Jiu Jitsu is unlike many other martial arts.
It came of age in the early days of the UFC and MMA and that brutal gauntlet divorced it from the pageantry and bullshit that typifies many martial arts.
As a child in the early and mid ‘90s, I studied Koei-Kan Karate. I lucked into a legitimate school, not a McDojo. There was hard sparring and face strikes were permitted. This appealed to me, but when the time came for Kata, I tuned out. In tournaments, I only competed in Kumite, never Kata.
Kata seemed irrelevant to me, something more dance-like and less martial. I was missing the point, though if the point had been explained to me, I doubt that I would have understood. In any embodied practice, the point is experiential and comes with time in immersion.
Reflecting on those early Karate days now, I see that Kata is embodied meditation. It is a deliberate, focused practice. It is a quest for kinesthetic precision and a simultaneous profound mind-body understanding of what each strike or block or stance is. It’s an understanding that happens before thought even enters the picture.
Pretty profound for something that seems like total bullshit. Do it enough and you begin to see the martial utility.
Does BJJ need Kata? No, I think BJJ is fine as it is and is evolving as it should be evolving. But I do feel that sometimes, BJJ is sufficiently martial and not enough art.
It falls to the individual grappler to bring in the art. How do we do this?
Category: Inner Work
Tag: Embodied Wisdom
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