New year, new you

But no, that’s not what your belt says. Your belt says you knew all that stuff, but unless you constantly practice, whilst keeping your mind engaged, it’s all too easy to find yourself slipping backwards.

Remember, when you’re a white belt, your first kata is judged as a white belt, and when you’re a black belt, the kata is judged accordingly. To somebody who knows the difference, there’s almost no comparison between the two, even though the pattern and the moves might look the same.

That’s the great thing about karate – it’s like an onion, with multiple layers, except, with an onion, each time you peel back a layer, you still end up with an onion – just a smaller one. With karate, each time you peel back a layer, you end up with a whole new understanding, that wasn’t even visible to you before.

Sure, you might talk about hips, and stances, and power, and rotation and timing and focus each week, but it’s only by constantly thinking about and searching for those things in your performance of karate, that you start to make discoveries about their real meaning.

I think karate is about discovering the meaning of these things as they apply to your physiology. In other words, stances for a tall person and a very short one have very different meanings, although the intention is generally the same. We may formularise them for the benefit of learning students, but things are not always as cut-and-dried as saying two shoulders long, or one shoulder wide. You need to adapt for your unique body attributes.

So again, I remind you to stay focused and try to think about what you’re doing in class. Ask questions. If you’re a brown belt and you don’t have lots of questions to ask, I want to know why, because the more you know, the more that interesting technicalities arise for you to explore and ponder. That’s one of the reasons I think, that I never went through the so-called blue-belt blues, or the brown-belt downs – I always had questions to ask and challenges to motivate me...