It’s That Something

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That something that triggers your spidey sense in that what you are experiencing or observing has something that sits just to the side of the consciousness leaving a puzzled look on your fact until suddenly like a flash of light, you get what it is. 

I observe and have observed kata practice both live on the dojo floor and via social media such as Youtube. I can watch and sense when someone is performing kata, performing kata ROTE and living the kata. What is “Living the Kata?” Well, being difficult to explain but it is a sense of spirit, understanding and intent within the practice and applications. 

Most know it when they see it even if they are unable to explain what it is they are perceiving. I say perceiving because that involves both the conscious and unconscious. When a true adept of karate practices there is something in the way they project their attitude, something in the way they move and something that is projected like the first morning rays of warm sunshine at dawn over a prairie with a backdrop of the majestic mountains of this wonderful world in which we reside. 

Another way to describe it is as if you were clairvoyant and can detect the tells that speak of something interesting, unique and spiritual but not religious in nature. It is like when you watch a couple in love you can perceive in their body language and the underlying aura that says to you they are truly in love or at least deeply infatuated with one another. 

Its’ that something similar to where you watch a group and you can feel, see, sense and even taste the connectedness that projects when the move together like watching military maneuvers especially those of spec-ops types, they instinctively know what each is doing and what they are going to do, etc. 

Likened to the Tao Te Ching or the I Ching, it is something that becomes instinctual in nature, a reflex that makes your eyes go wide and you intake a deep breath of surprise. It is that moment when you are in the wild and you come upon a predator stalking prey, the movement is likened to moving within the environment as if a part of it like the cool soft breeze causing the tall grass to move rhythmically. 

When I see kata today I see body language and facial expressions of boredom and ROTE, moving to meet a minimal standard of connecting various disparate techniques to make one long dance. It is as if one is merely moving haphazardly with no story, no intent and no meaning. It is empty, an empty shell of various individual movement to form a form, a form without substance as if copying a pattern onto material so you can take scissors and cut along the lines. 

As you can see it is most difficult to put labels and meaning on true kata being presented through moving meditative intent, purpose and substance. It is that something that you seek when you train and practice karate but can’t get exactly what that something is but with diligence, honor, consistency in training and practice, searching for more while absorbing deeply that which was found, and letting go of what must be let go then on that one day, that one hour and into that very moment you are suddenly thrust into understanding, a “Oh Crap, that’s it!” moment.

Karate is just a vehicle to get you to that something and it is your efforts that fuel karate until that moment, a solid valid beneficial and worthwhile wholehearted journey.  

Think “Living breathing sentient human vs. zombie Kata.” 

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