Bunkai thought process
So, one of the things I have been thinking about lately is the mistakes (to me anyway) that I have done, or have seen others do when thinking about bunkai.
I will start with what I consider an important thing to keep in mind when working out new bunkai for kata. When going through potential new applications for kata I have seen, and been guilty of it myself, that many will only think about attacks that they are familiar with. If their system is based on very linear motions then that is usually what they design bunkai to defend against. I know I have seen this within my own training since Isshin-ryu is very linear on many levels with less hooking and swinging attacks. Because isshin-ryu has less of the swinging attacks, at one point it took me some time to consider such attacks because they were outside of the normal things I practice myself.
To me now, it seems like a very obvious thing not to over look, but I have seen it many times and found myself doing it as well. I would assume it is common because the people we practice bunkai with are almost always from our own dojo/style. This causes us to over look the ways other styles attack and can also lead us to the false conclusion that the person we are fighting knows any kind of martial art at all (and bad ass doesn't count as a martial art!).
For me once I started looking at the way other styles attacked, and just used common sense, I started to come up with new applications that proved to be effective and simple (my favorite kind of bunkai!). More importantly it helped me give myself good answers for parts of kata I never felt comfortable with the application for.
For me breaking out of the box that my brain had put my bunkai into started when I attended a seminar with Tsuyoshi Uechi Sensei in 2010. During a break he showed a simple bunkai to someone for part of chinto that really made me realize I had been missing a lot of obvious applications that I never should have been. From there, I started looking at the ways other styles attack from videos on youtube, books, talking to others, and etc.
Breaking out of the box that your style might put you into can be done many different ways: working with people from other martial arts, watching other martial arts, looking at untrained fighter's attacks, learning proper body mechanics. The most important things that should be done though is just working with a partner and just getting down to business working through kata.
I hope this was all clear. I am rusty in writing my thoughts out ( and I was never that good to start with).
Feel free to comment. I know I have just touched on the surface of what could be said here.