Daily Training

by Hoa Newens

​Learning and Training

When we learn, we acquire a new understanding or new skill. We essentially take something desirable from outside and bring it inside to make it ours. It is a two-part process: in the first part, we scan and assess the desirability of the object of learning; in the second part, we make it ours. We’ll call the first part understanding, the second part training. The main subject of this essay is the training part.

Learning does not occur until we train. In understanding, we open ourselves to receive and explore new concepts, new ways of doing things and home in on those which may benefit our life. In training, we take these new desirable things and work on them to make them part of our life. In understanding we open ourselves to change; in training, we reinforce the change so that it lasts and eventually becomes a part of us.

Understanding without training may provide a temporary boost but will not make our life better in the long run. Conversely, training in the same things all the time without understanding their true nature locks out opportunities for improvement. Understanding and training form a constant cycle of learning: understand what we want, train for it, continue to understand its changing nature, train for the new change, etc.

In the balance of this essay, we discuss learning and training in martial arts, and we may occasionally use these two concepts interchangeably.

Attending Classes

When we come to class, an instructor shows us how to move or do certain things in a way that is new or not yet natural to us. Then, within the time frame of the class, we mimic the instructor’s actions or movements using our body and mind, and repeat many times.

In most Aikido schools, the opportunity to learn the specific movements ends with each class and may occasionally repeat at the discretion of the instructors. Unless the instructors follow a structured curriculum and track class topics to ensure cyclical occurrence, students will miss optimal reinforcement of the new things that they were exposed to.

Therefore, serious students should take responsibility for their own training and create their personal training schedule to reinforce the new items at their own pace, until the new material has been assimilated. For example, the last time we worked on the jo suburi in detail in class was probably a few weeks ago; if a student was exposed to it for the first time then, and they have not practiced it on their own since that class, they most likely have forgotten most of it by now. If they had practiced it regularly on their own, then at the next time we work on the suburi they can benefit from the clarifications and corrections, otherwise they would have to start from scratch.

We expand our understanding in classes, but we train on our own. Attending classes gets us on the path; we must walk it to get to the destination.

Why Daily?

All natural phenomena on earth follow a cycle due to planetary revolution and rotation within our solar system. Human life is one of the natural phenomena and is governed by the natural cycles, with activities appropriate for each part of a cycle. We go to sleep at night and become active when day comes; we slowdown in winter and pick up in the spring. All basic life functions follow natural cycles.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance . . .

Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 NIV, (Third century B.C.)

Each human being is born under the influence of certain planetary arrangement and is subject to a unique destiny determined by the interaction of these planets at specific points of their cycles. According to cosmologies, both in the West [horoscope based on the Zodiac signs and constellations] and East [divination based on the hexagrams of the I Ching, (Book of Changes)] there is a best time for every human action.

In addition to the effect of cycles in Nature, living things follow a natural rhythm of expansion and stillness within themselves.

Empty the mind to the utmost extent.
Maintain quiescence with the whole being.
The ten thousand things are growing with one impulse,
Yet I can discern their cyclic return.
Luxuriant indeed are the growing things;
Yet each again will return to the root.
Returning to the root means quiescence;
Quiescence means renewal of life;
Renewal of life means in tune with the Immutable.
Tao The Ching, Ch 16, by Lao Tzu (translation by Henry Wei, 1982)

A day in a human life is one cycle in this universal cogwheel system. All sentient beings, including human beings, are subject to circadian rhythms which allow the organisms to anticipate the changes in the environment and adapt their biological processes to derive the most benefits from these changes. When daylight comes it’s time to wake and move; when light goes out, it’s time to slow down and rest. This coordination with the environment occurs throughout the entire organism, down to the cellular level.

Human beings have different lifestyle involving different activities. There is an optimum time for an individual to engage in each activity: a good time to feed the mind, a good time to engage in physical exercises, a good time to practice breathing and energy work and a good time to meditate. There is a best time in a cycle for each physiological function of an organism.

If we don’t make use of these optimal times, we miss opportunities to ride the natural flow of the universe. Each of us should find the optimal time slot for training and not let it go to waste.

The sun rises and sets every day.

If we are to be in sync with the universal rhythm, we should train every day.
 

O Sensei training in the woods.

​The Benefits of Daily Training

In our busy modern lifestyle in which multi-tasking appears to be the norm, flexibility equips us to deal with unforeseen changes. An activity that can be accomplished through its smallest denominator affords us that needed flexibility: a little bit every day goes a long way.

Additionally, when we train daily, we allow yesterday’s layer to cure overnight before we add a new layer on top. Piling on too many layers at one time does not allow sufficient time for curing. With this incremental approach, we minimize the chance of error and injury. This breathing room is especially important when we do deep work with body tissues, such as stretching for flexibility, or qigong work.

Many types of training are exploratory, such as in qigong or neigong work. Proceeding in small steps makes the student aware of changes that may not be congruent with the mind or body and thus be potentially harmful and allows him to stop timely.

Thanks to this safety margin, mental barriers are lowered, and the practice is less stressful.

In addition, daily training has a similar compounding effect to daily accrual of interest rate. Each day we train, we add to the capital within ourselves, which will make better use of tomorrow’s training. In this way, the capital grows exponentially over time.

Deep and lasting change happens slowly.

Yukiyoshi Sagawa Sensei, Soke of Daito-Ryu, admonished students as follows on training (Transparent Power: A Secret Teaching Revealed, by Tatsuo Kimura, MAAT Press, 2017):

You must train your body every day for decades; you must perpetually condition your body, or you will not really get what this is all about. It is only through relentless practice and analysis of your moves that your technique will come to radiate from your body. Even if you manage to train intensively every day while trying different approaches, it will take at least 20 years before your body has been conditioned enough.

The Challenge of Daily Training

When we learn something, we project our awareness toward it and wraps around it to explore its nature; if we find it beneficial, we attempt to replicate it inside our mind or our body to make it ours. In the beginning there is a certain excitement that is caused by new stimuli to the mind – the mind being a small part of our awareness that has self-organized into a coherent entity with multiple functions, one of them being storage of past experience. That excitement drives and focuses our energy and keeps us on point.

As time goes on, unless new details emerge from the object of learning, the mind’s interest in it wanes since a large part of that object has become “past experience” within the mind. We no longer have the beginner’s mind. The energy slackens and the awareness subsides. Smart instructors will recognize this inflexion point and highlight new details related to timing, angles, hand and feet placement, etc. Sometimes they even modify the object of learning to stir up interest.

In a personal daily training program, we would have to dig for this newness ourselves, such as by drilling down into the minutia of movement, understanding relationships (riai), plumbing the essence of movement, exploring variations, etc. We have to do everything within our means to keep our consciousness homed in on the object of learning, always remembering that learning occurs only when consciousness is present. Mindless repetition won’t do.

Daily Training Plan

We can learn the horse stance in one class but to get the benefit of this stance we need to make time and go through the effort of practicing it every day for several months.

Gichin Funakoshi of Karatedo laid down six rules for training in his book Karatedo My Way of Life, Kodansha International 1975, the first one being:

You must be deadly serious in training. . . Your opponent must always be present in your mind, where you sit, stand, walk or raise your arm.

As with any serious goal we must have a plan for it to happen; we must at least create a favorable environment for daily training. Such plan should include these four aspects:

§  Personal health - Training takes energy; we should plan our daily life to save energy for this purpose: get enough sleep; consume nutritious foods; reduce stressful activities.

§  Priority – If we truly believe in the benefit of daily training, we must reprioritize daily activities and carve out time for personal practice on our daily schedule.

§  Commitment – Successful training hinges on sustained repetition over a long period. Periodic outburst of training are not effective, daily doses of short sessions are. At the outset of new learning, we must decide on a period to commit to training, e.g., I will work on the jo suburi every morning before breakfast for the next twelve months.

§  Support – We can add synergy to our daily practice and increase the chance of success by joining a group of like-minded individuals doing the same thing, e.g., the Jo Suburi zoom group. We should also solicit support from those living around us, family and friend circles: ask for their patience while insisting on our training priority.

In your training, do not be in a hurry, for it takes a minimum of ten years to master the basics and advance to the first rung. Never think of yourself as an all-knowing, perfected master; you must continue to train daily with your friends and students and progress together in the Art of Peace.
Morihei Ueshiba, by John Stevens (2010). “The Art of Peace”, p.158, Shambhala Publications

What Should I Train For?

​Our personal training program is a mix that should be constantly adjusted. It should include these four components:

§  Personal practice for own growth – This includes items that I need to work on at this stage of my life and my level of training.

§  Practice for teaching others – If I am a teacher, I need to practice these items so that I can teach others, though I may not need them.

§  Research for improvement – I need to keep my mind open and look for better ways to learn and to practice and be ready to receive constructive feedback from all.

§  Constant adjustment of daily practice – Based on the feedback, including feedback from my own body, I need to adjust my practice so that it reflects my learning goal. I need to be mindful to adjust my training in the face of changes in external environment as well as my body conditions.

As we untiringly train and search, our quest is registered in the quantum field of possibilities, and we will naturally draw favorable circumstances and guidance our way. A divine intelligence will trickle into our consciousness and guide us in our inner quest. With sincere effort, we will know what, and how, to train.

The Training Mode

The more we train the more we realize that the subject of training is not important. What is important is being in the training mode.

One of the four vows that an uchideshi in our dojo makes is this:

“My daily life is my practice.”

The uchideshi lives and train in the dojo, hence every living moment is a training moment. They are on full training mode. To an uchideshi, anything that they encounter is part of their training.

One important practical benefit is that when we are on the training mode, we treat an event that would be regarded as hardship by others as just another challenge to be overcome for training purpose. Others would call this positive thinking, we call it training.

The training mode is characterized by three core attributes:

1.     Constant focus on a life goal (ikigai)
2.     Commitment to a self-improvement program (kaizen)
3.     Openness to new opportunities (kenkyo)

Continue training until training becomes normal living. In this kind of lifestyle, we are constantly moving ourselves toward our life goal through a balance between commitment to a program and openness to all opportunities for changes, that is a balance between concentration and relaxation.

When we are constantly in the training mode, we are continuously striving to be the change that we want, in each moment. We are being our best in each moment, nothing else seems to matter. There comes a time when we realize that what we train for is no longer important; what is important is “training”. In other words, what really matters is that we are fully engaged with life.

We should train until it is no longer a “training”, and all we do is live fully.

Change of State

As we undertake a daily training program, there are times when our body and mind will attempt to back off and hook on to any excuse for not training: it has been a long tough day in the office; I am traveling; I don’t feel so well and should rest before I get sick; I completed a 100-day training streak and I deserve a break today; etc. Despite these complaints, if we forge ahead with determination and conviction in our daily training, we effectively abandon our current state of being and jump to a different state. This is a small jump, more like switching mood, but it is a good practice jump. A more pronounced change can happen when we operate under elevated emotions, such as in a group healing session or during an arduous training camp.

Most of times, we are motivated into action by either fear of suffering, or expectation of reward. We get up every day and go to work, fearing the potential loss of employment and income, or expecting recognition or reward by our superior. We don’t cause harm to people, fearing the law of retribution. We go to class, expecting to obtain useful information or recognition of excellent performance by the teacher. We worship fearing ostracization by family or friends.

However, there may be times when we act just for the sake of the action, perhaps because we feel in tune with life or are in love. The normal motivators are absent. We make a conscious decision and act, with no strings attached. When we practice doing wholeheartedly what we don’t care about, in the long run we forge willpower that gradually removes any fear of what life can throw at us.

When we act without fear and expectation of result, we are engaged in what Taoists call wu wei (non-doing). The continued practice of wu wei leads to the key to true change in the universe. To create real change, we need to move from our normal emotionally laden dimension world into an impersonal dimension often referred to as the quantum field, create the blueprint of the change there, and let it manifest in our world. It happens almost instantly. This is a difficult jump but not impossible. Sometime extreme hardship in life causes a wedge that takes us into a flight to this field. We can train ourselves to make this jump, instead of waiting for life to force it on us; we do it through the act of daily training.

The crucial criterion for moving from our normal daily state to the quantum dimension is stillness; we must strip ourselves off any mental or emotional disturbances. We need to “just be” or “just do”. In the beginning, just do is easier. Like, just train, for no reason and with no emotion.

Let’s be clear: this jump is a change of state of being. It is a total change of context, making us feel like we moved to a different life dimension. We effectively forsake the present canvas on which our life is drawn and use a new blank canvas to create anew.

Practicing the ability to transport the self from one state of being to another state is the most practical benefit of engaging in a daily training program; however, this should not be our motivation.

The Echo of Training

As we continue our learning and training experience for many years, it will seem like the topic no longer matters, rather, what we enjoy the most is the learning of, or training for, new things, irrespective of what they are.

This constant thirst for learning is a state of being that recognizes the insignificance of human existence within the vast universe of divine creation. This is when we discover true humility; we feel like a baby playing in an enormous cosmic playground and continually discovering exciting things about life.

Then one day, suddenly the question arises within us: who is learning?
 

Each time we learn something, our consciousness shoots toward the object and wraps around it to get a sense of its form and substance and pulls that sensation into the self. When we train, this back and forth happens regularly. Each time the ball of consciousness bounces back from the object of learning it not only brings a unique sensation back to the mind but also taps a piece of our inner self and wakes it up. This constant reflection transforms the object of learning into a mirror for the self to look into in order to ascertain its nature. It is a process for our self to recognize itself.

More training means more echoing that leads to better knowledge of self. Through this echoing with  life, we gradually put the pieces together and begin to discover who we are.

Hoa Newens
​December 9, 2023