Why people fail to question what they believe, very often to their own detriment, surprises me again and again (it shouldn’t).
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Growth is part and parcel of being a martial artist. Learning is a life-long process and the knowledge that you have is never enough. There is always more to know. The desire to learn is among the best characteristics a person can possess. But to learn deeply you have to question, you must have enthusiasm to really want too, and be open and willing to change ideas and beliefs that you hold on to so vehemently.
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There are some who boastfully proclaim that theirs is the only right way to teach their karate, that tradition is more important than anything else. There’s no point boastfully stating you are “always a student” if you continue to only believe in “your way”.
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I have to wonder whether that it’s because these people simply are unable to allow their minds to evolve, or because they know that they cannot understand higher level material and therefore feel safe within a certain comfort zone.
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As practitioners of martial arts, you are supposed to have flexible minds and attitudes that enable you to use whatever is at hand to make the best of a bad situation. But stating that things are the way they are because it’s always been that way, or sensei (insert name here) said so, or wrote it in his book, is doing a huge disservice to students and teachers alike.
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Martial art evolves, that it is a living, breathing art, and after training for almost 50 years, it’s easy to see that. The art changes with each new generation that is exposed to it – to meet the needs of that generation. It would be foolish to think that a student walking into the dojo today should be expected to train the way we did back then.
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I often ask my students to test what I am teaching them. To always allow for failure….. because failure will happen. And if you stick dogmatically to a technique that only works the way it is prescribed (I wrote about this in a previous article), it does not allow for this failure.
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Being able to flow from one variable to another in the course of combat is a skill that should be taught to students. Depriving them of that by clinging to the “old ways” or “this is the only way”, is like clinging to an anchor amid a sea of your own ego.
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Dogma is rigid and fixed, evolution is a natural free-flowing mindset. If you teach martial arts or train in martial arts, are you rooted in dogma, or are you evolving?
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In many cases, pragmatic is all about being practical, while dogmatic refers to someone sticking to certain beliefs. Dogmatic people can be intolerant since their ideas revolve around the specific ways they have been taught with no question. While those who are pragmatic consider what’s matter of fact, or at least with logic and common sense.
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If the applications that anyone uses in their karate is just a reflection of their own knowledge, if all they have is an understanding of punching, kicking, and blocking, then that’s what they’re going to see in the techniques and movements within their karate.
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There are a myriad of ways a technique can be used, if you remove the nomenclature and look at the whole movement from beginning (the beginning of which is often more important) to end, using BOTH hands.
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All the karate techniques you have will work if you are expecting the attack. If in combat you need to THINK about what you’re doing within a close-quarter scenario, then it is already seriously flawed. If you truly want genuine skills that you can trust under pressure, then you need to consider your skill-set as concepts rather than a single application of a technique, and focus on practicing those chosen elements to gain a deeper understanding.
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“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” – Doris Lessing
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