An Uchideshi Experience: Chapter Fifteen
Someone Watching Over
It was another crowded Thursday night class, Sensei was teaching, and he showed a technique I had seen only once before in my life. It really surprised me.
Because I had been studying both Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Seibukan at the same time, knowledge was being amassed at both ends, and I’d often try to combine elements from each to find new techniques, or at least different ways of getting into them. Such was the case here. It was an armbar formed by triangling the legs, something I had never seen before, something that had just come to me in a dream the night before.
So there it was, the triangled leg armbar I had never seen in real life, demonstrated for the class. Now it was our turn. I grabbed a good friend as a training partner, and tried it out. We did it a few times, and since I knew him, I decided to share my little precognitive shocker. By his lack of response, I made an assumption he was unimpressed, and we continued to train in a lighthearted manner.
At work the next day, that friend called me up and asked if I had a minute, since he had something to tell me. He mentioned that he’d appreciate it if I didn’t speak about this to anyone else, since they might not react to it favorably. You see, he had a long history of psychic occurrences stemming back from childhood, but rarely mentioned them to anyone other than close friends for fear it would affect his business.
“Hey Roy, do you remember when we were in the room at the back of the house?” He was referring to a small office that had been built behind his main house, where we had been gabbing through the evening, about nothing in particular.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Well,” he continued, “since you had mentioned you had dreamt that technique Sensei was showing, I kind of took that as a sign that I should share this with you. I wasn’t going to mention it before, but I think you should know. There was somebody in the room with us that night.”
“Are you serious? What do you mean?”
“I’m totally serious. Just to the left of you, when you were sitting in that chair, I saw a woman staring right at me. It wasn’t all of her, it was just the top portion… you know, just the chest and head."‘
I was flabbergasted. This was not a man who would make something like this up, have anything to gain by telling me, or (for those of you who are wondering) ingest hallucinogenic substances. He was a straight-arrow, professional family man, describing something he felt was very real, and taking a chance by sharing information that others would ridicule.
I had to know more. “So you could really see her, clearly, and she was real, I mean, she wasn’t just...?”
“I could see her just as clearly as I could see you,” he assured me. Then he went on to describe her. She was a small woman, about five feet four, 70 to 75 years old, with strong Mexican or Italian features, and old-age spots on her skin. She had long, straight, coarse hair, black giving way to gray, and she was emanating a message to my friend. Unmistakably, it came through to him as this: “We are watching over.”
Is there someone watching over? I hope so. Sometimes I need somebody to keep me from going over the line: serving martial arts instead of having them serve me. Originally, I set out to invest myself fully in martial arts as simply a means to an end: achieving a higher state of consciousness and reaping physical benefits along the way. But more and more often, as I trek down this path, I find myself distracted by delving into deeper realms, and paying heavy tolls for the distances I’ve traveled.
At times my training has eclipsed far more pressing priorities, which begs the question “Who is serving whom?” Whether it’s born from insecurity or compulsion, this urge to train has to have some sort of check to achieve a sense of balance. For me, I’m discovering that my body is the ultimate limiting factor. I pop and crack a lot for someone who’s 24. At some point, I’m going to have to take a long break. Maybe that’s part of the discipline, too.
People who knew me supported my ambition because they realized my passion, even if they secretly feared for me. My boss at the NTSB gave his own brand of tacit approval by barking commands at me in the office: “Royboy...CREAN DOJO! My parents supported my goals, even if they didn’t fully understand them, and my family of training partners at Aikido North encouraged me to take a chance. But like almost every position in life, support was not universal.
When I explained to acquaintances, or to my friends’ parents, my plan to live as an uchideshi, the first question I always received was, “Oh, and what are you going to do with that?” Then, after the inquisition, came the mourning. “God, and what about your music? You’re giving it up for that?” I understood their lament, but doesn’t sacrificing something dear to you make martial arts mean that much more? I think so.
I started out with a pretty mystical take on martial arts, but ended up as a pragmatist. The underlying secret of martial arts I wanted to know is the one I knew all along. It’s training. Mat time. All things come through this. Ki, energy extension, whatever you want to call it, does exist, and plays a part in technique, but as far as I can tell, it’s icing on the cake. Maybe ki is like talent. It’s present in everyone, some people have more it than others, and you really can cultivate it, but don’t ever, ever rely on it. If you do, sooner or later, you’ll pay a price you can’t afford.
On the other hand, in his book Drifted in a Deeper Land, spiritual teacher Adi Da brings to light an interesting point through his washing machine analogy. He discusses how consumed and distracted we are by our “washing machines,” something we should have only so much interest in, because it’s easy to get lost and overlook the fact that the electricity is the source of what makes the machine work; that’s the juice we should focus on. A good point, but you’ll never be able to utilize that energy if your machine is broken, or as is more often the case, was never programmed how to operate.
Is there someone watching over? I’d like to think that there is. I feel that I took a blind leap of faith, pursuing some archaic ideal as an adventure, stepping out into the unknown on an unhacked path. Miraculously, I came to the right place, under the right instructor, who had more than just a school and a need for another body willing to undergo hard training. It wasn’t merely his technical knowledge, ranks, physical prowess, or students that made this the right place. All of that played a part, of course, but there’s more.
It was his honesty, openness, and willingness to experiment. I mean, how many instructors would have let me study under another teacher while I was living in their dojo?
Not many, but every time he let me go, he won me back again.
The most important thing though, all things considered, was his positive intention. He gave me an opportunity to have the uchideshi experience he wished he’d had, in a system he designed and would have liked to have studied at my age. He genuinely wanted me to get the most out of my year, his heart was in it, and that made the difference. Technique without heart is hollow, and so is instruction.
What I’ve written is a collection of experiences, incomplete in its reenactments even as a finished product. It’s difficult to remember a year in its entirety, and there was more that happened in my time as an uchideshi than I covered in these chapters: I walked on fire, saw U2 in concert, and flew to Ft. Lauderdale during spring break, only to see the cruise ship I intended to board pull away from the dock, overbooked with passengers. There were definitely disappointments, but these were largely offset by physical progress and the achievement of my goals: I was training, I was learning, and I was getting better.
But every so often, in the thick of this physical training, something very subtle would occur. Unintentionally, I would stumble into what I’ve called an open moment. It’s difficult to describe, but in the middle of whatever I was doing, something came over me that made me think, “Hey, this is it.”
There’s wasn’t any reason to look beyond where I was. My mind wasn’t jumping ahead to the next step, but at the same time, I didn’t slow down. I was just half a step ahead of the cadence and everything suddenly fell into sync as the moment began to expand. At best, it’s a fleeting state of mind, but things like that remind me that the discipline of martial arts has a lot going on beneath the surface of fighting techniques.
Is there someone watching over? I hope so. After all, we’re just a minute of hypoxia from anarchy and chaos. Without some sort of guidance from above, I wonder if people would be able to find the right teacher who can give them what they need. Perhaps, but it’s a big world, which leaves a lot of space to miss making vital connections. As for my experience, although it would be impossible to prove, I’m starting to suspect that someone may have had a hand in it. Of course I’ll never know, but it all worked out. Maybe that’s proof enough.