Uechibones

all things Uechi and Ashtanga

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Part 1: The Big Picture

Video and Blog series: What the heck is martial arts all about? Is it just another sport or is there more to it?

Part 1: The Big Picture

The point and purpose of traditional martial arts training is health.

But being healthy is counter-cultural. Our culture does not value or understand health. We are quick to give our health the lowest priority and we sacrifice our health in pursuit of our goals.

Physical health

In a worst case scenario in which we would need our martial skills we would need to be physically strong and healthy to succeed.

Emotional health

But physical health is not enough. We need to be emotionally healthy and skillful so we can make healthy decisions and we need spiritual health so we have a healthy perspective and a healthy purpose.

Spiritual health

The big picture of martial arts training is summed up in the word Yoga which is a pun with two distinct meanings.

One meaning of Yoga is “union” meaning connecting with some sort of foundational truth however you conceptualize that, perhaps the Divine or God, or the Tao.

Yoga also means “yoke”, put on an animal to pull a load. Our daily karate practice is a yoke that we voluntarily accept in order to move closer to union.

Resources for Emotional & Spiritual health

The potential for spiritual and emotional development is built into our martial practice but we can miss it if we don’t know what we are looking for. The Eight Limbs of Yoga is a good place to start, particularly the Yamas and Niyamas. You can find many translations and interpretations of these precepts. Do not take anyone’s ideas as the last word - these concepts are for you to unpack over time.

Here is a link to JB’s introduction to the Yamas and Niyamas.

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Your Most Powerful Health Upgrade

Here is the second instalment of Five Things You Can Do In-between Classes to Get Way More Out of Your Yoga or Martial Arts. This one is all about your diet and it’s called….

Your Most Powerful Health Upgrade

What is the fastest way to upgrade your health and leverage all the good work you’re doing in class? Upgrade your diet.

I recommend a modified ketogenic diet - that’s keto with lots of veggies. Keto is a high fat, moderate protein, and low carbohydrate diet.

I started by cutting back on the bread and pasta I used to eat three or more times a day. Within a few short weeks I lost the “muffin top” I was growing around my waist, I had more energy, I was sleeping better, and my mood lightened considerably. I continued down this path for many years and I feel better now than I did in my 20s.

Here are some links to my most trusted sources for good diet information. I encourage you to read, think, and experiment. There’s no stronger way to improve your health than to improve your diet!

Eric Berg

Lots of solid, actionable info. He has a remarkable talent for making complex science accessible.

He has an excellent YouTube channel, a book, and a pamphlet.

Dave Asprey

He coined the term “bio hacker” and he’s earned it! He has taken the science-based pursuit of health and longevity to the extreme. It’s good to know where the edges are!

He has a couple of excellent books and a great podcast and blog.

Gary Taubes

This Harvard-trained science journalist reviews the last 100 years of food research revealing some important basic facts, including:

It is impossible to get fat by eating fat,

High carbohydrate consumption causes diabetes and heart disease,

There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.

He has two good books on this subject: Why We Get Fat and Good Calories/Bad Calories, and some good YouTube videos.

Thomas DeLauer

A bodybuilder, model, and food science geek. Great if you want a lot of biochemistry detail. Here’s his YouTube channel.

See you in class!

Ken

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Guest Post! - Mark Ellis “Northern River Notes, blog #1″

In my understanding of Uechi-Ryu, there is an emphasis on grounding, as well as an upright posture.  Naturally, I think of my feet for grounding, and my upper back/shoulders/neck/head for standing up straight.  Within the past couple of years, I have found a very strong connection to what my ‘core’ is doing in relationship to my body mechanics in Karate.

I used to differentiate the core with the Dan Tien.  More and more, I see them as the same thing.  The Dan Tien encompasses the ‘core’.  However, using the word core makes engaging the lower abdomen more accessible to me.  

The body is a series of interconnected systems, and I was looking for a way to connect the upper body with the lower body.  

To give an example, I use the word “engagement”.  When I engage my core, it brings more focus to the Dan Tien and my awareness is brought to unifying the entire body.  I don’t clench the abdominal muscles, or somehow bring tension to my torso.  To explain it mechanically, I draw the abdomen inward, toward the spine.  I bring a compactness to the stomach muscles.  It’s similar to the bandhas in the Ashtanga practice, but not as vigorous.  I don’t want to bring any restriction to the breath with the Uechi-Ryu movements.  

The Dan Tien is fluid, and my engagement of the core reflects that.  There is no recipe for how I engage it, or at what time, to what intensity, etc.  But my awareness is there.  I find it very helpful for joining posture and grounding, and bringing maximum power to my movements.  

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Hard and Soft: gentle, happy practitioners with forearms like crowbars.

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Gordian Health Knot

I made a point in class last Saturday that I would like to flesh out a bit. This is a big subject but I just want to give anyone who is interested a way to start cutting this Gordian knot.

I am talking about diet. The point I was making in class is that the three pillars of health are exercise, sleep, and diet. (Thanks to JW for this insight.) Our traditional Asana practice (including our martial work) pretty much covers our exercise needs. We can take steps to improve our sleep (that’s another blog post) but the low hanging fruit for improving anyone’s health is diet.

I said this in my little talk in class: “If you are eating a conventional diet you will get sick.” Sadly, I think that is true. We are living in a very unhealthy food culture.

So what is the problem with our culture’s conventional diet? A lot. But to make it as simple as I can, the main issue is the predominance of simple carbohydrates. That means sugar. Simply put, carbohydrates = sugar. That means that when you eat a simple carb, like bread or pasta, as far as your body is concerned, you just ate a bowl of sugar.

So to get a great start down the road to the healthiest version of yourself, my recommendation is to reduce (or better yet, eliminate) breads and pastas. You could go further and eliminate all grains. (Do not reduce calories! Consider that reducing calories works only because some of those calories are simple carbohydrates.) There is much more you can do, but this is a great start and you will feel (and see) differences quickly.

Moving down the road towards the healthiest version of yourself is the entire point of traditional practices. Emotional and mental health is the prime goal, but traditional practice recognizes that there is no real distinction between the brain and the rest of the body.  If you are engaged in traditional practice but your diet is not supporting movement toward your healthiest self, you are pulling in two directions at once. And as powerful as our physical practices are, they are no match for a poor diet. 

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The Other 23 Hours - new blog post for you. Enjoy! http://uechibones.tumblr.com/

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The Other 23 Hours

“When damaged, the liver causes a potbelly appearance..There is a tight, almost arthritic-like feeling in the lower back, particularly in the morning. There is also a tightness or pain in the right shoulder or right side of the neck, which they will swear is an old injury, but treatments to the right shoulder never seem to resolve it long term.”

Eric Berg, DC, The New Body Type Guide

An obvious benefit to practicing Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is that it is superb exercise. It just covers so many bases in such an efficient way. A less obvious benefit is at least half the reason I practice daily and that is that it is such a good diagnostic. However I feel when I get up in the morning, it is not until I get on the mat that I really know what is going on for me. 

The first few Sun salutations can be surprising - I might have more energy, strength and flexibility than I expected, or I might have less - and even that revelation is not an accurate predictor of how I might feel by the end of the practice. After many years of practice I am so aware of my range of motion in each joint that I notice even small differences from day to day. I see these variations as health indicators. Sleep, exercise, and diet are the three pillars of health, so these indicators give me important information about the quality of my sleep and diet. (By the way, the concentration challenges of maintaining the internal count is also a good indicator of mental sharpness and emotional stability.) 

This is a gift. I suspect that if we were insightful enough we could point to specific indicators in the practice and identify the likely cause; as in, tight hamstrings means not eating enough raw greens; a stiff back means consuming too much sugar or alcohol. (These are nonsensical examples; I do not have anything even approaching that kind of insight.) 

I chose the quote at the beginning of this post because the symptoms of liver disfunction in that book accurately describes my tendencies. In the world of Qi gong and traditional medicine, liver and gall bladder disfunction is associated with anger. That means that anger hurts the liver and a compromised liver makes us prone to anger. I used to have meaningless waves of anger and frustration in every Yoga practice. That is completely gone now. Now I get meaningful waves of gratitude and contentment. 

Once we have a steady practice established, the next level, the next gift, is to improve the other 23 hours of the day. 

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Last night’s class takeaway. #yegfamily #yegcommunity #yeghealth #yegwellness yegkarate #yegyoga

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Enso as Practice. A new blog post for you. http://uechibones.tumblr.com/ #poseoftheday #yegwellness #yegfamily #yeggers #yegcommunity #yeghealth #ashtangapractice #yegkarate #yegyoga (that’s Dave’s Enso, btw!)

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Enso

Do you know what an Enso is? You can see endless beautiful examples in Google images. Making them is a practice and they also describe what practice is. 

The first thing you notice about them is they are circles. That tells us that a practice covers the same ground, around and around, over and over. My teacher said that this is not a rut, it is a spiral. We come back to the same or similar issues but we are working with greater experience and understanding each time.

Usually there is a gap in the Enso circle. That is the part of the practice you do not understand or do not like. That is where the baby is that you are sometimes tempted to throw out with the bathwater. 

Each Enso is unique, but not because the artist is trying to do something unique - exactly the opposite; each artist is drawing a circle. 

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Uechi masterclass! #yeggers #yegfit #yeghealthyliving

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A top student’s takeaway from our Saturday morning class. #yegkarate www.threebattles.com

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View this post on Instagram

Hey all you wonderful followers of this account! We are moving to YEGKARATE. Please follow us there. See you there! This video is the first in a new series: What’s Your Takeaway from Class? Enjoy!

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Innovation in Traditional Practice - New blog post for you! #yegkarate #yegyoga http://uechibones.tumblr.com/ www.threebattles.com

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Innovation in Traditional Practice

There are stages of development in traditional practice. At the start we do well to take our teachers’ instructions literally and pretty much do as we are told. That approach will get us through the beginner stages fast. It just doesn’t make sense to be changing things before we understand them. As they say, you can change the practice or the practice can change you.

At a slightly more advanced level we move past simple obedience. We need to really understand the directions we are receiving and that takes a kind of translation - we have to translate the teaching into our own language and into our own bodies so we can really work with it. 

As we progress with this more advanced approach we find that we can sometimes answer our own questions. I often get questions from students at this level that aren’t really questions - they have already answered their question and they are bringing their discoveries to me for confirmation. This is entirely healthy. 

After a few decades you don’t need external confirmation. At this stage you are expected to bring something to the practice from your unique perspective. We all have a unique perspective, we just need to get advanced enough to make our contributions. Everyone has that potential. 

It is important to know which of these stages we are in. Sometimes beginners want to skip to innovation before they have a basic understanding; sometimes advanced students want to stay in their obedience comfort zone. By understanding and accepting where we are we accelerate our progress to the next level.

It’s worth noting that the more advanced and innovative a practitioner is the more likely they are to be very strict with themselves about the fundamentals. The longer we study a traditional form the more we respect it.

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Anger

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” Nelson Mandela

Anger is unbecoming of a Karateka or a Yogi. Here’s why:

Anger is destructive. 

When you are angry you are doing harm - automatically. At the very least you are harming yourself. If there is anyone within sight, sound, or text of you, you are probably harming them too.

Anger is stupid.

When we are angry we get the facts wrong. We think we have the high ground but we never make things better with our anger, we always make things worse.

Anger is fear.

A primary insight of traditional practice, Karate in particular, is that fear and anger are two sides of the same coin. The coin is ignorance. (see Anger is Stupid)

Anger is self-perpetuating.

There is no such thing as venting anger. When you are angry you are practicing anger. With practice you can get really good at getting angry faster and staying angry longer. 

Anger is self-indulgent.

The only people who can say, “I can’t help how I feel” are children. The rest of us are responsible for the feelings we cultivate and express. Feelings come and go like clouds. We choose which feelings we feed or starve. Choose wisely. 

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Builds Confidence! (or does it?) New blog post for you! http://uechibones.tumblr.com/