October 5, 2020
I don’t know why but the online black belt gasshuku this weekend felt very special. It’s been a time where I’ve felt very tumultuous internally — agitated, vulnerable and strangely alone. Not my family relationships, but many others feel fragile. I think it’s because everyone has been churned by the pandemic, everybody has had changes to deal with, and is just finding their way around. In the midst of that the gasshuku felt familiar and rooting.
On day one seeing Sensei Higaonna in his dojo, a solid place where I have felt the grounding energy of years of serious practice by seniors, was a moment that suddenly brought my scattered self, back into my body. And then the six hours of training, focused around kata, brought a quietness that has been gone for a while.
This morning I woke tired as I had barely slept ten hours over the last two days. But I felt light and hopeful. I felt like if this exists in the world then the world will be ok. There are many things in the world that bring to it an ‘ok-ness’ when things feel like they are falling apart. I began writing in my journal and found myself musing about what kata means to me and though I have a growing list of things to be done I felt compelled to write this note.
Karate, and especially kata, is one of the hardest things I’ve learnt in my life. I used to think music was, but kata was even harder. In a group lesson I was always the one facing in the wrong direction or stuck in the last position after the count to move to the next. Even those that had joined after me learnt the steps and passed me by. It was humiliating and many have sniggered at me or told me that perhaps karate was not the thing for me. I remember how I couldn’t master the last move in the first kata despite having been in the dojo for a month. In the first camp I attended in Lonavla, I was the most junior, despite my white hair, and also the slowest to learn anything. I remember Sensei Mistry pulling me up at dinnertime one evening and right there in the cafeteria trying to teach me that impossible last move. He almost succeeded. This state of being the last to learn the moves has continued on, and perhaps one of the reasons I love kata so much is because it is so challenging for me.
It to me it is an attempt to perfect the self via the body, and the movements of the body. It puts me in a state where I surrender my always active mind to something else. I bring the body into focus and let go of all there is in the mind. It is a state of lack of control while attempting to find perfect control. When I do a breath focused meditation something shifts in the mind and kata has a similar effect. I am definitely one of those that believe that kata contains inner self-defense structures and if practiced regularly these structures become imbedded in the very body, become a new dna. In that sense it changes the body and the entire self just like meditation changes the mind and the self. If I was a poet I would write an ode to kata today. Not sure why this weekend brought this sudden gush of love for kata. Perhaps the detail and attention with which the Senseis taught their sessions re-ignited my beginners passion.
When I attend any training or read an article, even if I learn one new thing, I feel the effort was worth it. This weekend it was a cascading waterfall of learning. New ideas, new possibilities of creating new training drills from kata bunkai seem graspable. The owl and the warrior feel satiated.
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