The wife of one of my students came by the other day. She is friends with the student who provides space for us, and she was seeking some advice from him on a project she was working on. We spoke casually for a few minutes, since I know her, and I have not seen either her or her husband for some time.
Her husband was my first student in my new enterprise, after I left my old place. He had joined the old place because of me, and when I left, he was the only one who went with me, as opposed to quitting outright or staying behind. He helped me land rental space for a new class; he also connected me to the community college program where I am still able to teach each week. In a way, I owe him for helping me redo my act for what I am doing now.
But all along it seems there was a trade-off involved, which I was not totally aware of. It turned out the ulterior motive was that he wanted to study the particular style that was the cause of the rift with my old place, and which I have at least temporarily shelved in favor of stuff I find less politically fraught to teach. There were hints, of course, that he preferred one style over another, and I knew that. Still, when I asked him directly, he said he was happy to do anything, but he hoped that eventually I would return to the other style. In truth, at least until the end of 2011, I also thought that might be a possibility. Events at the end of the year, though, convinced me that there was not much to be gained by continuing, and by "gained," I mean in terms of maintaining some respect in the ryuha and providing a fair shot for my students who wanted to study. It's very difficult to accomplish those two modest goals when a number of people are actively working against those interests and when the teacher is indifferent, to put it rather mildly. It does take me a little while to see the handwriting on the wall sometimes, but once I see it, I never look back.
During one of our last conversations, I offered this person some alternate paths to training in that particular style - (1) to train with the group who kicked me out, since they were still offering the style he was interested in; or (2) to go to a dojo in New Jersey where the main branch of the style was being offered, quite unaffiliated with the offshoot branch, but very similar in technique. I had also suggested several times that if he would like to arrange a mutually convenient time and place, I would be willing to work with him, even though I do not consider it part of my curriculum at this point. (Considering everything, this was meeting him more than halfway, I think.) I told him that I was not kicking him out in any way, and he would always be welcome in my dojo whatever he decided.
But, for whatever reason, he has not come back to okeiko. Last I asked him about it, he said he had obligations on my teaching evenings in the form of networking seminars and other things that were keeping him away. Getting space for a semi-private workout was a complete nonstarter, since the subject never came up again.
Leave it to his blunt-spoken wife to make everything clear: he would not come to okeiko because I was not teaching what he wanted to learn; and, as for free time, he had taken up dragon boat racing so he was not available to do anything else. Mystery solved.
Years ago Otani Sensei mentioned something to me that has guided my practice for a long time: "Once you know the principle, the technique doesn't matter." In fact, this idea had guided my practice even before he articulated it. When I was training, we did whatever Sensei or the sempai on deck wanted to teach, whether it was empty-hand techniques, jodo, kenjutsu or some weird, obscure stuff that the sempai had picked up at a seminar and that no one (including the sempai) would remember by the following week. No one complained. No one. We were just so grateful to be there, doing cool stuff every week (or even boring, repetitive stuff) that we didn't care; or if we did, we kept quiet. We were not allowed to complain, or be picky. If we did not like what was being taught, it was understood that we were free to look elsewhere, and Sensei was the best game in town. And with experience and observation, it has become clearer and clearer to me that there is a principle, and it is always there. Once I discovered it, I began to see it everywhere. I can't say I see it all that clearly even yet, but I know it's there.
Perhaps it's that the internet has opened up so many possibilities for practice, we now feel as though we know what we are missing, and since everyone seems to have less free time than ever (leaving out the dragon boat practice schedule), people have become fussy and very specific about what they want to study. "I want to learn this, and not that." As one of my other students put it lately, "It's like going into a math class and saying 'I want to learn math, but I want to use this book, because this is what works for me.' It doesn't make sense."
Not only that, but you can't learn the principle if you don't know it exists.
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