Martial Tourists Need Not Apply
“Don’t Try to Rob or Rape Me Today; I Am Depressed.”
A martial arts master named Bilal who is a friend of mine said, “… What do you think that a rapist or a mugger, or someone who means you harm will understand your depressed, what are you going to say to them ‘ don’t rob or rape me today I’m depressed?'” I know this may come as a shock to many people, but if I am in a lot of pain, feeling bad, or depressed it would be the worst time to try and attack me. A lot of people take feeling bad, being sick, or even something as little as rain to be an excuse not to practice martial arts, but I used study while sick in the rain. I still love practicing forms on top of roofs or in the woods. I have practiced in the desert, on mountain tops, and up to my neck in water. I pride myself on the fact that I have never seriously injured an opponent. All that being said, if I were in a very bad shape, in pain, depressed, sick, and generally feeling hopeless and someone were stupid enough to try and attack me, it would actually make me feel better. Unfortunately, as the exhilaration of combat took hold I would transfer all of my pain and all of their attacking Chi into what would most likely be a lethal counter-strike.
When I play kung fu, it is life. There are always people who just kind of dance around with it. They only come to class if they feel good and the weather is nice. I have worked out so hard that it knocked illness out of me before, but at this point I use my knowledge of herbalism to get rid of illness before I even start to work out. Recently, I had a student drop out of class making excuses, but it amounted to me expecting him to live up to the martial ideals in his daily life and show up for classes regardless of how he felt. Since that time, his weight has doubled or at least that’s how he looks. If he had had the discipline to practice when he wasn’t in class, he would have lost weight instead.
That being said, martial arts is not about suffering, it is not about hardship, and it most definitely is not about fighting. In fact, it is about minimizing suffering, decreasing hardship, and avoiding fighting. There is a saying in yoga that pain is nature’s way of telling you that you made a mistake. There are way too many “martial tourists” in classes today.
Ultimately, martial arts and yoga are things that you have to love in order to be successful with them. I don’t mean what most people mean by successful however; I mean if you want to master them. My friend was talking about the importance of consistency, especially consistency in coming to class and that is important. Another thing that most people talk about is self-discipline, and that is useful too. I will frequently talk about the necessity of feeling that your life depends on learning martial arts. I myself started learning before I can remember and practice became a daily thing at the age of eight. I became very proficient. Proficiency is not enough.
My martial arts and my yoga did not translate outside of my life with the exception of the breath control discipline I learned from meditation and yoga. I had severe asthma and that was the only thing that got me to the hospital alive on a number of occasions, and it kept me out of the hospital on even more. Most of the time, my martial arts knowledge showed up nowhere else in my life. I had acquired a degree of proficiency, but they were not part of my life and I acquired no amount of mastery.
I did meditate in class during high school, out of boredom. I believe I was 15 when I had the sudden realization that I actually loved yoga but hated being told to do it. I started doing yoga during my spare time. It wasn’t until I was doing yoga when I wasn’t being told to that I wasn’t being controlled in relation to it.
After learning nothing but strikes, kicks, and weapons techniques for years and being told that it was about learning to fight, I had no interest in martial arts. My first class of kung fu at 18 changed all that. My instructor emphasized the importance of learning to avoid fights, had us constantly doing stance work, and put me to work doing forms and sets. Suddenly, when all the parts were put together, it made sense and I felt like I was remembering something I had forgotten.
Don’t get me wrong. I knew somewhere between three and six ways to kill a man by hitting him in the face when I was 6. That might be fighting, and it might even be martial arts, but it sure as hell isn’t kung fu or self-defense.
I was very clumsy as a child because I had a lagging eye, pressure on the inner ear, and club feet. Despite yoga, I fell down between once a day and once an hour until my second lesson of kung fu. Once I realized the stances were the ones from yoga, and I was learning how to move in them, I immediately stopped falling down. To be honest, I fell down once a year after that for the first five years, and after I realized the importance of horse stance, I stumbled once a year for two or three years, and then I didn’t fall down until after I was in a car wreck, having been a passenger in a vehicle hit by a drunk driver going at least 75 mph while we were stopped. With whiplash of the entire spine and brain damage, I would pass out at random intervals for the first two or three years. Still, falling practice was so well ingrained in me that when I woke up I never had sustained additional injuries. The reflexes trained into my spinal column didn’t care if my cerebral cortex was shut down.
The day I fell in love with kung fu was the first day of class. It was then that I started putting together the parts of my life. It was as if there had been one missing piece. From that point on, martial arts informed every move I made. A martial master once commented that he had never met anyone whose every movement was an integrated martial movement until me. I consider this one of the greatest compliments I have ever received. As the martial philosophy and movement brought together every aspect of my life, I found that I became one-pointed. Unfortunately, that only lasted four months until I had to have emergency surgery to remove my appendix the day after John Lennon was shot. The Filipino doctor at the hospital in the rural Georgia town where I was shot me full of drugs I was allergic to (yes, they were all on my chart) and looped stitches through my intestines. He also damaged several internal organs in the process. It took 14 years for the drugs to entirely get out of my system, and I started trying to put my life back together again. And in all that time, the martial path guided my progress. In all the intervening years, it has kept me safe, whether sliding down iced-over stairs or being unexpectedly attacked, it, whatever it is, has kept me safe. Martial arts are the only reason I’m alive today. Kung fu is my life. It is not something I do. It is something I am. I am certainly not well today, but I was not supposed to live to be 18 and in the more than thirty years since then, I have had injuries that would kill most people many times over. It’s not so much that I am in some way special; it’s that the path is, and to walk the path you must achieve balance. To maintain balance, you must dance so as to remain at the eye of the storm. A tourist can’t do that. You must live the Path.
vulcanjeditimelord 