Budo and Stillness

Photo by Ever Omar Laura Perez on Unsplash

The modern world seems to abhor stillness. If we’re not doing something, something must be wrong. The corporate offices I worked in couldn’t bear for someone to be still. If you weren’t visibly busily working on things, a manager would be talking with you pretty quick. TikTok, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the rest of social media positively thrive on unnecessary activity. They work hard to tweak their algorithms so you never stop scrolling. TV shows are ”Must Watch.” The apps on our smart phones do their best to keep us engaged with them and disconnected from reality.

We live in a world where companies will spend wild amounts of money for our attention. They want our eyes glued to the screen because they make obscene amounts of money selling our attention. Often we seem to be the only ones who don’t understand how valuable our attention is. What we pay attention to is our life. Literally. You will only see, experience, and remember those things you pay attention to. On social media, your attention is the product being sold, and you’re not getting much for it.

To step into a budo dojo, even the noisiest, most chaotic seeming dojo, is to step away from all the media seeking to suck every last second of your attention away. The budo dojo is a place for focused attention, not scrolling an endless banquet of mental candy that withers your ability to pay attention for more than 30 seconds. The activity you see doesn’t seem to have much to do with developing your mind though. If I ask you what a place dedicated to developing your mind should look like, what would you describe? A library? A classroom? A crowded seminar?

Budo training starts out like learning any new activity. First, you spend a lot of time practicing basic movements. The surprise is that you’re going to be spending a lot of time learning to focus and pay attention to yourself and your body while repeating the same set of movements over and over. This is because you don’t learn to do them well by just repeating them. There has to be a real effort to concentrate during practice and make sure the details aren’t lost. You don’t want to do the same thing 100 times. You want every repetition to be its own, individual thing.

If I practice a throw or a strike or a sword cut 100 times, no two should be the same. Each will have characteristics I want to strengthen and characteristics I want to eliminate. Ask me after any cut, and I will be able to tell you what I found good and bad about it. My attention is on each cut, not drifting somewhere else while my body swings. The only practice of any real value is mindful practice.

Budo training is all about paying attention and actively choosing what you pay attention to. The only way you can pay attention to anything is if your mind is calm and still. The mind must be like a still pond on a windless night before it can accurately reflect the world around it. Social media encourages us to rush on from one post to the next without a break, and makes our minds resemble that pond during a thunderstorm, whipped up by the wind and disturbed by countless pounding raindrops smacking into it.

Budo teaches you to pay attention to the moments, to filter out the unimportant chaos around you. It starts with the little rituals of entering the dojo: you take off your shoes, put them neatly away, and bow respectfully to the room. The ritual slows you down and gives you a chance to breathe. Keiko often starts with a command of “mokuso!” directing us to quietly meditate on what we are about to do. Practice itself is focused. You learn not just combative techniques, but techniques for proper breathing and how to coordinate your breath with your action. As you advance, you learn to use breathing to calm your nerves and quiet your mind so you can focus on the lesson.

These are the first steps to learning to calm the wind and clear the clouds over the pond that is your mind. As you train mindfully, your physical skills will improve. Your mental skills will be developing and growing as well. You will notice that it is easier and easier to filter out the chaos around you and concentrate your mind on the particular technique or kata that you are working on. Your ability to take your mind from racing a mile a minute to being still and peaceful will grow and you’ll find yourself using it outside the dojo more and more.

One of the budo skills I find particularly useful is using my breath to calm my mind when I want to give my full attention to something, whether that is making sure I don’t burn dinner, a conversation I’m having with someone important to me, or an essay I’m writing. Any time I want to pay full attention to something and want to calm my mind, I start with my breathing pattern, just like I do in the dojo. I make sure I’m breathing from my diaphragm. I make myself actively aware of letting the air in and out of my lungs. I feel it flow in and out of my nose. This is an expansion of the proper breathing we do in the dojo. Only a few focused, conscious breaths are needed to allow me to drop whatever thoughts I am carrying about life, work, or any other distraction and bring a sharp, calm focus to whatever I am doing.

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This ability to calm and focus the mind is an essential lesson and practice of budo. At the most fundamental level, if your mind is easily distracted in a fight, you’ve lost before the fight has begun. If you can’t stay focused, something will undoubtedly grab your attention for an instant, and that’s the opening your opponent needs to take you down. The ability to calm your mind and pay attention is more important than the quality of your technique because it determines your ability to perform technique under pressure. If you can’t stay focused, it doesn’t matter how good your technique is in practice.

This is as true outside the dojo as it is in it. Every advertiser wants your attention, and they really don’t want you taking the time to think about what they are trying to sell you. They want you to just buy it. If you can’t calm your mind and pay attention to the things that are truly important to you, you’ll waste your entire life chasing whatever advertisers throw in your face.

The mental stillness and calm that is needed to perform under the pressure of a physical attacker in the dojo is just as necessary when dealing with all the things grabbing for your attention outside the dojo. YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are all designed to suck your attention and time–in other words, your life–and leave nothing behind. A calm, focused mind can make them useful tools that add to life instead of distracting from it. It takes practice and effort.

Staying calm in the face of everything that life throws at us throughout the day isn’t easy. Life is busy, often rushed, and filled with stress. Staying calm takes effort and practice. Though, if you’re doing it right in the dojo, you already have the tools to stay calm and relaxed in the midst of the storm. If you can stay calm when someone is trying to hit you with a big stick, throw you across the room, choke you unconscious, or punch you in the face, it’s a lot easier to stay calm when the attacks aren’t so brutal.

In the dojo we work on remaining mentally still even in the midst of violent chaos. Here’s a video of Ishigaki Shihan, an aikido teacher, doing randori against multiple attackers. He’s being attacked by a crowd of people, but even in all that chaos he is calm, almost sedate in the way he moves. There’s no rushing, no hurried movement. He is the stillness at the center of the storm. If he was distracted for even a moment, one of the attackers would surely get him. This is the sort of focus, concentration, mental calm, and stillness that budo training develops.

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There are loads of things attacking our attention all the time. When I’m driving on Detroit freeways, I see people checking their phones, eating meals, doing make-up, even reading books while driving. That’s on top of all the other things grabbing at their attention; other cars, potholes (this is Michigan), the radio or podcast they’re listening to, billboards, the attractive person on the bicycle, rainbows in the sky, and every other thing you can imagine. Being able to take a breath and let go of all those distractions so you can concentrate on not getting hit by one of the many crazy drivers that populate Michigan freeways can help you avoid nasty accidents.

The dojo can look like a chaotic whirlwind if you don’t know what to look for. With a little practice, you’ll be able to see islands of complete calm scattered around the room. There will be teachers and advanced practitioners who, even while they are moving, project a feeling of calm, stillness, and complete focus. Being able to maintain this state is one of the goals of budo practice. Budo may appear loud and chaotic, but as you progress, your stillness grows until your kokoro (heart and mind) remains calm and still even when you’re sparring. If you remain calm and still when people are trying to hit you, throw you, or choke you, you can keep calm and stay focused on what’s important anywhere.

Special thanks to Jacques Vorves for editorial support.

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