Mushinkan Kokyo

Thursday Thoughts from the tatami.

“Overcoming yourself is sometimes like deceiving yourself, for martial arts training requires great discipline.” — Aikido for Life

The mind can be an astonishingly persuasive attorney.

The moment training becomes difficult, it arrives with evidence, witnesses, several impressive charts, and a closing argument explaining why we have unquestionably reached our absolute limit.

Sometimes, of course, it is correct. Bodies have limits. Injuries are real. Exhaustion deserves respect. Wisdom is not demonstrated by charging through every warning light simply because perseverance sounds noble.

But sometimes…

We are merely uncomfortable.

And discomfort has a remarkable talent for dressing itself as impossibility.

Perhaps this is the “deception” the passage points toward. Not pretending that limits do not exist, but refusing to accept every declaration of I cannot as established fact. We answer it with one more attempt. One more repetition. One more moment of remaining present when some impatient part of us has already packed its bags.

Training gradually teaches us the difference between the boundary that should be respected and the one quietly waiting to be crossed.

Know yourself well enough to recognize both.

Then have the discipline to honor one and the courage to challenge the other.

Artist Hiroaki Takahashi (Shotei)
Title: Returning Woman in an Autumn Evening
Date: 1936

Thursday Thoughts from the tatami.

“Theory [narai] is not to be taught lightly; it is to be passed on a little at a time to those who have achieved merit in practice, in order to help them understand the principles [of the art]. Theory, even if not taught, will develop spontaneously with the accumulation of correct training.”
— Legacies of the Sword

We humans are terribly fond of explanations.

Give us five minutes of instruction and we would quite happily spend the next forty discussing the profound implications of the thing we have practiced twice.

The old traditions had another idea:

Practice first.

Not because theory is unimportant, but because some explanations are useless until experience has prepared somewhere for them to land.

A principle explained too early may remain merely an interesting sentence. After hundreds of repetitions, however, the same words can suddenly illuminate something the body has been quietly discovering all along.

That is perhaps the more intriguing part of this passage: theory need not always arrive from the outside. Correct practice begins generating understanding of its own. The student notices relationships, recognizes patterns, and discovers why something must be done as it is.

Then the teacher’s explanation does not manufacture understanding.

It gives a name to something already beginning to awaken.

Practice until the question appears.
Then the answer has somewhere to live.

Title: Evening Bell at Mil Temple
Artist: Tsuchiya Koitsu (1870-1949)
Date: 1940

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