Practice and Resistance

The author Steven Pressfield (author of Gate of Fire and the Legend of Bagger Vance) frequently writes about topics that while specifically are about writing, apply more widely to art in general and to martial arts. Below is an excerpt from a post about Practice and Resistance. The full post may be read here.

Why do we have a practice at all?

I have my own reasons, some of which definitely go deep into the airy-fairy, but the most obvious and the most practical is this:

We have a practice in order to confront and overcome Resistance.

A practice by definition defeats Resistance because it produces work every day with total focus and dedication. And a practice is lifelong, so we know we’ll never quit.

One could say that a practice is “habit.” But in truth a practice goes way beyond that. A practice enlists habit. It implies habit (if we have a practice, we do it every day, i.e. it can be called a habit) but it is habit only in the sense that giving birth is exercise.

Likewise, if we said the purpose of a practice is to overcome Resistance, we would be vastly understating the depth and effect of having a practice.

Overcoming Resistance is a side-benefit of having a practice. 

For myself, I was years into the act of having a practice before I even thought about its efficacy as a strategy to overcome my own Resistance. Resistance was (and is) a given for me. It wakes up with me. I know I will have to face it every day, and I know it will never diminish or relent or go away.

But I have a practice. That’s all I need to know. I know at a certain time of day I will go into a certain room. I will enter with a very specific mindset, i.e. “Leave your problems (and your ego) outside.” And I will engage in a very specific (though infinitely varied in the moment) enterprise.

 

Leave Your Troubles Outside

As martial artists, we can learn from other athletes and artists. Below is an excerpt from a post that appeared at Steven Pressfield's blog (author of Bagger Vance and Gate of Fire). The full post may be read here.

My great friend and mentor (and also my first boss), David Leddick, spent several years as a ballet dancer with the Metropolitan Opera. David trained with a celebrated teacher named Margaret Craske.

Here’s what he wrote in his book, I’m Not For Everyone. Neither Are You.

I studied ballet at the old Metropolitan Opera when Antony Tudor, the famous choreographer, was the head of the ballet school. In fact, Margaret Craske was the teacher most students considered to be more important.  She had danced with Pavlova in the ’20s. 

Miss Craske instructed us: “Leave your problems outside the classroom.”

Such good advice. And in that hour and a half of intense concentration on every part of your body, the music, the coordinating with other dancers—you really couldn’t think about your troubles and it was great escaping them. You emerged much more relaxed and self-confident.

We worked hard. We never had a sick day. You went on even if you had to lie down in the wings until you were needed. No one thought this was unusual. 

At the Met, the powers that be were only interested in two things: how well you sang and how well you danced. Your race didn’t count, your background, sexual preferences, family, none of that mattered. You had to deliver.  That was the sole standard. It was great.

In later careers, all of this has stood me in good stead. I never had to work that hard in any of the various worlds I entered. I knew the quality of the work I was doing. Dancing at the Met was a wonderful experience and a wonderful preparation for the rest of my life.

 

Practice Every Day

Below is an excerpt from a post from Steven Pressfield's excellent blog which has to do with art and writing. Mr. Pressfield is best known for his books, The Legend of Bagger Vance and Gates of Fire. Every bit of the post applies to our martial arts practice.

If you want to be good, really good at something, practice every day.

The full post may be read here.

It was 1990-something.

I was working in a small mom-and-pop publishing house just down I95 from Health

Communications, the publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

My boss wanted a series just like that.

Think of all the possibilities. Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul. Chicken Soup for the 12 Year Old’s Soul. Chicken Soup for the Chicken Soup Hater’s Soul. Chicken Soup for everyone!

I can’t remember if my boss told me this or if I read it in a magazine or heard it on the radio, but around that time, either Jack Canfield or Mark Victor Hansen said something about doing an interview a day, or scheduling something every day—or just doing something every day. (Murky, I know . . . Getting old is a hateful business).

Point was: Do something every day.

Stuck with me.

Back to 2019. I watched Amanda Seales’ “I Be Knowin’” special on HBO last weekend.

Part of her routine hits on how hard it is to go out in the evenings when you’re older—especially when all you want to do is curl up in bed. It’s a funny bit.

Reminded me of authors.

Very few of the ones I’ve known have wanted to do interviews.

They want to write.

They want to eat in their own kitchen, not in restaurants on the road.

They want to sleep in their own beds, not in hotels, motels, or the Holiday Inn.

They aren’t interested in any of it, but they know they have to do it, and they have to get into the mood.

Back to Canfield and Hansen—or whichever one said do something every day.

Think about interviews, or networking or whatever it is that helps share your book just as you might think about losing weight or saving money.

You don’t have to do a lot every day, but you have to do something.

Something. Every day.

So what is that something?

This is where it gets frustrating—and where I get angry at sites that have all the answers for how to launch a bestseller.

There isn’t one plan that will yield the same results for two different people/books.

I can give you a long list of books that, at their core, were launched the same way (minus some tweaks here and there), and they didn’t all hit the bestseller list. Part of it is the author, part is the topic, part is just what’s going on in the world. I’ve known authors who were wonderful authors but awful speakers, authors who looked the part and had little to say and authors who weren’t “camera ready” and got little play because they were rough around the edges. I’ve had an author bumped because a plane was landing without all of its wheels and another author bumped because, yep, another plane story won out.

A few weeks back, I wrote about what does always works.

That’s where you have to start.

From there, look at what your favorite authors have done and make it work for you.

Adjust it a little every day, but do it every day.

I know. It’s not your thing. You want to write. Trust me. A little every day.

Change

Decades ago, when I was a young software engineer, I had a job where I sat next to a PhD from Taiwan. He took an interest in me because I was practicing taijiquan and had an interest in Asian things.

Every day he would write out a character for me and explain it to me. The one that really stuck with me was “change.”

If you’re stuck, change. If something isn’t working, change. If your mind isn’t right about something, change it. 

As martial artists, change is one of the fingerposts of what we do.

Below is an excerpt from a post from author Steven Pressfield's blog on the topic of change and why it is so difficult. The full post may be read here.

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98^th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of hot air came through her glass windows as intense as opening a pizza oven.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Seminal Change Curve is Story-Driven

She did not hesitate. She didn’t even pick up her purse, make a phone call or turn off her computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit, pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-stairway decent to the ground. What she found curious is that far more people chose to stay right where they were. They made outside calls and even an entire group of colleagues went into their previously scheduled meeting.

Why would they choose to stay in such a vulnerable place in such an extreme circumstance?

Because they were human beings and human beings find change to be extremely difficult, practically impossible. To leave without being instructed to leave was a risk. What were the chances of another plane hitting their tower, really? And if they did leave, wouldn’t their colleagues think that they were over-reacting, running in fear? They should stay calm and wait for help, maintain an even keel. And that’s what they did. I probably would have too.

Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn’t immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar story in their minds to guide them.

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.

Even among those people who chose to leave, there were some who went back to the floor to retrieve personal belongings they couldn’t bear to part with. One woman was walking down alongside Marissa Panigrosso when she stopped herself and went back upstairs to get the baby pictures of her children left on her desk. To lose them was too much for her to accept. The decision was fatal.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstances, our impulse is to stay safe by doing what we’ve always done before. To change our course of action seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives, even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety.

How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one that takes every ounce of the protagonist’s inner fortitude. Because that’s what it takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit your job. It just does.

I think it is because change requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Courage and Boldness

There is a good post at The Art of Manliness on Courage and Boldness. An excerpt is below. The full article may be read here.


What causes one culture to flourish while another flounders?

Why do some civilizations reach great heights only to fall mightily?

Historians have dedicated great tomes to these questions. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West are two prime examples of this line of inquiry.

But another can be found not in a work of non-fiction, but that of historical fiction. In Tides of War, author Stephen Pressfield provides a fictionalized account of one of the greatest conflicts in history — the Peloponnesian War — fought between two of the West’s greatest civilizations: Athens and Sparta.

While Tides of War is a work of historical fiction, Pressfield went to great lengths to maintain the integrity of the actual events described, relying on primary sources from Thucydides and other Greek historians. He also worked to capture the ethos of the time, and the men who inhabited it.

Peppered in between Pressfield’s thumos–inspiring depictions of battle, are penetrating deductions about the cultural forces going on behind the scenes — the differences between the warring parties’ mindsets and principles, and how these differences led to mighty, imperialistic Athens falling to modest, republican Sparta.

While the decline of a civilization is often chalked up to economics or politics, Pressfield theorizes that Athens deteriorated because one particular aspect of its individual and national character degraded, and another was substituted in its place.

Sparta and Athens: A Tale of Two City-States

Despite living in close proximity with one another (the cities were only about 150 miles apart) and sharing the same gods, the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta were more different than alike. While Sparta was more communal (some would even say fascist), Athens celebrated individual liberty and freedom. While Sparta disdained wealth and luxury (going as far as outlawing money), Athens was a commercial empire. While Sparta’s military might lay in their fierce and indomitable army, Athens ruled the seas with their navy. Sparta was content with remaining a small and independent city-state; Athens was much more imperialistic — ever seeking to expand its influence politically, economically, and culturally.

The Spartans valued things like poetry, music, and philosophy more than is popularly believed, but such pursuits were decidedly subsumed by an emphasis on military training. This focus created one of the most effective, disciplined, and fearless armies in the world. Athens, on the other hand, celebrated art and philosophy as the pinnacle of human flourishing, and produced aesthetic masterpieces along with many of the most influential thinkers and philosophers in Western history, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Athens and Sparta differed politically as well. Sparta maintained a democratic system with a balanced constitution that divided power among three groups. A system of checks and balances prevented any one group from gaining too much power. Athenians, on the other hand, governed themselves under a radical democracy in which every male citizen was expected to participate.

While Sparta and Athens banded together for the sake of Greek freedom during the Persian War, they were reluctant allies. Each had long kept a suspicious watch on the other. Spartans were particularly wary of the Athenians’ increasing imperialism, believing it was only a matter of time before they would try to conquer their slice of the Greek peninsula. It was exactly that fear which led to the thirty-year Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Though the decades-long conflict would decimate the power and strength of both city-states, Sparta emerged the victor.

While both Sparta and Athens had their particular strengths and weaknesses, by the time of the Peloponnesian War, the latter had forgotten the apothegm attributed to their mythological law-giver Solon: “Nothing in excess.” Athenian virtues and ideals were taken to such extremes that they became vices. Love of individual liberty and expression degenerated into narcissistic, hyper-individualism; robust commercial enterprise morphed into unhinged avarice; hardiness and restraint were replaced with softness and debauchery; active and healthy democracy devolved into mob rule and demagoguery.

Even the great philosophers of Athens — Socrates and Plato — became increasingly critical of Athenian degradation, contrasting the discipline and virtue of the Spartans with the civic and moral decay of their fellow citizens. They looked on with dismay as a once thriving culture was slowly eaten by the cancer of decadence.

Spartan Bravery and the Difference Between Courage and Boldness

What was the core difference between Athens and Sparta, then? We’ve dissected external differences between the city states, but was there a deeper, foundational quality that the Spartans maintained, and Athenians lacked, that led to the latter’s decline and ultimate defeat?

In Tides of War, Pressfield uses the Spartan naval admiral Lysander to give answer to this question. In perhaps the most stirring scene in the book, Lysander stands before thousands of Spartans and their allies in the lead-up to the Battle of Notium and gives them a rousing speech. In it, he lays out the differences between Athens and Sparta and makes the case for why the Spartan way of life is superior, and why, in the end, his men will prevail.

For Lysander, the heart of what separates Spartans from Athenians is this:

“We, Spartans and Peloponnesians, possess courage.
Our enemies possess boldness.
They own thrasytes, we andreia.
Pay attention, brothers. Here is a profound and irreconcilable division.”

Andreia, or courage, was the dominating quality of the Spartans; thrasytes, or boldness, was the dominating quality of the Athenians.

For the Greeks, the word andreia meant both courage and manliness. Courage was the sine qua non of being a mature man; the two qualities were inextricably intertwined.
Thrasytes, on the other hand, was more of a boyish trait.

“The bold man is prideful, brazen, ambitious,” Lysander explained. “The brave man calm, God-fearing, steady.”

While Lysander set up a stark dichotomy between boldness and courage, acting with the former can occasionally be useful even for a grown man; sometimes impulsive, even reckless action is needed to seize a fleeting opportunity.

But where boldness exists, it must always be coupled and harnessed with courage; courage must be the prevailing quality of a man’s character.

Why?

In his speech, Lysander elucidates the difference between men who primarily act from boldness, and those who primarily act from courage, and details “what kind of man these conflicting qualities produce.”

Below I highlight Lysander’s words from Tides of War, and explore how they applied both to the Spartans, and equally well to men today:

Boldness Is Impatient and Fickle; Courage Is Steady and Enduring

 

 

Character in Martial Arts

The noted author Steven Pressfield had a great post at his blog about character. While he was writing about writers, it applies every bit to martial arts practice as well. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

Olympic Character

By Callie Oettinger | Published: February 21, 2014

Jean-Dominique Bauby, Stephen Hawking, Francis Tsai—a journalist,  a theoretical physicist and an artist.
The similarities? Olympic character.
Olympic Character
In his column DNA of Champions, Joel Stein wrote about having his DNA compared with Olympic Gold Medalist Sergei Bubka’s DNA. It wasn’t surprising to read that there are certain genes that are common within Olympic athletes.
However . . . “The key Olympic success,” said Bubka, is that “you need to have character to go to your goal, to do your work, to be a hard worker.”
The Journalist
Twenty days after having a stroke, Jean-Dominique Bauby woke from a coma, able to control his mind and one part of his body—his left eyelid.
“In the past, it was known as a ‘massive stroke,’ and you simply died,” wrote Bauby in his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony. You survive, but you survive with what is so aptly known as “lock-in syndrome.” Paralyzed from head to toe, the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, unable to speak or move. In my case, blinking my left eyelid is my only means of communication.

On its own, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a magnificent book (it became an international bestseller and then a Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated film of the same name), but knowing how it was written—that blink by blink Bauby “dictated” his book to Claude Mendibil, who transferred his blinks to words on paper . . .
Each reading is the release of a story that was born in a prison.
Though Bauby was “locked in,” through blinking his voice was released, to be heard within the heads of readers around the world.
In the beginning of the prologue, he described  “something like a giant invisible diving bell [holding his] whole body prisoner.”
As his day unfolds . . .

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’ court.
You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

Then he starts into the actual writing of the book.

My main task now is to compose the first of these bedridden travel notes so that I shall be ready when my publisher’s emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by letter. In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.

Blink by blink his voice escaped, his passion continued.

Set Your Troubles Aside

One of the things I like about martial arts training is that it is a concrete opportunity to take your cares and woes and put them on a shelf for a while. You have to set them aside to concentrate on what you are doing. Having set them aside, you give yourself a respite, create a little distance from them and gain some new perspective.

Recently at Steven Pressfield's blog, there was a post on this very topic. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

“Leave Your Problems Outside”
By Steven Pressfield | Published: December 25, 2013
Leddick ballet

David Leddick in Met Opera days

    I studied ballet at the old Metropolitan Opera when Antony Tudor, the famous choreographer, was the head of the ballet school. In fact, Margaret Craske was the teacher most students considered to be more important. She had danced with Pavlova in the ’20s.

    Miss Craske instructed us: “Leave your problems outside the classroom.”

This excerpt comes from an upcoming book by my mentor, David Leddick. David continues:

    Such good advice. And in that hour and a half of intense concentration on every part of your body, the music, the coordinating with other dancers you really couldn’t think about your troubles and it was great escaping them. You emerged much more relaxed and self-confident.

    We worked hard. We never had a sick day. You went on even if you had to lie down in the wings until you were needed. No one thought this was unusual.

    At the Met, the powers that be were only interested in two things: how well you sang and how well you danced. Your race didn’t count, your background, sexual preferences, family, none of that mattered. You had to deliver. That was the sole standard. It was great.

    In later careers all of this has stood me in good stead. I never had to work that hard in any of the various worlds I entered. I knew the quality of the work I was doing. Dancing at the Met was a wonderful experience and a wonderful preparation for the rest of my life.

2013 is almost over. How will you and I handle our work in 2014? What’s so great about “Leave your problems outside” is it’s applicable even if we’re only going to have one hour a day to pursue our artistic dreams.

One hour is plenty if we banish all distractions at the doorstep.

Focusing on the Wrong Things

Steven Pressfield is the author of many fine books. At his blog was a very good post by one of his associates which was made in the wake of Amazon's announcement that it was making some experiments with delivery by drones and the subsequent media chatter afterwords.

The gist of the article is that it is all too easy to get hooked into focusing on the minor issues, thereby ignoring the larger ones; the ones that really matter. 

Why the article itself is about the book industry, there are wider implications in our training; what we choose to focus on, and in our larger lives. 

An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

Don’t Major in the Minor

By Callie Oettinger | Published: December 6, 2013

“Don’t major in the minor.”
Mellody Hobson said it, but I’ve thought it these last few days, since watching Jeff Bezos on 60 Minutes this past Sunday.

In case you haven’t heard, Bezos unveiled a prototype for package-delivering drones at the end of the interview. Without missing a beat, the character-bashing, Jeff-Bezos hating, Amazon-vilifying tribes descended, with articles and comments from one site to the next.
They majored in the minor.
I’m not saying that the drones weren’t newsworthy. They were—and I saw mentions pop up in everything from Outside Magazine’s site to Waterstones’ blog. And I’m not saying that Amazon isn’t above criticism, but . . .

There was much more to that interview than the last few minutes of drones. And if you are going to go down the drone rabbit hole, there’s a much bigger discussion that needs to take place, outside whether Amazon will or won’t ever be able to use them.
Instead of responding to the bigger ideas, they went for the jugular and the jocular, playing guessing games about why 60 Minutes ran the interview, why the secretive Bezos shared the drones.
...
1) Complaining is not a strategy
When Charlie Rose asked Bezos about worries of small book publishers and traditional retailers, and whether Amazon is ruthless in its pursuit of market share, Bezos replied:

“The internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie. You know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.” (about the 9:15 mark of the interview)

He’s right. And the future isn’t just happening to booksellers. Look at how the rise of e-mail played into the decline of the U.S. Postal Service’s revenues. After years of struggling, a plan was sent to Congress for approval, to end Saturday delivery. Congress nixed the plan. A few months later,

Amazon stepped in with a different plan—to add Sunday service. Via this partnership, the USPS will deliver Amazon’s packages on the one day of the week that no one else delivers them, thus increasing delivery options for Amazon customers and bringing in revenue to the USPS. A win-win.

The examples of industries sideswiped by the future is long, as is the list of industries that have risen, offering much needed innovation and efficiency.

But . . .

It’s easier to bash Bezos and Amazon than it is to look in the mirror and ask, Why didn’t my publishing house lead the charge to sell books online? Why did we focus on the chains as the future when we saw the indy stores struggling to stay afloat? Why didn’t we recognize the potential for the future?

It’s easier to hate Bezos and Amazon than it is to ask, Why didn’t my bookstore stock backlist, long-tail titles, and books from indy publishers in addition to all those big publisher frontlist titles? 

Why didn’t my bookstore create a model that could be tapped by indy publishers and authors, instead of requiring top co-op dollars that only the big guys could pay for prime placement?


It’s easier to vilify Bezos and Amazon than it is to ask, Why didn’t I keep spending dollars with indy stores instead of spending them at the big chains, which then caused the indys I love to die?

It’s easier to major in the minor.

Find Your "Authentic Swing"

Steven Pressfield, the author of many great books, has written another terrific article at his blog. He describes a famous golfer who has an ... unusual swing that works for him, and goes on to talk about finding your "authentic swing" in your own life. 

An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

The concept of the Authentic Swing is that each of us is endowed from birth with our own gift, our own style, our own unique talent and point of view. Our job is to find it and bring it forth.

“I believe that each of us possesses,” Bagger Vance began, “one true Authentic Swing that is ours alone. It is folly to try to teach us another, or to mold us to some ideal version of the perfect swing. Each player possesses only that one swing that he was born with, the swing that existed within him before he ever picked up a club. Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone … “

Please, take the Foolscap Method (or anything else I propose) with a major grain of salt. Tweak it. Modify it. Chuck it completely if you don’t like it.

Do what works for you.

If you’ll forgive me for quoting myself twice in a single blog post, here are the last few paragraphs from The Authentic Swing. I swear I did not fudge them to comport with Jim Furyk’s incredible round.

Are you a writer or an artist or an entrepreneur? Don’t copy me. Don’t do it my way. Work at four in the morning if that feels right. Work in the shower, work on the subway, work at the wheel of a moving taxi cab. Start at the end, play backward, write your stuff in Urdu and translate it later.

Do it your way.

Don’t swing Rory’s swing, or Bubba’s, or, for heaven’s sake, Jim Furyk’s. Listen to Bagger.

Swing your Authentic Swing.

The Path May Be Hidden

Steven Pressfield is the author of several well known books: The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Gate of Fire and The War of Art. He also authors a very good blog.

Below is an excerpt from a recent blog post. The whole post may be read here.

“In the End, We’ll Succeed”

By Steven Pressfield | Published: May 1, 2013

Not long ago I took a wilderness trek with an old friend who had been the commander of a Recon company in the army. We were out in the boonies for five days, with no check-ins with civilization. I had never done this kind of thing before and I noticed two things:

One, my friend was completely confident of our whereabouts at all times.

Two, we were lost at least half the time.

A phrase kept re-appearing in my friend’s conversation: “In the end, we’ll succeed.”

At first I didn’t pick up on this theme, but after the twentieth time or so, I started saying it myself. It was a great mantra, and I think it applies equally well to such diverse enterprises as writing a novel or starting a business or undertaking any long-term, high-aspiration project.

What is a “Recon commander” anyway? As my friend explained it, recon teams or platoons (among many other assignments) guide larger formations across unfamiliar territory. Their job is to go into the unknown and make it known to those who follow. My friend’s vintage is the era before the invention of the GPS or other satellite-based navigational technology. He’s old school. A map. A compass. The sun.

I know from unimpeachable history that my friend is a superb land navigator. But, trust me, when you’re out in the deep boonies with no highways or man-made landmarks within miles, everything starts looking like everything else. My friend taught me about “blind maps”—a map with no place names on it, just topographical features. It’s amazing how hard it is to scan the horizon and say, “Ah, that peak over there is this peak on the map.”


One evening as the sun was setting we couldn’t find our way out of a box canyon. I was starting to freak. My friend was calmly collecting firewood. “In the end we’ll succeed.”

Another day we hiked all morning toward a road that had ceased to exist since the map’s publication. No problem. “In the end we’ll succeed.”

And we did.

There seemed to be two components to my friend’s principle:

1. Commitment to the ultimate object.
“In the end” meant to him the final goal. What happened along the way was purely anecdotal. There was a goal. That was where we were headed. Nothing would stop us from getting there.

2. Indifference to setbacks along the way.

 

Budo and Self Discipline

Budo is supposed to enhance your life, not replace it. How many people do you know that train, train, train, train, train and have no life to speak of outside of the dojo?

Training for a specific event is a special situation, but generally speaking martial arts training is training for life. Sometimes you might focus on one thing and sometimes something else as is appropriate for the time and situation. In the long run your practice should be balanced.

According to lift.do where I track my own practice, I’ve now logged 160 consecutive days. I’ve accomplished this by waking up a little extra early every day and working out before I go to work (I’m also assisted by a couple of young dogs who are eager to start the day). I really don’t like getting up early, but I like training everyday a lot more than I dislike getting up.

Steven Pressfield is a well know author. He wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was made into a movie; The Gate of Fire, which I hope will someday be a movie; and a host of others including the War of Art and Turning Pro, which are about actually doing something with your creative abilities. While he writes specifically about the business of writing, everything in those books could just as easily be applied to the study of martial arts.

Mr. Pressfield has an excellent website and blog. On that blog recently appeared an article by his associate, Shawn Coyne entitled “The Difference Between Self Discipline and Self Flaggelation.” Below is an excerpt. The full article may be read here.

The Difference Between Self-Discipline and Self-Flaggelation

By Shawn Coyne | Published: March 8, 2013

I have a difficult time determining whether or not my internal insistence that I bang out xxx number of words in a  day—no matter what!—falls within the realm of constructive self-discipline or destructive self-flagellation.


There’s no easy answer. The words don’t magically type themselves.

I asked Steve about this when I was in LA a couple weeks ago. He reminded me of his friend who trains thoroughbred horses. He wrote about him in TURNING PRO. What the trainer told Steve is that he never grinds the horses, making them finish a lap when they stop running. While he certainly has an agenda each day and he nudges them with encouragement to improve, once they get tired or bored, he takes them off the track. Tomorrow’s another day.

 ...

Self-discipline is simply having the nerve to sit down with a pile of construction paper or a laptop or a band saw every day at an appointed time and letting that little guy come out to play. If he gets fidgety after a while, let him go do something else.

Happy Easter

First of all, I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Easter.

I would also like to thank and congratulate those who took part in the 2013 Lenten Challenge.

According to lift.do, I have completed 124 consecutive days of practice without a break.

To help close the 2013 Lenten Challenge off to a good well, I've included an excerpt from my ebook, Cook Ding's Kitchen: A Kung Fu Carry Out ( if you don't have a Kindle, you can download the FREE Kindle Reading App here) below. It's the second chapter on the value of having a practice.  Enjoy.

“Philosophy practiced is the goal of learning.” – Thoreau

There are numerous reasons why someone would want to practice a martial art: self defense, exercise, a social activity, carrying on a piece of history and many others.

For some people, the overriding reason that they practice a martial art is to study “the way;” a type of self improvement which may include those listed above but which overall is meant to bring the student into alignment with the elusive way of the world.

What do we mean by “a practice?” In an article by Steven Pressfield, the author of the Legend of Bagger Vance, Gate of Fire and many other excellent books, he writes:

What is a practice? A practice is a regular, daily application of intention. We might have a yoga practice, or a martial arts practice; we could have a practice in calligraphy or tai chi, or flower arrangement or Japanese swordfighting. Have you read The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura? The brewing and serving of tea can be a profound practice.

A practice isn’t pursued for money. It’s not an ego trip. Humility is a prime virtue in entering upon a practice.

But a practice is not for cream puffs.  A practice requires fierce intention and the relentless commitment of a warrior. A practice needs killer instinct.

A practice is spiritual. Its technique is to use a simple physical act or skill as an avenue to access the higher aspects of the self. In Hatha yoga, the various poses are meant to take us beyond our bodies, into our breath and ultimately into a state of consciousness where we’re present in our flesh but are, at the same time, looking on from a higher, more detached plane. That’s the payoff (beyond easing our aching backs).

Practices take place within a sacred space. When we enter our martial arts dojo, we dress in traditional garb that shows respect for the discipline and its history, for our instructors and for our fellow students; we take off our shoes; we bow to the sensei. We’re quiet. We turn off our iPhones. We stop texting.

The great part about a practice is it can be learned. There’s a syllabus. It’s not a mystery. The teacher starts us at Square One. He guides us. We practice; we get better. Our understanding deepens over time. We had thought, when we started, that we were teaching the calligraphy brush to do what we want, but now we see that the brush is teaching us. It’s teaching us patience. It’s humbling our ego. We finally produce a masterpiece and our instructor throws it into the fire. We’re learning. The end is nothing. The act is everything.

Practice is more than putting in the proverbial 10,000 hours. It’s a deliberate study as well.

An excerpt from an article that appeared in 2007:

The Newest Mandarins
By ANNPING CHIN

Lei Bo is a philosophy graduate student in China whose faith is in history, and by habit he considers the world using the thousands of classical passages that live in his head. Three years ago he was studying in an empty room in the School of Management at his university in Beijing when students began to amble in for their class on Sun Tzu's "Art of War," a work from either the fifth or the fourth century B.C. Lei Bo decided to stay. He had taken two courses on "The Art of War" in the philosophy and the literature departments, and was curious to see how students in business and management might approach the same subject. The discussion that day was on the five attributes of a military commander. Sun Tzu said in the first chapter of the book, "An able commander is wise (zhi), trustworthy (xin), humane (ren), courageous (yong) and believes in strict discipline (yan)."

The students thought that a chief executive today should possess the same strengths in order to lead. But how did the five attributes apply to business? Here they were stuck, unable to move beyond what the words suggest in everyday speech. Even their teacher could not find anything new to add. At this point, Lei Bo raised his hand and began to take each word back to its home, to the sixth century B.C., when Sun Tzu lived, and to the two subsequent centuries when the work Sun Tzu inspired was actually written down.

On the word yong (courage), Lei Bo cited chapter seven of The Analects, where Confucius told a disciple that if he "were to lead the Three Armies of his state," he "would not take anyone who would try to wrestle a tiger with his bare hands and walk across a river [because there is not a boat]. If I take anyone, it would have to be someone who is wary when faced with a task and who is good at planning and capable of successful execution." 

No one ever put Confucius in charge of an army, said Lei Bo, and Confucius never thought that he would be asked, but being a professional, he could expect a career either in the military or in government. And his insight about courage in battle and in all matters of life and death pertains to a man's interior: his judgment and awareness, his skills and integrity. This was how Lei Bo explored the word "courage": he located it in its early life before it was set apart from ideas like wisdom, humaneness and trust. He tried to describe the whole sense of the word. The business students and their teacher were hooked. They wanted Lei Bo back every week for as long as they were reading "The Art of War."

Scores of men and women in China's business world today are studying their country's classical texts, not just "The Art of War," but also early works from the Confucian and the Daoist canon. On weekends, they gather at major universities, paying tens of thousands of yuan each, to learn from prominent professors of philosophy and literature, to read and think in ways they could not when they were students and the classics were the objects of Maoist harangue . Those inside and outside China say that these businessmen and -women, like most Chinese right now, have caught the "fever of national learning."

There is reading, and there is study.

From Pressfield and Chins’ articles, it becomes clear that you can’t take an art by force, although you must be diligent. Theory will inform your practice but is not a substitute. The unsaid element is submission. You have to submit to your practice; to allow yourself to be shaped by it. 

“The mind and body reflect one another.” – Kushida Sensei, Yoshokai Aikido

 

Here are a couple of examples of being shaped by ones practice. The mind and body indeed reflect one another. We can work on one by working on the other.

In this day and age, I think the main reason for most of us to train in martial arts isn't to fight, but to cultivate a calm, clear mind.

I am 55 and haven't been in a fight since my early 20's. I do however find that I have an opportunity to show the advantage of a calm, clear mind nearly every day.

Take the other day for example.

I was on the freeway with my family driving back from visiting some relatives in Ohio. I was in the left lane passing a truck. There was a SUV behind the truck.

Just as I was pulling alongside the SUV, he decided to change lanes sharply. I dodged as far to the left as I could without driving off the pavement and into the median.

It wasn't far enough. When he finally saw me, he hit my car and went back to his own lane. I didn’t go into the median.

The highway patrolman said that if he had hit me a little differently, my car would have spun out; a very bad thing. If he had hit me much harder at all, I would have ended up in the median and rolled over.

As it was, the damage is superficial. No one was hurt and all's well that ends well.

I didn’t panic when this happened. I didn’t freeze. I focused on what I was doing and rode out the situation. I kept my car on the pavement, my passengers (relatively) calm, didn’t go into the median and I was calm and level headed when I exchanged information with the other driver after we pulled over.

I owe this to my training.

As for being shaped physically, I have recounted elsewhere how I used to train pretty diligently in Yoshinkai Aikido under Kushida Sensei as a young man. When it came time to raise a family and build a career, I hung up my dogi for a while always knowing that I would come back to martial arts training in some form. Martial arts practice is a lot like gravity in that once it gets hold of you, you may think you can escape it for some time but eventually it pulls you back in.

When my late mother was in an assisted living home, then later a nursing home, I got to see and spend time with a lot of human train wrecks up close. The criteria I would apply to determining how I would go forward with exercise in general and martial arts training in particular began to crystallize.

I would want to practice something that I could physically carry into my dotterage. It had to be intellectually engaging. I wanted to do something I could practice effectively as a solo practice and have no need of special equipment or location; that is, self contained and portable.

About 12 years ago, I began some of the fundamental exercises of Yiquan. The standing practice really resonated with me and I have continued it in one form or another to this day.

Five years ago, I began studying Wu style Taijiquan. Beginning 3 years ago I began to focus on the small frame square form from the Wu style.

This was all a very Yin practice though. To burn some calories, keep up some cardiovascular capacity and muscle tone I felt I needed to supplement this. Alongside those practices I also used a treadmill (which I wore out and replaced with an elliptical machine) and weight machine (which I eventually set aside in favor of body weight exercises; the weights made my joints sore).

From my youth in the 70s's from reading the books of Robert W. Smith, one of the martial arts that I have been fascinated by was Xingyiquan. I started learning the Five Elements forms from some videos to add some Yang flavor to my practice.

I wanted to see how Xingyiquan would physically shape me, so I dropped the elliptical machine and the body weight exercises to see what would happen. 

Aside from my "soft" practices, the only regular physical exercise I get other than Xingyiquan is the stuff I do around the house (and the Mrs has no shortage of Egyptian Pyramid slave labor projects she'd like to see me complete) and of course, walking the dog.

I've always had quick results when I've done physical exercise. My usual development would be a big blocky chest, biceps, thighs and calves. I've never been successful in building size or definition in my forearms.

The regular Xingyiquan practice has changed that. My chest is flatter, like a boxer but well defined. I still have strong biceps but the muscle tone seems longer than big. My forearms are getting meaty (for me) and are not only picking up definition, but the insides of my arms are getting defined as well. 

Like my biceps, my thighs and calves have a longer quality to them. My lower back; the area that would be covered by a weight lifting belt if I wore one, DOES feel like I'm wearing one of those support belts. Finally, I am becoming aware of a lot of little muscles in my shoulders and back.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Michelangelo

We went to a wedding last month. A couple of weeks before the wedding, the Mrs suggested that I try on the new suit I bought last spring. The jacket was too tight. The jackets of all my old suits were too tight. I had to buy a new one.

At 55 I feel like I am in as good shape as I was in my 20s when I was going to over a dozen aikido classes a week. I am nearly as strong as I've ever been and I can't think of a time when my stamina has been better. I had already lost most of the weight I was going to lose from my peak three years ago by the time I started learning the Five Elements, but my weight is generally a few pounds lighter than a year ago. Altogether, over the last 3 years, I've lost 40 lbs.

My “shape” has changed in many ways. My head is clear and my body is strong. I feel great. The path leads, I follow.