day 231: a return to kyudo

concepts:

• shooting

lessons:

• kyudo

there was no formal kung fu class this week, since sifu was in Canada to give a seminar. but i went to the park anyway, and joined up with a few other students for practice. we spent a few hours reviewing all the bagua forms we've done to date, with the exception of xiao kai men: 64 palms (sides A & B), the leg form, forest palm, and the fist form. this was good, since it turns out we'd forgotten a few elements and needed to take some time to sort things out. luckily, kieun had all my Youtube videos on his iPhone, and so we had immediate real-time adjudication to resolve our memory issues.

kyudo

this evening was my 1st time back to kyudo in quite a few months (at first, i thought it was 3, but now i think it's more like 4). i had quite a bit of trepidation, since 1) i'd been struggling just to get the bow and arrow into shooting position the last time i'd attended, 2) i hadn't practiced at all during the time i was away, and 3) i hadn't shot that many times to begin with during the months i had been in class.

what i found, however, was much better than i had any right to hope for...i struggled this evening with kisa (although, that was expected, and i know it's something i'll always need to work on), but everything else went dramatically better than any of the other times i've tried to shoot--the arrow didn't fall off the string, and i actually managed to shoot every arrow that i knocked. granted, i had form issues, and some breathing issues, but this evening went better than any of the previous times. i was, to be quite honest, shocked.

i suspect that a good part of the situation was that i came in with a different mental state and a different philosophical approach tonight.

i had gone on break because of some personal issues, issues which i know had been affecting my mental health, and i had told sensei before i had gone on break that i believed a lot of my problems in kyudo were related to my mental state. at that time, i told him that i was having a physical inability to open up and that my body was contracting inward because i thought my mind was contracting inward, as if i were trying to tighten up to hold onto something. this translated into poor posture, poor holding of the bow, poor execution of the form, and poor release. all together, it summed to an inability to shoot the bow and arrow.

since those issues have been resolved (at least well enough to move on), i felt that i had come tonight with a much lighter heart, and was no longer holding on to whatever baggage i had been holding onto before. i think this translated into a very different physical expression, with better posture, better holding of the bow, better execution of the form, and a better release. of course, this doesn't mean perfect, but certainly an improvement compared to what i'd been before the hiatus.

i also came with a different philosophy tonight. before the break, i'd been incredibly anxious over my difficulties with kyudo, and had taken to obsessing over details and nuances, with a goal of trying to set everything into a logical, distinct series of steps. i think this had let me to over-analyze and over-think what i was doing, with the effect that it was actually frustrating my execution of the form--sort of akin to a golfer taking a swing: you can break the swing down into its constituent components, but in order to swing well you eventually have to be able to swing without thinking about any of them. in other words: you have to see the forest for the trees.

this time, i'd decided that i was going to stop thinking about details and steps and components and form, but instead just do it--shoot the arrow. i recalled that last week when i had discussed my situation with sensei i had taken to describing my problem as like a fire, that would alight spontaneously to burn me, and that it did so because i had refused to let the problem go. during our conversation, i had said that i knew the solution was to let the problem go; at that time i had used the words: to let the waters run. tonight, that was what i had decided to do: let the waters run.

i don't know if i was entirely successful. but i do know that the results were better than before. and i do know that tonight, for perhaps the first time in my lessons in kyudo, i actually understood the concept of shooting without thinking about shooting--about doing the act of kyudo without actually thinking about the act of kyudo, to the extent that i could think not of the bow or the arrow but of just my mind and the target...not completely. but i could see it. at least a part of it.

which is a whole lot more than i saw before.

this was a positive night. i hope to find more.