Fear in martial arts

I remember a story a friend, Steve told me many years ago, which perhaps will give a taste for what I’m writing about. We were at University, Steve started studying Karate, mostly because there was a cute girl in the club whom he wanted to get to know better. He didn’t last long as a Karateka, and explained what it was that turned him off.

Often as not in the changing rooms he would overhear conversations between his fellow (male) students. Though the exact contents differed, the form of them went something like this.

‘ Last night I was in the pub, yeah’
‘ Yeah.’
‘ And there was this bloke, and he was out of order, yeah’
‘Yeah, and what happened’
‘Well nothing, but if it had happened I’d have....( fill in with the technique of choice)’

After hearing this plenty of times he decided that he‘d had enough macho martial wannabeism and stopped training.

Now that’s a story that comes from Karate, but the overheard conversation could just as well have happened within any other martial arts style, or taken place my own imagination too if I’m honest.

I offer the story as an example of how I don’t want to develop in martial arts. So much of what I see seems like a battle against fear. Fear that someone else is going to beat the *%$£ out of you. Fear that age is stealing strength. Fear that someone else knows more, or moves better or...

When I was training hard for competition, though I enjoyed the training a great deal, it also had an addictive quality, which I think came from a basic insecurity. Since I pretty much lived training I was so used to this that I didn’t notice it, like forgetting the air that we breath.

After getting injured and being out of training for a while and coming back into this hidden quality became clearer. Though the atmosphere in the clubs was friendly, there was an undercurrent of competition that was based on a fear of other people being better in some way, overtaking you in strength. Of course in contact competition other people being better has painful consequences, so it’s normal to feel something like this. I think what I object to is the degree to which the emotion is unnoticed, denied, hidden.

I find the same thing in Taiji and internal martial arts, where the students look down there noses at ‘external’ practitioners with some strange sense of superiority. Here you won’t find people trusting in the strength of their arms to keep them safe from fear, but rather the mythology of their art, the tales of immortals and near magical power as a shield against passing years, and the grip of the mighty wrestler called time.

I don’t want my training to be driven in this way anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to be strong, or skillful, rather I want to train for the pleasure of training, for the joy of moving, for the fun of testing myself.

I still have moments of fear like this, more than moments, but my relation with them has changed, a little. I still look at people training in other styles, and think, in a slightly superior way ‘ I’m so glad I practise Ba Gua, its so much more...’
the aches in my body still act as an incentment to work out ( except when they don’t act as an incentment to stay in bed). When I see particularly skilled and violent practitioners, or hear stories of horrible attacks on the street my stomach still turns over.

The difference is when these things come now I’m beginning to catch myself. Rather than training feverishly harder, or berating myself for the weakness of my mind, I prefer to greet them as old friends. ‘Oh, there you are again,’ and instead of shutting the door on them like unwelcome salesmen, to invite them in for tea. The house of martial arts is one of fear’s favourite places to enjoy a cuppa, so much so in many it rules the entire kitchen.

Training for me has become part of who I am, rightly or not. There is some part of me that unfolds in training and I love the experience. It changes my state and lets me see, lets me move in a world beyond winning and losing for a while. Just the appreciation of events as they happen.

This is the value of training for me, and it’s that state that comes from training that lets me get there. I still value clarity of detail, or efficacy of technique. It’s the refinement of technique that creates the concentration through which the change of state can take place, as much as a way to keep myself safe from an attack that will probably never come.

It’s in this new state where I can take my fear and change it back into an appreciation of what’s important.

It reminds me of a Cheng Man Ching talking about qi, that qi is like water with a little depth of water you can float a match stick, but it takes a greater depth to float a boat.

Practise is a way to create more depth, more expansiveness, a way to surround and embrace the fear, to saturate it dissolve it and reveal the shape of the message it holds. I‘m not sure exactly what that message is, I’m not sure how to write it down, except perhaps as the wonder of opening to life, to find the truth of something deep inside, and allow life to move through me.

If you’re wondering whether Steve got the girl, he never told me. But I like to think he did, and that life moved through them both.