Kotsu Kotsu

I picked up a copy of Salvadore Dali's "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship" in a bookstore. That guy who painted the melted clock, as you may know, was a groundbreaking surrealist painter, photographer and filmmaker, You may also know that Dali was famously an eccentric, egoistic self-promoter, famous for quotes like: "Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali"  In the book the artist promised to provide the key that would save modern art "from chaos and laziness." I admit, I was kind of fascinated in what Dali, the self proclaimed greatest artist of all time, offered to teach. The book is full of Dali's characteristic, flamboyant language. A lot of it seems to make no sense: "Begin, then, by knowing that according to the Dalinian aesthetic the tulip is a horrid thing next to celluloid"  But then there are whole passages of things like how to grind paint. What type of brush t...

Some time ago I read a really great book called "Thank You and Okay: Diary of an American Zen Failure in Japan" by David Chadwick . It's mostly about him spending time in Japanese monasteries and the culture shock that ensued. Chadwick's writing is simultaneously humble and hilarious, with lots of food for thought. In the first chapter he describes the difficulty of waking up to the alarm clock at 3:45 for morning zen service. Groggy and warm, the idea of staying in bed was inviting. But he remembered his teacher Shunryu Suzuki's advice: "When the bell rings, get up." Short-circuit the grumbling mind, and do . There's lots of things I know I should do, but I just don't want to get started. Meditation, exercise, practice. (Why do so many of these involve getting up early???)  How to get started? Just start! Very good advice. Even so, sometimes I just collapse back into bed.

I recently decided to learn a song . It’s one that’s typical of a certain Irish style of singing which is very wordy, often humorous, with lots of alliteration and  internal rhymes , and is sung quite fast. I’ve always been crappy at memorizing pretty much anything. For all that people call me talented and artistic, poetry reading and acting were never options for me. My aikido students  know that I can’t even remember the four basic principles: I get to three and then get stuck.  Memorizing a nine-verse song with long words that have to be exactly right or the rhymes don’t work, and no room for breathe or think? Out of the question. But I wanted to. And I was armed with some new tools for mastery that I've been using really successfully in my aikido and music practice.  So here’s what I did: Start with absolute confidence that it was possible .  Practice S-L-O-W-L-Y .  I have a cool program called Amazing Slow Downer . I set it up in my car t...

This entire post is pretty much paraphrased from my awesome piano teacher, David Leonhardt . Most people, when they begin to play with a metronome, start by setting the metronome to slow. They practice until they are proficient at that speed, then they gradually speed up the metronome. Very seldom do people start the metronome at the speed they would like to play the tune, and then step by step, slow the metronome down . This is kind of like a Tai Chi of music. When you slow the music down to the point where you have big gaps between the chords or notes you have to play, a lot of really interesting things happen. You can no longer play "automatically." It's just too slow. You actually have to know what you're going to do next It's a great focus practice, because, oddly, you're going so slowly that it's easy to lose track from one chord to the next You are going slowly enough to expose your (beneficial and not-so-beneficial) thought processes...

Today my piano teacher (who is awesome) was trying to help me improve my mediocre improvisation skills. We were talking about the fact that the improv sounds much better when you leave intentional gaps, spaces, or pauses in the music. They add a rhythmic component, they focus the listener's attention on what they heard, prepare them for what they're about to hear. They help me gather my thoughts before I come up with more ideas, and they just make the whole thing sound better. But even though I know this, I don't do it. "You have to practice it," Dave said. " You have to practice taking a rest ." I wrote that down.... .....in BIG LETTERS.

I remember one time I was in the locker room at the Y with my friend Jan. We were putting on our aikido gi (uniforms) before class. There was a little girl of about seven in the locker room with her mom, changing after a swimming class. As we put on our black belts and tied them, the girl's eyes lit up with wonder. "You're black belts ?" she asked. "Yes, we are!" said Jan, smiling. I guess no matter how jaded you are, when you can impress a 7-year-old, it feels really good. As the girl and her mom left, Jan looked at me and said quietly, "...and it's not as hard as you might think. All you really have to do is keep showing up." Of course Jan was underplaying the hard work she's done to achieve a high level of mastery. However, she made a great point. There are times when the most important thing to do is to show up. Whether you're writing a book, running a marathon, entering a violin competition, or just trying to get thr...

Recently after an aikido seminar, a bunch of us convened at a local restaurant with Sensei . As I was chatting with someone next to me I looked up, and Sensei met my eye across the table. "Judy, what do you think of Sensei this time?"  I laughed and said, "Sensei, you're even more amazing than before !" (First principle of ethical speech : Is it true? Yes. He was definitely more amazing.) Somewhat tongue in cheek, since the answer is the point of all his teaching, I asked him, "Sensei, how do you do it ?" He pulled up his sleeve to show me (for probably the 100 th time) the way he can keep his forearm and biceps totally slack and soft. And he said, (for probably the 1,000,000 th time,) "Judy: the secret is, I never use muscle !" A friend of mine once lamented, "Why is it you have to be in therapy for years before you hear the thing the therapist has been telling you ever since the first day?" Looking back over my po...

Have you ever had this happen? You try to persuade someone of something, and they just won't listen. but three days later they read it in the news and it's as if they came up with the idea themselves - they tell you about their great idea. It's frustrating! But it's understandable. Sometimes we have a hard time grasping a new idea when it's presented "straight on." It's like it has to come at us from a different angle, and then we have to absorb it as our own. I think it's like that with my practice. I have to absorb new ideas, think about them, and make them my own. Sometimes I write about aikido and sometimes I write about music. Most of the time I think the concepts I write about relate to both, (though I don't always mention it). You may wonder, "What audience is she writing for, that practices aikido and music? That can't be more than 100 people on the planet!" Here's my sneaky scheme: Both music and aikido a...

I dislike the concept of  listicles ,  as readers may know , but I ran across a nice blog post called  8 Things Top Practicers Do Differently . It's a brief summary of some research  done in 2009. The principles translate (as they so often do) to martial arts practice as well. You can read the post , ("No! I'm too busy! Just tell me what it says!"), but here's my takeaway ("Thanks!"). A group of piano students were set a brief excerpt of music, given the same amount of time to practice it and had to come back the next day to play it. Their performances were evaluated for correctness (right notes, right rhythm) and quality (tone, character, expressiveness). Practice Strategies of the Winners Since most people can only remember three things , here is a distillation of a distillation of the winning strategies: Whenever you practice, practice with focus and attentiveness . As we say in Kokikai Aikido, with "mind and body coordinated....

I have to work hard to carve out time for practicing, and sometimes I lose track of the fact that I play music because I love playing. I don't know how it is for other people, but, especially when I'm playing alone at home, I have to remind myself sometimes to just play . Play for fun. Play for playing's sake. Sit on the front porch with my instrument and mess around. It makes me feel guilty to have free time and not use it to practice. So I tell myself that, yes, it's fun, but it will also help me improve. That makes it OK. Maybe I should just pay more attention to my cat...

I've been thinking a lot about transitions lately.  I see a lot of people in yoga class who, when prompted to forward fold, or lift a leg into three-legged dog , zoom along in overdrive. I wonder, where are they trying to get to by going so fast? It's a fact that we all spend most of our mental "lives" in either the future (worrying, planning, anticipating, fearful), or in the past (regretting, reminiscing, rewriting).  We fall into the habit of thinking that we are in "transition" between one "important" thing and another: on the way to work, getting from downward dog to low lunge, getting "through" warmups. In fact our lives are one long transition from the two most important moments, birth and death. Are you really in such a hurry to get there ? But rather than beating ourselves up about our these habits, it's worth just looking at how we handle all the transitions in our lives. Do you tend to want to stay where we are, res...

Not long after I became a black belt in Kokikai Aikido , I was in the locker room at the Y with a friend who had been practicing a few more years than I. A little girl was with her mom, changing out of her swimsuit as we put on our uniforms. I felt proud as I watched her watching us put on first the t shirts, then the white pants, the gi top carefully wrapped and tied left side over right. When we took out our black belts, she finally burst out: "Oh! You're black belts?" We smiled and said yes. "I want to be a black belt!" My friend grinned and said to her, very seriously, "Well, all you have to do is keep going to class." These words hold great wisdom. They could be interpreted to mean that one needs no special talent, and yet I think the message of consistency is a powerful one. In terms of meeting long-term goals, talent is helpful, but consistency is a requirement.  I recently ran into someone I know who said he and his friend ...

Chick Corea, the 18-time Grammy winning keyboard legend, offers some advice to a fan who asked about managing practice time. I think this advice applies to all types of practice. Here it is: To learn how to prepare properly or practice properly, to make advances in one's technique, or knowledge at the instrument, or music in general, is a really important thing.  The main thing that I can see about practicing—and it's also true about playing—is that the very basis of practicing, and knowing "when" and "how" and all of that, stems from first having an intention to advance, an intention to improve. An intention to take a certain challenge, or a certain piece of music or a certain phrase, or any particular thing that you think of, and then you have an idea that you would like to improve it, and you also have an idea of how it probably would sound, when it sounded right.  And this is another real important aspect—how you know when you've arrived, ...

Often when beginning students practice an aikido technique they are frustrated at their inability to do the techniques correctly. (Actually, although they may be working on a different level of refinement, advanced students often feel the same way!) I have had students ask me whether we couldn't just focus on a few techniques until they get them "right," and then progress on to the next set, etc. I have never taught that way, mostly because my instructor doesn't teach that way, and Sensei doesn't teach that way. After a number of years, I realized that I did have a grasp of a great number of techniques, although I never remember devoting particular attention to any one. It was my piano teacher, David Leonhardt , who articulated why this worked in a lesson this morning. I asked, "Are you sure I should be moving on to the next exercise? I'm still pretty sloppy on this one in a lot of ways." He said, "Your goal in playing music isn't t...

When I was a kid I used to lie in the grass under a tree and stare up at the clouds. I would just watch the clouds floating slowly by, gradually changing their shapes. Occasionally I would notice a cloud that looked like a familiar object, and I would name it, "dragon," "ship," but mostly my mind just floated like the clouds, with thoughts coming in and flowing out just as freely. It was incredibly relaxing. I think most of us have very few moments of relaxation like that in our lives. What has happened to us? Life has given us so many experiences that whenever we have a thought, however random, it leads to another thought, and another, until we are carried far away from where we started. A lifetime's experience gives us many things to think about, many ideas to connect to. It's particularly unsettling to pay attention to the train of thought and realize how often it leads to self-criticism. This idea is particularly appropriate in a practice, whether it...