Somewhere along the way, my eye for detail became lazy. Funnily enough, apparently one of the topics in our Saturday class was ego. I missed this class as I had to work, but Todai Burke wrote a great blog about ego.
This week was an eye opener on ego and eye for detail for me. One of my favorite and go to forms is 18 Temple Motions. Now I love all of our Kung Fu forms, but this particular one feels the most versatile to me. It can be my warm up and cool down form, as well as my powerful precision form. The internal and external forces in this form is something I treasure. This was the form I chose for 2 IHC years in a row for these reasons.
Now I should have ‘gotten’ it by now, right? Wrong. When it is said - when you think you’ve got it, you don’t - it is said for good reason. This week I was shown how I am doing a couple of techniques incorrectly. Somewhere along the line I lost my eye for detail, became comfortable with being incorrect, and also let my ego take over. I’ve been focused for so long, how can it be incorrect? Insert ego.
Now this is actually very exciting for me. It reinforces that I always need to have an open mind to be teachable. I am human, and my ego has a way of being ever present even when I don’t think it is. I am on the path to mastery, and there is never a time to not be mindful of mediocrity. We need our ego to keep our progression in front of us, but we also need to always be aware and mindful of our ego blinding us to mediocrity. Although I am needing to make small adjustments to a couple of techniques, this is actually quite monumental in my journey. The constant reminder of when I think I’ve got, I don’t.
One of the things I love about this great martial art of Kung Fu is it will never become mundane. No matter what level we are at, or where we are in our journey, there is always room to grow, and to learn.
No comments:
Post a Comment