While circumstances continue to keep us from training together as one physical group, we have nonetheless worked to have those of you that are actively training studying the same material. In this way, we are all still working together. The challenges will certainly continue to come, but this is not a new feature of living and we will utilize our collective strength to overcome whatever arises. Even those of you that are not participating in any of our group training but are continuing to engage in solo training, or are simply supporting the dojo with your membership dues, your contribution is just as meaningful. We sincerely thank all of you for that.
Yet even when we are all practicing together, the fact remains that we all face our own individual struggles and hurdles to progress in our practice. In light of this, we would like to issue a challenge to each of you: identify an area (or several) of your practice, and actively work to increase your skills and abilities in that area. It should be something rather specific; along the lines of “I’d like to make my kokyu-ho ukemi more natural”, and not “I want to take better ukemi”, for example. Perhaps you would like to increase your training stamina, the accuracy of your weapons strikes, or even just get a better command of the curriculum; the idea is to focus in on a specific area of improvement for your practice, and then get to work on making it happen. Many of you have already initiated this process on your own.
In addition to our regular training in class, we are here to help you get this process started, either by helping to identify areas of improvement or by assisting in the design of a self-training program. In this way, you can begin to craft for yourself a cycle of improvement: taking the results of rigorous self study and discovery and bringing them into training with others (whenever that may be), which then confirms/denies the fruits of your self training and gives you a whole new set of problems to solve in your solitary practice.
We would like all of your training over the next few months, in whatever form it takes, to result in tangible progress that allows you to really feel a full sense of ownership over your practice.
Let’s go!