A man who is extremely foolish
should come to know something in the end because of his faith. On the
other hand, isn't it said that " A half-baked martial art is the
foundation of great injury?"
The Unfettered Mind; Takuan Soho
I never really considered myself the owner of my personality. I was an
imitation of a Australian Man. It was a skin I wore, yet had no rights over. I had no real idea what lay
underneath it. In retrospect being gay explained a lot of my feelings of cultural dislocation. I had a personality, but it wasn't mine; it was more of an inert thing; sucked into the vacuum of what I
presumed my friends and families needed. I cannot complain
or consider myself hard done by. No one ever asked me to be someone
else, no one ever explicitly required anything from me. And yet I always
felt that to be myself would require reckless indifference to others opinions.
I tried to make myself a man without really feeling any sense of belonging to that concept. I tried to make myself into what I thought I was supposed to be. But I cannot read minds, and so what I presumed was required of me was likely wrong, 2 dimensional, and flawed. I never considered my attitudes, my beliefs, or my identity my own. I rented them off somewhere I couldn't see , and so I didn't understand on what terms I used them. All my failures were my own. All my successes belonged to a shell; someone else, some third party that I attached to my outward actions.
I trapped myself in this mask like a monkey trapped by its clenched full paw in a jar of nuts; a jar with a opening wide enough to let an empty paw in but not a full paw out. I was too stupid to realize that if I let go of them I could escape and be free. So I would thrash and think myself a victim. And I was a victim; but I never took the time to ask who was doing the persecuting. Trapping yourself behind layers of deceit can make you more lonely than any physical isolation. You start to wonder if there really is anything underneath the impersonation; if what you consider yourself, what is "you", isn't just another shade of insincerity that bears no truth or value.
Ever since I was 12 I have days where I want to kill myself. I think about it recurrently. When it first started happening it was terrible. In time I learned to manage it. When life was going well I would think about it maybe once a month, and when I went through stressful or harsh periods in my life I would think about it maybe once every three days. Once every three days is not pleasant, but manageable. You can structure your life to mitigate it.
The key to getting through the bleakness is to make sure you have some sort of answer for yourself when you believe that life is pointless and empty. You need to build a barrier against your own worthlessness. It's an argument against yourself. You need to have some sort of justification to continue living when you start to doubt if there is any good in existing. So long as you can achieve something, no matter how small, on your other two days on that cycle, then you can build a prop, or some sort of support against the blackness when it next comes. You need some sort of answer for the shadows in your head for when you next ask yourself;
I tried to make myself a man without really feeling any sense of belonging to that concept. I tried to make myself into what I thought I was supposed to be. But I cannot read minds, and so what I presumed was required of me was likely wrong, 2 dimensional, and flawed. I never considered my attitudes, my beliefs, or my identity my own. I rented them off somewhere I couldn't see , and so I didn't understand on what terms I used them. All my failures were my own. All my successes belonged to a shell; someone else, some third party that I attached to my outward actions.
I trapped myself in this mask like a monkey trapped by its clenched full paw in a jar of nuts; a jar with a opening wide enough to let an empty paw in but not a full paw out. I was too stupid to realize that if I let go of them I could escape and be free. So I would thrash and think myself a victim. And I was a victim; but I never took the time to ask who was doing the persecuting. Trapping yourself behind layers of deceit can make you more lonely than any physical isolation. You start to wonder if there really is anything underneath the impersonation; if what you consider yourself, what is "you", isn't just another shade of insincerity that bears no truth or value.
Ever since I was 12 I have days where I want to kill myself. I think about it recurrently. When it first started happening it was terrible. In time I learned to manage it. When life was going well I would think about it maybe once a month, and when I went through stressful or harsh periods in my life I would think about it maybe once every three days. Once every three days is not pleasant, but manageable. You can structure your life to mitigate it.
The key to getting through the bleakness is to make sure you have some sort of answer for yourself when you believe that life is pointless and empty. You need to build a barrier against your own worthlessness. It's an argument against yourself. You need to have some sort of justification to continue living when you start to doubt if there is any good in existing. So long as you can achieve something, no matter how small, on your other two days on that cycle, then you can build a prop, or some sort of support against the blackness when it next comes. You need some sort of answer for the shadows in your head for when you next ask yourself;
Why do I deserve to be alive?
Am I a person worth living?
Do I deserve what my family and friends have lost to me?
Physically induced pain is something that is better understood than
mental pain. Knowing physical pain is simpler ; easier to connect
the dots between cause and effect. Mental or emotional suffering is
more ambiguous. People tend not to talk about it all that much. Wherever it arises, suffering is a battle. In a battle you need to know yourself and your enemy if you hope to win.
I think that people tend to think of suicidal people as emphatically distraught or upset; that the will to die arises when life gets too painful to live through. And that is certainly a path to it. But I feel that thinking of it like that paints it in too broad a brush. Feeling like shit and emotionally suffering are not necessarily the same thing. You would not call being tickled "painful" yet for most it is an unpleasant experience. You would not call what your ears go through "pain" when you hear fingernails scratch down a chalkboard, yet I have yet to meet anyone who says they like that sound. Jumping into a cold lake early in the morning straight after waking up does not hurt you, yet few want to do it. You suffer when these things happen to you but you don't necessarily feel pain. A quick google search on "suffering" yields the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. I feel that the "or" is significant. It's not "and".
Not everything that is awful is painful. My experience has shown me that there are a lot more subtle hues to despair than just the pain from sadness. It ranges from everything from sadness, to boredom, to emptiness, to hopelessness, to guilt, to regret, to bottomless pessimism, to feeling trapped, to self hatred, to loneliness, to feeling useless, to losing your soul to insensate indifference.
There is only so long that you can stumble and wade through sludgy brown and grey mud before it exhausts you. "Horrible" is probably not the right word to describe what that feels like. "Vast" is probably better. I feel the best way to describe it would be to call it a spiritual prison. It's like being stuck in a lifeless desert wasteland, that expands outwards further than you can go. You are free to go anywhere but there is no difference between where you are now and where you might choose to go, except that going there will exhaust you. If your emotions turn acrid and start to burn you, it's a struggle you cannot win. You are fighting yourself internally, you know everything you will come up with as an attack against yourself. You can only struggle with a mirror image of yourself and you can never win.
I would daydream about finally working up the resolve to jump off a bridge or something and no longer having to feel. When I thought this, most of the time I wasn't that upset. I wanted to die the same way you might walk past an advert in the window of a travel agency and imagine lying on an exotic beach. I didn't want to feel good anymore. I wanted to feel nothing. There is only so long you can keep indulging in these kind of feelings before you start to resent yourself for not doing it. I didn't get that technicolor holiday because I was too weak to resolve to do it. I knew what needed to be done yet refused. I deserved the suffering.
I started to ask myself "You keep daydreaming about the release of death, and have done for years. Yet here you are, exactly where you were years ago. You will be exactly here for years. You will always stay here. Do you really deserve to feel better if you refuse to do something about it? Why should I, or anyone, take you seriously if you can't even take responsibility for your own feelings?"
It was from that frame of mind that made me decide I wanted to do Judo in the hardest team I could find in the world. I knew I was nowhere near the level of proficiency required to train there. But I thought it was possible they would give me the strength to subjugate and defeat the worst adversary I have ever had; myself. I wanted to master myself. Or they would kill me and do it for me.
In retrospect that attitude was pretty cartoonish and flawed. I guess I went in hoping to be taught some sort of shamanistic magic to fight the demons in my head. Unfortunately they didn't teach me how to go super-saiyan and fly off to fight a cosmic crusade. I didn't ask myself before I went; can people find any meaningful personal development out of a game? What if they only maimed me? Or just refused me? Much more likely would be that I would repetitively lose; either at the game or the opportunity to play. I wanted to fight a decisive battle against myself and conquer my enemy; not win a game.
Can thinking about a sport by using heavy handed allusions to battle be particularly wise? Judo may have developed in a vicarious way out of war field combat, but it is first and foremost a sport. Athletes play Judo, in clean cotton suits. Soldiers and bystanders die in warfare, in greasy machines, in greasy fires, from greasy diseases. Calling Judo a war probably misses the point on what either a game is, on the one hand, or a mechanized destruction of life is, on the other. And even if that distinction matters when you consider whether or not Judo is a legitimate way of attempting to fortify yourself, does that have any relevance to my situation? My problems are inside myself; not outside me, not somewhere identifiable that a Japanese pastime might prescribe resolutions to.
They say war is simply the continuation of policy by other means. seiryoku zenyo ("maximum efficient use of energy") and jita kyoei ("mutual benefit") are policies; kinda. Dumping people spectacularly on their back is sort of a means; maybe? I wanted to try to live. I have spent too long hiding from the world and hiding from myself. I was sick, and was sick of it. I knew that I would always deserve every bad feeling I had ever had and will have in the future if I refused to try to exert some level of responsibility over my failures. I took a massive risk on the biggest punt I have ever taken in my life. You don't need a death wish to train at Tokai University, but it certainly helps.
When I returned home, my style collapsed, my emotions crumbled, and I became pretty much useless at everyday tasks within a few weeks. It turned out returning home was harder than Tokai ever was.
I had had some crazy amounts of good experiences in Japan. I got a lot of help from the Judo players. I turned up to training one day to find the class was being taught by Yasuhiro Yamashita. Going to a lesson on O-Soto Gari from him was like being given a Judo technique by a god. In 8 years spanning from 1977 to 1985 he played 203 rounds in domestic and international competitions and never lost. He tore his right calf muscle in the 1984 Olympics and still won. He's 180cm and his operating weight was over 127kgs. He moves like the blade on a bulldozer. Nothing moves him and when he plows through his opponents they roll over the top of him like uprooted trees. His approach to O-Soto Gari is essentially the pinnacle for that throw. That throw belongs to him. You cannot find a higher source of authority; living or dead, for advice on that technique.
The next time I got a wave of mental darkness I asked myself,
Why do you deserve what you have?
What value do you have as a person?
I expected to wash through everyone in my local club like a tsunami. But I couldn't. And I had no idea why. I had an enthusiasm for my style of Judo; "drunken Judo", that was bordering on the insane. Maybe I had extended beyond that border. When I brought it to Australia it quickly withered and died under the blaze of the harsh southern sun. So when those questions came around again, I had nothing to counter it with.
Suddenly I found Judo training completely pointless. When you have been shown one of the most powerful Judo techniques from one of the best Judoka ever, and you fail to be able to throw beginners with it when you try, you start to feel that any perseverance in trying to learn is pointless. I had been given literally the best possible chance and I couldn't use it. It was completely wasted on me. I will never get another shot at that. I must be unteachable. My teacher in Australia told me something to the extent of, "the difference between a lunatic and a genius is timing".
First it was Judo, but then I started to lose most of my motivation for most things. I stopped turning up to lectures because I couldn't see the point. I'd just fuck that up too. I started avoiding friends because I was too ashamed to see them. I stopped studying Japanese. Then I stopped studying everything.
I turned up for a tutorial for one of my classes and couldn't walk in. I had prepared everything I needed to do; had my answers neatly printed on two A4 sheets, and couldn't get through the front door. I walked away for a bit and then tried again; and still couldn't. It was my favorite subject that semester. I turned around and walked out of uni knowing it was the last time I would be there as a student. Without really understanding why, I went from turning up uninvited to one of the best Judo schools in Japan and the world; lingering like a house guest that obstinately refuses to "get the message" and leave; I started out pretty much useless and from nothing progressed to being able to throw better and stronger martial artists. A few months later I returned into nothing and was incapable of walking into a room full of my peers where I was welcome. This happened to me in the space of about 6 or 7 months. Maybe I burnt out the last of my mental fortitude.
Looking into the eyes of one of the head Judo teachers who I am about 60% sure was Hidetoshi Nakanishi, and asking if I could participate at Tokai was like greeting a hippogriff in Harry Potter. He could probably smell my fear. I bowed, made careful unbroken eye contact with him, gave my best parrot imitation of polite Japanese, and waited to see what avenue of suffering he would make available to me. Would he deny me, meaning I would have to eke out my life without the training; would he claw me to pieces with his talons, or would he allow the rest of the students to?
A few weeks before I left Japan I asked Or Sansson, the +100kg 2015 European Judo championship silver medalist for a round of Judo. He was the biggest and strongest looking guy in the Dojo. He didn't look enthused about going with a whippet of a creature with a colored belt, but I knew he wasn't going to get a round off the Japanese players. I was basically his only option if he wanted some target practice. I lasted four minutes out of a five minute randoori round before he could throw me. When you have faced something like that, very little after feels like a commitment. And a few months later I couldn't walk into a classroom.
Why bother graduate? You're a fucking joke and a lie. A degree wont change that. You're a lunatic and a bad person. Drape whatever pieces of paper you want around yourself but no one anywhere can make you into anyone worth being alive. You're a disgrace and all the suffering, everything, you, are your own fault. You are nothing and you deserve nothing.
My Judo fell apart. I had an idiosyncratic approach I couldn't make work. I got laughed at a lot. I have always felt inferior for most of my life. I pretty much expect this all the time. That is how my style developed. Orthodox Judo for the most part requires an attacker to drop their center of balance underneath their partner to pivot and turn them over. I think you can extend this concept to other areas. If you think of yourself as subordinate to others then you can get underneath people and pivot people over the top of you in ways that don't have to be limited to your body. I intended to use an unorthodox style to make my opponents underestimate me. They would presume I was crazy and incapable, and think I couldn't attack them. From an ostensibly weak position I would use their opinion of themselves as better, higher quality Judoka to my advantage.
When I use my style of Judo, one of its main advantages is how unreadable it is. My opponents could never really anticipate my attacks because I set myself up for throws in really unusual and counter-intuitive ways. When you throw someone using a "drunken Judo" approach, your intentions are cloaked. The problem with this is, if no one can read it; then no one can tell why you are doing it, or if you actually intend on trying to throw at all. For anyone who watches, if you fail to throw your opponent it looks like incompetence.
If you fail to throw someone using a conventional Judo approach; there can be several reasons why. It's at least a century year old art and sport and it has a history that can be referenced. If you don't know something you can ask someone more familiar with it. You can check why what you are doing isn't working. Perhaps your opponent is simply better than you. Maybe you don't have the technique nailed down decently yet. Maybe you had everything right but the context you applied it in wasn't so easy, or wasn't so compatible, to use that technique in.
"Drunken Judo" is different in that the entire amount of contexts it has been applied in fit (with a fair bit of empty space) in less that one year of my experience. Only I knew or could know when, how, and why it could work. If it didn't, I also am the only person who might understand why. Reminiscing back into less than one year isn't that long to gain any meaningful reference as to why you might not be moving well. The only way you can prove to onlookers that a technique has any validity at all is if you completely dominate your opponent decisively. I was confident I could do that in Australia; because I did that sometimes against some of my opponents in Japan. I failed miserably.
Looking around in the Tokai Judo hall watching the players' precise; beautiful; and intimidatingly complicated styles; I realized it would be easier to build a new style from scratch than it would be to try and learn what it was they were doing. Trying to learn Japanese Judo in the short time frame that I had would be like trying to build an army with as much military hardware as the USA's with a budget that wouldn't support a tenth of it. If you play their game the same way they do, very quickly you will discover you don't have the same resources. You cannot out-train Japanese martial artists and it isn't wise to try. Any amount of time you have spent drilling a technique they have probably spent at least 1 order of magnitude more.
When you learn Judo you learn it from the ground up. Your teachers and superiors build up your knowledge and experience from scratch into something that can withstand and overcome another players conditioning and training. It's a crude comparison, but I feel it's a bit like "conkers". You have a 5 minute Judo round where both players "bash" into each other until one "breaks" (gets ipponed / loses on points). What happens on the mat is only incidental. You don't win conkers by swinging yours well. You win because of your preparation. You win because you spent the time making sure the one you use is better than your opponents' one. If you want to win, you have to have the better conker. The race to get the best opportunity to throw begins a long time before either player bows onto the competition mat. It begins on the very first day of training.
I don't think its easily feasible for people to win Judo matches quickly and spontaneously. They win them after spending grueling hours, weeks and years drilling their throws into something they can pull out at will in competition. Those opportunities don't just happen. They avail themselves only to those who have done the preparation to create them. Of course people get lucky, make mistakes, or throw and get thrown in ways that their training did not specifically address. But I think most feel that it is better to rely on an approach with a few decades of proven application in the experience of your teachers than it is to hope to MacGyver something together on the spot.
Learning Judo to become like a Tokai athlete was impossible for me. All of them were already well beyond my foundational technical base; they were off somewhere in the stratosphere. I watched a light weight guy cartwheel out of his opponents' Tomoe Nage like it was nothing; like a ninja or some sort of action movie hero. Varlam Lipeteliani strangled me in Newaza using an approach I had dismissed before as being impossible. When you can't see the ground; you can't start from there. I had to start in the sky and work down.
And so once I started being able to throw my opponents, I found that I was learning a lot of Judo concepts from an inverted approach. I didn't start with articulated basics. I started with what didn't work and what shouldn't be done. Everything else not forbidden was legitimate to try. Trial and error was the only guide I got. I started using techniques that were only a few weeks old against my opponents. Burnt in the furnace of trial and error into a small ashy misshapen lump, neither of us really knew what they were, what their parameters were; what their weaknesses were or how and if they could be used to gain an advantage. If I threw someone I was often just as surprised as them. Judo's techniques and approaches to grappling with your opponent have a century long trajectory you can look into and study. Using this as a reference is a good guide to anticipate where your opponent might come for you, or check how you might react to any particular attack. So far as I am aware no one has yet tried to fuse drunken Chinese Kung Fu styles into a Japanese sport. "Drunken Judo" has no such history.
I consider "drunken Judo" a similar but different style to Judo because it has a different structure to it. I played with the methodology of Judo to come up with something that achieves the same result by taking a different course. The way you use balance in "drunken Judo" is different, they way you escape throws is different, the way you grip and engage with your opponent is different. It feels like a similar but different "language" to me than Judo when I "speak" it. Without any understanding of any of these languages I feel like it might be like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, or Mandarin and Cantonese.
The "words", the throws, are all more or less the same, but the "grammar", the way you might get into a context where you can use those "words" or throws, is different. The main important difference is balance. I think that Judo was designed with the intention to be used by smaller people to throw larger and stronger people. As a derivative of Jujitsu it expands on it by applying leverage to balance to create throws. To me; I think that a Judo approach to throwing usually needs a low, stable and crystallized stance. A Judoka's aim is to stay on balance while taking their opponents'. If you can be underneath your opponent when you "break" their balance, you can easily pivot them over some fulcrum you create out of your or their body and turn them over.
"Drunken Judo" is the complete opposite, but what makes it different makes it like Judo. I came up with "drunken Judo" as a way to throw shorter players that were stronger and better at Judo than me. As a derivative of Judo it applies imbalance to leverage to create throws. A "drunken Judo" approach to throwing uses a high center of balance. Compared to Judo; its like 2 sides of the same coin. You sway like a drunk; and you move your opponent by rolling your body weight above their center of balance. Its harder to use than Judo, but much more volatile. "Drunken Judo" attacks are simply countered; but difficult to defend from. When you are flowing ok when using "drunken Judo", you cannot use jigotai as a position to recover your balance with. When you use it well, your opponent can't either. When you use it really well; your opponent cannot take control from you over your balance because you never exerted control over it in the first place.
I feel that a Judo approach to balance treats it as if it were a stone. It ought to lie low, hard, stable, and it is a good thing if it is difficult to move. I think it is for this reason that Kuzushi is translated as "breaking" balance. If you "break" the balance that a Judo player is trying to protect with their stance, you shatter their control over their base; and can easily throw them.I feel that the way I was trained was that a good Judoka's stance can't ever be stable enough. No matter how straight your back is, regardless of how good your footing is on the mat, it can always stand to be better.
"Drunken Judo" treats balance as if it were water. You can hold it with difficulty but you can never truly control it. It ought to flow, splash, crash, be heavy without being brittle; be light without being insubstantial. It's easy to talk about and much harder to do. No matter how loose and fluid your balance is; it needs to be looser than that. Its not enough to just "relax". Moving like you decided mid anaesthesia shot that you really don't feel like the surgery after all and decided to walk out of the hospital is a start. No matter how unstable your balance is; it can stand to become less so.
People tend to think of instability in balance as being a precursor to falling over; arriving at the state of a complete lack of balance when you are on the ground. I feel about it differently. I think "balance" is merely a synonym for lack of movement compared to gravity. If you can stand upright without making any apparent movements you are "balanced". If someone can move you from this position you are "imbalanced". But if you get thrown and you land on your back; you arrive back in a state of total balance. You get there in a state where if you did not move while on the ground; gravity would not change your position into something different. And so I feel "balance" tends to be treated like it is a noun; something you have; some absolute quality that either exists or doesn't.
On the ground, on multiple limbs, or maybe lying down, I think this view is valid. When standing; humans are bipedal creatures with narrow feet. I think in this situation balance is a constant mediation between slight angles precariously perched over the small surface area your 2 feet provide. I view the word "balance" as only having a useful meaning when it is used as a verb. At any time anyone is standing, any slight angle that is not carefully adjusted and readjusted in their stance and weight might develop into something that might make them fall over; if they weren't in a constant subconscious process of adjusting and readjusting. I think that standing is a constant process of re-calibrating your weight to remain over your feet. I attempted to exaggerate this process in "drunken Judo" so that I could expand the limits in which I could be unbalanced.
I don't really use the word Kuzushi for what it is I do to my opponents balance when I use "drunken Judo", because I think "breaking" balance is too limited a metaphor. I don't disagree that you can "shatter" anothers' balanced stance as if it were brittle, but I also feel that you can crunch that balance, you can warp it, you can stretch it, you can wring it, you can squish it, you can bounce it.
Just before I left Japan I started using my balancing advantages in a way that didn't seem coherent with the concept of Kuzushi. I deliberately allowed one of my opponents to throw me in Uchi Mata so I could roll out of it in the air and land on my feet. He "broke" my balance perfectly and legitimately, but I warped myself around his sweeping leg and landed as if he had not done it. I went for a round of Randoori against the bronze medalist of the 2010 Asian games. He "broke" my balance in O Soto Gari and came in to sweep my leg. I let him push my head over my hip. Pushed into the shape of a banana, I counter-threw him backward in Ura Nage. My balanced stance didn't "break", yet I didn't do anything to prevent him from pushing my head over my right leg. I know I did nothing to prevent his Kuzushi technique, yet I threw him in his "breaking" of my balance. I think I "stretched" my own balance to wrap and bind his up. I'm not sure if Kuzushi encapsulates this. So I feel that at its core "drunken Judo" is an expansion on the concept of balance in Judo.
Countering an opponent in their Kuzushi against you is something that you can do in ordinary Judo too, but not in a way where your balance becomes entirely dependent on your opponents force against you. Judo has a very positive approach to balance. You build up your own position so that it is safe, and then from there you can take your opponents balance from them. "Drunken Judo" is the inverse. You shut everything down in your body; then you sway like a drunk; your body weight shifts in chaotic paths. You allow this so it can flow into your opponent. Simply, Judo takes balance from people. "Drunken Judo" gives imbalance to people.
This difference may not be all that important and may just be a rewording of the same thing. I am not sure. But I know I can move people near 50% heavier than me with "drunken Judo" attacks (90kgs X 1.5 = 135kg) . I can barely move players with Judo. "Drunken Judo" is much harder to steer and has no way of stopping; but it is more powerful and volatile. I can do maybe 2 X 25 push ups maximum, which is pretty pitiful. Yet I can sometimes pull Judo players off both of their feet towards me with one grip, so that they fell toward me while momentarily losing contact with the mat, like Scorpion in Mortal Combat.
I think that people tend to think of suicidal people as emphatically distraught or upset; that the will to die arises when life gets too painful to live through. And that is certainly a path to it. But I feel that thinking of it like that paints it in too broad a brush. Feeling like shit and emotionally suffering are not necessarily the same thing. You would not call being tickled "painful" yet for most it is an unpleasant experience. You would not call what your ears go through "pain" when you hear fingernails scratch down a chalkboard, yet I have yet to meet anyone who says they like that sound. Jumping into a cold lake early in the morning straight after waking up does not hurt you, yet few want to do it. You suffer when these things happen to you but you don't necessarily feel pain. A quick google search on "suffering" yields the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. I feel that the "or" is significant. It's not "and".
Not everything that is awful is painful. My experience has shown me that there are a lot more subtle hues to despair than just the pain from sadness. It ranges from everything from sadness, to boredom, to emptiness, to hopelessness, to guilt, to regret, to bottomless pessimism, to feeling trapped, to self hatred, to loneliness, to feeling useless, to losing your soul to insensate indifference.
There is only so long that you can stumble and wade through sludgy brown and grey mud before it exhausts you. "Horrible" is probably not the right word to describe what that feels like. "Vast" is probably better. I feel the best way to describe it would be to call it a spiritual prison. It's like being stuck in a lifeless desert wasteland, that expands outwards further than you can go. You are free to go anywhere but there is no difference between where you are now and where you might choose to go, except that going there will exhaust you. If your emotions turn acrid and start to burn you, it's a struggle you cannot win. You are fighting yourself internally, you know everything you will come up with as an attack against yourself. You can only struggle with a mirror image of yourself and you can never win.
I would daydream about finally working up the resolve to jump off a bridge or something and no longer having to feel. When I thought this, most of the time I wasn't that upset. I wanted to die the same way you might walk past an advert in the window of a travel agency and imagine lying on an exotic beach. I didn't want to feel good anymore. I wanted to feel nothing. There is only so long you can keep indulging in these kind of feelings before you start to resent yourself for not doing it. I didn't get that technicolor holiday because I was too weak to resolve to do it. I knew what needed to be done yet refused. I deserved the suffering.
I started to ask myself "You keep daydreaming about the release of death, and have done for years. Yet here you are, exactly where you were years ago. You will be exactly here for years. You will always stay here. Do you really deserve to feel better if you refuse to do something about it? Why should I, or anyone, take you seriously if you can't even take responsibility for your own feelings?"
It was from that frame of mind that made me decide I wanted to do Judo in the hardest team I could find in the world. I knew I was nowhere near the level of proficiency required to train there. But I thought it was possible they would give me the strength to subjugate and defeat the worst adversary I have ever had; myself. I wanted to master myself. Or they would kill me and do it for me.
In retrospect that attitude was pretty cartoonish and flawed. I guess I went in hoping to be taught some sort of shamanistic magic to fight the demons in my head. Unfortunately they didn't teach me how to go super-saiyan and fly off to fight a cosmic crusade. I didn't ask myself before I went; can people find any meaningful personal development out of a game? What if they only maimed me? Or just refused me? Much more likely would be that I would repetitively lose; either at the game or the opportunity to play. I wanted to fight a decisive battle against myself and conquer my enemy; not win a game.
Can thinking about a sport by using heavy handed allusions to battle be particularly wise? Judo may have developed in a vicarious way out of war field combat, but it is first and foremost a sport. Athletes play Judo, in clean cotton suits. Soldiers and bystanders die in warfare, in greasy machines, in greasy fires, from greasy diseases. Calling Judo a war probably misses the point on what either a game is, on the one hand, or a mechanized destruction of life is, on the other. And even if that distinction matters when you consider whether or not Judo is a legitimate way of attempting to fortify yourself, does that have any relevance to my situation? My problems are inside myself; not outside me, not somewhere identifiable that a Japanese pastime might prescribe resolutions to.
They say war is simply the continuation of policy by other means. seiryoku zenyo ("maximum efficient use of energy") and jita kyoei ("mutual benefit") are policies; kinda. Dumping people spectacularly on their back is sort of a means; maybe? I wanted to try to live. I have spent too long hiding from the world and hiding from myself. I was sick, and was sick of it. I knew that I would always deserve every bad feeling I had ever had and will have in the future if I refused to try to exert some level of responsibility over my failures. I took a massive risk on the biggest punt I have ever taken in my life. You don't need a death wish to train at Tokai University, but it certainly helps.
...
When I returned home, my style collapsed, my emotions crumbled, and I became pretty much useless at everyday tasks within a few weeks. It turned out returning home was harder than Tokai ever was.
I had had some crazy amounts of good experiences in Japan. I got a lot of help from the Judo players. I turned up to training one day to find the class was being taught by Yasuhiro Yamashita. Going to a lesson on O-Soto Gari from him was like being given a Judo technique by a god. In 8 years spanning from 1977 to 1985 he played 203 rounds in domestic and international competitions and never lost. He tore his right calf muscle in the 1984 Olympics and still won. He's 180cm and his operating weight was over 127kgs. He moves like the blade on a bulldozer. Nothing moves him and when he plows through his opponents they roll over the top of him like uprooted trees. His approach to O-Soto Gari is essentially the pinnacle for that throw. That throw belongs to him. You cannot find a higher source of authority; living or dead, for advice on that technique.
The next time I got a wave of mental darkness I asked myself,
Why do you deserve what you have?
What value do you have as a person?
I expected to wash through everyone in my local club like a tsunami. But I couldn't. And I had no idea why. I had an enthusiasm for my style of Judo; "drunken Judo", that was bordering on the insane. Maybe I had extended beyond that border. When I brought it to Australia it quickly withered and died under the blaze of the harsh southern sun. So when those questions came around again, I had nothing to counter it with.
Suddenly I found Judo training completely pointless. When you have been shown one of the most powerful Judo techniques from one of the best Judoka ever, and you fail to be able to throw beginners with it when you try, you start to feel that any perseverance in trying to learn is pointless. I had been given literally the best possible chance and I couldn't use it. It was completely wasted on me. I will never get another shot at that. I must be unteachable. My teacher in Australia told me something to the extent of, "the difference between a lunatic and a genius is timing".
First it was Judo, but then I started to lose most of my motivation for most things. I stopped turning up to lectures because I couldn't see the point. I'd just fuck that up too. I started avoiding friends because I was too ashamed to see them. I stopped studying Japanese. Then I stopped studying everything.
I turned up for a tutorial for one of my classes and couldn't walk in. I had prepared everything I needed to do; had my answers neatly printed on two A4 sheets, and couldn't get through the front door. I walked away for a bit and then tried again; and still couldn't. It was my favorite subject that semester. I turned around and walked out of uni knowing it was the last time I would be there as a student. Without really understanding why, I went from turning up uninvited to one of the best Judo schools in Japan and the world; lingering like a house guest that obstinately refuses to "get the message" and leave; I started out pretty much useless and from nothing progressed to being able to throw better and stronger martial artists. A few months later I returned into nothing and was incapable of walking into a room full of my peers where I was welcome. This happened to me in the space of about 6 or 7 months. Maybe I burnt out the last of my mental fortitude.
Looking into the eyes of one of the head Judo teachers who I am about 60% sure was Hidetoshi Nakanishi, and asking if I could participate at Tokai was like greeting a hippogriff in Harry Potter. He could probably smell my fear. I bowed, made careful unbroken eye contact with him, gave my best parrot imitation of polite Japanese, and waited to see what avenue of suffering he would make available to me. Would he deny me, meaning I would have to eke out my life without the training; would he claw me to pieces with his talons, or would he allow the rest of the students to?
A few weeks before I left Japan I asked Or Sansson, the +100kg 2015 European Judo championship silver medalist for a round of Judo. He was the biggest and strongest looking guy in the Dojo. He didn't look enthused about going with a whippet of a creature with a colored belt, but I knew he wasn't going to get a round off the Japanese players. I was basically his only option if he wanted some target practice. I lasted four minutes out of a five minute randoori round before he could throw me. When you have faced something like that, very little after feels like a commitment. And a few months later I couldn't walk into a classroom.
Why bother graduate? You're a fucking joke and a lie. A degree wont change that. You're a lunatic and a bad person. Drape whatever pieces of paper you want around yourself but no one anywhere can make you into anyone worth being alive. You're a disgrace and all the suffering, everything, you, are your own fault. You are nothing and you deserve nothing.
...
My Judo fell apart. I had an idiosyncratic approach I couldn't make work. I got laughed at a lot. I have always felt inferior for most of my life. I pretty much expect this all the time. That is how my style developed. Orthodox Judo for the most part requires an attacker to drop their center of balance underneath their partner to pivot and turn them over. I think you can extend this concept to other areas. If you think of yourself as subordinate to others then you can get underneath people and pivot people over the top of you in ways that don't have to be limited to your body. I intended to use an unorthodox style to make my opponents underestimate me. They would presume I was crazy and incapable, and think I couldn't attack them. From an ostensibly weak position I would use their opinion of themselves as better, higher quality Judoka to my advantage.
When I use my style of Judo, one of its main advantages is how unreadable it is. My opponents could never really anticipate my attacks because I set myself up for throws in really unusual and counter-intuitive ways. When you throw someone using a "drunken Judo" approach, your intentions are cloaked. The problem with this is, if no one can read it; then no one can tell why you are doing it, or if you actually intend on trying to throw at all. For anyone who watches, if you fail to throw your opponent it looks like incompetence.
If you fail to throw someone using a conventional Judo approach; there can be several reasons why. It's at least a century year old art and sport and it has a history that can be referenced. If you don't know something you can ask someone more familiar with it. You can check why what you are doing isn't working. Perhaps your opponent is simply better than you. Maybe you don't have the technique nailed down decently yet. Maybe you had everything right but the context you applied it in wasn't so easy, or wasn't so compatible, to use that technique in.
"Drunken Judo" is different in that the entire amount of contexts it has been applied in fit (with a fair bit of empty space) in less that one year of my experience. Only I knew or could know when, how, and why it could work. If it didn't, I also am the only person who might understand why. Reminiscing back into less than one year isn't that long to gain any meaningful reference as to why you might not be moving well. The only way you can prove to onlookers that a technique has any validity at all is if you completely dominate your opponent decisively. I was confident I could do that in Australia; because I did that sometimes against some of my opponents in Japan. I failed miserably.
Looking around in the Tokai Judo hall watching the players' precise; beautiful; and intimidatingly complicated styles; I realized it would be easier to build a new style from scratch than it would be to try and learn what it was they were doing. Trying to learn Japanese Judo in the short time frame that I had would be like trying to build an army with as much military hardware as the USA's with a budget that wouldn't support a tenth of it. If you play their game the same way they do, very quickly you will discover you don't have the same resources. You cannot out-train Japanese martial artists and it isn't wise to try. Any amount of time you have spent drilling a technique they have probably spent at least 1 order of magnitude more.
When you learn Judo you learn it from the ground up. Your teachers and superiors build up your knowledge and experience from scratch into something that can withstand and overcome another players conditioning and training. It's a crude comparison, but I feel it's a bit like "conkers". You have a 5 minute Judo round where both players "bash" into each other until one "breaks" (gets ipponed / loses on points). What happens on the mat is only incidental. You don't win conkers by swinging yours well. You win because of your preparation. You win because you spent the time making sure the one you use is better than your opponents' one. If you want to win, you have to have the better conker. The race to get the best opportunity to throw begins a long time before either player bows onto the competition mat. It begins on the very first day of training.
I don't think its easily feasible for people to win Judo matches quickly and spontaneously. They win them after spending grueling hours, weeks and years drilling their throws into something they can pull out at will in competition. Those opportunities don't just happen. They avail themselves only to those who have done the preparation to create them. Of course people get lucky, make mistakes, or throw and get thrown in ways that their training did not specifically address. But I think most feel that it is better to rely on an approach with a few decades of proven application in the experience of your teachers than it is to hope to MacGyver something together on the spot.
Learning Judo to become like a Tokai athlete was impossible for me. All of them were already well beyond my foundational technical base; they were off somewhere in the stratosphere. I watched a light weight guy cartwheel out of his opponents' Tomoe Nage like it was nothing; like a ninja or some sort of action movie hero. Varlam Lipeteliani strangled me in Newaza using an approach I had dismissed before as being impossible. When you can't see the ground; you can't start from there. I had to start in the sky and work down.
And so once I started being able to throw my opponents, I found that I was learning a lot of Judo concepts from an inverted approach. I didn't start with articulated basics. I started with what didn't work and what shouldn't be done. Everything else not forbidden was legitimate to try. Trial and error was the only guide I got. I started using techniques that were only a few weeks old against my opponents. Burnt in the furnace of trial and error into a small ashy misshapen lump, neither of us really knew what they were, what their parameters were; what their weaknesses were or how and if they could be used to gain an advantage. If I threw someone I was often just as surprised as them. Judo's techniques and approaches to grappling with your opponent have a century long trajectory you can look into and study. Using this as a reference is a good guide to anticipate where your opponent might come for you, or check how you might react to any particular attack. So far as I am aware no one has yet tried to fuse drunken Chinese Kung Fu styles into a Japanese sport. "Drunken Judo" has no such history.
I consider "drunken Judo" a similar but different style to Judo because it has a different structure to it. I played with the methodology of Judo to come up with something that achieves the same result by taking a different course. The way you use balance in "drunken Judo" is different, they way you escape throws is different, the way you grip and engage with your opponent is different. It feels like a similar but different "language" to me than Judo when I "speak" it. Without any understanding of any of these languages I feel like it might be like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, or Mandarin and Cantonese.
The "words", the throws, are all more or less the same, but the "grammar", the way you might get into a context where you can use those "words" or throws, is different. The main important difference is balance. I think that Judo was designed with the intention to be used by smaller people to throw larger and stronger people. As a derivative of Jujitsu it expands on it by applying leverage to balance to create throws. To me; I think that a Judo approach to throwing usually needs a low, stable and crystallized stance. A Judoka's aim is to stay on balance while taking their opponents'. If you can be underneath your opponent when you "break" their balance, you can easily pivot them over some fulcrum you create out of your or their body and turn them over.
"Drunken Judo" is the complete opposite, but what makes it different makes it like Judo. I came up with "drunken Judo" as a way to throw shorter players that were stronger and better at Judo than me. As a derivative of Judo it applies imbalance to leverage to create throws. A "drunken Judo" approach to throwing uses a high center of balance. Compared to Judo; its like 2 sides of the same coin. You sway like a drunk; and you move your opponent by rolling your body weight above their center of balance. Its harder to use than Judo, but much more volatile. "Drunken Judo" attacks are simply countered; but difficult to defend from. When you are flowing ok when using "drunken Judo", you cannot use jigotai as a position to recover your balance with. When you use it well, your opponent can't either. When you use it really well; your opponent cannot take control from you over your balance because you never exerted control over it in the first place.
I feel that a Judo approach to balance treats it as if it were a stone. It ought to lie low, hard, stable, and it is a good thing if it is difficult to move. I think it is for this reason that Kuzushi is translated as "breaking" balance. If you "break" the balance that a Judo player is trying to protect with their stance, you shatter their control over their base; and can easily throw them.I feel that the way I was trained was that a good Judoka's stance can't ever be stable enough. No matter how straight your back is, regardless of how good your footing is on the mat, it can always stand to be better.
"Drunken Judo" treats balance as if it were water. You can hold it with difficulty but you can never truly control it. It ought to flow, splash, crash, be heavy without being brittle; be light without being insubstantial. It's easy to talk about and much harder to do. No matter how loose and fluid your balance is; it needs to be looser than that. Its not enough to just "relax". Moving like you decided mid anaesthesia shot that you really don't feel like the surgery after all and decided to walk out of the hospital is a start. No matter how unstable your balance is; it can stand to become less so.
People tend to think of instability in balance as being a precursor to falling over; arriving at the state of a complete lack of balance when you are on the ground. I feel about it differently. I think "balance" is merely a synonym for lack of movement compared to gravity. If you can stand upright without making any apparent movements you are "balanced". If someone can move you from this position you are "imbalanced". But if you get thrown and you land on your back; you arrive back in a state of total balance. You get there in a state where if you did not move while on the ground; gravity would not change your position into something different. And so I feel "balance" tends to be treated like it is a noun; something you have; some absolute quality that either exists or doesn't.
On the ground, on multiple limbs, or maybe lying down, I think this view is valid. When standing; humans are bipedal creatures with narrow feet. I think in this situation balance is a constant mediation between slight angles precariously perched over the small surface area your 2 feet provide. I view the word "balance" as only having a useful meaning when it is used as a verb. At any time anyone is standing, any slight angle that is not carefully adjusted and readjusted in their stance and weight might develop into something that might make them fall over; if they weren't in a constant subconscious process of adjusting and readjusting. I think that standing is a constant process of re-calibrating your weight to remain over your feet. I attempted to exaggerate this process in "drunken Judo" so that I could expand the limits in which I could be unbalanced.
I don't really use the word Kuzushi for what it is I do to my opponents balance when I use "drunken Judo", because I think "breaking" balance is too limited a metaphor. I don't disagree that you can "shatter" anothers' balanced stance as if it were brittle, but I also feel that you can crunch that balance, you can warp it, you can stretch it, you can wring it, you can squish it, you can bounce it.
Just before I left Japan I started using my balancing advantages in a way that didn't seem coherent with the concept of Kuzushi. I deliberately allowed one of my opponents to throw me in Uchi Mata so I could roll out of it in the air and land on my feet. He "broke" my balance perfectly and legitimately, but I warped myself around his sweeping leg and landed as if he had not done it. I went for a round of Randoori against the bronze medalist of the 2010 Asian games. He "broke" my balance in O Soto Gari and came in to sweep my leg. I let him push my head over my hip. Pushed into the shape of a banana, I counter-threw him backward in Ura Nage. My balanced stance didn't "break", yet I didn't do anything to prevent him from pushing my head over my right leg. I know I did nothing to prevent his Kuzushi technique, yet I threw him in his "breaking" of my balance. I think I "stretched" my own balance to wrap and bind his up. I'm not sure if Kuzushi encapsulates this. So I feel that at its core "drunken Judo" is an expansion on the concept of balance in Judo.
Countering an opponent in their Kuzushi against you is something that you can do in ordinary Judo too, but not in a way where your balance becomes entirely dependent on your opponents force against you. Judo has a very positive approach to balance. You build up your own position so that it is safe, and then from there you can take your opponents balance from them. "Drunken Judo" is the inverse. You shut everything down in your body; then you sway like a drunk; your body weight shifts in chaotic paths. You allow this so it can flow into your opponent. Simply, Judo takes balance from people. "Drunken Judo" gives imbalance to people.
This difference may not be all that important and may just be a rewording of the same thing. I am not sure. But I know I can move people near 50% heavier than me with "drunken Judo" attacks (90kgs X 1.5 = 135kg) . I can barely move players with Judo. "Drunken Judo" is much harder to steer and has no way of stopping; but it is more powerful and volatile. I can do maybe 2 X 25 push ups maximum, which is pretty pitiful. Yet I can sometimes pull Judo players off both of their feet towards me with one grip, so that they fell toward me while momentarily losing contact with the mat, like Scorpion in Mortal Combat.
...
In a few months after I arrived back home the Australian national Judo championship was being held near Sydney. Physically I was in the best possible condition I was ever going to be in for it. Mentally I had slid so far backwards it felt that I had never trained in Judo at all. It felt like some sort of demonic claw had reached into my skull and pulled out a clenched fistful of my resolve, my skill, my mental fortitude. I signed up for it thinking some sort of goal might help me get back on track. It didn't really. I started skipping training. I started drinking so I could sleep at night. I had pretty much invested my soul into "drunken Judo". I gave it everything I had. When I lost it I felt like a lingering fart.
Being criticized for doing stupid and crazy things hurts. But it doesn't hurt nearly as much as being complemented for using a style of Judo that pales in comparison to what you were once capable of. One Friday I was at training. I did a round of randoori against one of the heavy weights in my local clubs training. We were ramping up the intensity of training progressively over the weeks in preparation for the nationals. The teachers encouraged us to go hard. My own style had fallen apart so I was resorting to orthodox Judo. I couldn't throw him. I couldn't even move him. He threw me a few times using his superior skills and weight advantages. He was a dan grade, I was a kyu. Its pretty much what you would expect considering the rank and weight differences. After the class my teacher complimented me and said I was moving well that night. Immediately after training I drank myself stupid on cheap wine. I needed not to feel.
I don't really know who I am. I am not a good or moral person. I don't know if I should call myself a man. But I know one thing with complete certainty. I found out in Japan that I am a crappy Judo addict. Without my crappy Judo my life falls apart. The withdrawals are fucking terrible.
The next day I went to the states' team Judo training. On Saturdays they would hold a large randoori session at another Judo club. I turned up hungover from the cheap label-less wine that I drank while playing skyrim the night before. I bowed on the same heavy weight player. Recovering from the night before had left my body loose and soft. I was mentally elsewhere. I wasn't clenching my jaw like I normally do with orthodox Judo. Maybe after 30 seconds of grip fighting I felt it. He was bigger than me and stronger than me. He held his balanced weight close to a point somewhere between his chest and hips; fortified behind his stance. Through my grips on him I could just about hear his weight singing a song I had heard before.
I felt it. Every time he moved his body would chime like a tuning fork; the reverberations would travel from his toes up into my hands. If your opponent relies on their sight to perceive you, you can easily feign attacks by using baiting movements with your body. Looks can be deceiving. When you can feel how your opponent is balancing themselves; that can't. A perception of balance is the polygraph machine of Judo. It is near impossible to make your balancing lie for you. A skilled Judoka can hide it with skill; but no one in my experience can make it tell falsehoods. If you can feel your opponent negotiating their weight onto their stance, there isn't really a better authority to understand how they will attack and react to you. Tapping into that sensation feels like reading their mind. You know which attacks they intend and which they don't, you know how they intend to control you; you know where and when they will come for you. I didn't dominate him; but I threw him a few times using a "drunken Judo" approach.
I felt it. Every time he moved his body would chime like a tuning fork; the reverberations would travel from his toes up into my hands. If your opponent relies on their sight to perceive you, you can easily feign attacks by using baiting movements with your body. Looks can be deceiving. When you can feel how your opponent is balancing themselves; that can't. A perception of balance is the polygraph machine of Judo. It is near impossible to make your balancing lie for you. A skilled Judoka can hide it with skill; but no one in my experience can make it tell falsehoods. If you can feel your opponent negotiating their weight onto their stance, there isn't really a better authority to understand how they will attack and react to you. Tapping into that sensation feels like reading their mind. You know which attacks they intend and which they don't, you know how they intend to control you; you know where and when they will come for you. I didn't dominate him; but I threw him a few times using a "drunken Judo" approach.
One of the most important things you need to do to be able to do "drunken Judo" is you must let go of your anticipation of your opponent. This is because if you are afraid of being thrown; your body will lock up and you won't be able to move. Any involuntary reactions on your part; no matter how slight, can interfere with how you mediate your stance changes with your weight. This is not that physically difficult, but quite mentally demanding. If you want to win, if you want to throw your opponent, you might lock up when they get into position to throw you. If you lock up, this completely voids the fluidity you need to be able to maintain a "drunken stance", the base position from where you generate the power "drunken Judo" attacks come from. "Drunken Judo" has no Jigotai position and so there isn't really any place for stiff or rigid approaches to moving.It's psychologically difficult, partly because of how counter intuitive it feels.
You have to constantly be putting in just the base minimum to prevent yourself from falling over. Conventional martial arts for the most part seem to want to create as stable a base as possible from which to generate power from. "drunken Judo" is different in that you need as unstable a stance as you can possibly maintain without falling over. Willingly entering a state where you constantly feel like you are about to fall over; and yet rolling with it so you don't; without applying too heavy a corrective force that your opponent can use against you is incredibly difficult.
It really helps if you can let go of your doubt, your will to win, your resolve to do well. You need to enter a state of emptiness, a state of nothing, so that nothing will get between you and your opponent when they come for you. Your own anticipation is enough to make your body and your balance involuntarily brittle. If you allow your body to become even slightly tense, ordinary Kuzushi will "break" your balance.
You have to constantly be putting in just the base minimum to prevent yourself from falling over. Conventional martial arts for the most part seem to want to create as stable a base as possible from which to generate power from. "drunken Judo" is different in that you need as unstable a stance as you can possibly maintain without falling over. Willingly entering a state where you constantly feel like you are about to fall over; and yet rolling with it so you don't; without applying too heavy a corrective force that your opponent can use against you is incredibly difficult.
It really helps if you can let go of your doubt, your will to win, your resolve to do well. You need to enter a state of emptiness, a state of nothing, so that nothing will get between you and your opponent when they come for you. Your own anticipation is enough to make your body and your balance involuntarily brittle. If you allow your body to become even slightly tense, ordinary Kuzushi will "break" your balance.
I started doing my yoga ball stuff in Japan because I discovered that my balancing ability was the only physical advantage I had over the Tokai Judo students. They were all stronger than me, they were all more technically proficient, they were all more disciplined. I started pushing to develop my balancing so that I could have one advantage of my own to use against them. In a few months I went from kneeling on the ball to being able to catch a tennis ball behind my head while standing, and leaning backward at a 45 degree angle.
They
talk of Zen Buddhism as being a tool or method which can offer some
kind of mental state that defies human expression. It is a freedom from
the burden of human thought; and so trying to confine it within language
and concepts is both impossible and unhelpful. But I don't think that
impossibility or impracticality are real reasons, really, why you ought
not try expressing what it might be. Just because its impossible doesn't
mean it isnt useful to have a go articulating it . I think I found something while looking
at a white wall upside down on a yoga ball on the basement floor of
Tokai's Budokan.
I
had to let go of my safety. If someone came while I was looking in the
other direction I wouldn't be able to see them. I had to let go of my
fear of falling. If I fought to hold my balance like I hold it while
standing normally; if I treated balance as something that could be
controlled and owned, I would quickly fall off. I had to let go of
control over my body; let it flow where it naturally would over the
ball. The better I want to balance the harder it is. I had to be
totally indifferent to how I did. If I could do this, on occasion, I
gained a mental clarity unlike anything else.
The position is not that hard physically to enter. Psychologically it is quite difficult. You have to willingly put yourself in a position which violates your equilibrium. You bend backwards as if you are trying to limbo underneath something, but you are a meter up in the air precariously balanced on a ball. I think that it's probably the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever had in my life. I had to look right and left before I started leaning over to check if any of the students were coming. Sometimes they would kick the ball when I was standing on it and it was difficult to maintain my balance when they did it. If one of them did it while I was in that position I would likely fall onto my head.
I would check if anyone was coming to prod the ball, and if I saw no one coming, then I would start. You had rely on the fact that you could do it uninterrupted. It's more or less a leap of faith. A good 50% of my style came from watching movies; so I lean heavily on pop culture and flashy, neon platitudes for instruction. I have deliberately chosen this scene for its cheesiness. Bear with me; i'm trying to get to a point somewhere in all this waffling. (not really necessary to watch beyond 3.10)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9SvGciRWc&t=1m30s
I would check if anyone was coming to prod the ball, and if I saw no one coming, then I would start. You had rely on the fact that you could do it uninterrupted. It's more or less a leap of faith. A good 50% of my style came from watching movies; so I lean heavily on pop culture and flashy, neon platitudes for instruction. I have deliberately chosen this scene for its cheesiness. Bear with me; i'm trying to get to a point somewhere in all this waffling. (not really necessary to watch beyond 3.10)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9SvGciRWc&t=1m30s
As your head goes behind your hips, and you start to look at the ceiling, and then over to the wall behind you, it feels like you "see" something. Whatever it is, it breaks the 4th wall of your perception. You know that feeling; that involuntary reaction you get when you lean backward on a chair too far and it falls over? That knee jerk reaction of uncomfortable adrenaline and warning klaxons in your head? I believe that with training, that can become a voluntary reaction. If you can put yourself in the position where you voluntarily experience this, in time, you can put yourself in this position and voluntarily choose not to feel this.
You know that feeling you get when you are watching a movie with friends, a movie with a relatively engaging plot, but then in one sudden point the writers or actors or whoever completely drop the ball? And in that moment you glance at each other and you go what? Are they seriously trying to pass that off as plausible? My father sat through The Hobbit; An Unexpected Journey with me in the cinema; and afterwards complained that he (basically, I'm paraphrasing heavily) got subjected to 169 minutes of flashing colors and nothing else. The scenes where they are escaping the orcs; just before Bilbo finds the ring; he took them as an affront to his dignity. He took it that the writers didn't take him seriously enough to bother to take their storytelling as anything more than flashing tinsel and slapstick.
The feeling is kinda like that. In the past few paragraphs I tried to write for you a decent; methodical; plausible explanation of what mushin no shin feels like; and smack in the center of it blasted you with Neo's award winning acting. I intended to completely shake the plausibililty of the thread of my story. I made you aware that what I wrote here was just that. nothing more than a story.
When I lean backward on a yoga ball, I push my body and my mind beyond any point of credibility, any point of believable experience, to find nothing on the other side. Whatever was going on in my head, the fear, the apprehension, the anticipation of how i ought to approach this task; whatever was going on around me; it was just another bad plot arch that came from an incompetent source. It's clumsily done. The thin veneer of reality is full of plot holes. If you wrote it you could do it better. And maybe you can.
You start to see your fears and anticipations as burdens which can be lost. You start to feel that you yourself are a burden which can be lost. It feels like seeing something unusual flicker on the wall of Plato's cave; something shocking and yet banal, in a clumsy application of a poor movie trope or cliche kind of way. Its dubious and incredible; feels like clumsy writing maybe, and in that instance you become aware that whatever it is; it's just an insubstantial performance, and nothing more.
It's enough to make you break gaze with the shadows and illusions on the cave wall for a short moment. You see the shackles that bind you in the cave, and yet you realize that these shackles which bind and limit you are not actually in the cave at all. They aren't anywhere external to you. They are inside you. They are built out of your fears, your anticipations, your understanding.
If you can lose these you lose the prison you built for yourself, out of yourself. You can with difficulty lose your attachment to your ability to understand what is going on around you. It isn't real. You aren't real. None of this is real. It's very trite; but it definitely feels like a "there is no spoon" moment.
You know that feeling you get when you are watching a movie with friends, a movie with a relatively engaging plot, but then in one sudden point the writers or actors or whoever completely drop the ball? And in that moment you glance at each other and you go what? Are they seriously trying to pass that off as plausible? My father sat through The Hobbit; An Unexpected Journey with me in the cinema; and afterwards complained that he (basically, I'm paraphrasing heavily) got subjected to 169 minutes of flashing colors and nothing else. The scenes where they are escaping the orcs; just before Bilbo finds the ring; he took them as an affront to his dignity. He took it that the writers didn't take him seriously enough to bother to take their storytelling as anything more than flashing tinsel and slapstick.
The feeling is kinda like that. In the past few paragraphs I tried to write for you a decent; methodical; plausible explanation of what mushin no shin feels like; and smack in the center of it blasted you with Neo's award winning acting. I intended to completely shake the plausibililty of the thread of my story. I made you aware that what I wrote here was just that. nothing more than a story.
When I lean backward on a yoga ball, I push my body and my mind beyond any point of credibility, any point of believable experience, to find nothing on the other side. Whatever was going on in my head, the fear, the apprehension, the anticipation of how i ought to approach this task; whatever was going on around me; it was just another bad plot arch that came from an incompetent source. It's clumsily done. The thin veneer of reality is full of plot holes. If you wrote it you could do it better. And maybe you can.
You start to see your fears and anticipations as burdens which can be lost. You start to feel that you yourself are a burden which can be lost. It feels like seeing something unusual flicker on the wall of Plato's cave; something shocking and yet banal, in a clumsy application of a poor movie trope or cliche kind of way. Its dubious and incredible; feels like clumsy writing maybe, and in that instance you become aware that whatever it is; it's just an insubstantial performance, and nothing more.
It's enough to make you break gaze with the shadows and illusions on the cave wall for a short moment. You see the shackles that bind you in the cave, and yet you realize that these shackles which bind and limit you are not actually in the cave at all. They aren't anywhere external to you. They are inside you. They are built out of your fears, your anticipations, your understanding.
If you can lose these you lose the prison you built for yourself, out of yourself. You can with difficulty lose your attachment to your ability to understand what is going on around you. It isn't real. You aren't real. None of this is real. It's very trite; but it definitely feels like a "there is no spoon" moment.
If you can manage to do randoori in this state; your movements will be more free than anything else can make you. I have done it maybe a small handful of times. You can't be tricked into moving into a position where your opponent can throw you because you never anticipated them in the first place. You never feared being unbalanced. You can't be set up, you can't be deceived, you can't be misled. When you exercise no judgment your opponent has nowhere they can start to try to lead you. You can't be pre-empted if you don't pre-empt yourself. If you relinquish control over your mind; it feels like all the techniques you do come from your opponent; it feels like your throws are sucked from their mind into the vaccum of your skull.
I have done "drunken Judo" throws that I have not trained or ever seen or even really thought about much before, because I gave up on trying to hold onto them mentally and just flowed with the feel of my opponent. I just sorta ... fell, into where my opponents' body and trajectory required of me. Apparently the Judo comes from you; but it doesn't feel that way at all. It feels like your opponent is trying to claw their way out of nothing.
I have done "drunken Judo" throws that I have not trained or ever seen or even really thought about much before, because I gave up on trying to hold onto them mentally and just flowed with the feel of my opponent. I just sorta ... fell, into where my opponents' body and trajectory required of me. Apparently the Judo comes from you; but it doesn't feel that way at all. It feels like your opponent is trying to claw their way out of nothing.
....
I lined up for my first round in the international open; trying to think down my nervousness. I had fucked up most of my training in Australia. I had nearly completely lost my style of Judo. I had tried to build myself up into something I wanted to be and failed. I will never be like any other Judo player I know. I will never be a Judo player. I will never be like any other Australian I know. I will never be Australian. I will never escape this worthlessness. I can never become anything worth acknowledging. I have lost my mental fortitude, I have wasted my time overseas, I have wasted the time of everyone I trained with. "Drunken Judo" is a joke and a lie. I am a joke and a lie. I will prove nothing by doing this. It is nothing. I am nothing.
...
