Karate Nobody

 I’ve spent a lot of time training kata and studying bunkai. It is really at the center of my training, at least mentally or intellectually. When I think about karate, I’m usually thinking about bunkai. The dojo I came up in had many many kata, something like 30 kata all told. As I discussed in my post of the Flexible Bunkai Model , I think there were several reasons for this and I’ve continued to train a number of those kata beyond the 8 classical Goju-ryu forms. However, what I’ve stopped trying to do is decipher bunkai for those kenkyu or research kata. I’m sure I could slap together something obvious (and have had to do that before for testing), but I don’t believe it would be close to the Core Bunkai I would want, the ones the kata was built around. For Goju-ryu, I think I have enough of a map to find those Core Bunkai. For example, Goju-ryu bunkai will usually have you move off the line of attack, get in close to control the attacker, and finish with a strike to or t...

While karate-ka love to talk about spirit , no one ever seems to define it. Indomitable spirit is one aspect of it, usually in the context of a ferocious warrior-like spirit. Gentleness and benevolence also come up from time to time too, as in the Bushi or gentleman warrior. For me the spiritual side of training is more grounded than those two extremes. I'm not trying to be  an ideal, I'm trying to be , ideally. I believe that life is difficult. In different ways, and certainly not equally distributed, but everyone will face hardship and have burdens to carry in their lifetime. For me, karate teaches us how to endure this hardship and make peace with the struggle. Obviously in the dojo we push ourselves past our previous performance as we get stronger and more skilled. One reason I’ve always loved pushups is because they work the most important muscle in karate – the never-give-up muscle. But the real lessons in spirit come when you look beyond just the physical demands o...