and with every visitation, I learned something from him.
This time I managed to asked him through his 40 years of teaching, what is the common ails amongst the students he has taken? ‘Ego.’ to sum up his answer. People with ego always will want power. For him he has been asked countless of times, ‘How long does it take for me to get a black belt?’ that would very much defines how much a person can do in this line of work.
It baffles him as well, why people are so caught up in their ego and the desire for power. It baffles me too at times, and sometimes i can understand why we get so caught up. it certainly feels good to know that you are in control and you can do some amazing things with your skills. Having a brief taste of that kind of power, it is euphoric, and dangerously addictive.
He also shared with me why he is so open when it comes to sharing his skills, and how he was disappointed with a certain sensei in the past for being so secretive (and still secretive) about his skills. He said that it took him so many years to know what he knows, and it would be impossible for us as his students to learn everything so quickly. He doesn’t believe in secret technique, there is no secrecy in what he teaches. In fact he could teach all he could and share all he wants, not everything can be absorbed in its full fidelity and potency.
we agreed that given a student’s desire to learn, that fire to absorb new skills, can only be hampered by the teacher’s bias and unwillingness to share. Take me for an example, I can be in the prime condition to learn Aikido, mind willing, body raring, only to see that look in my sensei’s eyes that he is holding back, teasing you with a little secret that he is only NOT willing to share with you, because you are ‘not good enough.’ How then can i sustain my motivation?
Which is why i am so thankful for being in this situation. I am willing, my sensei is willing. In this dynamic, there is no limits to where my learning can take me, and for my sensei, he will be able to reach a higher learning from where he is now. We both win, we both benefit. The blossoming is fantastic.
When training with Harry sensei, I never felt any form of ‘holding back’ from him. in fact his power comes from not holding back. He is always giving, sharing and being open. He is only frustrated when we cannot comprehend his understanding of the art. Because at our level of understanding we cannot see the view he is looking at, we are blinded by our own ego, clouded by our own judgments or misjudgments, holding back, letting our ego take control, expecting, wanting.
As my sensei, he is always there, telling us to that we can see beyond our wanting, he wants us to see what he sees, that joy and openness. I as his student would very much want to but that very wanting is the source of my blindness. Still my sensei accommodated to my blindness. Fancy having a seventy-odd year old man leading this thirty-something bloke around the place. showing me the treasures he has seen and i cannot comprehend all that, because of my ego.
Other than this blog, I have a notebook where i pen my thoughts while on the train or almost immediately after class. I’ll never forget the look on my wife’s face when i told her ‘Dear, I just bought a notebook.’ She was like ‘!!!’. thinking than i bought the ‘Notebook’ as in a ‘computer notebook’. funny how some nouns stayed the same but the items associated with the names have changed.
Anyway, back to the purpose of this post. I’ve posted about more than 100 topics, and when i read back some, there is often a repetition of themes. some inconsistencies in opinions and other biasness. guilty as charged.
I’ve said it in my first blog post this is somewhat a journal for me, and if my readers finds it beneficial, great. some who do not disagree, fine. if there is severe bias on my part, i subject myself to the scrutiny of the public. Please feel free to comment.
Repeating themes are like life and our ego, ever wondered how some songs get stuck in our head and refuse to go away? Same. these repeating themes and incessant issues in my head sometimes drive me up the wall. Nagging knots of thoughts that refuse to go away, like circling vultures, ready to swoop down and pick on my tired and weary mind. It drives me crazy.
On hindsight, this has helped me, crystallize my concepts, unloading these nagging thoughts into my posts, emptying them here enable to think of some other things. Like the Zen fable, I try to empty my cup through these writings so that my cup can have space for more fresh tea.
I want to thank those who has commented and those who have read and find some value out of these words. I do not, own these words, nor say that they are absolutely true. It is my own tinted glass, don’t wear mine as yours, find out for yourself, if it works, use it, if not throw it out, if it does not work anymore later, throw it out. if it is rubbish now, but valuable later, take it back and use it. Pay it forward, i really do not want anything else in return.
Thank you.
It’s a mushy thing, isn’t it? especially for a Asian to talk about it, hell, a Chinese man, so say the least. i am no love expert. However as a practitioner of Aikido, which the first word has to do with ‘愛’. … Continue reading
I still keep this little black magazine commemorating the 15th Anniversary of Aikikai(Singapore) dated 18th September 1995, which i guess was about the time i started Aikido. This is an interview with Harry Sensei, typed out word for word, in true fidelity. … Continue reading
If we learn our art well, we will find ourselves irresistable to people. People will find themselves irresistable to us. its not about the laws of attraction. Rather its about offering nothing to people to resist, therefore people cannot resist us.
Harry sensei is quite adept to doing this, his strength at and 70 odd years of age, certainly does not comes from his physical, biological source. How much more strength can an old man offer against a person half his age? His strength comes from our strength.
I relearned this again in class on Thursday. Resistance against him is futile, simple because there is little of him to resist. When he offered his hands, and when you hold his hands, his hands becomes you. He has trained so long and hard that he can give up his strength and take yours instead, as if he is telling me that using my strength to move myself is the most logical thing on Earth.
It is, isn’t it?
He is able to tap into my power and simply allow me to do what i want to do. In fact the resistance i offered to him, is simply the resistance i offer to myself. he can access that part of my psyche and turn that ‘fight’ against him to become a ‘fight’ against myself.
Partly he does that by being more centred than me, after when i come into contact with him. he is able to disrupt my centre so much that i simply lose interest in attacking him, fighting him, because i am too troubled with my own unbalance.
You can only resist, when there is a certain tension felt, and opposing force detected. i tried to detect this force on Thursday. like using the ‘blending’ in kind of policy. I held his hands in a gyaku hanmin, kata te tori , fashion and i felt a ‘resistance’ when i tried to pull Harry sensei’s hand, so the smarty ass me, thinks in a sudden, “Since i cannot ‘pull’ down, let’s push up! ‘Bet that he will never see this coming!”. Bad move.
All Harry sensei simply did was allow my hand to rise. and since i’ve engaged my thought in up, the thought, the energy and momentum got accelerated when Harry sensei allowed and in fact lead my hand up. And because all the counter energy is now suddenly released, with his agreement to let me raise my hands, i lost all balance and when my upward travel was exhausted, when else can i go? down. and down hard.
And it is not the first time this has happened.
We often use mountains as metaphors as our quest for human excellence and the pursuit of self actualization. Maslow’s theory of needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs) already presents our needs in a pyramid, pitching the highest ideal as ‘self actualization’. As the triangle looked like a mountain, we can symbolically determine it as a kind of a challenge, a climb.
Similarly, in martial arts, we often diplomatically says, ‘there are many ways to reach the summit.’ which loosely means, we can train hard in Aikido, Karate, Kendo, and the ultimate aim is ‘satori’ (悟り), or enlightenment.
Surely it is an ideal pursuit, worthy of our effort. there is a caveat, i realised recently.
Are we climbing the metaphorical mountain, or are we building our own tower of knowledge instead?
One is the land, the other is the map to the land.
We are all living in a world full of information and knowledge, and yet, wisdom, is still lacking. We all study so hard, to earn our degrees, learned so much to know all that we can know, and yet, we get pissed off by the slightest provocation.
I’m not discounting that building a tower of knowledge. It take arduous effort, and one can professed an in-depth knowing of the hows and whys of a discipline, we become the proverbial expert, but that does not lead us up the mountain. We become experts, but we fail to become a master. More so, we are becoming more isolated by all our knowing, we know this we know that, so that is no more for us to venture for, since we already know what we know, if we don’t know something, we know where to go and find the answers. And hence, we build another layer on our tower of knowledge.
Knowledge does not lead us to the summit. Knowledge tells us, we can look out of our tower window, and gaze at the summit. No matter how high we build our tower, we cannot reach the highs of the summit, on the contrary, the high we build our tower, the more precarious it become, and it will topple in eventuality.
So in our modern world, all of us is in a tower. i can see that in the trains, in my work. Everyone knows a little about what they know, and makes a big deal out of it. People gaze into their iphones and computer screens and tippity tap on their keyboards (like what i am doing now) and think we know all there is to know about the summit. But all we know about the summit, is not the summit. It is the map, not the land. We think we know about people, we learn about people, and yet we suck at socialising. We are virtually losing our ability to connect with each other, since we are more interested in connecting with the net, with the system, with the apps.
We need to come down from our ivory tower, walk the land. Walk with one another, and head for the summit, know the terrain, the soil, the animals, touch and feel them. Allow them to touch and feel us back. Because true knowledge is not in the knowing, it is in the doing.
One thing I’m extremely anal over, is a decent proper stance. A physical stance is very important fundamentals for any martial arts, or any physical endeavour. In skiing, even though i hadn’t done any in my life, will have its own specific way of standing. Same goes for riding a bike, rappelling. In my domain, the least a beginner needs to do is to study the stance.
One evening, I barked at a rather elderly white belt as he didn’t have a good stance, rather he didn’t have a stance. Now he sees me, when i partner him, he will, in a rather automatic and comical fashion jerked his hands up, stance ready. Well, he gets the point, for now.
The point of it is the state of readiness, a good stance, well practice, ends a fight even before it begins. Steven told me this story about his Tae Kwon Do friend, who got into a rather heated argument with a fella, and it is escalating to a point of physical argument. The taunting comes to a tipping point, and his friend did a Tae Kwon Do stance. The belligerent did a double take, blurted out ‘Seow ah!’ (loosely means, You crazy or what???) turned and left the argument.
For Aikido, our stance is rather ambiguous, there is no raised fist, no parallel stance, no overt form of aggression. There is still hope for a peaceful non-violent end. If you execute a Karate stance, chances are you’ll add that minute spark to the already flammable situation, well then again it might diffuse it too. The point is, we need to ensure our stance is proper, and show readiness to handle whatever that might be happening next.
A proper stance is also like a runway, if you have been training really long and hard, your runway will be long and wide, smooth for all sorts of take-off, rough or not. A big cargo plane with a novice pilot will still make a safe landing on your runway. Have a good well prepared runway, let the plane in and land safely.
Study every aspect of movement with your stance, notice how your shoulders roll, your hips drop, right down to the how your toes grip the floor. Study all this well, and you’ll know your immediate environment, your stance brings to your awareness your blind spot. You cannot be surprised if you have a good stance. And a good stance allows you to have a 360 awareness, surely we don’t have eyes behind our head, because we don;t need them, out perceptual awareness, when harnessed can be many times more powerful than sight alone. and a good stance is the first, baby, nano steps towards cultivating that awareness.
The less you think about fighting, the less fighting thinks about you.
I ended class with Siew Chin on Thursday evening. And she always finds it a challenge exercising kokyu-ho with me. So I shared with her a few pointers.
Be Ready.
It is not about ‘getting ready’, which to me means a state of transition from ‘not-ready’ to ready. There is a stage of preparation that mean there was a stage of un-preparation. This is not acceptable in life as we must always be prepared. Taking time to get ready for something is a waste of time because you can never be fully ready for something. Aikido has taught me that no amount of training and preparation will prepare one for whatever that person is preparing for. There will always be something not done ‘right’, something fall ‘short’ on hindsight.
The attitude in Kokyu-ho is about being ready. Be ready. To be ready will cease the stage of not-ready. and hence minimize weakness. Be ready is also a state of relaxed awareness, not too sure of what to expect, but at the same time confident in oneself to handle whatever may come.
One habit she has is that she clenched her fists, repetitively open and close, in a pumping motion, which i personally would discourage, as it doesn’t really ‘relaxes’ the hands, by playing with contraction and expansion. In fact, it transfers more tension downwards and makes the fingers loses its sensitivity, something that is very important in Aikido, kokyu-ho.
Handshake
Kokyu-ho is like a mutual, opposite handshake.You cannot shake a person’s hands, stiff. Palms open, fingers hyper-stretched is not a handshake. A ‘handshake’ hand is relaxed, open for the contact, not anticipating anything else other than a candid friendly open contact. No one anticipates a handshake, it either happens or it doesn’t. The contact, the distance put into a handshake is important.
Similarly, think of Kokyu-ho as a handshake, nothing more, open your palms, wrists relaxed not ‘cocked’ or ‘locked’ in any direction. just let the person wrap his hands around your wrists, not worried about moving him/her now or later. Your uke moves when the movement comes.
You, not me.
It is not about geometry, where you tilt a person off angle and then easily topple your partner, of course geometry plays a part in kokyu-ho, but if you meet a centred person, you cannot simply, tilt, leverage, angle the person off balance. whatever. tilt, leverage, angle you hope to achieve will be absorbed into the person’s centre.
Project your energy to achieve what you want and you will stall. The funny thing about Aikido or kokyu-ho in specificity, is that the more ‘you’ want to do it, the more difficult you face in doing it. The stronger the ‘I’ the weaker you become. If in your mind you think ‘I want to do kokyu-ho. I want to off balance him/her. or he/she has to be tilted, off balance so that I can execute kokyu-ho.’ I’m sorry, all you will get is all the ‘I’ you wanted. You will tilted. you will be off balance, it’s never about you. If all you get self absorbed in kokyu-ho, you will be absorbed by the self. That is not the point of Aikido.
0-100km/h
If there is a start, there will be a stop. If you can start it, someone can stop you. In Kokyu-ho, power can be felt, commencement can be detected. It all starts with a jerk, a muscular tension that happens suddenly. My reaction is simply that a reaction to an action. As long as you jerk, the acceleration can be felt, I can stop it. Tension begets tension.
So try to small start if you can, in your kokyu-ho. make the acceleration as small as possible. so small that your partner cannot detect it, and by the time your partner detects it, it is too late for your partner to do anything, other than to succumb to your directions. It is not the big movement that kills, it is the cumulation of small moves that leads a to often dramatic ending. People sees the dramatic ending, but not everyone sees all the small movemenrs leading up to the climax.
So in Kokyu-ho, think small, the slight move of the wrist, down to the finger nail tip, not even the finger tip. your muscle twitch must be so imperceptible that you can move at ease. It is stealth in movement.
So that is my thought for Kokyu-ho.
All these years in Aikido, training with Harry sensei, I cannot recall one time, i was injured by him, true there were some nasty unexpected falls, and other surprises, somehow I always managed to escape safely.
No, I’m not bragging about how good an uke I am, rather, it is the kind of understanding, sync between Harry sensei and me. Me being the novice, will depend more on him to look our for me, having said that, it also relies a large part, the feeling between Harry sensei and myself.
Ultimately, we aim to practise safely so that we can be the ultimate eco-friendly item, a training partner that can be used again and again and again. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if we injure and put our partners out of action.
It takes more than being agile to develop a safe break-fall especially in Aikido, where contact is also part of the beauty in the movement, the uke needs to follow, the nage needs to lead, all in a timing that puts aside the uke’s and nage’s ego. Sincerity is paramount as well as openness. When you are out to grab your partner, do so with sincerity, balance between aggression and condescendence. If you are too fierce, or too relaxed, you’ll get injured because you will not be able to read the situation realistically.
Take it as it is, which is my attitude being Harry sensei’s uke. I don’t get intimidated by him, neither do i try to test him. I just do what i do with all my Aikido friends train with sincerity and openness, and this approach has serve me in good stead till now and for many more years to come.
I remembered having a conversation with Renny one day, and the the conversation strayed to the ‘what ifs’ scenario. What if a kick, what if a hook… Renny was quick to say ‘Aiyah! go and take up MMA lah!’
Of course, the MMA repertoire covers almost all aspects of fighting from the striking, to grappling to ground and pound. then again, since it is such a well rounded, ‘category killing’ martial arts, then why does other martial arts still exist and thrive? Why don’t all of us just go and learn MMA and be done with it?
It is a matter of understanding why you are in your discipline to begin with. Every martial arts goes through a hype, in Singapore, it was Tae Kwon Do (it still is) that was the vogue, then there was Karate, Aikido (mostly due to the Steven Seagal hype) the MMA, and until recently Wing Chun. Well, if we were to learn our martial arts following the hype, then we will indeed become very busy, and all for the wrong reasons.
Personally my approach is to understand MMA, or other martial arts through the perspective of Aikido. How the knowledge of MMA, the principles of Karate will help me in my understanding of Aikido. Ultimately, it si always about the singer and not the song. A lapse in concentration happens to everyone, even to the best MMA fighters as well as the most seasoned Aikidoka, it is the ability to capitalise our opponent’s lapse and to recover from ours when it happens that makes us good at what we do, and this traits is universal to all martial arts. Once you’ve stayed long enough in one art, you’ll realise that qualitative feel and the entire spectrum of fighting will move beyond the technical, physical aspect of fighting towards the psychological and mental part of it.
Such a transcendence cannot happen overnight and if you move from one art to another just because one art is perceived superior over the other, then the practitioner might missed out something totally. there is no such thing as an instant martial arts, there is only instant ‘idiot’.
To make a judgement that we are ‘wrong’. We need to first make a value of the ‘wrongness’ of wrong. first we can look at the right/ wrong duality and say that the least of the ‘wrong’ will result in the commencement of ‘right. In other words, at the end spectrum of wrong is the beginning spectrum of right. Another perspective of it is to see right and wrong as not duality but separate and distinct entities that is mutually exclusive. So we cannot do no ‘wrong’ what we can do is to minimize the severity of the wrong, which does not necessarily correlates with right since right is right and wrong is wrong.
Once we can agree on that, we can say that the ‘thing’ we value as wrong would means that there is a potential for the value to become right or at the least, less wrong. then we can decide on the travel on the severity of the wrong. The extreme severity of the wrongness we can put as an absolution is death, then is the ultimate end, and it ends all rightness and wrongness, once you are dead, it doesn’t matter if you are wrong or right anymore.
But life isn’t always about death (although it ultimately does), so we look at a situation and if the given outcome can be improved, we can better the ends, then the original end is somewhat ‘wrong’ since we can have the potential to make it less ‘wrong’ with improvisation and knowledge. For example, if a desired result is 60/100 and if we could have made it 70/100. then the first result is ‘wrong’ with the second result being less ‘wrong’.
Ok, we have somewhat settled the value of wrong.
So what are we wrong about? My original title was ‘What if everything we do or say is wrong?’
Then we need to know what is the ‘everything’ about the doing or saying that is wrong. collectively we can look at doing and saying as one entity since it is all about a ‘verb’ a doing word. Everything on the other hand, will be a bit more challenging to describe.
So that thing we talked about can be as absolute as a grade,as used in the earlier example. We can all safely agree that 70/100 is less wrong than 60/100. My challenge here is that what if we are taking the wrong exams altogether? even getting 100/100 is still ‘wrong’?
How can that be possible? Well, logically speaking if you study economics and walk into a dance exams, failure is almost certain. A big bad wrong is as good as a guarantee.
So what happens is that if the entire world is studying economics and the exams is about dancing, we can all load up to the Titanic on a global, Earth scale.
It just dawned to me, that all these issues and problems we have, and our increasing difficulties in solutions for them, all boiled down to one thing, we all might have started off on the wrong foot, and there is, unfortunately nothing much we can do about it, the wheels of motion was started in our forefathers’ time, way back in the ice age.
What can we ‘do’ about it then? Well, it all goes back to the first two assumptions we made about the ‘wrongness’. Maybe, we will reach the end spectrum of our ‘wrongness’ and then transcend into the realm of the rightness. Or we have embarked on the path of least wrong, in the principle of the lesser of the two evil, this direction might be, after all, the least of the severity of wrong. Or we could be wrong about that too.
