Probably the hardest thing about getting medically
disqualified from my scheduled fight was realizing that this was not a passing
thing or something I could bull my way through.
Physically, I am in really great condition and watch my diet
and do all the physical work you could ask for. Of course, all of that has to
be predicated with the phrase “for my age”, because I am 50 and that’s not
young. Therein lies the problem.
My “mental game” had to date consisted of something like me
telling me anxiety, tension, and fears to just “shut the hell up and get in
line.” If I was 20, I might ride out this half-assed “just cowboy up” mental
game, but at this age my body reacts differently and I have to acknowledge
that. My blood pressure jumps around more readily than in the past, and things
like dehydration and stress more obviously impact me. My whole solution had
been to ignore and deny that this is how I approach these things mentally. The
result was the “great disappointment” but also (I suspect) other instances
where I was abusing my body needlessly. So this opened up a whole new area that
I have been exploring ever since.
It has gone something like this: reading, inventorying,
meditating, and being honest and compassionate with myself. Let me start with some
excellent books that have really helped my thinking on martial arts,
meditation, and the relationship of my mind and body. Jeffrey Mann’s When Buddhists Attack: The Curious Relationship Between Zen and the Martial Arts and
the medieval classic The Unfettered Mind by Takuan Soto were both very helpful
in their suggestion that this was a puzzle that could be unwound. The most important book though was Micahel
Raposa’s book Meditation and the Martial Arts because its subject is how all
sorts of people across multiple continents and through time have tried to
resolve the apparent dissonance between such a violent activity and some
level of inner peace.
Not surprisingly the author dwells a lot on the “softer”
arts like Aikido and Tai Chi. There is quite a bit of talk about ways of peace
and harmony that are familiar to anyone who has studied martial arts, talk that
most fighters I know find pretty quaint and even a bit silly. I don’t know that I would have been in that group, but I had
also read all of this for years and I thought I understood it. It became clear I had not. Then I
ran across two things that I had never really put together (despite several
years of Aikido).
This quote:
Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there. -Morihei Ueshiba
And this picture of the different levels of ethical
self-defense:
At the top of the chart is the least ethical, an
unanticipated attack on an opponent, progressing downward to the most ethical,
self-protection with minimal injury to the attacker. I had always regarded this
as a nice way of thinking about restraining violence, but now with the Ueshiba
quote in my mind I had an epiphany. If there is no opponent, then who exactly am I
doing these things to? I concluded that though this was meant to be a literal treatise on self-defense, that the opponent I had really been fighting was myself.
Starting from this realization, I began to construct a
program of mindfulness meditation which has helped me slow down and more
closely consider what I am doing in my training and in fighting. I am trying
not to simply attack and bully myself into doing things despite fears and
tension, but instead I am compassionately considering the sources and realities of
those fears and trying to address them directly.
The results have been very promising and I am trying to
approach this with the same discipline I approach my physical training. The
immediate results have been good. I am able to take my blood pressure down by
10-15 points with around 10 minutes of meditation. I am also much more able to
recognize when I am too tense or when the BP is rising. This has really helped
me both when training and sparring (between rounds I recover better) and in all
sorts of other parts of my life (I am able to avoid getting into a snit over
daily annoyances far more effectively than a year ago). So those are the kind
of instrumental impacts, but more generally I think I have had some nice outcomes for my
interacting with others (including those who know nothing about training or fighting).
But the question remained would this help me get to my goals
and allow me to fight, and that remained to be seen.
