How Can Iai Be Interesting

How can iai practice be interesting?  There are only about 4 real cuts (kiri oroshi, kesa giri, kiri age, and ichi monji).  It’s mostly done slowly. We repeat those same four cuts from every position and situation imaginable. We always work with an imaginary opponent or opponents. We endlessly return to the first kata in the system and practice it to death.

How could this not be boring?  What could we possibly do to make this interesting? We repeat these same few movements over and over and over. As a student and teacher, I know there is a standard script of comments that can be made, in fact need to be made, every practice with every student. What could be more boring than hearing the same critique every time you go to class? You know “You need to slow down. Relax your shoulders. Tighten your little finger. Use your hips. Move from you koshi. Don’t bend from the waist.” Every iaido teacher says the same things over and over.

Listening to sensei tell you what you are doing wrong, and knowing what he’s going to say before you even start practicing should  be one of the more mind numbing and discouraging you will ever encounter.

It’s not though. Iaido is frustrating and sometimes tedious. It is hard, physical work that takes effort and focus to do even poorly. It can make muscles ache and quiver from the effort demanded. Time and time again I can tell what Sensei is going to say before he says it because I can feel the weakness in my own performance of the kata. It’s difficult to be bored by what Sensei is saying when you can feel the truth of it in your muscles and bones while he is still drawing a breath to power his comments.

Iai is interesting because there is a chasm between knowing what you want to do and being able to do it with any sort of consistency. I remember as a new student watching Takada Sensei demonstrate for me in the old, unheated dojo in Eichigawa. The doors at each of the dojo were pushed open so we would get some ventilation, and since we were no more than a 100 meters from the shinkansen (bullet train) tracks, every time it roared by going over 100 miles per hour (160 km per hour) all other sound disappeared for a few moments.

Sensei never flinched at the sudden roar. His focus on the kata was fantastic. He was in his mid 70s when I started training, and he had perfect koshi, posture to die for, and cuts so precise and sure I would not have been afraid to let him use my stomach for a cutting stand. Sensei’s posture and breathing were so much a part of him that he could no longer stand incorrectly. I think trying to breath from his shoulders would have been physically impossible for him after so many decades of doing it right.

From the day I started, the goal was to get good enough that I could try to approach Sensei’s level of perfection. It was quite a while later that I realized that Takada Sensei was working on improving his technique in one corner of the dojo while I was in one corner of the dojo another working on mine. Initially, I couldn’t even imagine myself doing w

hat he did. It helped when a 2nd dan would attend. I could believe that what he was doing was possible for me. Looking back I understand that Sensei’s relaxed power and precision were beyond what I could understood, so I couldn’t imagine doing what he did. The 2 dan wasn’t far ahead of me along the path, so I could see myself doing what he did, and I tried.

It seems easy enough.  Draw and cut, step and cut. That’s the first kata.  Shouldn’t be tough at all. 20 years later I’m still working at it. At least now I can understand what Takada Sensei was doing, even though I still can’t approach his skills. I can at least draw, cut, raise the sword above my head, step and cut and make it look presentable. Which comes back around to the question at the beginning. How can this iai stuff be interesting?

Photo courtesy of Grigoris Miliaresis

If it was just going through the motions of drawing and cutting and stepping, it wouldn’t be.  Iai isn’t about going through those motions.It’s about being and moving perfectly. All of the challenge is internal. From the outside, it looks like you’re just repeating the same few motions again and again. Internally, every time through is different. You’re working on fixing the angle of the draw so you don’t miss the target (YES! You can miss the target in iai, but that’s a different essay). Maybe you are working to keep your hamstrings and thighs engaged. A big one for me these days is the relationship of my hips to my upper body, shoulders and head.

The sequence of movements nearly vanishes from thought now. The focus shifts to improving movement and balance. Once I do that, each movement is unique. I’m not swinging and cutting over and over. Just like practicing music, each repetition is it’s own thing. Faster or slower. Harder, softer. Adjust foot positions. Get my hips under my shoulders. Get a little better. Make the next version of the kata a little closer to the ideal.

The goal is to do everything perfectly.  Draw precisely. Stop at the perfect moment. Raise the sword and bring my body together in perfect form completely balanced and completely relaxed. Swing down and cut while driving my body forward from the hips. Step out and finish the cut without tipping forward with the energy.

Photo Courtesy of Grigoris Miliaresis

After a while doing the first kata over and over is fascinating because there are so many small variables to play with. Speed, strength, which muscles in the legs and back and arms to to engage. What’s interesting is how perceptions shift.

Early on in the study, the goal is to learn all the kata, to learn as many forms as possible.  The thinking is often that the more kata you know the better you are. I was anxious to be practicing all the kata of Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu, the iai system I was doing. The advanced kata include lots of cool scenarios. Multiple attackers, interesting set ups with narrow lanes or in crowds or trapped in a gate. These kata are fascinating because of the scenarios.

As I got better, these kata became more and more similar. No matter what the scenario, no matter what combination of opponents, what I’m trying to do with my body remains the same. I’m still trying to draw with precision so I don’t miss the target. I want to control the movement with as much power and as little muscle as possible. Swing so that I don’t create any openings and and don’t off-balance myself. Raise the sword and bring my feet together with my hips, shoulders and head balanced solidly above them. Snap the sword tip forward with the last fingers of my left hand. Step forward with my right foot and pull the now extended sword down with my left hand. Then catch it at the bottom with a slight twitch of my right and left hands while my whole body comes to rest with my weight settled and solid and my left leg loaded like a spring in case I have to move again.

 

Just as a basketball player practices endless layups and jump shoots in order to make their technique perfect, and just as an American football player spends hours every day drilling throws or blocks or whatever his position requires, and as football players practice ball handling, passing and kicking, and iai practitioner spends endless hours practicing and studying their most basic movements.

There are two main differences. The first is that until you can’t move, there is no reason to ever stop budo training.  I know people in their 90s who make every effort to practice, polish and improve technique.  Iai, and all budo, is not a mere pastime and entertainment. The lessons and training of iai and other budo continue as long as we do.

The other big difference is where this training is applied.  If you practice shooting baskets, passing, and ball handling, you will become better at basketball, American football, or football. If you practice iai, you will become better at being you. You will improve how move and stand in the world outside the dojo. You will have better control of your mind for whatever you want to direct it to. You will be able to control your reactions and breathing even under stress.

How can learning all of that be boring? If you are just looking to swing a sword around, then yes, iai will quickly become boring. If you want to learn to control and use your body efficiently and effectively, then iai offers endless lessons and challenges. The opportunities to refine your balance, movement and control never end. There are kneeling kata and standing kata and those weird tatehiza kata. As you practice, you get better and better at calming and quieting your mind so you can focus on only the task at hand.

The challenges here are endless and can keep you coming back to the dojo for decades. The value of making the these physical and mental improvements doesn’t end when you leave dojo. That’s when their true worth will appear. And the practice never gets boring. No matter how old you are.

Photo courtesy of Grigoris Miliaresis

The Way Of The Sword

Here's a beautiful short video about Japanese sword arts, practice and the mind you want.  It's about Shozo Kato Sensei, 8th Dan Kendo, 7th Dan Iaido.  The cinematography is lovely, the budo is excellent and the ideas fundamental to practice.

Shozo Kato - Way of the Sword from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.

Budo Training Is Exhilarating!

Budo practice is exhilarating.  I’ve been searching for the right word to describe how I feel about practice and how it makes me feel for years.  Obviously I’m kind of slow if I’m just now figuring this out, but hey, after more than 25 years of exhilarating budo practice being thrown around, choked unconscious and beaten with sticks, maybe there’s a reason it’s taken me so long to figure it out.

People always ask if budo is fun, as if it is a game or a sport.  Some bits of it are fun, but they are an awfully small portion of my budo practice.  It’s difficult to call long practice sessions trying to master the proper swing of a sword, or the best way to unbalance someone, or the proper technique for sweeping someone’s weapon out of the way “fun.”  They are challenging and intriguing and full of learning, but fun is not the word to describe them.  That feeling when the sword flashes through the air and feels like it is doing the cutting itself and you’re just along for the ride?  Exhilarating.  The moment when you touch someone so their balance vanishes and they don’t even know you’ve done it and the throw happens as if they had jumped for you?  Exhilarating.  When you get the sweep just right and your partner’s weapon effortlessly whips around and behind them and maybe right out of their fingers?  Definitely exhilarating.

Even when I don’t make those great leaps in understanding or technical ability though, budo is exhilarating.  The focus it requires and teaches is wonderful.  Getting every part of my body and mind to act as one, coordinated whole just feels fantastically exhilarating.  Iai is certainly one of the least exciting forms of budo to watch.  When done properly it is every bit as intense as any of the paired practice forms such as kenjutsu or jujutsu.  Everything comes together and drives forward with an intensity and force that blocks out the rest of the world and leaves me panting with exhaustion in minutes.   The ability to focus like that on something, even for a short while, is an amazing feeling.    It’s certainly not fun, and it’s definitely not relaxing, although it does seem to drive the tension and stress out of my body and mind.  It’s exhilarating.

Then there is paired practice like kenjutsu or jodo or any of the other delightful weapons we train with.  You and a partner are actively trying to bash each other with big sticks, and getting hit is a real possibility if either of you makes a mistake.  There’s just no way to call this “fun.”  What it is, is fabulously focusing and energizing.  The rest of the world vanishes as you focus on your partner’s intent and your own.  There is no room for your mind to hold onto anything else.  If you try to, you’re going home with big, beautiful bruises.  All you have room for is the awareness or your partner, her weapon, the range at which that weapon is dangerous and where yours is, and how she is moving.  She attacks filled with the intent of smashing you into the ground and yet your movement is just enough to avoid being struck while your counterattack steals her space and leaves her dangerously off-balance and unable to move, all in a single heartbeat of action.  Absolutely exhilarating.

The free practices, known as randori in judo and aikido (though they are quite different) and ji-geiko in kendo, are deeply intense, energetic, powerful practices with you and your partner both giving everything to the training, whether you are focusing on developing and refining specific techniques in an unstructured situation, or going at it full-on to dominate and master your partner.  It’s not “fun” in any sense of the word that I’m familiar with, but it is wonderful.  Often it’s quite uncomfortable, especially when then bruises are tender.  Still, the feeling, from the moment someone says “Hajime!” until well after the randori has ended, is one of exhilaration.  I’m out there working with my whole body, and trust me, when those small muscles all over your body ache they next day you know you were using the whole thing.  You’re also using your whole mind trying to figure out the puzzle your partner is offering you.  Some days you figure out the puzzle in front of you, and some days you are the puzzle that is being figured out.  Either way though, it’s exhilarating.  When I take a really big fall, thrown by that 275 lb (125 kg) guy who sends me flying half way across the dojo and then lands on me, and I get up without any pain or problem because the ukemi was good, it is exhilarating knowing I can survive something like that.  It’s even more exhilarating than when I throw him, although that is a different kind of exhilaration, the exhilaration of achieving something I really wasn’t sure I could do.  When it’s all over and someone yells “Yame!” and we all bow and thank each other, the feeling of exhilaration continues.  It lasts out the door, all the way home and often well into the next day.  That feeling of doing things that are truly difficult, both throwing and being thrown, succeeding and failing, is exhilarating.  

               Budo is not fun.  Fun is too small a word for what I feel when I train.  Fun is a game of euchre at lunch, watching a baseball game with friends.  Fun is pick-up basketball or a tea party with your kids.  These are worth doing.  They are fun.  But they aren’t exhilarating.  They don’t leave your body and mind flushed with the intensity of focusing completely on one thing and directing all your energy to one target.  They don’t leave you exhausted, wrung out and relaxed from the work of gathering all your energy into one focused mass and throwing it at your target through the budo.

That’s the feeling I get from budo practice, exhilaration.  At the end of practice I’m wrung out and exhausted, with my brain dribbling out my ears from the effort to do everything well, to analyze what I’m doing to and try to improve it a smidge every time I do it.  How else can you describe the feeling of someone genuinely trying to beat you with a stick while you block and dodge and control his attacks without getting hit?  The feeling of getting that 275 lbs guy up in the air and flying, or the joy when someone makes you fly and go slamming into the ground and it doesn’t hurt is just amazing.  It’s exhilarating.  Now I know what to say to all those people who ask if budo is fun.  I tell them “No, it’s exhilarating.”

What is Budo?

I wrote this in response to a question on an email list about "What is Budo?" and thought it was worth putting out for more public comment.


Shinto Muso Ryu, Shinto Hatakage Ryu, Judo, and Aikido all share combative function and technique as their core practices. This gets them lumped together as “bugei” (literally “martial arts”) or “bujutsu” (martial skill). “Do” or “michi” both written 道 is a much more involved idea. While bugei / bujutsu can refer to just the techniques and skills practiced, anything with the “do” 道 suffix implies a class of not just technical activity, but also a means of polishing and developing the whole self and one’s way of dealing not just with the literal techniques of combat, but with how we approach every action and non-action throughout the day. This is both an elevation of martial activity to philosophical/spiritual and a spreading it out by making it apply to everything thing we do from putting on our shoes to sitting in a chair to drinking tea.  Anything that can be done mindfully should be impacted.
       To me, the first thing that is required for something to be budo is that it must be effective at a technical level. If it’s not effective for what it is trying to teach at the most basic level, it can never hope to reach level of a michi. If you’re not practicing to be martially effective, you’re certainly not doing budo. Any michi has to
be grounded in reality.  It’s clear how ways such as sado (Way of Tea) and kado (Way of Flowers) are grounded in reality. You are making, serving and appreciating tea, or you are arranging and appreciating
flowers. I haven’t figured out a way to fake either one of those. Budo unfortunately is rather dangerous to practice, so it easy to deceive yourself about what you are doing. I do Kodokan Judo, hopefully as budo, but it is very easy to do it as nothing more than a sport by forgetting or ignoring the parts that aren’t comfortable to do or aren’t allowed in the sporting context. In iaido, since it is a solo practice, it is easy to drift away from the martial aspects of the practice and let it become just a series of beautiful movements.
With jodo, if you and your partner are not serious, and don’t practice with strong intent, it too can become a pretty, choreographed dance  sequence. Budo requires that the intent, practice, and practicality.
       Effectiveness is only a necessary component of budo though.  Just because something is effective doesn’t make it a form of budo.  Krav Maga is extremely effective, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that it
is budo.  For something to be budo, it has to have the broader application to all aspects of life, and not be limited in its practice to combative situations.  It needs to have a philosophical bent to it that allows this broader application. It must be bujutsu, but it must have an additional facet that is informed by the threads of Taoism, Confucianism and 1000 years of Japanese thought on the issue of individual development through the mindful practice of mundane activities. This is the tough part, and I suspect there is a PhD dissertation in there somewhere.  I’m not talking about religion, but a concept of what it means to be human and how to perfect one’s self. The practices that effective at a technical level for a narrowly defined practical activity have to applicable beyond that, to all aspects of life. There is in Japanese thought the idea that by developing the body to do practical things perfectly, the mind will be developed as well. This is why people revere masters of flower arranging, tea ceremony, and calligraphy. Through polishing a practical skill, they are polishing their whole being, and when they display outer mastery of a skill, it is seen as confirmation of their
inner development.  I’m not sure it always works, but that’s the idea.  The tales of simple people who have achieved true understanding of the Tao through perfection of a common task abound.  The tale of Cook Ting is a great example.  He has mastered the art of cooking and through that gained insight into the nature of the universe.
       If your art can be do that, and be effective, then it might be a form of budo.

Kiyama Sensei

Last summer, I visited my iaido teacher, Kiyama Hiroshi Sensei, in Japan. Kiyama Sensei is one of the last of the men who fought in World War II and he continues to actively train and teach kendo and iaido.
I'm learning Shinto Hatakage Ryu Iai Heiho from him. He is the last teacher of this small art. It's not one of the big schools that includes a huge curriculum, but it is a coherent system with plenty to teach someone who is willing to study it. Years ago Sensei wrote up his notes on Shinto Hatakage Ryu and he has given a copy of them to me. Unfortunately, the notes are in hand written Japanese, one of the most difficult mediums imaginable. He kindly went over several pages of the notes with me, helping me to understand what I was reading and making clear the characters my poor Japanese couldn't decipher.
We spent one afternoon together at an annual iaido tournament in Shiga. It's a wonderful gathering of iaidoka from all over the prefecture. The only drawback is that it's held during one of the hottest, most uncomfortable times of the year in Otsu, and the gym is an old school building with no ventilation other than opening the doors and windows and praying for a breeze. I love it though, because I get to see lots of old friends from all around the prefecture that I wouldn't get to see otherwise. We all show off our iai for each other, and who wins or loses really isn't important. Over the years I've managed a few 2nd and 3rd place finishes, but mostly I'm thrilled to be there to see and talk with everyone. It's also a great chance for instruction. All of the seventh and eighth dans walk around giving advice on weak points in your technique they have noticed. There is nothing like this chance in the US.
The embu and competition are a chance to see a variety of styles besides the omnipresent Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu and Muso Shinden Ryu. There was also Muso Shinden Jushin Ryu, Suio Ryu and Shinto Hatakage Ryu.