July 9, 2025
End June, I accepted that my injuries wouldn’t heal quickly, and karate movements at normal speeds hamper healing more than anything else. I accepted that I might be injuring myself each time I don’t remember this. I accepted this more deeply yesterday when I let the deadline to register from the CI gasshuku pass. When I train right now it is 60% strengthening, 20% haishukata, and 20% kaishukata at slow speeds, except Sunday trainings where though I remain mindful I train at 60-70% capacity and then pay the price of increased pain levels and inflammation for a day or two.
To offset the deep sadness this created, I gave myself permission to enroll in two writing courses in July, one poetry and one memoir. This meant skipping Saturday training. But almost immediately I am feeling the dividends of this choice. The courses are making me deliriously happy, releasing an endorphin-high intoxication similar to what I feel post training, but without the pain. It’s immersion in reading, writing, being guided by an expert, and hanging with writer friends that is fuelling this high.
This morning the poetry homework offered up a further dividend. I don’t write poetry, and I think I mistakenly applied for this course instead of another one, but sometimes these ‘guided’ mistakes open doors. When I got accepted, I decided to enrol and in the first class I felt like a beached whale.
Then while completing the first assignment I remembered things.
I remembered a group process from my distant past – probably December 2003 because I remember doing Sanchin kata before breakfast in the memory. It was a time when a few of us were working with schools and colleges in a voluntary capacity and doing programmes that focused on the increasing socio-cultural divides and identity politics of that time.
For the last session of that year a few of us had driven up to Panchgani Plateau where we were to conduct an afternoon session on conflict resolution during a five day workshop for teachers, which included teachers from rural areas in India and some from a Living Values programme from the US.
We arrived the night before our session. At dinner we saw a large group of white participants, from the Living Values programme. These youth, with loose linen pants and shirts, probably bought from Cottage Industries in Mumbai, seemed to have taken over the dining hall and the Indian participants sat in corners eating quietly.
The organiser told us that our session would have to be conducted in English to accommodate the foreigners. She said, “They are the paying participants, and this allows us to subsidise the Indian teachers.”
I asked, ‘Do the Indian teachers speak English?’
The organiser brushed this aside and we facilitators looked at each other. At night we went over our plan. Some conflict theory, examples of classroom conflicts and role plays on how they could be handled. We all had been teachers and two of us had trained in conflict resolution. The language issue bothered me. I said, “What do we do if they don’t understand English.”
N, the most pragmatic of our group said, “They have translators.”
I remember the bare basic unheated rooms we were assigned. The course bed linen, the bucket bathing system where hot water ran out faster than the geyser could heat it for the next person. The crisp, dry, cold morning air where we were served up a very invigorating gingery chai. I practiced my Sanchin while my roommates bathed.
We attended the morning session to get a feel of the dynamic between the participants. Five women from Manipur sat huddled at the back. I sat down next to them. They looked restless as the presenter spoke, passed out notes, asked questions. There were headsets attached to each seat, but they weren’t using them.
“Are you following the class,” I asked in Hindi.
“No, these headsets don’t work. We were promised translations.” The women were almost in tears. One said, “I’m not stupid but I feel it. I feel like a five-year-old child.”
I stormed out and sat on a stone baking myself. It was December but the stone heated by the noon sun brought warmth into my frozen limbs through my back. Soon I was sweating and removed my sweater. I lay down on the stone and allowed the mini-tempest with me to swirl and sort. I looked up at the sunrays filtering through silver oaks, the light shifting as the leaves moved in a soft breeze. I felt the gap between the me lying on the stone and something larger than me diminish. N brought me an aloo roll at lunchtime
I said, “N, we will conduct this session in Hindi.” I didn’t speak Hindi well, and I was the main presenter. “You will translate to English.” She would correct the mistakes I made.
She started to argue but then changed her mind and nodded. Emboldened I said, “And we will conduct a group process not the role plays. Some theory and then a process around language hierarchies in the room”
When we began the teachers from the US looked bewildered even though N translated after I spoke. A white, bearded male, at the back got up and brought in the organiser, they argued but didn’t interrupt us. The young women from Manipur came to the front and joined in the conversation. After a bit we forgot to translate to English, and a white woman who was leaning against one of the exit doors to the room yelled, “What is this crap. Speak in English.”
In the stunned silence that dropped, N and I set up the roles that had emerged naturally. The oppressor/I’m paying so speak English and the oppressed/It’s my country and you are my guest but don’t take advantage of me. The back and forth was heated and we modelled changing roles, speaking from both sides, encouraging others to do the same, and tried keep the translation going. By then most of the Indian teachers had come up front and were scattered on the floor.
Towards the end. One of the women from Manipur, took the mike and spoke in Manipuri. We gathered around her, though none of us spoke it. Some of foreigners also sat on the floor. Her anguish, her yearning didn’t need translation.
We had reached that magical moment which we often get to within a conflict if we allow it to emerge fully and deeply. The moment where the sides collapse into shared humanity and where coloniser and colonised, centre and periphery, can hear and be each other. People shared and listened for a while before we summarised parts of the process so the teachers could understand how the theory had worked in the room.
At dinner that evening the participants sat in mixed groups attempting to have conversations and the organiser said she’d try harder to get the translation going for the next sessions.
That memory unfolded after reading a poem and writing on the prompt the teacher gave the class Saturday morning. It came in small doses until I remembered most of what had happened. The heart of it especially. And I remembered that this was what I thought was my ‘heart’ work before I came to Singapore. That part of me has disappeared completely but to be reminded was a precious gift that came from allowing myself a break from activity that might begin to heal my dysfunctional joints and hopefully integrate this missing part.
Soaking into the remembrance of who I was and want to be.
