Mind in martial arts
Traditional martial arts are often viewed as separate from modern life. It is looked as being outdated and even vulgar sometimes. Looking closer, the teachings of ancient martial arts have a lot to offer, even for people living in the modern world.
We all know life has become more hectic in the last couple of generations. This change has made people stress more, tired from work or sometimes having more mental diseases such as depression. Martial arts have had to change their goal from teaching how to handle yourself in war, to somewhat counter the effects of the hectic modern world.
First and the easiest to point out is the physical exercise you get from practicing martial arts. Training is a great stress reliever. While your teacher tells you what to do, you can get your mind off the work.
While growing up, I got to experience the effects on a young person first hand. While the previous facts stand with the school also, I also learned a lot about discipline and how to make a progress. I started practicing sin moo hapkido when I was 13. I trained with other adults so I had to behave myself.
Training acted as a way of relieving the aggressiveness we all get when we are in our teens. All this points to the fact that, nowadays martial arts is more about persons mental health, not about learning to purely fight.
We get the means of teaching discipline and respect from ancient martial arts. So we can't stop looking back. Some of us get motivated from the history, some of us from the self-defence/fighting, but later on, the teaching starts to be more about
the mental strength than fighting.
While we are looking back, it may even be more important to look forward. How to teach people nowadays, when we have a different setting in our life. So to sum it up, we need to look both ways, but understand what we are seeing and how to make use of it.
When I teach martial arts I try not to teach just how to swing a sword. I try to lead the student to a way, that through practice they discover how to use their bodies better. Yes, learning to swing the sword is the start and the basics but it holds a lot of
information about how to use your body, so its a one of the best ways to start.
When we are learning to do new things, for example a form, it's a great way to train our minds. First of all, we need to remember the form. This makes us practice our
memory, which in itself is a way of mental training.
The best way, that I know, of learning a new form, is when you learn to do it once with your teacher, people should mentally do the form without swords in the same evening or the next day. This trains the mind to remember the form and also by doing the form in your head it trains the concentration skills.
Once we have learned the form and doing it, we should try to think two to three of steps ahead. Doing this while physically straining ourselves, trains our mind to do one thing, while our body does something else, while still concentrating on the task at hand. This also makes us use our bodies better. Once we know what we are going to do next before we do it, we can prepare the needed muscles for the movement while relaxing the unneeded muscles thus being more relaxed, quick and save energy.
The hardest part might be later. When we have practiced enough and know the forms. We go to the belt test and pass, and leave the previous forms to our past when we start learning new forms.
We should continue to review and practice old forms to see if we can learn new movement or get better understanding of the form itself so we can teach it better. The hard part is to try to think outside the box, to try new things and going forward.
When we are color belt, we usually get a lot of guidance from our teachers.
We are helped going forward. Once we achieve black belt, we are starting to go
forward on our own, we get less and less guidance, and have to find our own path
and style.
This is also a form of training our minds.
I try to point this out when I'm teaching.
The training becomes more than "just swinging your sword".
Training becomes a way of conquering yourself, finding yourself and learning new
things about your body and mind. The most important thing in almost
all of martial arts is without a doubt the mind.
I have been talking about how martial arts and training has the ability to strengthen our minds and also touched the fact that physical exercise heals the mind and can
give it time to rest after work or school. People handle and suffer from stress in different ways but we all share the same experience when we group up and train.
We forget about the bad things outside and focus on training. Training brings us closer together when we are tired, sweaty, try to perfect ourselves and purify our minds. Martial arts especially helped me when I lost two very important and close persons to me.
In both cases my whole world was in turmoil, my feelings were all messed up and I did not know how or what to think. In both cases I continued to train
haedong kumdo.
I own my thanks to Juha Lepistö 3.dan and Sami Pelkonen 2.dan because when I went to train they managed to turn the dojang to a sanctuary for me. The time we trained I could forget all the bad things that had happened to me, put my feelings aside and just focus. There was me and a sword, nothing more. After training, I always felt more clear, like I could see more things than before training.
This is just one example from what I believe to be in many ways martial arts have helped people to handle bad things in their life. For me I feel that martial arts is more than Just a hobby. I affects how I think, how I feel and how I approach things. Juha Lepistö talked about the concept of "emptiness is full" in the book "think outside the box".
The feeling of serenity and pureness in both our minds and bodies carries from
dojang to outside. With the same feeling when we train in dojang I have noticed I have started to have same feelings on other things. I have also climbed bouldering walls in a gym in Jyväskylä for 3 months and the feeling has risen there. There is just me and a way upwards.
I'm not sure if this is because of physical exercise or because of my past in martial arts and haedong kumdo but I can see how martial arts have been affecting my whole life for the past 8 years. I feel certain way towards martial arts and haedong kumdo. I hope you can get the rough idea of this feeling from what I have been writing here. I know I have lot of room for growth in martial arts and I will continue to search this growth. For all of us who are growing and searching the emptiness.
Haedong!
By Risto Sainio
=> First of all, searching the Emptiness is Do, to sum up.
Thinking out of the box is to get an enlightenment to the changes around us.
All fundamental energy come from the zone of Emptiness (or fullness, light, love etc.)
e,g) See it more for better and detailed understanding at the site of
Harmony with balance is to correct mistakes by myself from my mind after thinking out of the box, which will make us be good in both better training and better life in quality.
So we can emphasize the importance of harmony and balance in body & mind in the training for remembering or promoting new forms etc.. First we should know it by the principle of nature, I mean the basic way to do it as a formula so we can develop it with ease by myself.
If we could make it well and nicely in the martial arts,
we also can make it nicely in daily life. We live in 21C, as you have mentioned, it is most important part that we should know and practice how to learn and teach modern
times.