Chances are, that if you’re reading this, you are or have been a student of the Martial Arts. You may have trained in a beautiful school with nice aesthetics, or perhaps you trained in a basketball gymnasium. Or perhaps even a dairy truck garage? Okay, that last one may seem a bit strange to you but it is one of the places I trained and have fond memories there.
One of the challenges instructors have is finding a place that can adequately support the needs of their style. For some, really all they need is an open, flat, firm surface to train on. Others might need to have mats or other equipment to effectively train new students. Over the past month, I’ve been teaching a new crop of students, in a space that is more than adequate, and I have the equipment I need. Though I’ve been thinking a lot about what various training spaces have meant to me, and how it might shape the experience of new students.
My first training space was actually a small field, at around 2:00 am, my sophomore year of undergraduate school. It was my instructor’s lunch break (he worked overnight shifts) and was really the only time in our schedules I could make work. This was my first impression of what was required to do martial arts. No mats, no beautiful hardwood floors, no mirrors, no uniforms, no belts, no egos; just one person sharing information with another. This set a precedent in my mind that the Dojo is in fact not a physical place, but a place that exists within your heart and mind.
It’s easy to forget the hardships our forefathers in the martial arts experienced trying to establish new schools. The study of Asian Marital Arts outside of their home countries was something that each style experienced challenges with. Though here I am, a white man, teaching martial arts to other white people, in the rural hills of Vermont. Our training space is in a large open room inside of a Fraternity (Moose Lodge). There were people who dealt with daily death threats for sharing the knowledge they saw as proprietary to their culture, and now I am sharing that knowledge with another generation of martial artists.
I study a blended style so my martial arts family tree has three trunks, but if I look at one of those trunks it was my teacher’s teacher’s teacher’s teacher who was the first to bring a historically guarded Japanese art to non-Japanese. There is some footage available of some of this early training in cramped dojos and a lot of outdoor training. There is a lot we can learn about our fundamentals here, but I won’t say for a moment that it isn’t worthwhile to have a dojo with more considerable accommodations for safety, and optimization of training. We’ve learned a lot about our bodies over the years, how much damage they can take, and how a lot of us would prefer to retire with bodies that aren’t falling apart due to years of abuse. So having padded mats versus bamboo mats makes a difference.
At our school (like many others I’ve visited) we bow as we enter and exit the training space. I would posit that this is not only a sign of respect for the space and those that train there but also a moment where you can transform the space in your mind to be what you need it to be. When we grappled in a cold, barely-heated dairy truck garage in the winter, we realized that it was about what we were doing, not just where we were doing it.
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