Really, only for a moment.
Everyone has them, those little instances when something makes perfect sense, and for that single 5 minute jigeiko, everything fits nicely in to place and you totally savage the guy in front of you without actually thinking about doing anything. I had an experience like that again yesterday.
So, I wrote previously about the Tak, and all the awesome advice he’s been giving me recently. One piece, the piece that triggered my most recent minor epiphany, was that I seme too much with my shinai, and not enough with my feet and hips. Fair enough I says, let’s work on it.
In order to fix this I altered my kamae slightly to allow my a little more space to hold my shinai in a way more relaxed fashion. I wasn’t initially sure of this modification as I didn’t know if this was going to make me instantly more hittable than before I started thinking (I should have learnt ages ago about this “thinking” malarky, but I keep going back for my lumps!”). In any case, my aim in this relaxation was to forget about the shinai, to relax enough that I barely feel like I’m holding somethin, to essentially remove it from the equation, and concentrate purely on what my body, most specifically me legs (and by extension my feet and hips), is doing.
So, why forget about the shinai in jigeiko? Weeeeeeeell, here is where we get all high brow and sunday-kenshi about it (by which I refer to the sort of kendo phylosofisers who talk a great talk – and at length as well – but when it comes to walking the walk end up a bit like Douglas Bader. They are also inevitably the same people who tell you that you couldn’t do that with a real sword, never do shiai because they want to learn to kill people on a battlefield, and do very shit, but real, kendo. I try not to talk too much about this stuff as a rule as I prefer to learn by doing). Mushin. There, I said it. The essence of mushin is essentially your body moving without you doing the thinking for it. Well, I reckoned I could apply this to my shinai. Lord knows that I do enough kihon that by now my body should have at least a half decent idea of where my shinai is supposed to be going in particular situations, so when I go it goes where I’ve been practising for it to. Good plan.
So, now that I’ve taken the shinai away, my only thought is transporting my body from A to B (A being where I am now and B being the actual attack) whilst creating a chance somewhere in between, by making that transition threatening (seme). So it’s all about the body…..No sword mind? Another high brow topic for the, smoking jacket, hanshi ikkyu conversation but for a brief moment I realised that’s essentially what I’m suddenly aiming for. This is all obviously very personal to me, as anybody’s interpretation of these “theories” should be, but for me, this is what this particular one means. I don’t need the shinai to beat the guy. The shinai is simply the thing I use whilst hitting him. Before that, I’m concentrating on getting my body there, the shinai is doing what simply feels natural at the time, whilst I am doing the important stuff.
Then there is the final piece to the jigsaw, sutemi. This was by far the rarest (hardest?) part to come forth, but it did, at least once that I remember, and is linked in it’s entirety to the other two. What is sutemi? Literally (and mistakenly) translated it means to throw oneself away, but the truer meaning is one of total commitment to your action. The best way of describing, again, my own understanding of it, in particular in relation to what happened to me is that following on from being less distracted by the shinai, and it simply being “there” as opposed to being needing active control and manipulation from me, this leaves just my body and it’s action to deal with. As a result, it’s far easier to give everything because I was concentrating on less. The action of going in and attacking came more naturally and easily, and as a result the attack (in this case a debana men) came out essentially before I knew that it was coming, and with such force of action that there was no resisting it (it was like the Borg of men-uchi), because every single last part of me was behind the cut. For once, real sutemi. And then of course I totally couldn’t get it again, but it was there, and I actually felt it.
As it turned out, this kind of detachment from the physicality of the shinai didn’t come easily, nor did the working of the body, or the sutemi, but it did come, maybe once or twice. I had potentially the best jigeiko I’ve ever had in terms of how effective my seme was at the weekend whilst trying to achieve this with a hachidan from keishicho, and scored a quite frankly awesome debana men in ippon shoubu yesterday (the one I mentioned above), without even thinking about it. Both of these, I know for a fact, happened because of my mentaility at the time. I simply managed for those moments to let go of my attachment to the shinai as being essential to seme and simply let it act as it needed to while my body went about getting in my ideal position to attack and simply let the attack happen.
It feels wierd writing this stuff, mostly because I’m more used to expressing myself in terms of the viscosity of my morning poo, so perhaps I’m not getting my point across very well, but this kind of realisation, of a conceptual nature rather than a physical point or technique, is exceedingly rare for me, as is discussing it (I’d rather talk about sex, or beer, or food, or all 3) so maybe what I’m writing comes across as contrived bull shit, but for a moment, for me, it wasn’t. And it worked.
The best thing about this is that I suddenly have the holy grail of kendo (or at least, my kendo) in sight. I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it. For five minutes on saturday, and maybe less yesterday, I actually did it. And I want it again. Now I’ve finally got something worth chasing after thats more than a simple result in a shiai, and will inevitably facilitate the results in the shiai, that is going to make my kendo explode if I can only chase it down, force it to the floor and take it’s wallet and phone before the police see what I’m doing.
