The story of Koryu variation

This post is just another of my personal experiences about moral lessons(sometimes it has nothing to do with morality at all)😆I learned from an event in life to improve the life itself 😃.

This post is just another of my personal experiences about moral lessons (sometimes it has nothing to do with morality at all)😆 I learned from an event in life to improve the life itself 😃.

morality wheel

Last month was one of my worst month at work 😠. It was because we had a new external colleague in our team for a project. In the long list of my complains, the most accurate one is that that guy is not a team player. I had never thought that working with someone could be so frustrating and how much a non-team-player could affect the whole team so bad 🤕. This guy kept complaining about everthing in the team 💢!?! He pointed the finger to everyone and… taught people how to do their jobs by kept talking about how the work should be done, we must follow this and that standard because that what he is using and that is how the “world” is doing 🧐🤨🤬!! He did all of them without any concerns about the internal environment knowledge and why people had to do that and have kept doing that! In general, he just made me (or the whole internal team instead) frustrasted, tired. And the worst thing is I started douting myself at what I was doing 😵. I know that I should not be like that and stick to my work but yes it happened! Then as usual, after another long day, I went to my Iaido1 class 🦄.

go towards the light

FYI, I started Kendo and Iaido just almost two years ago 😇. It is a wonderful “more-than-sport” sport. There are many great things about it and I will… write more about it soon in other posts 🤭.

Today, my sensei taught us Koryu. There are many points about this interesting martial art. One of them is the story about its variation.

Koryu Iaido is not a style but a general name for Iaido’s old-school styles. Each Koryu school has their old phylosophies and sword controlling methods. It’s very interesting to see their differences and learn the idea behind each of them. Besides the number of schools, we can even find the variation among each Koryu school itself.

Martial art is called art is because it reflects each individual practicer’s thinking. Eventhough taught by the same sensei, each student, with or without intention, put their own “personality” in their katas, depending on their physical forms, lifestyle, mindset, experiences in life etc… To say that, there are many people practice the same set of katas, whose sequences and all details written on paper, such as Seitei Iaido2, they still show to observers their different personalities, presure levels, fighting “idea” that sometimes we have to give a big “wow”. It’s like, well, you know, handshaking 🤝, and how you tell someone’s personalities after you two’s first handshake.

handshake

In Koryu, the variation in each kata is even bigger. As my sensei explained, for the same Koryu kata, people can have a vast amount of variations such as different ways of starting the kata, different sitting position, hand gestures, eye looking etc… while maintaining the same kata’ scenario. And, as my sensei kept emphasizing mulitple times during our practice (and he will continue I believe 🤭): “they all are CORRECT”.

A good teacher will not correct the details, and respect all the variations from different people, clubs, and other senseis… -said my sensei.

As other clubs, we have a limitted time of practice a day, however, on that day, my sensei patiently spent a lot of time to explain to us the important of seeing the differences in people, who practice the same Koryu school, and respecting them. I could not agree more with him about that!

In our life, we always try to come up with “best practices” to make life easier. Gradually, those “best practices” becomes reflections (or habits) to solve all of our problems. And maybe on one day, we start seeing them as the only solutions for the whole world and apply them to other people 😱!!! Just like the variation of Koryu Iaido, sometimes, it is not about the “best solution”, but really the most suitable one for a person to “solve” the kata’s scenario. Besides that, it is also a very good idea to see the others’ “solutions”, eventhough that they cannot immediately become our solution but we can always learn from them. And, well, you know? Time changes! our “best solutions” at this time may not even be considered as a “solution” in a short future. That’s what we call “we (human) create the future” 😎! It’s a gift to us human to be capable of learning and improving. So why do we have to be so concerned about the others’ solutions and question our own capability of finding new ones? Of course, we can only achieve that through learning, improving ourselves by collecting experiences day by day. It’s like that we all must start Iaido with simple cut practices. As soon as we can master those basic cuts, we will see that all the beautifully complex katas are built upon those basic horizontal and vertical cuts that we repeat day by day in our dojo 🤯. And who knows? Maybe one day, you can develop your own Iaido styles which people will recognize and call your name as soon as they see the performance 😍!

At the end of the practice, I left the dojo and had a drink with other people. The sky was high and blue again 🌇. It’s always like that in life, that we usually have many positive thinkings to duel with “grey days”, however, at some point of time, it is so difficult to remember of them or to put them in practice. In order to get out of that “foggy view”, most of the time, the only thing we need is just another one who can remind us about those beautiful things and convince us that we are not alone 🤗. This could be as difficult as wandering arounds the world, or just as easy as going to a usual Iaido practice in a casual Tuesday evening.

Thank you sensei!