day 232: elbows and arrows

concepts:

• elbows
• review
• expansion v pulling
• following the arrow
  

lessons:

• bagua elbow basics
• kyudo

today was rather warm, and made for a rather strenuous day. we had a visitor today: Aurelius, who used to be a regular student with Sifu before going to teach English in Taiwan. he's apparently returned for a month, and so will be attending class during this time.

i took a little time during class this saturday to review a little bit of chang quan. i'd been working on pao quan and chao quan over the week, since i was a little concerned about my memory of both and had found the concerns justified. i managed to fit in some cursory work on both during breaks of the bagua elbow basics, but i think i'll have to continue on them a little bit more on my own.

bagua elbow basics

we did a pretty straightforward review of the bagua elbow basics. Sifu asked Eric to lead us through the moving elbow basics. however, a fair number of people today had missed the prior classes, and so we went back and reviewed all the standing basics before continuing to work on the moving ones.

the moving basics are logical extensions of the standing ones--the upper body movements are largely the same, but are integrated with the act of stepping. for today, we did the moving basics on a line, although i strongly suspect that they will eventually follow a circle.

kyudo

kyudo today was a continuation from last week--at least on a personal level. i just wanted to build upon what i'd done last week in terms of being able to get the arrow to the target. to some degree, i think this was successful.

since everyone had already packed and shipped their equipment for the seminar in South Carolina, we worked with dojo equipment tonight, and shared bows, arrows, and makiwara. this worked out well, even though we had a higher-than-expected turnout, since it allowed more people to have more opportunities to practice shooting. i got most of my arrows out to the makiwara. i had a few mis-steps, but i think that i know what caused the problems, and so i think i can fix them with some work.

i'm starting to think that kyudo is really more about mental and spiritual development than it is physical. the physical aspect is a very basic form of 8 steps that is repeated over and over again. while subtle and complex, it is consistent, and so is not so much about learning the form but more about recognizing how to adjust the body to the form--and this is where the real challenge is, since adjusting the body requires a certain mental awareness and spiritual resolve.

and this is not a trivial thing. because the arrow is a blatantly unforgiving indicator of your ability (or inability) to follow the form. any failure, no matter how minute, is exaggerated and made glaringly obvious by the trajectory of the arrow. as the arrow goes, your body goes. and because body language is a product of your mind and spirit, as the arrow goes, your self goes. no matter how much you try to hide it, no matter how much you think you've disguised it, the arrow. does. not. lie.

i think this relates to the Buddhist use of the term "mindfulness", in that to properly follow a path (hopefully the right path), you must be attentive and committed to the path...you must be aware of yourself and it, and must be resolved to make of both one.

Sensei had hinted at this during our conversation from a 2 weeks ago. i forgot to mention last post, but i'll say here, that before last weekend's return to kyudo i had scheduled a meeting with Sensei. the meeting had nothing to do with kyudo, but everything to do about spiritual matters. i've had a crisis of faith over the past few months, and i've sought various perspectives from various faiths. since Sensei is a zen monk, i figured he'd be as good a source as any regarding Buddhist perspective on my ruminations. our talk was quite interesting and very helpful, and while it really only served to verify some of the truths that i'd discovered on my own--Sensei had even pointed that this is what Zen, Buddhism, and religion in general often really only do--i found it comforting and enlightening.

one of the things we'd discussed then was mindfulness. he noted it again today in passing while observing my form. he added the following:

• expansion v pulling--the question is not just to be mindful, but to be mindful of what? Sensei said that i was concentrating on pulling, which is completely wrong, even though visually that is what most people often see. he said that pulling leads to instability, and instability leads to all sorts of problems (in my case, a shaky bow, leading to a chaotic arrow, accompanied by random strikes at the target and self-infliction of wounds from all the devices involved). he noted that this is a metaphor for life. the better way, he continued, was to just expand outward, by beginning from the center. at this point, i realized he was continuing our conversation from the past weeks, and that he meant expansion not just the center of the body, but the center of your being, so that your mental and spiritual self projects out, leading the body to project out, in a way that is stable and (more importantly) mindful of the path to the target (and i suppose this is what he meant when he described shooting as an act of uniting everything into one: yourself, the bow, the arrow, the target, it's all the same thing).
• following the arrow--to avoid pulling with the string hand, he said it helps to think about pushing with the bow hand. to do the latter, it's best to just imagine that your bow hand is following the arrow towards the target, so that the arrow is guiding your body, as opposed to the common (mis)perception of your body guiding the arrow. while it's actually not about pushing or pulling, Sensei said that thinking about following the arrow can help correct the tendency to pull, and thus even the body out so that it ends up being balanced between the 2, making it easier to do the 1 thing you're really supposed to be doing, which is expanding.
  

we finished around 10. i ended up getting a group of people to go to dinner with me. i found out a fair number of us had skipped dinner and we were all hungry. i managed to convince a few to go to Twohey's, which is a diner in San Marino famous for being a historical landmark and is currently featuring 66 cent ice cream floats (that's right, 66 cents, but only through this July). it was a good night.