What I Like

I have a former instructor (the friend I mentioned here) who has said to me multiple times, "Once you've seen good aikido, you know bad aikido." He says this to me whenever I say that, because I'm still a relative beginner, I have no business judging instructors. Despite his encouragement, I'm still not convinced I have any business deciding whose martial art is good or bad; those whom I might potentially judge still have every right, I think, to tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about.

That said, the more I train and the more I talk to experienced martial artists, the more confidence I have in deciding what I like. This confidence is what fueled the decisions I started to make in "Aikido for Me" and continue to make as I explore new places to train.

I recently visited a school of Wing Chun kung fu and saw lots of things I like. Does an abundance of things I like make an objectively good club? I, arrogantly, like to think so, but I'm not going to make any such claim here. What I am going to do is make some observations of things that I like, using this club as an example, and try to give readers an idea of what I'm looking for when I visit a martial arts club. You can decide for yourselves whether or not you agree.

I like friendly instructors. A surefire way to scare me off is to begin our relationship by either ignoring me or lecturing me on how serious/important/powerful/difficult your martial art is. I wrote about a Shotokan Karate instructor like this last summer. A good instructor, I think, makes an effort to be someone people enjoy training with.

The instructor at this Wing Chun club was always smiling. He was happy to talk with me when he wasn't too busy with his students, and when he was with his students he was not above joking with them like the fellow adults they are. There are those who believe that this kind of attitude results in wasted time and half-hearted training, but I didn't see any of that at this club.

I like students who look like they're having a good time. There are a few things in my life worth getting really serious about, like my family and my job. The martial arts have definitely made me a healthier and happier person, but they're just not in the family/job category of importance. I have very little patience for those who treat the martial arts as something too serious or too sacred to be merely enjoyed. There are very few of us who really need advanced unarmed combat skills, and those of us who need exercise have many cheaper and more efficient options than martial arts training. If there is no enjoyment, there is no reason to train at all.

The students at this Wing Chun club were obviously enjoying the process of learning their art. They smiled when they discovered new things, they laughed at their own mistakes, and they treated each other like friends rather than animated training dummies. Apparently, there are people who have a problem with this, but I can't imagine why.

I like seeing some students who look like they could beat me up. At this Wing Chun club, I saw a few guys that I definitely wouldn't want to mess with. I don't necessarily believe I'll ever be one of those guys, but I do like to think that my training is the kind of training that those guys find challenging and interesting.

My own discipline of aikido has a reputation for being the martial arts refuge of the weak, the old, and the out-of-shape. It's not entirely true, but it's truer than I'm happy to admit. One of several reasons I'm looking for an alternative to my current aikido club is that I'm tired of training with people who would have a hard time with a few jumping jacks, let alone a live application of martial arts techniques.

That's not to say that instructors who can no longer practice everything they preach are of no value; in fact, they are often great instructors (anyone who has trained with the great Hiroshi Ikeda can back me up on this). No one expects Doc Rivers to be able to get back out on the floor and guard Chris Paul. But in my day-to-day training, I want to work with people who can push my body to its limits. It's one of the reasons I started training in the first place.

I like honesty in instruction. I'm not training to become a vigilante crime fighter, and I hate--hate, hate, HATE--all the arguments on message boards and YouTube about what works "on the street" (the suburban cul-de-sac where you live is not "the street", mmakilla12, and you haven't been in a fight since grade school). All that said, I like to see an instructor doing his best to be honest about what works.

At this Wing Chun club, I heard the instructor say things like, "That's only working because he's letting you get away with it," and, "That's not going to move someone who's a lot bigger than you." He would then show alternatives. He had no illusions about his art being an ultimate fighting style, but he wasn't teaching a dance, either. He looked for things that didn't work like they were supposed to, and corrected them, even when they were executed with good form and had all the aesthetics of good kung fu.

In my own aikido, I struggle (internally, not verbally) with instructors who teach "center" and "connection" but have no time left over for the positioning and unbalancing that make throws and takedowns possible against an uncooperative opponent. The aikido they teach often looks very pretty, but doesn't bring down partners who haven't been conditioned to take falls. I'm sure some people genuinely enjoy this kind of martial arts training; they can have it. I want a reality check every once in a while.

I like seeing students sweat. I don't really feel I've gotten my money's worth unless my gi needs washing after a class. There will be time for tai chi in the park when I'm 80; right now, I want a workout. Like most martial artists, one of the reasons I first got into martial arts training was exercise.

The students at this club worked hard enough that they needed sweat rags and water bottles. Even when they were doing choreographed forms, they practiced with enough energy and did enough repetitions that it worked up a sweat. There are many people who equate traditional, stylized arts like aikido and Wing Chun with yoga and chi gong. Not here. The students at this club, despite their traditional, stylized training methods, were working hard.

I like clubs that keep pretense to a minimum. I am turned off by martial arts instructors and schools that take themselves and their traditions too seriously. I want to laugh at instructors who expect to be called "master". I am baffled by classes conducted in foreign languages students can't even pronounce, let alone understand. And I bristle at students being taught to treat their uniform and gear as religious relics. I think these kinds of things are usually the efforts of overzealous, misinformed Westerners trying to achieve what they perceive to be authentic Asian-ness.

My own experiences with authentic Asian-ness have been quite the opposite. I had the great privilege last fall of training with the aforementioned Hiroshi Ikeda, an internationally renowned master of aikido. When Ikeda Sensei's luggage did not arrive in time for the class, and he had no gi or hakama to wear, he dismissed it with a laugh and taught the class in his jeans and tee shirt. And though he occasionally stumbled over his English, he never spoke a word of Japanese after he greeted us with, "Onegaishimasu."

This Wing Chun club was similarly unpretentious. Clearly, clothing was supposed to be dark and functional, but I didn't see a set uniform. There were belts (sashes, in this case) that showed rank and official club shirts, but not everyone wore them. No one was speaking Chinese, except to call the instructor sifu ("teacher", similar in use to the Japanese sensei). Other than the occasional bow, there were no other Chinese affectations, either. Weapons and other equipment were treated as tools; they certainly seemed well cared for, but there was no sign of worship.

I like up-front information. I have complained before about martial arts clubs that aren't forthcoming with basic information. I regard any club with suspicion that doesn't supply information about rates or schedules until after the prospective customer has heard a sales pitch. Are they afraid their prices will scare me away? Are they gauging my gullibility? No matter how many times I think it over, I can't come up with a good, honest reason a club would conduct business this way.

The first thing the instructor did when I sat down was hand me a schedule, tell me what the monthly rates were, and tell me what was included in membership. He also told me that membership was month-to-month, which meant no contracts. That reminds me...

I like clubs that don't make their students sign contracts. Contracts are, in my humble opinion, a blight on the martial arts landscape. There are those (mostly people who run contract clubs) who defend them, and some even make some pretty good points in the process, but the fact remains that a contract can really only do one thing: force people to keep paying for something they no longer want.

What if I get hurt? What if my schedule changes? What if (as is happening to me now) there are changes at the club and I'm not sure if it's the place I want to train anymore? What if, a few months in, I decide that my body's just not up to the demands of the training that goes on at this particular club? In any of these cases, if I'm locked into a contract, I have to keep paying. Even more frightening are stories I've heard (here, for instance) of clubs that have closed down and sold the contracts to collection agencies, meaning that students have to keep paying for training at a club that doesn't even exist.

This Wing Chun club was not cheap (about $100 a month), but didn't seem to have any trouble hanging onto students without using contracts. And that makes me wonder why so many clubs seem to think they're necessary.

Finally, I like clubs that don't cost a lot. I debated with myself about whether or not to include this last one, because there are many very good clubs--the one I talk about here included--that aren't cheap. But I'm not a rich guy. I'm a lowly special education aide at a tiny little non-union public charter school. I have rent to pay and a baby on the way. I don't have much of a discretionary budget. The martial arts are wonderful, but they're not worth cutting into food and rent for. I can't afford expensive clubs, and I don't think the martial arts can afford to become exclusively a rich man's hobby.

I don't have a clever way to wrap this up; it was never really more than a glorified list. All I can say is, this is what I like. What do you like?

Karateville

I'm going to begin here by directing my few readers to a better and more widely-read internet writer than myself. This particular writer happens to have the same parents I have.

My brother recently wrote a wonderful piece on The Inclusive about video games. Specifically, he aired his beef (shared by many of us who grew up on the NES, Sega Genesis, and SNES) with the kind of social games on Facebook and the iPhone that he calls "Villes" (think Farmville, Cityville, etc.). The purpose of these games, says my brother, is not be fun or interesting, but to hook players on a progression of increasingly difficult and expensive rewards. The goal in developing these games, he says, is to get a few gullible people so addicted that they're willing to pay real money for benefits that exist only in the imaginary world of the game.

My brother compares these games to B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning chambers:

This is why these games are free, brightly colored, and cute: if they get enough people in the box, some of people will keep hitting the button. If there are time delays constricting how often the button can be pushed, some people will pay for the privilege of hitting the button sooner. Although this sounds like a Dire Metaphor, it is almost literally accurate: pay fifteen in-game-currency units (sold at ten for a real-life dollar) to get the Pig Pen now, rather than waiting to accrue that many units over time.

My brother, mind you, has a much bigger and much more important point to make than his distaste for a particular kind of game; I encourage you to read the piece for yourself. But his grievance against the "Villes" got me thinking (as many things seem to these days) about the way we, as students, practice the martial arts.

I train because I like to. Sure, in the back of my mind, I'm on a years-long hunt for an elusive treasure known as the Black Belt, but that destination wouldn't be worth anything to me if I wasn't enjoying the journey. The martial arts fascinate me; when I'm working my way through a new technique, the next rank is the last thing on my mind.

But if you've ever been to an independent regional taekwondo or karate tournament, you've likely seen a very different attitude from mine about rank. You've seen cadres of "masters" who seem intensely proud of all the ranks and awards prominently displayed on their doboks and gis. You've seen children as young as nine who have already blazed through dozens of ranks to earn their black belts and are eagerly working on the next degree.

My mind is boggled by this kind of thing. In my own discipline of aikido, many instructors are middle-aged men who have yet to move beyond their first dan. Most organizations have only six ranks between zero and black belt, and usually most of those ranks do not have corresponding belt colors. Testing at my club is done only once a year. Rank, in my experience of aikido, is a personal milestone and a tool for designating instructors, nothing more. The art is its own reward--ars gratia artis.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone who's not doing rank the aikido way is doing it wrong. If I thought that, I never would have attempted my foray into taekwondo. What bothers me is a tendency I see among some martial arts schools to sell the next rank (for which there will of course be extra fees), rather than an experience, as their primary product, and worse, a tendency among students to buy it.

The last time I went to a taekwondo tournament, I watched black belts compete who could not punch straight or kick above their waists. I watched a red belt compete in a wheelchair--a man who cannot kick is nearing his black belt in an art that is roughly 75% kicking. These peoples' ranks are not indicators of skill; they are rewards for investments of time and money.

There are those who say that awarding ranks so freely makes a mockery of the martial arts. Personally, I couldn't care less about mockery. I put on long, white underwear and play with wooden swords with other grown men three times a week; the truth is already as funny as any mockery that might be made of it. What I do care about is the perception, fueled by people like the aforementioned tournament-goers, that the martial artist's purpose is to accumulate ranks rather than to practice an art.

A martial arts experience shaped by this perception stops being about learning and enjoyment and becomes Karateville, an endless cycle of chasing the next little reward. This is, of course, good news for people trying to cash in on testing fees. It's bad news, though, for all of us who just like the martial arts because they're interesting and fun: we don't want to confine our training to the handful of things on the next test, and we don't want to train with people more concerned about colored pieces of cloth than well-executed technique or a good workout.

Twice before (here and here) I have brought up Rob Redmond, writer of the excellent karate blog 24 Fighting Chickens. Redmond's take on rank is both cynical and iconoclastic. He goes so far in one piece as to suggest that the Karateville game is the only reason to have more than a few broad ranks:

There are not twenty discernible levels of skill in karate. I submit to you that there are probably only four or five. You are giving out ranks to reward attendance, memorization, and good conduct. You are encouraging the payment of fees for tests, belts, and for continuing lessons, but your ranks you give out do not have any real meaning. No one could look at your yellow belts and purple belts and see with their eyes which was the higher rank without you telling them first.

So what's a martial artist to do? Abandon rank altogether? I'm not going to advocate that here, though I do think the question of whether or not we really need rank in the martial arts is an interesting one. For now, I think we can ask some simpler questions of ourselves.

Is my pursuit of rank helping me focus on my training or distracting me from it? How different am I really from a student one rank higher or lower than me? How much recognition do I really need for learning this new technique or form? Is there an obvious purpose behind all the ranks at my school?

Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living. It naturally follows, I think, that the unexamined art is not worth practicing. If we only notice what we are awarded without ever asking questions about what we're really learning, we may be stumbling over the city limits into Karateville.

Waist Deep and Pushing On

The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
- Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"

I may not know much about the martial arts, but I do know a little something about teaching.

In order to teach material, a teacher must first know the material. He must be able to lead students through it, answer questions about it, and find a way to make it relevant to different students with different points of view. A teacher who doesn't know his material simply can't teach.

There is something worse, though, than a teacher who doesn't know his material: a teacher who doesn't know his material and yet insists on moving forward as if he does. These are the teachers students alternatively laugh and grumble about, and peers whisper about behind their backs. These teachers don't just make fools of themselves, they drag their students down with them.

We've all had these teachers at one time or another, and I've always wondered at their motivations. Can the prospect of owning our ignorance really be so daunting that we're willing to humiliate ourselves and inconvenience others instead? In my own experience as an educator, I've found it's much easier and much less painful for everyone (including myself) if I just say, "I guess I need to do a little more work on this before we can move on. Let's do something else for now."

Yesterday at the dojo, the club's most junior instructor tried to lead us in some exercises with the bokken (wooden sword). This began with partners matching each other in an alternating sequence of blocks and strikes. For the next step, our instructor brought up the other yudansha (black belt) present to be his partner in demonstration.

The first exercise, said our instructor, was preparation for the second, in which the sequence was offset so that one partner was striking while the other was blocking. In verbal form, this idea made plenty of sense, but it became clear as he attempted to demonstrate that it simply didn't work. Try as he might, our instructor just couldn't make this particular block work for this particular strike, at least not in a way that allowed the sequence to continue.

His demonstration partner, an aikidoka of the same rank but with longer and broader experience in the art, did his best to help out, trying out little tweaks to see if he could make the sequence work. He couldn't. Our instructor was missing something, something important enough that the entire sequence ground to a halt without it. It quickly became obvious to all of us--except, apparently, our instructor--that this wasn't going anywhere.

For several minutes we sat, watching our instructor try to figure out this exercise so that he could teach it to us. Most of us got tired of holding the seiza position after the first minute or two and shifted to sitting cross-legged as we waited, bored and increasingly frustrated. We began to cast sidelong glances at each other, wondering when he would give up and move on to something else so that we could get back to training. He pressed on, though, trying to work it out with his polite but increasingly exasperated partner.

After every conceivable option had been exhausted, our instructor finally stopped. There was a collective sigh of relief as we all anticipated moving on to something more pertinent, perhaps the kumitachi (paired sword kata) that would be in our upcoming tests. Instead, the instructor turned to us, smiling, and said, "Let's try it. See if you can figure it out together."

I was dumbfounded. There were no words for it.

My training partner and I would find the words a few moments into the most confused and clueless training session in either of our martial arts lives. They were quiet words, grumbled to each other under our breaths. I won't repeat them here.

I don't say this very often about training, because I think almost everything we do in the dojo serves a purpose, but it was  a complete waste of our time. We wasted time watching our instructor try to figure something out for himself rather than teaching, and then we wasted more time trying to practice something we hadn't been taught.

This is the first time in this blog I have made so bold as to openly criticize an instructor. I want to make clear, though, that it is not his forgetfulness I am criticizing. There is little shame in ignorance in and of itself. The shame comes when we, in our pride, cling to our ignorance and try (always futilely) to row upriver against the current of reality.

That's why we train. Hard, honest training is the best cure I know of for ego and ignorance. If you can't admit you're out of shape, if you think you're better than you are, if you're in denial of an injury, hard training is a surefire cure. Every martial artist knows what I'm talking about; they all can remember a moment when their pride and delusions were dashed (perhaps painfully) by training.

For me, it was when a common nikkyo lock sprained my wrist. Until then, I'd thought I was ready to play with the black belts. Delusion cured.

What I did take away from yesterday's class is that, years from now, when my time comes to teach, I don't want to be the one clinging to my ignorance, the big fool pushing on as the water rises. And that means more training. The more pride and delusion I can get beaten out of me before students are depending on me, the better.

See you on the mat.

Coffee Machine Aikido

Do you remember the old vending machines that sold coffee, hot chocolate, and sometimes tea or soup, dispensing them out of a nozzle into a little paper cup for a few quarters? I do; there was one in the lobby in the science building in college (the machine has since been replaced by an entire Starbuck's--kids these days don't know how good they have it).

Dave Barry remembers them, too. In one of his columns, he recalls:

I myself developed the coffee habit in my early 20s, when, as a "cub" reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., I had to stay awake while writing phenomenally boring stories about municipal government. I got my coffee from a vending machine that also sold hot chocolate and chicken-noodle soup; all three liquids squirted out of a single tube, and they tasted pretty much the same.

I took a class this week from an aikido instructor who reminded me very much of one of those old machines.

I have been investigating the possibility of moving to another club for some time now, both for reasons I have discussed in print and for unrelated reasons I'm not going to put on the internet just yet. Only recently, I've started actually visiting other clubs.

The club I visited this week is home to several former members of my current club. One of them, a friend of mine, sent me an e-mail shortly after he left, inviting me to come take a look at his new club. I'm not sure how I feel about this kind of recruiting, but hey, I'm looking. So I showed up, worked out with an old friend, and got to see a different kind of aikido.

As it turned out, I think it was a little too different for me.

The instructor was a very nice, very friendly, very capable man with a background in many different martial arts. His expertise extended far beyond aikido into kung fu, boxing, muay Thai, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, among other things. He didn't wear a hakama.

His class felt strange to me. We trained with bo (six-foot-long staves not commonly used in aikido). We finished techniques with jujutsu-style armbars rather than what I know as aikido pins. We practiced gun disarms, some based on recognizable aikido techniques and some not. It was lots of fun, to be sure, but I had to look very hard for things I definitively recognized as aikido.

I asked the instructor afterward how accurately the class I'd just taken represented a typical night at his dojo. He admitted the gun disarms were a rarity, but said that otherwise what I'd just experienced was pretty typical of the classes he liked to teach. He told me that he liked to bring the perspective of other martial arts to aikido, to show that aikido can be a deadly (his word, not mine) martial art.

I'm going to abstain here from any argument about whether or not deadly is a word that ought to be used in reference to aikido. It's not really the subject at hand and I'd like to give the benefit of a doubt to a man whose experience and skill so obviously exceed my own.

What did concern me was the nagging feeling that I was getting aikido from one of the old coffee machines: so many flavors had become mixed together that I was having a hard time telling one taste from another. I couldn't help thinking that this instructor was trying so hard to bring all his martial arts experience into play that his aikido class had become an eclectic self-defense class instead.

There are probably those who don't see this as a bad thing, but I don't think I'm entirely comfortable with it. To be sure, aikido is a malleable martial art that can be fit into many molds. I don't dispute that, and I certainly don't dispute the value of crosstraining. But I decided when I began two years ago that aikido is an art form with its own value that transcends its material usefulness to me (ars gratia artis and all that); if I change aikido to suit my needs, then I'm afraid that decision was a lie.

I will almost certainly visit this club again. Even if I don't join, I'm sure I'll drop in from time to time just for the chance to work out with my old training buddies. In either case, it's unlikely I'll become a regular attendee of this particular instructor's classes.

Give me that old-time aikido; it's good enough for me.

Bullshit

From time to time, I enjoy catching an episode of Penn and Teller's cable television show Bullshit!. For those of you who don't know, Bullshit! involves the popular illusionist duo picking something they find dishonest, underhanded, or just plain wrong, and tearing it apart with all the wit and humor they can muster--which is a considerable amount. I don't always agree with the things they have to say (Penn and Teller are staunch atheists and libertarians), but I always enjoy hearing them say it.

Over the past few years, Bullshit! has taken on conspiracy theories, religious movements, pieces of legislation, political organizations, and New Age fads, just to name a few. Their commentary is caustic, irreverent, and usually heavily laced with profanity (as the name of the show might suggest).

It was with some trepidation that I recently sought out a particular episode that I'd read about on a martial arts message board. It turns out Penn and Teller had done a Bullshit! on the martial arts. I had to find it, of course, but the idea of Penn and Teller tearing into one of my favorite activities certainly made me nervous.

Would Penn and Teller tell me that my training is, well, bullshit? Would their show be ruined for me forever? Worse, would they challenge my belief in the validity and usefulness of my martial arts training? I almost couldn't bear to watch. But, of course, I did.

In their 30-minute attempt to burst the bubble of the martial arts mystique, Penn and Teller made the following allegations:

1. No matter how much martial arts training one has, running away from or surrendering to an attacker is much more likely to prevent harm to a victim than any martial art.
2. Most martial arts instructors have never been in a real fight.
3. There is a telling lack of stories in the news about robbers and attackers being thwarted with martial arts skills.
4. Martial artists' claims about healing and other powers of "chi" or "energy" are mostly nonsense.
5. The colored belt system that many martial arts programs hold so dear is a modern invention with very little connection to martial arts history.
6. Many things that are being taught in martial arts studios as "self-defense" would be considered criminal acts of aggression by a court of law.
7. Most martial arts training is more fear management than danger management, meaning that many martial arts students are being misled into a dangerous, false sense of security.
8. Injuries are far more likely to result from martial arts training itself than from living without self-defense skills.
9. Breaking boards is a parlor trick that has very little to do with self-defense.

There are definitely some in the martial arts community who would be deeply offended by some of these allegations. I myself have had an aikido instructor who likes to talk about throwing with "spiritual energy", and a taekwondo instructor who treats the colored belt like an ancient religious relic. For all that they might protest, though, I look back at this list and find nothing particularly offensive, or even surprising.

Why? Because, as I said a few weeks ago, I have no problem thinking of myself as an athlete and the martial arts as a sport. I don't expect the martial arts to make me an invincible warrior and I don't pretend I'm following any ancient spiritual tradition, so there is no bubble to burst. The truth, as I said back in February, is only a weapon that can be used against me so long as I cling to a lie.

But why cling to a lie when the truth has so much to offer? In two years of martial arts training, I've improved my body, my confidence, and my attitude, all without buying into any of the "bullshit" exposed by the list above. Unless Penn and Teller can tell me that the martial arts aren't making me a happier, healthier person, they can't touch me. And thankfully, I can go on laughing at them.

Name Change

A brief note about the name of the my blog: I have changed it in an effort to be a little less esoteric.

"Newbie Deshi" was a pun on the Japanese term uchi deshi. I thought myself rather clever when I first came up with it, but it has been nagging me for some time that the title of my blog was going to confuse more than amuse. Only those of us with a background in the Japanese martial arts know what an uchi deshi is.

The new title, a reference to the television series Kung Fu, I hope is a little more suitable for mass consumption.

Nothing else has changed, not even the layout of the page, so those few of you who have been reading regularly, carry on as usual.

'Sport' is a Four-Letter Word

There are many martial artists (and I used to be one of them) who take real offense at their arts being called sports. They believe they are practicing something more noble, more real, and more valuable than sport.

I don't know whether or not George Ledyard Sensei takes such offense, but he exemplified the kind of high-minded sentiment I'm talking about in a recent post to his blog George Ledyard's All Things Aikido. Here's an excerpt:

Aikido is a form of Budo. Budo is basically the use of the martial arts for personal transformation. Aikido as Budo is a "Michi" or Martial "WAY" (the "do" in Aiki-do). O-Sensei, the Founder, actually believed that through Aikido, the whole world could be brought into a state of harmony; he called our art "The Way of Peace". For him, Budo was a life and death matter. Given the right level of commitment one could truly become a better person, less fearful, stronger, braver, more compassionate. One could, in his or her own Mind and Body understand that everything in the universe is essentially connected. His creation of Aikido represents a radical transformation of how Budo was viewed historically. It is a unique art. It is not a "hobby", it is not a "sport", it is not a "workout", it is a Michi, a Way.

Before I go on, I would like to make aboundantly clear that I greatly respect and admire Ledyard Sensei and recommend his blog. I have never met Ledyard Sensei, but his online writing alone has been a tremendous influence on my fledgling foray into the martial arts. No small part of the credit for my decision that aikido is a real martial art worth my time and effort should be given to him. He is an icon of American aikido and a treasure of the martial arts world.

All that said, I, humble sixth kyu that I am, am about to disagree with him.

It's not that I doubt Ledyard Sensei's claim that aikido changes lives. I certianly believe it is changing mine. What bothers me is the hard dichotomy he is drawing between martial art and sport on the grounds of his art's life-changing potential.

He is not the first to do so. The world is full of martial artists claiming, "My martial art is not just a sport; it's a way of changing lives."

What I want to know is, whoever said that sports don't change lives?

There is no question that martial arts training can make us "less fearful, stronger, braver, more compassionate". We gain courage and confidence when the martial arts make us face our fears and insecurities. We become stronger as the martial arts hone our bodies and minds. We become more compassionate as we learn that others' pain, joy, failure, and success are the same as our own. The martial arts can teach us discipline and perseverance, and can be a tool for the cultivation of mindfulness (in the Buddhist sense of the word).

But as I see it, all these things can be said just as accurately of ice hockey.

The hockey player has ample opportunity to face his fear and insecurity, to hone his body and mind, to feel pain and joy and learn the pain and joy of others, to learn discipline and perseverence, and to develop mindfulness and awareness. I suspect many have achieved changed lives on the hockey rink.

I even once saw a television documentary about how ice hockey brought together families of different creeds in parts of Northern Ireland torn apart by sectarian conflict. Could it even be that through ice hockey "the whole world could be brought into a state of harmony"?

Alright, maybe I'm pushing it a bit.

We have all heard the martial arts called "a way of life". The more I train, the more I come to see martial art as an activity, something I do rather than something I am. The "way of life" perception, I think, stems from the observation that people can make real positive changes in their lives through martial arts training. But unless a lot of other things--like ice hockey--are also "ways of life", I'm not sure those changes qualify the martial arts for that lofty distinction. No doubt, for full-time professionals like Ledyard Sensei (or Sydney Crosby, in the case of hockey), it really does become a way of life, but the rest of us, I think, are best described as sportsmen, or even (gasp!) hobbyists.

To admit this doesn't mean conceding the point of changing lives. It means recognizing that the capacity to change lives is everywhere, not just in our chosen discipline. It means recognizing that there is nothing shameful or inauthentic about sport.

Those of us who train in pajamas-and-colored-belts martial arts studios these days are aware of a large section of the postmodern world that thinks we are engaging in childish playacting and nonsense. Until we stop insisting that we are better than than the rest of the world's athletes by virtue of our choice of activities, I'm afraid they might just be right.

P.S.

Normally I would have ended there, but I'd like to add a little extra in reference to Ledyard Sensei, with whose words I have just taken liberty. As with most of my posts, this one will be copied onto AikiWeb, which means there is a very real chance that Ledyard Sensei himself will see it. I hope not to offend him.

To his credit, Ledyard Sensei prefaces the passage I quoted above with these words: "I have decided to explain what I believe about Aikido, and what I see as the mission of [my aikido club]. Folks can decide what these things mean to them, personally." In so saying, Ledyard Sensei opens up his remarks to interpretation and separates himself from most of the people this post is intended to critique, so I beg his pardon. His words, in this case, were just too perfect to pass up.

Domo arigato gozaimashita, Sensei.