Obedience

I thought that the post below was good even apart from the original context of the discussion thread.

Patrick Augé writes: Jul 24th, 2009 at 1:18 am

A teacher is a student who teaches in order to continue his study. (Mochizuki Minoru Sensei)

The question is: is our teacher here for us or is he here for himself?

How is his life style? Brand name articles, fancy cars, mindless hobbies and activities, whimsical spouses, secret personal life, etc.? Or did he prepare the proper environment and conditions to continue his study? How does he deal with daily life? Does he tell us what we want to hear or does he tell us what he thinks? Is it obvious that he has his students’ best interest at heart and has been maintaining that attitude in spite of all the model students who have left him for whatever reason?

Is the teacher a unified, integrated person in core ways – at least core in ways that are important to the individual student and the teacher himself? “Unified and integrated” don’t necessarily mean treating everyone the same. I might treat my children differently than I would an adult stranger. I might handle business relationships differently than I would a student-teacher relationship.

Having one’s students’ best interest at heart doesn’t mean giving them what they want, it means giving them what they need, which is often contradictory.

Did he leave his own teacher or was he expelled and avoids the subject or has he maintained the relationship with his teacher and often talks about him without hiding the fact that there were disagreements at times?

Is our teacher a public person, does he make himself available to his students, will he make the time to listen? How are his senior students, the product of his teachings? Is it an unreachable clique or a group of compassionate students who close the gap between our teacher and us? How do they behave when the teacher is away?

Is our teacher a human being? Is he struggling with his weaknesses and does he admit them and work on improving himself?

Those are not the only questions to ask, but they may help in seeing more clearly through one’s emotions.

In all relationships there are problems. Doubt is healthy when it leads to researching the truth in order to make a decision. Doubt is wrong when it becomes the excuse to avoid making a decision. Many students who left their teachers without fully understanding their actions and their consequences end up being treated the same way by their own students. It may go for another generation or so but will die for want of the spirit that ensures the continuation of the lineage.

When the relationship is based on the right reasons, all difficulties become opportunities to strengthen that relationship. Otherwise the slightest problem becomes the excuse for running away from the relationship.

If you decide to leave your teacher over deep disagreement with him, then do it cleanly. Return your ranks, certificates, all that which you received from him. That will be the best expression of your disagreement. Look for another teacher, explain the situation and do not expect any special treatment since you will be considered as a high risk student and will have to establish your credibility, which may take time. That may help you if you later find out that you made a mistake and want to go back to your teacher. But be ready to start again from the bottom.

If your priority is to learn, be unconditional, accept anything, do not victimize yourself.

“Unconditional”. This relates to my thoughts on faith, as I’ve written elsewhere. Many times I’ve seen people whose expectations of teachers were not met or disappointed, maybe even ravaged and shattered. For some of these people, they could not follow that teacher anymore, at least not in any way that requires them to open up their heart to their teacher.

To open up your heart to your teacher and have faith in them does not mean, necessarily, that the teacher will see this and get something out of it. The primary goal and consequence is that you, the student, see more of what the teacher has to offer, and accordingly receive more of the good stuff from the teacher. (Perhaps as a further consequence of this (ie that you are getting it), the teacher may see what is happening and your mutual relationship deepens.)

To have faith in your teacher means to try to see that which they may be clumsily trying to get across to you, that which they may imperfectly be striving to achieve. Maybe the teacher is socially inept, verbally crude, interpersonally sloppy, etc. To have faith means to accept that the teacher might be imperfect and clumsy in some respects, but to recognize whether those imperfections do not fundamentally interfere or obstruct your learning from the teacher. This recognition includes grasping that how and how much you are bothered by those imperfections is your issue – that you yourself are holding yourself back in some ways from learning from the teacher.

To have faith means to be accepting, patient, generous, and open-minded. In the case of relating to a teacher, it helps greatly to have a heart of gratitude and humility, selflessness and devotion. These not only clear away the clutter of your own issues that may interfere with your learning, but in the context of relating to the teacher as another person, they may go a long way to communicating to the other person where you stand and how you wish to relate to him. If you want to be treated as an equal, a customer, a peer, a rival, an advisor, etc. – of course the way you present yourself to your teacher will influence how he sees you and will see fit to relate to you.

Many people in the above forum had strong reactions against excessive obedience, or against obedience in general. There was a similar mentality seen in this thread about burkinis. What is this fear or aversion toward giving yourself over to someone or something?

“Do not victimize yourself”. Does the teacher seem to require you to completely debase yourself in order to relate to you as a student? Does the teacher encourage you to prostrate yourself possibly excessively? Does the teacher encourage you to beware of how you realize humility and selflessness? Does the teacher encourage or guide you to have awareness of your own development? Does the teacher give the impression that you should always trust his opinion over your own? The fear/aversion I mention above, it seems to be indicative a lack of reconciliation of selflessness and devotion with self-awareness and self-actualization. That is, faith, obedience, etc. – the things that would appear to go with selflessness and devotion – they seem to contradict self-awareness and a person knowing how and where he is going, and some level of responsibility for the same.

Interview with Philippe Gouttard

Interview with Philippe Gouttard

… Christian Tissier, who was just back from Japan, came to give a course in Saint-Étienne. There I said to myself “this is what we have to do”. What is funny about it is that the other members of our group did not like what they saw at all. There I realised that perception is really a question of moment. If Mr Tissier had come 10 day before or after, maybe it might have been me who had said “that’s crap” and the others “that’s great!”. Anyway, I was in a good state of mind to receive his teaching and I realised that it was exactly what I wanted to do.

G.E.: Nowadays you speak Japanese fluently. Did this change your understanding of what the Japanese teachers were doing?

P.G.: When I finally understood, I was a bit disappointed by the fact that they spoke very much like we do. I thought they would use poetic words with a lot of metaphors but in fact, not at all. They talked exactly like us “raise your arm, lower your hips, you are a bunch of morons!” (laughs). When I first came to Japan, I was convinced that the masters lived in tree tops, that they did not eat, did not have sex and so on. When I saw that every now and then, they fancied a drink or two, I was really disappointed. I realised that these guys who were virtuosos in aikido were in every other aspect very much like us. They were Japanese men living according to the customs of their own country.

G.E.: Was there a Japanese instructor who had a particular influence upon you?

P.G.: A gentleman like Seigo Yamaguchi helped me a lot because he was a nonconformist and that is exactly what I am trying to do on the mat. He was not in the Aikikai standards. For example, it was forbidden to smoke in the Aikikai but he smoked there, he used to do exactly the class he wanted and sometimes, he wouldn’t even turn up at all! For me, he brought freedom to a peak. This guy that I found ugly was suddenly magnificent when he stepped on the mat. Gradually, as I met teachers and improved in my practice, I came to realise that I wouldn’t mind dying in the arms of somebody like Mr Tissier or Mr Yamaguchi.

G.E.: Does your knowledge in osteopathy help you to teach aikido?

P.G.: All this allowed me to ask myself: instead of thinking of hurting, control and twist wrists, couldn’t we say “we are going to build the body”? Of course in the beginning, we build our own, we become very strong but what is the point if it is only to destroy the other guy? I tried to formulate things a little differently. He is attacking me because he has run out of any other way of expressing himself. I will therefore put him in such a situation of motion and pleasure that I will take any desire to aggress from him; not the will of being powerful, decided or strong; just the urge for destruction.

My own experience with the teachers I like, and furthermore the teachers who blew my mind at one point or another, the experience was disconcerting and unfamiliar, but felt light, open, and pleasurable. Currently I’ve reached a place where I can viably explore how to let the partner’s function actually happen and accordingly how I can help them to “dissolve” in that open way. That open way is something that is not simply overpowering or oppressing the partner (although attachment to one specific way or another isn’t constructive). In an odd way, the partner often seems to expect to experience some degree of fighting or resistance when he/she attacks. By letting the partner succeed, they don’t encounter the fighting experience, and at least something different can arise.

G.E.: This idea of construction is a crucial part of you teaching isn’t it?

P.G.: When we twist a wrist, we don’t only act on the wrist but on the whole articulation and the muscular chain down to the point of balance. This is why we have very few acute injuries in aikido but many more chronically debilitating pains. The body gets used to taking the abuse until the day it makes you say “that’s it, I can’t take it any longer”. Then we start wondering why it went wrong since we’d been so careful all these years and never got injured. It is now that we must be careful and practice intelligently. We should not change the techniques but change the minds instead. We must avoid at all cost incidents due to awkwardness or lack of attention. Also, we must get rid of the notion of wanting to do well and focus on wanting to do better. It is when we expect to do well all the time that we end up with frustration. We have to leave ourselves room for improvement, allow ourselves to make mistakes.

What I really want to get away from is the idea of perfection. We should obviously tend towards perfection but certainly not let ourselves be put down by mistakes. As soon as we are afraid to make mistakes, we don’t do half of what we are capable of and we make excuses for ourselves. Right know we are talking to each other, we try to speak properly but at some point, we are going to make language mistakes. If somebody passes by at that moment, he is going to say “Look at this moron, he can’t even speak properly”. The thing is we don’t care about it! I much prefer to things according to the way I feel than using perfect but empty sentences. Afterwards, we can always fix things if they have not been expressed properly or understood right instead of always having to be careful. Let’s face it, this is only aikido, it is not like if we were in politics trying to reunify a country. It is exactly like when people want to take pictures. I don’t mind people taking pictures when I am in an awkward position. People who appreciate me will figure out that it was at that particular time of the motion whereas others don’t like me will always find something anyway. By far I prefer things to be natural. See, when a politician screws up, I don’t mind it as long as he recognised his mistake.

Some of these above points are very much along the lines of what I’ve been hearing Endo sensei say. The reconciliation of striving to do something better with letting go (of achieving “better”) is, in a general sense, also about reconciling how to follow one’s wishes and desires (i.e., what one’s ego is telling one to do) and how to achieve freedom, actualization, and happiness. Too often we get sidetracked in strategizing and dissecting.

G.E.: During seminars you indeed show little concern towards the form but pay a lot of attention to the essence of a technique.

P.G.: That is right. In fact I try to give as much freedom as possible to my students, they are always right but all in a different way. We become better by changing of partner, vision, teacher, place etc. Of course we do the same technique over and over again but the point is to understand why it works in some places, not in others. Everybody has the solution within themselves but the difficulty is to take enough time to think it over. A teacher can only give his own solution which is one amongst many others.

To relate this to aikido, shihonage is the same everywhere but sometimes, we see a practitioner doing it and we think that it is rubbish. He is probably not rubbish but he has motions, postures and attitudes that irritate us. It only means that we are not good enough yet to accept that the others might do things differently. Instead of saying that the other guy is crap, we should say that we did not train enough to understand him properly. As a consequence, we will go see somebody else and later, we should go back to see him.

This is speaking to the idea of developing one’s eye. Developing one’s eye is not only about discerning more detail, but about freeing oneself from “the specks of dirt on the lenses” – those workings that can be no one’s but our own which make us overlook some things while over-fixating on others. To develop one’s eye in seeing a baseball thrown by a pitcher is one thing, but to develop one’s eye in seeing another human being in the context of proceeding through life is a whole other ball of wax.

This is basically what I try to do in Japan. Before, I rarely went to practice with the teachers that I did not like. Nowadays, I always go there.

G.E.: Why is that?

P.G.: Precisely to check if I really don’t like them or if I just was not mature enough to understand.

G.E.: Isn’t this degree of liberty unsettling for your students?

P.G: I offer the technique to my students, from that, they do whatever they want with it. Of course I am sad when my students leave me but I would be even more upset if they were staying with me so as not to sadden. In that case, they would be considering me as an old man. If a student of mine tells me “Philippe, for the next year, I won’t be coming to train with you because I want to train with this other guy.”, I won’t mind at all. The thing that would really hurt me is if we did not keep contact. The fact that during his life, a student might want to study with another teacher is perfectly normal; it does not strike me since I did it myself. We will meet each other again, that is aikido, paths that divert and meet each other all the time. The times when we meet each other have to be very strong and precious moments so we don’t feel guilty to have parted from each other. As a teacher, if you give intelligence and practice you also give freedom. Freedom is priceless.

Of course we can’t be free at the beginning; we only can trust our teacher. We go to a dojo, usually randomly and we are told that there is nothing better. With practice, we realize however that the best in us is very similar to the best in somebody elsewhere. That is why I think that grades do not have a technical value but a value as a representation of experience and formation.

Faith (in one’s teacher) – it pops up again.

Take the example of Tokyo or Paris; it is quite normal to have 30-40 people on the mat in a dojo. Now, if a teacher has 10 persons on his mat in Galway, Cork or Tipperary, it is as intense as in Paris. Is aikido better in Paris than in Tipperary? I don’t know. What I do know is that in Paris, people can train 6 times a week, 3 times a day whereas a practitioner in Tipperary might consider himself lucky if he has the possibility to do it twice a week. Now both have the same value because even if the shodan in Paris and Tipperary does not represent the same experience, it rewards the same level of personal investment. Personally, I ask of students and teachers that they train hard, without thinking of whether in Tipperary or Paris it is good or not. Us students, we always feel guilty because we think: “I don’t train in Paris and I have never been to Japan so of course, I can’t understand” but once we finally have been to Paris or Tokyo, we often feel empty unless we meet a teacher or a student who enriched us with knowledge that we could not have grasped at home.

Aikido is accessible to everybody but not everybody can access all of aikido.

G.E.: So we don’t practice the founder’s aikido?

P.G.: … aikido has to evolve in function of our needs.

Nowadays, people who come to see us are well behaved and well educated, they are self disciplined. We must tend towards suffering less during the practice, be less frustrated, less jealous. If we get hit, we must accept it, lose a bit of our self esteem; a bit of the 7th dan that goes away. For example, I try to make people practice in a situation where they don’t have the control anymore. I push the students to do techniques beyond reflection in order to make the body “go for it”. Afterwards, we might say “shit, I shouldn’t have done that” but if we leave the intelligent spirit time to anticipate, we won’t go for it anymore because we know we are going to die.

It is probably greatly, vastly, horrifically, tremendously overlooked how much most students protect themselves from ever having to experience all that which aikido practice could expose them to.

Students must trust their teacher but the teacher must also be tolerant of the reactions of his students. It is always a reciprocal thing, a teacher must always accept when a student of his goes to train with somebody else but the student also has to remember that if he is able to make anything out of what the other teacher is saying, it is because of the knowledge he got from the first one.

G.E.: Is the social aspect important for you?

P.G.: It is very important outside the mat. We can talk, cry, hug all night but the following morning, we must be back on the mat at 9 a.m. and go for it! This is a dictatorship, no feelings, no religion, no politics. Gender is non-existent, a girl on the mat is just a smaller partner and I will make her suffer as much as a bloke so she understands that we all deserve to work as hard. However, I believe that we do more aikido than we think at night when we share a good meal and a good beverage. After that, on the Sunday morning, the big bad guy of the previous day is not as nasty as we thought, he is even rather like us but we just did not understand each other the day before.

G.E.: You always work to the limit of physical exhaustion and pain…

P.G: In aikido, we must reach the limit beyond which we should not go. When we practice, if I go beyond the limits of a partner, I abused him but if I don’t reach theses limits, I cheated him. We must always go forward and when we can’t go forward anymore, we just have to choose another forward.

G.E.: Any last word to finish?

P.G.: Give strength to others. If we are strong it is to help others, not to crush them.

Gordon Ramsay

I was watching clips on Youtube of Gordon Ramsay for the first time recently, mostly of a reality show, “Hell’s Kitchen,” in which he’s leading two teams of chefs to compete against each other. As he is famous for, his way of interacting is extremely confrontational and aggressive. As I was watching, I took note of the fact that I was identifying more with him than the contestant chefs, and had some thoughts related to teaching and hierarchical relationships.

1.  One book that has left me with an impression is Erich Fromm’s ‘Escape from Freedom’, in which he writes about power, sadism, and masochism, relative to socio-historical trends. Another salient train of thought in my head is about defensiveness, security/confidence, and relationship. How does all this relate to identifying with Gordon.

The simplest aspect is that it’s easier to identify with someone in a position of power than not. “It’s good to be the king.” Also, I’ve been playing with the realization that it is a defense – a subtle one – to look down upon others. And since the human psyche has a knack for making any way of seeing the world and others make sense by selectively seeing certain details and assigning significance and associations to them in certain ways,  so it can go for this way of defense. Furthermore, not only can one selectively see certain aspects of the world, one may also gravitate toward certain situations and environments as well as participate in creating one’s own situation.

For example, one may see the failures and hiccups in others, and not their successes and innovations. One may unconsciously find oneself more frequently than not in situations where one is more experienced or skilled than others. One may create a situation/environment (e.g., a school) where one can be the experienced person. One can contribute to the “excuse” of getting to, or having to, look down upon others, such as by bettering one’s own skill.

Having been on the student side of a difficult student-teacher relationship, I think that in a good relationship there is some appropriateness/fittingness which, for humans, could also be synonymous with communication. Receiving harsh feedback from a teacher, no matter how true, is not always constructive. Of course it’s not impossible for the student to dig deep and make it constructive within him/herself. However, part of a good student-teacher relationship is the teacher making the student dig just deep enough. If the pattern is becoming evident that the student is not able to dig deep enough, then the teacher would be wasting his/her time in continuing an unconstructive pattern. If the teacher continues to do something that isn’t benefitting anyone, then the focus on the teacher should be revisited. That is, what is the teacher really getting out of it, by acting in that way? If it’s supposedly to serve the student but isn’t actually doing so, then it’s possible that the teacher is working out his/her own junk and diverting focus away from him/herself, while putting the onus on the student.

2. One thing I noticed was that, of course, depending on how someone was spoken to, their reaction was relative to the thing that was said to them (e.g., your sauce is too spicy) or to the way it was said to them (e.g, “I wouldn’t give this to a pig by mistake! You donkey!”). When the person being spoken to, the recipient, felt affront more than anything, they would comment on how Gordon spoke, how he made them feel, or how they themselves were (e.g., “I’m qualified, I know what I’m doing, I know how to make this sauce”, etc.) Their being occupied primarily by the affront prevented them from noticing the valid observation or advice, such as that the sauce was, in fact, too spicy. This also happened quite clearly when some contestants tried to exert superiority and take charge over others.

In the context of this show, Gordon has virtually complete authority over the contestants. If they don’t like it, they can quit and leave. If he doesn’t like it, he can do much to ensure that they have to leave. If they disagree, they can’t say so. Apparently Gordon has also acted as consultant to restaurants that were going out of business. In such cases, if the restaurants didn’t like it or disagreed, Gordon could terminate the relationship.

How does this parallel a student-teacher relationship? How does it relate to being a student? We would expect the student to be there voluntarily. However, we might expect the teacher to have less weight, as far as being unpleasant or poor at teaching. Perhaps the teacher relies on the student being there, such as for income. Perhaps the teacher strives to be a teacher that students are attracted to. On the other hand, the difficult position a teacher is in is that of conveying to the student that which the student does not know. The student may not know because they simply haven’t heard it yet. They may not know because they are inclined not to know certain things. The teacher must decide what to do when a student appears to be inclined to stay not knowing. One decision may be to confront the student’s inclination, and bring to light the necessity of knowing certain things. Another decision may be to let the student’s inclination take its course, and possibly transform on its own. The decision-making, I reckon, is a reflection on the teacher’s wisdom and character.

From the perspective of the student, they may perceive the teacher’s course of action in any number of ways. A student who is confronted about his/her inclination may become defensive and focus attention on the way the information was given (e.g., “You don’t have to say it so harshly/subtly/directly/now/today/when I’m not ready, etc.”). A student who is subtly feeling that he/she is missing something, but the teacher is not helping them or filling them in, may feel abandonment or bitterness at the teacher’s inaction (“Why doesn’t he/she just come out and tell me?!”). In the end, practically speaking, the teacher is the teacher because he/she has more knowledge/skill/wisdom, etc. The teacher also has more social clout. The teacher may also have multiple students. For these reasons, in the end, the student should come to see things in the teacher’s way, rather than the other way around. In a sense, the student must come to be in the teacher’s shoes, and during the learning process, put him/herself in the teacher’s shoes. In another sense, the student learns to speak more of the teacher’s language. The teacher on the other hand must always be mindful of how he/she is going about his/her own practice and how he/she is putting him/herself out there as part of a relationship with the student, regardless of whether the teacher is trying to related in a certain way or not.

As a student, putting oneself in this inferior position is not something that most people would find immediately palatable. They want to be respected. They want to feel that the teacher understands them. They want the teacher to say things so that they can grasp it. This may work to some extent, and it depends on the subject matter of course, but then again it may not. If they already felt comfortable with it, then they would already know it or have an easy time acquiring it. Although it may sound counterintuitive to some that it might feel uncomfortable to learn something that is easier or healthier, learning something, coming to know oneself, etc. are endeavors that inevitably have to do with discomfort and letting go of attachments. How a teacher fits into such an endeavor is not necessarily to make things easier or more comfortable. In fact it may be just the opposite – what’s necessary to encounter that which one is not likely to if left to one’s pre-existing tendencies.

Learning to be a student, 素直(Sunao) & Faith. And curiosity (cont.)

Enough of the black and white. Now what if you are tentatively believing but have walked in through the door and likely to remain inside? The thing is you may stay tentative and spend the rest of your days with aikido being a light weight on your scale of priorities and things that bring meaning to you. You’ve been handed the memo that says, your being here requires this, entails that, etc. to which you say, okay, I accept.

素直 (Sunao), the Student-Teacher Relationship, and Religious Faith

(This is an ongoing draft – the more I add the less organized it gets. For now. 3/25/07)

Sunao – I did not hear a satisfactory definition of this word during my whole time living in Japan. Every definition I heard was along the lines of, “A person who is sunao does what he is told without objecting or complaining.” Although I had the impression that sunao was a word with a positive connotation – a kind of virtue – the definitions I heard all had the sound of obedience, compliance, or other quality that oppressors or superiors would like to see in those who are of lower standing.