A Question of Balance
Jumping side-kick over a 4-foot pile of cushions. Black belt demonstration test, 1998.
Master Kwon always said that we were training mind, body and spirit. And that all three aspects were equally important.
The body was easy to see: I could do a front split, touch my toes, jump over a 4-foot stack of pads and break a board. Mind and spirit were a bit harder.
The mind training came in a variety of ways. We had to memorize the Korean and US flags and all the symbolism of each; we learned Korean terms and Korean history; we were taught the basis for the movements in our forms. As we got more advanced, we also were expected to be able to do our forms backward, and mirrored, and with our eyes closed.
Doing a form with your eyes closed is crazy hard. You lose balance almost immediately and also spatial awareness. When I finally was able to get through one, I’d open my eyes and be turned at some crazy angle from where I started. The goal was to end at the proper place as if your eyes were open. This was incredibly challenging.
Nearly as hard was having my eyes open but doing the form at a 45-degree angle to the room. This may not seem like that difficult a task, but not having straight lines to judge spacing makes a huge impact on movement. And of course, once you got that figured out you had to also do it backward and mirrored, which added another level of complexity.
What all this taught us was how to concentrate in non-ideal situations and how to adapt mentally to new challenges. It was a lesson I don’t think I appreciated at the time, but have since come to rely on to get me through difficult situations.
To understand how the spirit could be trained, we first need to come up with a definition for the word. You can look at spirt from a religious point of view, as a reaching for the divine. You can look at it more philosophically as that which allows us to appreciate art and pulls us beyond ourselves. Or you can look at it physiologically as that aspect of ourselves that involves emotion. I think all of these tie in to martial arts, but the last one does so the best for my purpose.
Controlling emotion and staying calm in a fight can be the difference between winning and losing. Staying calm at your job when a coworker insults you can be the difference between being fired or not. Keeping calm behind the wheel when someone does something unexpected can be the difference between life and death.
We trained this with breathing and meditation. We also practiced physical balance and eventually realized that physical balance relied more on mental calmness than anything else. After I passed my grueling black belt test and had a list many awesome physical feats that I could now do, what I was most proud of was balancing my staff on my finger.
I have a bamboo staff, a little over 6-feet long, that I trained with and could spin and throw and catch and do all kinds of cool tricks with. But, yes, I could balance it on one finger with the staff straight up to the sky. Big deal? I challenge you to try. Grab a broom or something and keep it upright. You probably can, but now try it without moving your feet or your arm. That is much more difficult.
After all my training, I could balance it without it or myself moving at all, and not only that, I could maintain that as I sat down cross-legged on the floor and then stood back up, There is very little physical skill involved here, it all comes down to a calm spirit. I tried this again recently and was surprised that I could almost still do it. There was a little movement, but not too bad. I’m sure if I focus I can probably get back to that complete stillness.
All of life is affected by our mental, spiritual and physical sides. They feed off each other. If you’re in a bad mood and make yourself smile it can change your outlook. The mental resolve to do the physical act of smiling can trigger the spirit to tell your mind you are happy. I won’t go too much deeper into that here, there are reams of books and songs written about this.
But next time I will get into more lessons I learned from martial arts. See you then.
