Windsor Shotokan Karate Club

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bHHUd6Dzqo

2hour podcast interview with Sensei Amos

www.youtube.com

Was good to see an old friend join us for class tonight.

-nevermind the cat...just practice! :)

rick hotton sensei - sharing thoughts, Denmark 2019 rick hotton sensei teaching and sharing his thoughts on an approach to practice - Denmark. For more video content/instructional material, join us at;https://...

Congrats to Andrew on passing his 3rd Kyu grading today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZsJp6YA0Pg

Gyaku-zuki: 40-minute class, developing timing and depth to this technique Digging deep in many variations of gyaku-zuki, gradually increasing intensity. Available also as free content on our Karate Ikigai Academy Int'l app on both ...

Got most of the band back together and a new member. Still missing our lead guitarist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-UOEwPJ6pk

Sensei Naka Tatsuya learning Machida Karate! Sensei Naka Tatsuya from visited Machida Karate Academy and learned the advanced Kumite Kata 4 from sensei Chinzo Machida!Sensei Yoshizo was to...

Nostalgia for the Absolute

That’s it. That’s all I want to say. A succinct phrase with an equally succinct message.

However, articles rarely comprise of a title and a sentence. So, I best start with acknowledging the source of the title – George Steiner. In 1997, he wrote and published a short book with the same title, the content of which can easily be googled and has conveniently provided me with a framework for my swirling thoughts to coalesce around to form this article.

I am currently sitting in a rather plush Radisson Blu, watching shuttle buses ferry passengers to and from Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, Sweden. I’m having a relaxing morning, having taught in one dojo last night, before heading off to another dojo for a three-day seminar this weekend.
Last night, whilst teaching a small, dedicated group of senior grades, one brown belt asked about the count of the kata Bassai Dai.
‘What count should we follow?’ she asked. ‘How should it be done?’
I gathered my thoughts and concluded that I had two things to say about that. First, was that kata can be thought as like physical poetry. That is to say, you read a poem one day and it is all about love and romance. You read the same poem the following day and it is all about longing and loss. What you bring to the reading of the poem is as important as the poem itself. The same can be said about music, movies, and any other form of art. In fact, I continued, I would argue that at a high level, no two performances of any one kata should be the same. When performing a kata, we bring to it a whole host of feeling, ideas, needs and restrictions. Although we are forced through a narrow bandwidth of movement, these factors can produce an infinite number of possibilities, which can equally produce an infinite number of outcomes. To try to replicate the same kata over and over again isn’t art, it is analogue photocopying at best.
The second thought that came to me was that any instructor who teaches with the implied or direct message that ‘this is the ONLY way to do the kata/technique/exercise’, is merely exerting their own ego. Teaching with such absolutism is forcing students to copy and paste the instructor’s karate, despite the infinite differences the students have from their instructor. In fact, I continued, it is abhorrent for any instructor to put the needs of their own egotistical fragility above the desire of their students to learn karate for them. For sure, a sensei must give frameworks to their students to allow them to fulfil their potential. They must guide, nudge and cajole them into a direction that the instructor feels is best. They can teach with a try-this-for-now type of openness. They can reference other ways, whilst teaching the way that will best help them pass rank grading. However, to teach in an absolute way reduces karate to the myopic, narrow, pin-head sized point of non-functionality.

‘Yeah,’ said the brown belt. ‘But, what count should we follow?’

I get it.
Karate is hard.
Getting it right as a student and getting it right as a sensei is a path fraught with danger. A kyu grade is the infancy of our karate journey. For an infant, their lives are dictated by their parents. Every waking moment of the child is controlled and monitored, as they are taught the acceptable norms of society. However, as that child enters the teenager years things start to change. For me, this is the difficult shodan to sandan years. As a parent, everything becomes a negotiation. ‘Maybe you should try this’, ‘if you do this, the consequences could be that?’ We batten down the hatches, hope our guidance from afar lands on them in some way and we watch with horror as they go off into the nearby world, finding a different path for themselves. Then, presuming we have done a good job, they become an adult, go off into the wide world, creating a new family, occasionally dropping by, asking for advice, and uniting once more for family get-togethers. For me, in this clumsy analogy, this should be anyone who is yondan and above. However, similar to seeing dysfunctional families screaming at each other in ASDA, I have seen senior dan grades still being controlled by the head instructor, waiting for the next kata update or highly prescribed protocol of movement that means that they are doing karate correctly. They have allowed themselves to become institutionalised, protected from the chaos of the outside world by a gilded cage.
I get it. I, too, sometimes feel like Cypher from the Matrix, who, after nine years of being free from the machines, wanted once again to be turned into a human battery. Why? Because of his dissatisfaction with reality.
Like him, I sometimes have a nostalgia for the absolute. To be told what to do, how to do it and when to do it, is to be swaddled by your mum and soothed to sleep… Then I remember I am an adult. I am all grown up and, more importantly, I am a karate-ka. And, as a karate-ka, I must rally against the easy way out, I must choose the less trodden path, I must strive to fulfil my potential. So, I encourage us all not to fall for the rose-tinted vision of an absolute answer. It will be a hollow and fleeting moment of joy followed by frustration and dissatisfaction. It will be the cutting and pasting of someone else’s karate. It will be the antithesis of what karate should be.

Oh… And hit something every day. Breathe functionality into your karate by becoming strong, fit, flexible and elastic, then nothing I have written above really matters 😊