Choking on Bitter

“Eating Bitter” is a phrase that refers to students being willing to go through whatever their teachers tell them to do.  In Japanese arts, the word “Oos” means “go beyond.”  How much pain will my teacher ask me to endure?  I will go beyond!  How much effort?  I’ll go beyond that!  There are many ways to Eat Bitter, but I was caught up in the macho ones.

I was 26, and I moved to Lake Louise.  There were only two other Aikido people there, and one (the lowest ranked) was obsessed with Aikido politics over actual training.  The school never got off the ground.  I wanted to keep training and there was a Taekwondo group.  I got excited because I was going to learn to be more flexible.  I was determined to distinguish myself in this group with my drive and ability to eat bitter, work through the pain and give more effort than any of them.  If nothing else, I was going to do this to better represent my art and my Sensei.  I was going to give a good account of Sensei.

Every class started with high kick warm-ups (completely foreign to me), then we went into aggressive partner stretches.  Sit in the butterfly position with someone standing on my knees with someone pushing on my back with all their body weight.  Sitting on the floor with my legs spread wide, with someone grabbing my belt and pulling me forward as they spread their legs against my knees while someone put their whole body weight on my back.  Classes were very painful, and went for two hours or longer.  After the aggressive stretches, we did sparring then went back to aggressive stretches after we were warmed up.  I had seen Van Damme movies where he gained super flexibility in a five minute montague by having his legs ripped apart by ropes.  I think I actually thought this was possible, or at least a good idea.

I was genuinely surprised when I found after a month of regular training that I was less flexible.  I wasn’t going as high with my kicks.  Also, everything hurt.  All.The.Time.  I wasn’t able to hike much during the beautiful summer, both from the altitude and my legs couldn’t move up the mountain side anymore.  I needed to find a flat place to walk, and the Canadian Rockies don’t have that.

I finally asked the teacher one day to show me what the stretches looked like when he did them.  He was always having to be the one to put the extra weight on us and talking us through the workout.  He declined.

In turns out, his hip now pathologically dislocated.  He had several muscles that had been torn in his hip joint, and even attempting to do certain kicks with power could leave him unable to stand for a couple of days.  Despite his rank, he had not been the teacher for the school – the teacher had been killed in an accident recently.  The man leading the class had little experience in teaching.  The Taekwondo school folded within weeks of him telling this to the class.  I decided that I would rate my next teacher in this way:  if the art was to give someone a long, healthy life then the teacher who best represented that would be an older but very healthy person.  30 year old cripples would teach me to be crippled before I was 30.  If this Taekwondo student knew how to train to be healthy, why would he chose not to be!  I started to realize how good my Sensei had really been.

I found a karate teacher in Banff who was very impressive in his abilities.  He was a paragon of health, very quick in his movements.  His training was difficult but I could see that health was a bigger focus for him.  He showed me how he could break rocks with his hands.  (I still have a piece of one of the rocks)  His advice to me to get better at my punches was to find a small tree and wrap my jacket around it, then punch it many times.  I was inspired and I did it.  I cut my hands on the tree bark through my jacket and got blood on my jacket.  My knuckles would be bruised and torn, then I would return to the kitchen where I was working unable to hold a knife and vaguely concerned I would get blood in someone’s food – but taking time off work was not an option.

I finally thought finding a balanced approach was maybe a better idea.  I started to think for myself, and I evaluated all the training advice I was given instead of blindly following it.  Along the way, I did get a couple of hernias, a torn hamstring, a badly broken left arm and bad knees and toes.  I am the 40-year-old cripple I never wanted to be.  I did Eat Bitter – and I had eaten it until I metaphorically vomited.  There was something that my healthy Aikido teachers and healthy Taiji teachers had been trying to show me that I had missed.

I had a process of reevaluation and self-evaluation that was unpleasant.  I became a worse student in some ways.  Instead of being the example to the rest of the class of a student who put out more effort and ignored more pain, I allowed myself to get more precise and slow down.  When the teacher showed something that was painful, I modified it.

The correct posture for power is actually not excessive.  In Yoga, we study excessive postures to make the everyday posture more relaxed and comfortable.  In martial arts like Aikido, the posture we should use is not excessive, but rather a very relaxed and neutral platform for possibilities to build on.  It felt uncomfortable at first, probably because it had become unnatural for me.  In time, it became the posture that I tried to live in. 

There were more insights gained from this.  Past a point, the posture should stop being painful.  Pain is a warning signal from your body.  I started to learn this martial art as a way of life hoping to have a longer, healthier lifestyle.  If I chased the pain, I would get injured.  A small injury can be laughed off, but eventually small injuries became chronic injuries or permanent ones.  Chasing the Pain is not Eating Bitter!

From there, the problem became chasing the Effort.  A blend and neutralization is supposed to feel like nothing happened, to both the Uke and the Nage.  I learned I didn’t strive for feeling nothing if I had it in my head that this is supposed to feel difficult:  I started chasing the effort instead of the soft, relaxed power.  Soft and relaxed started to feel wrong, so I “corrected” away from this by making things feel more hard and difficult.  Often, this meant “correcting” to a more excessive posture.

I learned falls are supposed to protect your body, and as your muscles adapt and your structure improves the fall should become easy to do.  If you want to chase the pain and effort, you “correct” yourself into doing harsher falls.  I learned not to get frustrated if a roll didn’t rattle my teeth.  I stopped telling myself on the ground I felt good, therefore I was being lazy.  I learned to stop saying to myself, “Damn, I came here to get a workout and this is too easy!  Gotta ramp things up!”  I had to learn that things were not supposed to feel painful and full of effort - which meant that I never corrected something that felt painful and full of effort.  I corrected easy to be more painful, more difficult.

I learned Uke does not take proper ukemi if they think they are supposed to make this hard for Nage – they resist in a strange way that might get them hurt and in a fashion that they never could if training at full speed with a committed attack.  Resistance makes something else very easy and creates an opening that Uke does not recognize because they are trying to make this “hard.”

This resisting ukemi also only works when Nage is working in a kata – when the kata is relaxed and Nage can do freestyle, Uke has not learned to follow but only resist.  If Nage moves well, Uke is in grave danger.  For example, Uke is pressing down, hoping to make it hard for me to go up.  The movement then becomes slower for Uke, and their brain can process the fall.  What if they push down, expecting me to push up, but instead I accelerate them at the ground?  Now Uke is surprised, probably stiffens up further before impact and has no time to process what is about to happen.  They never created a learned reflex to follow the movement, because they never learned to follow when they had the chance to learn.  Uke’s technique gets insidiously worse until they get injured someday.  Uke can make a kata impossible, but the goal isn’t the kata.  The kata is there to teach the reflexes that should always be present.

If Nage plays this game, they feel for the resistance, and apply force against Uke’s strength.  Using the above example, Uke presses down and my reflex becomes to try to lift up directly against them.  Force on force.  This is me, chasing the effort, instead of learning to do the technique with the minimum of force.  My technique gets worse.  I need to be where Uke is not, and feel for their openings.  In Chasing the Effort, I am constantly bashing into a brick wall.  Maybe I could walk through the door, but smashing through the wall feels like the right thing to do so I do that instead.  Chasing the Effort is not Eating Bitter.

In chasing effort and pain, my postures become inappropriately larger, putting my body at more risk and making my technique weaker.  I start to lean more, straighten my arms, hunch my shoulders, lock out the knees or bend them too much because this is what my idiot brain has decided is what “power” feels like.

I stopped trying to do my flexibility, strength and cardio training in the dojo.  Excessive flexibility is something to work on outside of class.  When the stabilizing muscles for a joint are too lax, the joint is prone to injury.  There is no reason to make excessive stretching part of a warm up or a workout, and for power there is actually a lot of reason not to.  Strength is not something to train when I am trying to not use strength.  Feeling I need to work on my strength makes me use my muscle power more.  Muscles that have gotten fatigued, stiff and tight are more prone to injury.  Cardio training is supposed to be an effort – but proper technique should not be full of effort.

I try to now keep my precise, relaxed technical training separate and apart from these other things.

I remember Sensei’s lessons now.  He would have me practice extra slow and smooth sword cuts when he saw me trying to do 1000 at full speed.  When I would run and strain, he taught me to stand relaxed.  He was unassailable, but calm and relaxed.  His structure was perfect, and his power was amazing.  He was trying to teach me these insights all along.  His senior students that could all throw with more power and train for longer than me - they knew it too.

In putting my appetite for bitter aside, I have become a more contentious student and a bit of a headache for my teachers.  But, I am now starting to realize power.  Maybe in becoming a bad student I am becoming a better one.