When the wooden sword cuts toward me, I reach mine out and catch the impact, gather it close, and then open for the next attack. We are practicing a simple exercise of stepping forward, cutting, and my receiving the attack without harm to either of us. My partner is newer. Where I’ve been practicing for almost two years, I’ve only begun seeing them around in the past six months. Not the biggest gap in experience but enough that I can recognize both the eagerness, insecurity, and tension mirrored in his attacks.
“Can I offer you a suggestion that helped me?” I ask. I’m hesitant to offer advice or corrections since I still feel like such a beginner, but today I feel the urge, and he’s open to it. “Don’t look at the swords when you strike. Look at me. It’s weird, but it helps.”
He’s open to it but seems mistrustful of his ability to try the advice, and I get it. My instinct has always been to stare at the perceived imminent threat, tension building in my body. An internal fight wants to occur when I see the threat coming—the sword cutting toward my face, the melting ice caps, the erosion of protections of women and queer people, the increasing polarization. One part of me wants to turn rigid, feeling safer, as though by becoming tense my body will absorb and negate the damage. Another part of me wants to completely collapse in cynicism and despair—resistance is useless and laughable, there is nothing to be done but watch the destruction.
Practicing a martial art is one of the ways I’ve learned to notice and step out of that battle. Learning to calmly receive a sword blow teaches me much. When I stare at the sword, too much of my mind is active. I am hyperfocused on the threat and my beliefs about the threat. My body tenses and doesn’t know what to do. It’s like all my focus is in my brain, on the thought of being in danger. When we’re driving and we become hyper-focused on something dangerous—an accident on the side of the road, for example—our bodies begin to subtly start to move toward it. It’s a strange paradox of the human threat response system, to move toward the feared outcome.
But when I am gazing at the person attacking me, eyes soft, taking in everything that is happening, my body feels more engaged and able to respond. In part I see that I am not in danger. I am practicing with another human being who instinctively does not want to hurt me, especially when we’re looking each other in the face. We are connected. Humans have an instinctive aversion to directly causing harm to another human, it’s something that has to be trained out of us, or else we have to be convinced other people aren’t humans, depending on the reason we are being encouraged to kill and harm.
In the Tarot, Swords represent the realm of thought, intellectual processes, and analysis. The suit of swords tends to be a rather gloomy, painful affair, full of grief, indecision, paralysis, and conflict. Yet my first Tarot teachers spoke of the capacity of the sword to “cut through the bullshit.”
When we are too fixated on our thinking, on our certainties, and we focus too much on each other’s swords, then we lose that capacity for discernment and cutting through bullshit. Our fighting is about whose ideology is the most correct, the most pure, the most evil. We stop seeing the human on the other side, holding the blade, and then we lose a great deal more. So much damage occurs when we forget about humanity. We create restrictive laws that create suffering for real people. We hurt the people we love most because we are fighting against an imagined monster.
Instead of fighting enemies, I like the somewhat antiquated word of “adversary.” An adversary is simply one who is on the opposing side, a person who challenges me, who brings attention to issues I wasn’t considering, who points out the holes in my logic, who provokes me to understand my position in a deeper way.
In life, this feels deeply threatening, but if we can look at our adversaries and remember their humanity, perhaps we have the possibility of simply practicing together. At the same time, it is not merciful to allow myself or others to be harmed if there is anything I can do to defuse and end the attack.
After two years of practicing martial arts, and more than fifteen years of practicing sitting meditation, I am beginning to find I have enough expertise to be very clear about when I’m doing things wrong. In my dojo, the teachers often say the expression, “Perfect practice makes perfect,” and I feel a sense of despondency at the belief that my body has not learned all the skills necessary to even engage in perfect practice.
Yet I see that now I can feel when the movement is not working correctly. I am beginning to sense the corrections I need to make instead of needing people to point them out to me all the time. I still encounter the judgment and expectation that, during sitting practice, one is supposed to be able to entirely clear one’s mind of all thought, and I find those moments exquisitely rare.
Attachment to perfect execution or perfect outcome seem to me another way of setting myself up for rigidity and despair. What has been far more workable for me is a goal of becoming better at returning to center, as my teacher T. Thorn Coyle often taught. When I am knocked to the ground, I have learned how to fall gently and safely and get back up ready for another round of practice. When I find myself mired in cynicism and despondency, it takes me less time to remember myself and recommit to my work.
There is no end to work or the cycles of history, though practice helps us begin to see that what we encounter are not cycles but spirals. Instead of circling through the same issues and problems in the exact same way, we begin to notice how this iteration of the cycle feels different, more expansive. We see more nuance in the problem. We spend less time being stuck in the outcome. The damage is less severe. We find more capacity for joy even when these problems exist.
May we all show up to practice together.