mind body mama: We Are the Folk

A couple of weeks ago, I taught my beginning Shuri Ryu karate students the opening moves of a Goju karate form. Which would have been lovely, had I not thought—and told them—that I was teaching the opening moves of their own Shuri Ryu form.

If you’re not a martial artist, just imagine this: you have struggled valiantly through the first few weeks of Argentine tango class. A vague and shadowy body memory is developing. You think you might actually know what your left and right feet are supposed to do at a certain moment. Then your bossy and ridiculously self confident instructor accidentally teaches you Mambo footwork, right when you are at your most vulnerably bewildered.

Back at the School of Come the Revolution I learned that beginners will call a teacher out over real and imagined mistakes. The sanguine New Englander I taught with for half a decade told me not to lose sleep over it. She deadpanned, “It doesn’t matter what you tell them, they are going to say another teacher showed it to them differently.” She wasn’t disrespecting our students. She knew that the nuances of teaching and learning styles, combined with the desperation many students feel to get it right, mean that a teacher of beginners will be pressed for accuracy and specificity and conformity beyond all reasonable measure.

Which is why I wasn’t entirely surprised when a student called out from the back row, “They taught it to us differently last week.”

But I was a little taken aback when she demanded, “Can you promise this is not going to change again?”

The light was dawning that I might have slipped into my original style of karate, that I might have made an error. One clue was the fact that I had made the same mistake while practicing the form with Small in our kitchen a few weeks prior. Another clue is that I will always make this kind of mistake.

My two styles of karate are cousins to one another, separated only by one master’s preferences or height or left-handedness. I know nothing of these masters, but I make up stories: One went to China, fell in love with kung fu and came back to karate crouching low and moving like a cat. Another broke up a bar fight and developed a deep respect for the elbow strike as it caught him in the chin and threw him across the room. Another met a teacher whose movement made his heart race with desire. He followed this teacher, watching and mimicking, trying to master the thing he wanted.

I imagine these legends because this is how my karate training has been: I fall in love. I grow hungry for technique, for accomplishment, for a quality of moving. I want some movement in my body like I’d want a lover; I crave it like I crave ice cream in the last days of my cycle. They say martial artists are disciplined, but it’s not obligation or rigor that drives me to practice my forms. It is pure and naked want.

The teachers who have only studied one style of karate are inclined to say things like, “The way we make a fist presents the hand in the strongest position,” but I know to my bones that’s not true. I know to say, “The people who developed this style felt that this hand position was the strongest.” Because the other masters whose forms run in my muscles thought something different, and they weren’t wrong. The forms they passed down express what their bodies wanted, the technique they found most useful and beautiful. The self-defense teacher in me knows that what works is never wrong.

These arts are a giant game of telephone, a message passed from one body to another. We try to honor the tradition and collective wisdom of a particular style and replicate what we are taught. But each of us changes the forms whether or not we make a mistake. We transform them through our preferences or height or left-handedness. We change it through what works best for each of us, and because of what we love.

So to my student I said, “No. I can’t promise that this won’t change. I can’t promise that I will never make a mistake teaching, and I can’t promise that another teacher won’t make a mistake. These forms are alive, they are always changing. The sooner you can roll with that, the happier you will be. A wise teacher once told me: Karate is a folk art. We are the folk.”