The Container and the Practice

This week I had the privilege to teach Modern Arnis to the beginner class at the School of Love. I was invited to teach a partner blocking and striking drill we call Trapping Hands Special. Like much of Modern Arnis, this drill can be desperately confusing. It is a complex, repeating pattern and as such it is as difficult and as simple as any other complex, repeating pattern. The exercise is just a little too long and has just a few too many elements to easily hold in one’s mind. Because it’s a pattern, as soon as one piece slips away from either partner, the whole exercise flounders. It’s a challenge similar to remembering the stitches in a long row of counted cross stitch or doing long division in your head. Odds or evens, right hand or left hand, what you did just before, what your partner’s doing, and what you’re about to do next all play a part in figuring out what your move should be.

The trick with Trapping Hands Special is to break the code, learn the pattern, and then allow your body memory to hold onto it. We often say to one another when practicing Arnis, “Don’t think about it; just do it.” This is what makes Trapping Hands Special especially difficult to teach: once we’re able to reproduce the pattern without thought, it is awfully hard to take it apart again.

I developed my (fairly crackpot) method of teaching it over an entire summer. I wanted to teach the pattern to my girls. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious was having a rough time with her joints that season, so she spent a lot of time on the sofa watching TV. I’d pose her right hand in one of the positions that my partner might feed to me and explore my various response options. Each evening’s practice was limited by the strength of Sweetie’s deltoids or the extent of her patience. I endured a fair amount of eye-rolling and she endured a fair amount of holding her arm up in the air. Eventually I developed a method of explaining the exercise that makes sense to me. Not the only way to teach it, by a long shot, but something I can reliably reproduce and something that it helpful to some number of students.

I thought I’d stop by the Tuesday class for about fifteen minutes to run through the pattern with folks, but of course it took forty-five minutes. I should have stayed another forty-five to do it properly, but Small was needing her dinner and bath.

In the midst of the practice one of the Senseis who regularly teaches this class asked me a question about the quality of the blocks we were using. Do we block with the hand or the forearm; is it a pinning type of block or a redirecting type of block, etc. And it came to me that my lesson for the evening really had no martial arts quality about it at all. I wasn’t asking students to attend to any of the things that develop their martial skills: targeting, or speed, or power, or technique, or foot-work, or posture, or breath.

The whole group of us—from a very first day karateka to a motley crew of karate, kung fu and tae kwon do black belts—were pouring enormous energy into memorizing where to put our hands when.

I was working really hard teaching and my students were working really hard learning. What we were working on was not the practice itself but the container into which the practice will enter. Next week, or next month, or next year when these students have confidence in the Trapping Hands Special pattern—when it enters their bodies and their minds let go—we’ll be able to fill that container with the qualities of our art.

Of course I know that this is a false dichotomy on some level—the room was fairly vibrating with kime (focus) and filled with camaraderie, laughter, peer leadership and beginner’s mind. So the practice was present as it always is in that sacred space. But it reminded me with a jolt that the container sometimes takes a tremendous amount of work, just to hold the space where our practice can commence.

For Unitarian Universalists, our container is made of committee and annual meetings, budget deliberations and ministerial searches. In family our container is house and home, childcare and lawn care, dishes and laundry. And as a woman the container of my life is right livelihood and service to my community which manifest as an endless “to-do” list of phone calls and emails.

I’m going to be pondering this for a while: the container and the practice. I often want to give the container short shrift—squeeze that pattern into fifteen minutes before dinner, so I can get to the heart of the work. But sometimes the container is the heart of the work—it gives us the opportunity for kime and connection, and what else is there? And sometimes it is just a to-do list—but it is a hard to-do list, full of worthy tasks.

Things don’t get easier—they don’t retreat to muscle memory, as it were—without the hard work up front. What if we were to admit when something was hard and give it its full due—a summer of independent inquiry, a whole long evening of practice?

I started showing Small Trapping Hands Special last night. She is delighted by the speed of my hands and dissolves into hopeless laughter, a balm to my black belt ego. Moreover, she is intrigued by the puzzle of the pattern. I see the martial arts hunger in her. “Mama,” she says, suddenly serious. “I want this form.” She doesn’t know if it’s hard or easy, confusing or simple. She knows her mama is fast like laughter and we are weaving a pattern together with our four hands.