Mt. San Jacinto, Palm Springs, CA 

Mitakuye Oyasin

This expression, mitakuye oyasin, comes from the language of the Lakota Sioux, a tribe among the Native Americans. It means "We are all related." It's uttered upon crossing the threshold into the Sweat Lodge, the small, low structure used by the Sioux for their sacred purification ritual, the Sweat. In Seido Karate we have a saying we utter upon entering the dojo and upon greeting others: Osu! Osu is an abbreviation of the expression Oshi shinobu osu, which means "maintain patience."

In life we are often impatient with others, annoyed by our differences. By saying osu we remind ourselves of our connectedness to each other and of the need to patiently nurture our sacred human bond.

On this day, Thanksgiving Day in North America, we pause from our busy lives and give thanks for all our blessings, not least of which is our family of Seido brothers and sisters here at the West Los Angeles dojo. We are all connected, not only to each other but to all living things!

It would be vain indeed if we were to forget this bond tomorrow or the next day. Every day is a day to give thanks, to appreciate the challenges and the support we receive to meet those challenges present in our lives. Each time we come to the dojo throughout the year we can bring to that visit an appreciation of our blessings. By saying Osu with mindful awareness, we can restore a wholeness to our lives that is sometimes clouded by our superficial differences. Remember this opportunity the next time you come to the dojo. This is the true heart of our practice of Seido. Gassho and osu! And Happy Thanksgiving!

Senpai Tony and Caren 

Your House Is On Fire

How do we really come to the decisions that we make? Is it just flip a coin and hope for the best or is there some underlying procedure that we go through, consciously or unconsciously, that guides our course of action?

Gary Klein is the author of "Sources of Power: Real Life Decision Making." The book is somewhat technical, but the author uses examples from first responders like fire departments and medical emergency units to investigate how people make decisions, sometimes under enormously stressful circumstances. After countless interviews and case studies in the field, Mr. Klein concluded that there are two reliable pillars available to support any decision we make:

(1) pattern-matching (intuition) and
(2) mental simulation (visualization).

Coming in a close third in the toolbox of decision making was the ability to tell stories which consolidate our experiences in order to make those experiences available to ourselves (and others) in the future.

An example of how intuition comes to our aid comes from a fireman who tells the story of how, upon entering a house on fire, he had this strange feeling that something was wrong. He couldn't figure it out but something in him advised that he withdraw his team from the house immediately. Of course, seconds after his team had evacuated the structure the floor he'd been standing on exploded into flame and collapsed. It was only in retrospect that the fireman was able to understand what had happened. Fires, he said, are generally very noisy creatures. He hadn't been able to identify it at the time, but the house he and his team had entered had been uncharacteristically quiet. The fire raging unseen in the basement of the house had been muffled by the floorboards. Hence, the silence and the threat.

Its hard to consciously pick up on something that's not there. Unconsciously though, the fireman's mind had noticed a flaw in the pattern that fires generally create and threw up a caution signal. Through his years of experience the fireman had come to trust these mysterious signals arising from his unconscious awareness, and it was the combination of experience and trust in his own awareness that saved his and his team's life that day.

The larger point of the story of the fireman is that the sources of power needed for making sound decisions are usually not analytical at all. Experience creates a set of reasonable expectations, but analysis is often absent from the moment-to-moment decision-making process. Instead we rely on intuition and visualization.

Mental simulation (visualization) draws upon our experience and allows us to imagine how a course of action might be carried out in situations that are completely new to us. Think of the Apollo 13 spacecraft and its crew. They had trained for almost every conceivable event during their flight to the moon, but they never specifically trained for the catastrophic failure that befell them on their mission. What saved them, among many things, was the ability to make accurate models of the steps they needed to take in order to survive. They were able to visualize something they’d never actually done before.

In Seido we do something similar to the firemen and the astronauts (besides wearing odd clothing on the job). What’s the similarity? We all train. We repeat and repeat and repeat simple, basic movements. We simulate conditions for common, predictable attacks and we learn simple but effective action sequences to evade or squash those attacks.

This is all well and good, but it’s not enough for the reality of life. Life is unpredictable. Who knows what the future holds? The point of training is not to insure robotic response-ability. Rather, it’s to prepare us to act with confidence and competence in the event of something completely unexpected.

How, you might ask, does the mind-numbing and muscle-busting repetition of certain simple movements prepare us for the unexpected? The simple answer is that the high level of repetitions we perform in class act on our brain as well as our body. Scientific studies have shown that repetitive motion induces a state of awareness that gives us access to the contents of our consciousness that the rational mind usually filters out. This may account for the high number of insights and discoveries made by people when they’re washing their car, taking their dog for a walk or engaging in otherwise uncomplicated, routine actions.

A similar insight was arrived at by non-scientific means thousands of years ago and provides the rational basis for meditation. Through meditation, the moving meditation of karate, we’re able to plug into a wider awareness of life, one not limited by our self-imposed constraints. So when you come to class and embark for the hundredth time on kihon waza (basic practice) allow for the possibility that you’re also training your capacity to discern something you can’t see, to sense the silent fire burning within you.

Flower in Brazil 

It's How You Play The Game

"Life is difficult." That's how Scott Peck's best-selling book, "The Road Less Travelled", begins. That life is difficult is not news. Over two-thousand years ago the Buddha said it too: Life is suffering. The sanskrit word the Buddha used for suffering is dukkha. Dukkha doesn't refer to physical pain, necessarily. It refers to something more akin to our English word 'dissatisfaction'. Adages abound in our language which attest to the universality of dissatisfaction in our daily lives. "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" puts it very clearly. "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till its gone" is another variation on the theme.

The presence of dissatisfaction drives us to find its "cure." We seek remedies for dissatisfaction in our relentless pursuit of entertainment, for example. Television, radio, books, the internet, concerts and sporting events all serve, on one level, to distract us from the gnawing sense that life is somehow not quite enough as it is. To be sure, these media also provide information that serves us in our passage through life. But too often we use the media as a compass for rather than a footnote to our experiences.

What draws many people to the practice of budo is a desire to connect with our deepest selves. Budo, which rightly encompasses the "life-giving" along with the "life-taking" poles of behavior, offers us the means to fully embrace life, if even for a moment, without the nagging sense of ambivalance or dissatisfaction the Buddha spoke of. With this ambivalence neutralized, we can connect with our integrity, our whole-hearted embrace of life as it is. The mechanism budo uses to acheive such neutrality (non-attachment) is the mindful practice of waza, or technique.

The challenge of waza practice is profound. Like everything else, the practice can become "objectified." We start to critique and compare and find fault with what we do. By doing so, we become dissatisfied once again. There is a way, however, to short-circuit our dissatisfaction with waza. Whole-hearted commitment to our practice in the dojo eliminates ambivalence. True, there is always room for improvement and dissatisfaction will dog our practice over the months and years. But during class, for that brief time we devote to training, we can fully commit to doing our best, leaving our misgivings and ambivalence at the door of the dojo. By practicing this way, we train not only the muscles of our body, but the "muscles" of our spirit as well. We inbue ourselves with the feeling of commitment. We can then transfer that feeling to other areas of our lives. We can bring to life the truth in the saying "Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game."

Train! Commit! Believe! Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo. Osu!