The dojo often serves as a wonderful microcosm for
everything else in my life. Example from my training recently:
I'm working on some technique. It is not working correctly.
Midway through it, I realize something is amiss and set to correcting it.
The only problem is that I do not change one thing to
correct it. I change many things. Together. Quickly. The problem with this
approach is that it embodies two things: sloppy thought processes and fear.
Here's what I mean.
Thought processes should be clean when you are solving
problems. If you change half a dozen things and the guy ends up getting thrown,
can you really say you understand what caused the problem? How many of the
things you changed actually accomplished anything? A key aspect of not
repeating errors is understanding exactly what the damn error was. Without the
ability to clearly "show your work" and cleanly describe a chain of
cause and effect, you are doing "Las Vegas" style martial arts. Maybe
it worked on this one guy this one time, but if you don't own WHY, what are the
odds you will be able to consistently reproduce it?
It's like being sick and downing six different pills to fix
it without knowing what the pills do. Maybe you get better... but with no idea
why. (And the side effects of this type of "shotgun blast" medicine
could get you in trouble. Same thing with training. Along with the one right
thing you did, you may have added a ton of wrong ones which you now consciously
or unconsciously associate with “getting it right.” Congratulations, you are
now deeper in the “muck” than you were when you started.)
The second piece, the fear, is maybe more insidious and
more human.
My teacher said to me years ago, "The good ones last
for an instant, but the bad ones seem to go on for eternity."
He's right. When you really nail a technique, it is like it
comes out of nowhere. Usually there is very little in the way of feedback and
it is almost done before you realize it happens.
You usually see screwing up well before it gets to its
apex. Like, miles before it gets to its apex. For me, it seems to loom on the
horizon like Mt. Kilimanjaro. My thought process usually runs like this:
“Ok, I’m going to do this technique… Oh shit, this is going
bad. I don’t quite have it… Let’s get out of this bad spot as quickly as
possible!”
Commence changing the gang of things I addressed earlier.
It is fundamentally human to want to escape when things are
not going the way we want them to. It does not matter whether it is a bad date,
a bad business meeting, or a bad arm bar. If you screw it up, there is a part
of you that wants to get the hell out of there before someone sees how bad you
messed it up.
That’s a funny idea because the screw up already happened.
Unless you have a time machine, you can’t un-do it. And chances are, the people
on the other end know damn well that you screwed up. If it is the date or the
business meeting, most people can tell really quickly if things are going
south. If it is a martial arts technique and the guy on the business end is
really talented, he or she can literally feel
the wrong-ness.
So why hurry to get away from there? The cat is already out
of the bag. And yet, some irrational part of us wishes it wasn’t, and thinks
that hurrying away from the problem will make it like it never happened.
The folks I am sharing the mat with now have a habit of
saying “freeze!” when a screw up happens. This very habit is what brought my “thought
poison” into technicolor detail. I screw up, hear “freeze!”, and despite
consciously thinking, “OK, don’t change anything in my body or my relationship
to my partner,” I unconsciously started trying to move body parts and fix stuff.
I’ve been at this for thirteen years now. I have spent that
entire time making peace with my errors and imperfections. Coming into my new
training environment (been in a new dojo for about a month and change), I
thought I had a very good grasp on it.
It has been illuminating to see how much my subconscious
still does not want my errors to be seen.
But it is, of course, only through the process of being
seen that we fix ourselves in the dojo. And everywhere else.
The times that I have managed to actually freeze and keep
my hand or foot or whatever in the wrong place, the error has been really
hammered into my mind. When the error isn’t a dirty secret, the fix isn’t a
shameful cure.
Progress has occurred when I have truly seen my errors,
understood them, and made a conscious decision not to make those mistakes
again.
Las Vegas, shotgun blasts, and fist-fulls of pills don’t come into the picture even a
little bit.
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