Ornoth

Time for a brief update on my kyūdō practice.

You may recall that after 2½ years of painful struggle and utter failure in this martial art of Japanese archery, I attended a seminar in South Carolina in hopes that our sensei would be able to correct my constant misfiring, which I wrote about at length here.

That was four months ago. So how has it gone?

Holding the tally board following Austin Kyūdō's 108 Arrows Shoot 2026.

Pretty well. Putting sensei’s feedback into practice has helped immensely. While I’m still far from perfect, I’d say I’m able to shoot nearly as reliably as anyone around me, which is an amazing degree of improvement.

Which brings me around to yesterday’s practice session: our annual ceremony of shooting 108 arrows to begin a new year.

Ironically, the meaning behind the ceremony is Buddhist in nature, as a way to recommit to overcoming the 108 Defilements. In her email to the group, our club leader phrased it as “letting go of tension, frustration, mistakes, grudges, and anything else we carry from the past year.” I think those words perfectly encapsulate my attitude toward my shooting in 2025.

So this was a very intentional opportunity to make a break with the struggles of the past, and begin a new year with a clean slate.

In previous years, my terrible form and lack of confidence made this ceremony uncomfortable for me, and I contributed very little to the group effort. But with newfound confidence in my shooting, this year I was eager to push myself and publicly demonstrate my progress. Plus this would be exactly the kind of shooting-focused practice I need.

One way I prepared was working out with my bow while the group was on hiatus over the holidays. I specifically wanted to develop the strength to hold a full draw for longer, and the endurance to do so repeatedly. To that effect, I did daily workouts, building up to three sets of three draws with my 12 kg bow, holding each one for 24 seconds before release.

On the day of the ceremony a dozen of us showed up, so math suggested each person should aim for about 9 or 10 shots. Whatever! I was the first archer to the firing line, shot the club’s first arrow of the year, and spent the most time at the line.

And at the end of the session, I tallied 36 shots, well more than anyone else, and tying (intentionally not surpassing) the current record for most shots during the annual ceremony.

Not all of them were perfect, of course. About a third of the way in, three of my shots ricocheted off the target, but I realized what I was doing wrong and corrected my form from that point forward. And even if I count those as misfires, that’s still a 92% success rate, which I haven’t enjoyed since early 2023.

So yeah, my shooting has definitely improved, and I’m pretty happy with where I’m at, with an eye toward improving even further in 2026. Or, as the Japanese would say, “Daiseikō!”

Aside from general improvement, one of my next steps is joining the local archery range and getting proficient at distance shooting. The range is open all day, every day, and is a very convenient 10 minute drive from home.

I also have the option of formal testing and advancing in rank, but – having begun in a different school of kyūdō that doesn’t have tests or ranks – those things aren’t of any interest to me. Nor am I particularly interested in flying out to South Carolina (or further) every few months for seminars.

For now, I’m perfectly happy taking my time and refining my form, free of the significant downsides that come with formal testing and ranking systems.

Though I will say that after 2½ years of stress, insecurity, and failure, being the top dog at the dojo – even if it was just for this one day – felt really, really good. If this were a TV drama or sports anime, this would have been the climactic episode of my redemption arc! And it was a deeply satisfying way to begin a new year.

Like golf, kyūdō is supposed to be a little humbling. Part of this Japanese martial art is to provide the archer with opportunities to observe and reflect on his emotional reaction to stress, adversity, frustration, and failure.

I really don’t think it’s supposed to be this hard, tho.

But before I talk about what’s going wrong, let’s talk about what’s gone well: buying things!

Soon after restarting my lapsed kyūdō practice in a new lineage, I purchased a basic kyūdō uniform: a dogi, kaku obi, hakama, and tabi (i.e. shirt, belt, pleated skirt-pants, and footwear). Plus my first yugake (shooting glove), custom-sized for my hand and specially crafted in Japan.

Last year I added the essential equipment. I ordered four semi-fletched arrows from respected kyūdō teacher Dan DeProspero in North Carolina for close-range indoor use with a makiwara target. Then I gained a beautiful set of six fletched arrows for long-distance shooting, which my buddies picked up for me while they were attending a workshop at Blackwell-sensei’s dojo in South Carolina. And I topped it off with a new, extra-long (yon-sun), 12kg draw weight Jikishin II composite bow in a group order from Japan’s Sambu Kyuguten.

I definitely look the part. So what’s the problem? Literally everything else!

But taking aim at the main problem: I can’t release an arrow properly. Sometimes the arrow launches feebly and bounces off the practice target. Other times it flies thru the air sideways and clangs off the target. Sometimes the string tries to rotate around the bow so violently that the bow “flips” and inverts itself, requiring a manual reset. I’ve even broken the string on one bow. And every misfire produces eye-wateringly painful abrasions and bruising on my left thumb or wrist.

This kinda thing happens to archers from time to time. With a normal problem, you would diagnose what you’re doing wrong, correct it, and move on with your practice; but it’s been more than 18 months, and I’ve tried so many things, with no success in fixing my release. In the past six months, I’ve made just 23 successful shots, against 31 misfires of various kinds. And I sat out three entire practice sessions purely out of fear of shooting. I’ve even had actual nightmares about kyūdō.

These days, I panic before every shot, anticipating the painful abrasions and bruising that accompanies yet another humiliating misfire. Obviously, my “release anxiety” isn’t helping matters at all.

Another frustration is the number of plausible fixes I’ve tried. At first I thought that the glove on my right hand wasn’t holding the string securely, causing it to slip free unexpectedly, with my other fingers impeding its release. When fixing that didn’t solve my problems, I started looking at my left wrist, which is weak and thus has a tendency to buckle inward or outward at full draw. Then we tweaked my grip on the bow, even swapping in a larger grip, because my fingers are considerably longer than those of the average Japanese archer. I tried rotating my right arm vertically on release rather than horizontally, in case that motion was interfering with my release. I tried changed where the arrow was positioned against my glove and putting less torque on my right hand, thinking my glove might be nudging the arrow out of nock. I’ve perpetually been advised to loosen my grip on the bow, but that’s something I’m pretty cognizant of, and doesn’t seem to be the main problem. Because I’ve been afraid of doing a full draw for so long, I tried altering my stance to force myself to fully extended my left arm, in case that was influencing the flight of the arrow. And most recently, I’ve tried focusing my grip on the bow with my middle finger. Out of all these things I’ve tried, nothing has worked.

A complicating factor is that our club doesn’t have an actual experienced teacher among us. Our most senior member is still pretty junior, only recently graduating from Second Dan. So although I get a ton of well-intentioned advice from other members, it’s mostly amateur guesswork and is sometimes contradictory. So many different suggestions have been piled on simultaneously that I can’t adequately test whether any of them are working. Especially when we are only able to shoot three or four arrows per weekly session!

As I said above, part of being a kyūdōka is learning how to manifest stoic strength, showing neither elation nor disappointment in one’s performance. So I’ve been exceptionally patient, never showing any overt emotional response. Meanwhile, I’ve helped new practitioners, who began with considerably less skill and self-awareness, advance far beyond me in skill. Although I really don’t care about rank at all, after nearly two years of incompetent struggle, I’m not improving, and I’ve finally exhausted my willingness to suffer in silent solitude.

A normal kyudoka would long ago have called on the experience of their teacher. For better or worse, our Austin group falls under the auspices of a Seventh Dan teacher who lives in South Carolina and runs his own group there. He never comes to Austin, and we can only travel to see him once or twice a year, when he holds kyūdō seminars that are well-attended and open to the public. At those seminars, he prefers to work with his advanced students, and I don’t want to show up on his doorstep asking for him to solve some aging stranger’s beginner struggles. Ideally, I’d get my problems cleared up and develop some basic competence before working with him. But until that happens, I’d be too ashamed to show up with such fundamental problems, and it would be a pointless waste of a trip if I was unable to participate in shooting.

While I expect my struggles to continue, there are two potential options for possibly getting help.

Our sensei has mentioned the possibility of hosting a weekend seminar specifically for our Austin group. This could be a way for me to meet him and get some personal instruction without taking his precious time away from his favored students. The challenge would be getting a critical number of students to schedule travel together to South Carolina to make it worth sensei’s time. And meanwhile, I’ve got an upcoming surgery that’ll prevent me from flying for six months.

Another possibility might be sending video clips to him for his critique. This has the advantage of being easier to make happen, but it would limit how much sensei can see, as well as how quickly I could test out his suggestions and get rounds of feedback. Plus it would still be an imposition, and he’s known for being terse and a poor correspondent.

At any rate, I’ll be taking the month of March off from kyūdō following my upcoming surgery. I have no idea whether that downtime will be a useful reset for my technique or an opportunity for me to atrophy and fall even further out of practice.

This is all an immense challenge to the air of competence and Buddhist stoicism I usually try to exemplify. Despite my obvious struggles over the past year and a half, I successfully remained nonchalant and kept my frustration on a low simmer. But at this point the pressure has built up and reached an explosive level where it has to come out. It’s been a very long time since anything has frustrated and humiliated me so thoroughly as kyūdō.

After two years of continuous struggle, it would be illogical to think anything is likely to change. So there’s no way to end this post optimistically. Just venting, while documenting my lengthy, painful, and ongoing struggle.

As I step away from some of my older hobbies, it looks like kyūdō—the Japanese martial art of archery—might be a new activity that arises to take their place.

People who know me will realize that when I commit to an interest, I dive into it with a unique intensity and dedication. Looking back, I’ve had numerous interests which I pursued for years and sometimes decades, such as Tolkien fandom and fiction writing during my youth, or cycling and meditation as an adult.

But every five or ten years, I step back and reevaluate my hobbies and how they fit into my life. Often I can tell when a chapter of my life is about to end because I feel that my interests aren’t helping me grow in the direction I want to go in. It’s at those times that I’ll suddenly walk away from things I’ve been devoted to for years, such as when I left my writers’ group after running it for more than a decade. At the same time, I feel myself looking for what new interests might come along to replace the old.

In the past year or two, I’ve set the groundwork for dropping two time-consuming hobbies. I’ve already publicized that after fourteen seasons, 2014 will be my last year riding in the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, which will free up a lot of time I’d otherwise spend fundraising. In addition, I will soon stop tracking my money using the Where’s George website, after a ten-year run. These were great activities, but it’s finally time to move on.

Knowing that this would free up time and energy, I started kicking around ideas for what I might enjoy doing next: something I could get involved with that would also appeal to the very different person I have become.

And the first thing that seems to have arisen is kyūdō.

Kyūdō is a meditative martial art devoted to the traditional Japanese form of archery. It’s surprising that kyūdō is not widely known in the US, because it is extremely popular in Japan, where archery and its equipment are viewed as highly sacred. Kyūdō has been refined and distilled into a highly reflective, meditative practice, as reflected in the first western book on Japanese archery. Eugen Herrigel’s 1948 “Zen in the Art of Archery” was wildly popular and was the first book to use the now-popular moniker “Zen and the art of…”

So why have I been drawn to kyūdō? It’s hard to explain, but it boils down to six attributes that appeal to me: it’s social, meditative, physical, elegant, familiar, and Japanese.

Although the focus of the form of kyūdō is internal, participation and instruction are offered in the context of a small, friendly martial arts dojo of mixed ages and genders. This is imperative to me, since social life and connection is revealing itself as the primary project of my fifth decade of life.

I probably don’t need to belabor how kyūdō’s meditative focus complements my longstanding contemplative practice. As a form of meditation that involves a fair amount of movement, Kyūdō seems to nicely fit in the gap between rather sedate walking meditation and full-bore regular life.

For years, I’ve been looking for some technique for integrating physical exertion and meditation, which initially led me toward an exploration of yoga. However, being in a room filled with women in tight skinsuits—all rolling around on the floor in provocative positions—wasn’t especially conducive to internal exploration. Kyūdō allows and incorporates a focus on the body without the detrimental distractions.

However, like the asanas in yoga or the forms in tai chi, kyūdō is strictly choreographed. And when control of the human body and its motions is combined with the natural geometry of the bow, bowstring, and arrow, kyūdō epitomizes elegance and grace: attributes that I strive to embody.

And archery has always appealed to me. Even as a child, archery was my favorite activity at summer camp, and over the years I became pretty skilled at it. And in my medieval recreationist days I bought and used a very powerful English longbow, as well.

And for whatever reason, I seem to be in a phase where Japanese stuff is interesting, so it fits into that, as well.

So as you can see, kyūdō actually complements my interests quite nicely.

Practices are both convenient and a bit of a stretch. During the winter, they use an indoor aikido dojo in Union Square, which isn’t easily reached by mass transit, but is manageable. And in the summer they’re out in Lincoln, which would be really difficult, except that’s just one town over from where I would be training during a regular weekend bike ride, so I’ll probably combine the two.

I first started looking at their website around Thanksgiving, and saw that they were running a new student “first shot” training at MIT in January. However, it filled up before I could sign up.

So two weeks ago I showed up at the dojo just to observe. Fortunately, another new guy was there, and apparently we comprised enough interest for them to schedule another first shot training the following week. So I returned for a second visit and received instruction on most of the form from Joyce and Randy, with the expectation that I’d get to perform my first shots the next time.

This past weekend, I returned for part two of the training. Although the other new guy wasn’t around, I received additional instruction from Joyce, and then Don covered some more details before encouraging me to step up and take my first shot.

To put that into perspective, in Japan new students often take weeks, months, or sometimes years drilling the techniques before they’re allowed to shoot. Due to Americans’ typical impatience, our school has disposed of that, but it’s still a big milestone.

So I felt some anxiety as I stepped up and went through the movements and fired two arrows. When we move outside, we’ll fire at targets 28 meters away, but indoors we shoot at cardboard bales from a distance of about ten feet. I managed to remember most of the steps, but forgot to flip my right arm back upon my first release; I corrected it for the second.

What was interesting to me was how intensely the body experienced it. When I stepped away, my heart was racing and I was breathing heavily. I think much of that is due to the selfconsciousness of taking my first shot under the sensei’s gaze, combined with the physical stress of drawing the bow and the loud thunk of the arrow striking the target.

Of course, I haven’t mastered anything as yet. It’s frustrating but entirely predictable that some of the things I do wrong are common both to kyūdō and cycling, such as tensing and hunching my shoulders. And I also need to pay better attention to keeping my body facing perpendicular to the target, rather than turning toward it.

But it was successful! I’d followed the forms and properly fired and lodged my arrows into the target. So at least I’ve got the basics down.

Over time, I hope to embody some of the elegance that you can see in some of the YouTube videos or Vimeo videos about kyūdō. And if I stick with it, perhaps someday you’ll even get to see a photo of me in a hakama!