Sometimes the pain is only in your head...

...which only makes it worse. Tonight, the full-body ache subsided, sparing me just enough endurance to carry on with the test preparations. After a full night's excellent practice--attentive, athletic, and accomplished--one of the newer students had a breakdown. He's been training a year and a bit, and he's taken only one test before. Thing is: he's a very, very good student. Even on days when the demons aren't hunting his self confidence, he's got only an inkling just how much he's learned, how capable he's become, in such a short time. Tonight, though, the demons were on a rampage.

When I asked him to pinpoint what was bothering him so much, he spent ten minutes showing me his approach to ikkyo (literal translation: the first teaching), insisting that he knew he was performing it incorrectly, that he knew the correct form, and that he couldn't, for some reason so unknowable that it bordered on the magical, do what he was "trying" to do.

This was the struggle Yoda taught us about twenty-five years ago. The only thing wrong with this guy's ikkyo was that he thought it was wrong. The ten minutes he spent demonstrating his supposedly flawed technique, I spent explaining to him that there was nothing wrong with his technique. I wasn't lying to him. His method was correct; he just wasn't actually using it when attackers were levelling knife-handed shomenuchi strikes at his head. Perhaps this description makes his problem sound like one, simply, of timing. If only that had been the case. Timing, like the mechanics of technique, is tricky--something even the masters keep working on--but it's not mysterious. Proper timing can be demonstrated, observed, pursued, and, eventually achieved. Tonight, the problem wasn't timing, because the student didn't even get far enough into the technique for timing to be a factor. He was getting hit in the head and tangled up in arms because there was no intent left in him by the time the attacker reached him. He had convinced himself that the technique wouldn't work, so he never really gave it a chance to. Excruciatingly, he continuously defeated himself well before his attacker ever had a chance at him.

This is the secret we can never show: agatsu. Self-victory. It's an often-discussed topic in many martial arts. Innumerable teachers have worked on it with even more students for longer than we could ever catalogue, but no one has ever successfully taught it. This is one teaching we all must learn for ourselves. No small demand on those seeking the way, because doubt hurts: in the mind; heart; and, as a result, tonight, the forehead.

We will keep working on it, though, and some day I will have the rare pleasure of seeing this student--and friend--realize the vast scope of the victory he will at that point have achieved over himself, and we will think back on tonight's painful progress...and laugh at it.