You don't have to be great all the time

In her fabulous book, Writing Down the Bones, author Natalie Goldberg introduces a Zen-inspired practice of writing, whereby one sits and writes for an allotted time, say five or fifteen minutes without stopping, without correcting, always keeping the pen moving. This is not writing for publication, but rather writing as spiritual practice, more akin to meditation, therapy and martial arts practice than writing for an audience.

Here's my favorite anecdote from a book packed with wonderful vignettes:

Artistic Stability

I have a pile of spiral notebooks about five feet high that begin around 1977, my early years of writing in Taos, New Mexico. I want to throw them out -- who can bear to look at the junk of our own minds that comes out in writing practice? I have a friend in New Mexico who makes solar houses out of beer cans and old tires. I think I will try to build one out of discarded spiral notebooks. A friend who lives upstairs says, "Don't get rid of them." I tell her she can have them if she wants.

I pile them on her stairs leading up to her apartment and leave for Norfolk, Nebraska, for four days to do a writing workshop. When I return she looks at me oddly, plunks herself down in the old pink chair in my bedroom: "I've been reading your notebooks all weekend. They are so intimate; so scared, insecure for pages, then suddenly they are not you -- just raw energy and wild mind. And now here you are -- Natalie -- in the flesh, just a person. It feels so funny." ...

She said it was empowering to read my notebooks because she realized that I really did write "shit," sometimes for whole notebooks. Often I tell my students, "Listen, I write and still write terrible self-pitying stuff for page after page." They don't believe me. Reading my notebooks is living proof of that. My upstairs neighbor said, "If you could write the junk you did then and write the stuff you do now, I realize I can do anything. There's so much power in the mind. I feel like who knows what I can do!" She said the main thing she saw in the notebooks -- whole notebooks of complaints, boring description, and flagrant anger -- was an absolute trust in the process. "I saw that you kept on writing even when you wrote 'I must be nuts to do this.'"

When you see someone do something amazing, it's a mistake to attribute it to mere talent. You just don't see the hard work.

Compassionate thinking

One of my principal teachers, Kyoshi Adam Bradshaw, teaches that the martial arts can and should develop critical, creative and compassionate thinking.

• Creative thinking engages the imagination to see more than one option (most of the time)
• Critical thinking includes dispassionate evaluation when choosing a course of action
• Compassionate thinking biases us to prefer actions that prevent or reduce pain in others and ourselves

If it seems paradoxical that martial arts, whose subject matter include detailed and systematic study of methods of violence and inducing pain and injury can teach compassionate thinking, read on!

At one extreme consider the compulsively angry person who, when provoked, responds violently. Not many options there, and not much compassion either. This person is failing to use all three forms of thinking; (s)he is merely reactive.

At the other extreme is the avowed non-violent person who believes that violence is unacceptable, always. Such a person is not prepared to use violence to stop a violent aggressor even to stop serial acts of violence, and must find other means, or be reduced to being a victim or by-stander. If other means are found all is well and good, but if there is an insufficiency of creative thinking, or simply no viable alternative, (s)he may hold true to non-violence yet greater evils may result.

By contrast, the trained martial artist, familiar with the ways of violence has the option of using it as a positive action, as when Vladimir Putin -- Russian Prime Minister and 6th dan in Judo -- saved a camera crew from a charging tiger by nonchalantly picking up a tranquilizer gun and shooting it. Sure, the tiger felt some pain, but far greater suffering was averted.

Here's another story: Tai Chi instructor Arthur Rosenfeld explains how he neutralized his own road-rage by doing something nice for a guy who was stupidly honking him in a take-out line. Instead of getting into an altercation and teaching the guy a (painful) lesson, he simply paid for the guy's coffees (without telling him), and drove off. The feel-good bit is that the guy then paid for the next customer, clearly prompted by Rosenfeld's creative and compassionate action, and from there the chain continued for several hours, cheered up a lot of people, and even got reported in the media.

* * *

By training in the martial arts we can lessen the negative effects of fear and anger on our actions. We train to enable us to perform at our best -- in every sense -- in difficult and even life-threatening situations.

Creating a Kata: Part I

At the end of each year the Australian Jiu-Jitsu, Judo and Chinese Boxing Federation of Instructors holds a Presentation Day which traditionally includes a kata competition.

A kata -- sometimes referred to as a form or set -- consists of one or more participants performing a pre-arranged of movements drawn from a martial art. Kata is:

• An instructional method
• A training and practice method
• A repository and source of techniques
  
• A performing art

and more besides. On Presentation Day katas are performed and judged, so they should be comprehensible and entertaining for the audience. But that does not mean that they are purely about entertainment value. They should at the same time showcase technique, spirit and cooperation.

This is the first year that I will be entering a student kata from my club at Monash Caulfield, and I am looking forward to the process of getting it ready.

My first choice is whether to prepare a traditional kata, or choreograph an original one. As the title of this article suggests, I will be opting for the latter option. While traditional kata are wonderful, their level of difficulty makes them better suited to a more experienced group. I look forward to training my students in traditional kata in the future.

My second choice is how to go about creating this new kata and preparing my students. My approach will be to first introduce a particular theme into training in the coming weeks, and then work with the students to create our own kata around this theme. I expect that:

• My beginning students will focus primarily on learning the techniques,
  
• The more experienced ones will gain from the exploration of connections and have some scope to contribute creatively
  
• This will allow me to
  
• take a themed slice through our curriculum
• set the scene for piecing together the actual kata.

Working title for the kata? The Kata of Come-Alongs (arresting techniques)