Pearls from Promotion Essays

from the July, 2014 issue of Kiai!

Second Degree Black Belt, June 6, 2014

Nidan candidates were asked to write about their struggles and successes with finding balance in their lives.

	Senpai Saul Friedman I will start this essay with the statement that I do not have a balanced life. While we all strive for balance, it takes a mature person who is able to see all the demands on their time and energy, and be able to responsibly meet them to achieve balance. It takes a mature person to have a sense of proportion. I am a teenager. By definition, adolescence is a time of transition between childhood and adulthood. It is a time of personal exploration and discovery. It is a time of feeling passionately about things, often to the exclusion of others. It is not a time of proportion. Everything is wonderful or terrible. As a teenager in late adolescence, I continue to struggle to balance the demands of school, relationships, family, my martial arts training and other activities.
	Senpai Thomas Keene I took the principles of breathing during meditation and constantly used that breathing everywhere I went. During the middle of school lectures, I would picture a baby’s stomach while they breathe and would try to recreate it while sitting. On the train home, I would pinpoint all my unnecessary tension and breathe into those areas. When I played trumpet, I wouldn’t play a note until I breathed correctly. And in karate, I stopped trying to make my gi snap, and would make sure that I breathed on every count so that I wouldn’t feel that dirty feeling in my body [from restricted breathing]. Finally, the benefit of Jun Shihan’s advice to keep my shoulders down was understood! I immediately felt results, I now understand what it means for my body to be tight because I’m no longer constantly tense. My tone on the trumpet has improved, karate is more physically refreshing and living is more comfortable.
	Senpai Kelly Coomer As I reflect on my last karate test for Shodan [first degree black belt] back in October 2004, I can remember many of the struggles I had soon after that test – managing my struggling business, having a newborn, and learning a very extensive black belt curriculum while stressed and sleep deprived. In the end, something had to give and it was karate. Or at least that’s what I thought had to happen, In reality, the problem I was really facing was being willing to accept less than what I thought was my best. I didn’t want to keep practicing karate if I couldn’t give it the same effort that I had previous to that life change so I stopped practicing altogether. Fast forward 10 years later and I have a very different perspective. I see someone who is very relieved to not have to always be the best at everything. It’s impossible to be balanced if you always feel you have to be the best at everything you do. Being balanced for me has meant learning to accept that sometimes I will have to forsake one aspect of my life for another and that it’s only temporary. Some weeks I can’t get to the dojo because of family or work. Other weeks, I decide the dojo is a priority and the work can wait. … In the end, balance is about being willing to make tradeoffs and being content with what you can give when you can give it.
	Senpai Hope Robinson Another way I think I balance myself is by “showing my work”. I like that phrase because it reminds me of when I was a kid, and math teachers would not give you full credit for an answer on a test if you didn’t show your work, even if your answer was correct. It was to show them that you knew how to get from point A to point B, and that you didn’t take the “easy” way out by maybe cheating or guessing. I feel like I use this a lot, especially in karate. I don’t have the type of build/coordination that I think matches well to karate. I have to work hard at it. I show my work by continuing to show up to class and seeing those ever so slight incremental changes. I am still striving to not compare myself to others, that I need to understand this is my own art, and that I need to own it completely. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to get stronger, more agile, more precise, just that I need to do it as best I can, in my own time. … I wish I had a video of me doing Taikyoku 1 as a White belt, a Green belt, and an Advanced Brown. I am sure I would be able to see the work and effort I put into the kata, and how because I kept coming back, kept working on the kata, I was able to interpret the meaning for myself, and see the story and flow. … How it is MY story, even though it may be the same moves as others are doing.

Third Degree Black Belt, June 6, 2014

Sandan candidates were asked to write about how they have changed over their years of studying Seido karate.

	Senpai Aileen Geary Fourteen years of karate, and I still find seiza [traditional meditation posture] painful. It is not an injurious pain. It is not an excruciating pain. It is uncomfortable. For any one second, it is completely bearable. Only when my mind projects out and piles those moments onto one another does it become unbearable. So I find it a useful meditation tool – to notice discomfort, but only give it one moment’s intensity. To sit through it. So many moments of pain are like that – unbearable if we imagine they will go on forever, but manageable one moment at a time. One wave sets thousands in motion. That is the phrase that inspired the name of our school. The longer I train, the more I see myself as one wave in those thousand. I find more and more times when I have passed along, accidentally or purposely, some piece of Seido/Thousand Waves knowledge in a way that it has enriched others. That, to me, is an important piece of my longevity in this practice. Last summer, an acquaintance who was working in a consulting capacity with a woman who was being bullied by her superiors at work told me, “I gave her the Aileen advice – ‘be assertive, not aggressive.’ She used it, and reported great success.” It is, of course, not the Aileen advice. It is the advice Aileen has learned.
	Senpai Jordan Garcia When I wanted to believe I was good at karate and I didn’t feel validated, the only thing for me to do to survive was to convince myself that I believed that I was good and then continue to work hard. The more I told myself that I was worth something in martial arts, the more I began to really believe it. Telling myself that I was good enough at karate ended up turning into a pattern that I use in any situation that I felt inadequate about. As I became more and more confident in myself in all aspects of my life, I began to feel truly passionate about things and invest my time and effort into them. … My own validation became enough. I was now able to set goals that tested my own limits and challenged me. Accomplishing these self-assigned goals is now the most rewarding part of personal training.
	Senpai Bill Sacco I love life. I love being with the kids I teach. I love their passion for life. I can see them not only as they are but also as the potential adults they will become. As I embrace the self-discipline of my martial art, I can better demonstrate the value of that approach to my students. I feel that real compassion is not simply feeling sorry for someone’s misfortune, but rather feeling the true human connection with that person and then using one’s resources to show that person how they can help themselves. I think that in the eyes of a youth, they think someday they will grow up and that will be that, but for me the process of maturation will never stop as long as I live.
	Senpai Carmina Andreuzzi To practice karate is to practice being in my own body. As I become fatigued and my stamina erodes, my façade erodes, along with what I think of my body. The practice of taking up space erodes my inhibition and shyness. Practicing my kiai I practice not apologizing for myself. And being confronted with my inadequacies allows me to practice being with myself. With practice, I begin to change the pattern of my life. Eventually the meaning of osu [striving with patience] becomes my practice, and I become more and more thankful as time goes on. One of the pleasures of teaching white belts is to see a student discover their own body and get to know a self that they may not have considered before. It reminds me to wonder, “What else could we be capable of? What other things have we not considered for ourselves? What other surprises await us in life?”