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In General
A Pleasant Surprise
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#63
 11-14-2003 12:25 AM |
Sempai Garry came by to visit. He popped his head in the doorway in the middle of our usual Thursday night Jo practice to watch the class and say hello to everyone. His recovery is right on schedule, and he wanted to see how things were going...I think he's getting a bit of cabin fever --- I know he misses coming to class!  It was really good to see him, and I got to catch a ride home from him and chat a bit to catch up.
Well, that was pretty much the highlight of my evening, because aside from Garry's visit I was in an otherwise foul mood --- after Jo practice, I started getting a stomachache/cramping that just wouldn't let up and it really influenced my performance (or rather, lack thereof). At first, I thought I was getting off to a good start. I continued breathing deeply, coupling my inhalations and exhalations with my movements and staying fully relaxed...but then eventually the discomfort became too distracting and I could tell that my disposition was getting, shall we say...less than sunny. 
We were working on Morotaedori from two-person attacks for most of the night, and there was one technique in particular --- I believe it was the Kokyunage --- where you had to draw your arms into your centre prior to throwing both ukes, and that every time I would draw them towards my centre, ouch! Boy, would it be throbbing! It got to the point where I became less and less tolerant of Sensei's side comments, especially after he implied that I wasn't able to take the roughness of the practice in comparison to another classmate (one of whom he has been known in the past to comment about being more feeble than most)  --- heh, external pain I can handle; it's sporadic and you get hurt and move on. I've been fine with that. It's the pervasive internal pain that I'm finding tougher to deal with because it tends to be so consistent that merely distracting yourself with activity rarely does the trick --- as a matter of fact, activity usually aggravates it.
But stupid me, I wouldn't just sit out. No, I had to plug along doggedly with training regardless of how I felt, even though it was obviously affecting me. I think that after awhile, Sensei perhaps started attributing my foul mood to frustration at not being able to do some of these techniques properly (notably, the one I just described), but what else is new with me? I suppose this is really a chicken-and-egg scenario. So as a result, he started to lay thick on what, at least in my haze of pain, seemed to be rather excessive and insincere praise, even when I really didn't think I was doing a technique well at all. This was probably the most exasperating thing of all, aside from my stomach hurting.
So in conclusion, I realize that I really, really need to find a way of dealing with pervasive, consistent internal pain during training (aside from taking some "Vitamin I" ) --- you know what I mean, dealing with it internally, inside my own mind and body and not letting myself get distracted by it or letting my mood get swayed by it so easily. To me, this means getting to the point where I can tune out all of the other nonsense that folks might say and do without getting emotionally drawn in by them (as I seem more susceptible in this kind of mood) and simply being able to focus on the task at hand. Clearly focus on the physical, mental, and spiritual planes without any regard to anything else.
Hmm...I think it's about time I took up meditating again...
(Oh yeah --- on a happier note, I've been paying more attention to balance/centering since last journal entry and am feeling better about it; at least during Jo practice I was )
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