Ornoth

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.

Back in December, one of the teachers at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center sent me an email, inquiring whether I would be willing to volunteer to periodically read the announcements before their Wednesday evening dhamma talks.

This was ironic and fitting, after something I’d done the month before. During the feedback go-round at the end of the 9-day “Sandwich Retreat”, when I got the mic, I made a joke by reciting the familiar (and grammatically flawed) opening lines of the standard Wednesday night announcements. Since all the teachers had been watching, I suppose it was a manifestation of kamma that they’d soon single me out to “volunteer” to be an announcer when the need came up.

You might ask why I chose to do it, rather than tell them no. Over the past year I’ve really stopped going to the Wednesday night programs, and with my new job a 45-minute train ride from the center, I had a ready excuse.

On the other hand, it’s an easy way for me to give back to a center that has helped me quite significantly. Plus, after 15 years in consulting and 10+ years running DargonZine Summits, facilitating and speaking in front of a group are things I am very comfortable with.

Still, it would give me some interesting material to practice with, from nervousness and perfectionism to vanity and the ego. Plus it would earn me some respect as a leader, both by other practitioners as well as by the teachers. And it would certainly provide food for thought regarding my relationship to myself and the social environment, since I’ve always had a dualistic relationship with receiving attention and praise.

So given that the only material loss I’d face is some “me time”, I think the benefits of doing the announcements are worth pursuing, at least for the time being.

Once I made that decision, it surprised me that the people at the center didn’t schedule a training session for three months, until mid-March. But when they got in touch with me I blocked off a Friday night and left work early to get to Cambridge in time for the orientation session…

… which never happened. The guy who was supposed to train the two of us simply brain-farted and blew us off, not even remembering the meeting until more than an hour later, despite having called the other attendee the day before to ensure she’d show up. This is a person who has also either flaked or simply ignored my previous attempts to volunteer for the center’s tech committee.

I was ripped, but I had the presence of mind to examine the reasons why, rather than simply let my emotions run unchecked. When I tried to map my reaction to the needs, desires, and assumptions underlying it, I came up with several elements.

The two expectations I had of the administrator were competence and consideration. In the former case, I expected him to do something he committed to. In the latter, I expected that he wouldn’t waste my time, since I’d blocked off one of my rare free nights for this training. Of course, I often have to remind myself that I cannot expect other people to have the same zeal for competence and consideration that I do, and this was one of those instances.

However, lest you conclude that my passion for competence is completely positive, I have to admit that not only did my perfectionism cause me to have unmet expectations of someone else, but my high expectations for myself magnified my frustration a whole lot more…

You see, while the training was scheduled for Friday, I was already signed up to do the announcements by myself the following Wednesday. So by blowing off our training, the administrator had triggered my own concern over doing a good job the following week. And I generally don’t take well to anything that comes between me and an audience’s perception of me as a fully competent individual. So underlying my anger was my own anxiety, since his bungling might make me look like a fool a few days later. And that was the real issue.

For the next few days, my mind continually returned to how I was going to respond when I finally saw that administrator, mentally practicing a cutting response to an expected apology. Ironically, our homework for Narayan’s Long-Term Yogis group was exactly that: to observe repeating thoughts and try to let them go. Thanks to that homework, I had the presence of mind to avoid picking those thoughts up and running with them, which was very beneficial.

At the same time, when I did think about it, I realized that it was an opportunity to examine my reaction to being owed an apology by someone. My default reaction to an apology normally is to minimize and dismiss the offense, even though I’d remain angry internally. My usual preference would be to avoid bringing it up at all, to avoid any possible confrontation or unpleasantness. It’s an interesting thing for me to work with, since it’s one of the few situations where I have difficulty being my normally assertive self.

In the end, as I walked into the center for a rescheduled training session on Tuesday (the day before my premiere performance), I decided to throw away all my rehearsed lines and just respond to his apology with whatever response came to me at the moment. That was great, although it still wound up producing my usual self-effacing dismissal of the problem. Oh well!

So running the Wednesday evening talks involves a bit more than just reading the announcements. The announcer is also responsible for audio, which includes the mic for the teacher, as well as hearing-assist devices and their base station. We also record the talks live onto CD, so the recorder must be manned and media capture and levels properly set and monitored. And at the end of the night, one has to set up the room for the following morning’s sit.

So how did my first session go? For the most part, everything went off flawlessly. I only made a couple minor hiccups while getting through the announcements. On one hand, I was a little self-conscious about having to wear my reading glasses in front of the crowd, but on the other hand, it blurred everyone’s faces out when I looked up, so although it looked like I was making proper speaker eye contact, I didn’t have to actually register people’s faces, which made things a bit easier for me!

The biggest challenge I faced was when one of the attendees (a woman I know, actually), laid down in an aisle and closed her eyes while listening to the talk. It wasn’t long before the inevitable happened and she began snoring loud enough to distract the people sitting around her. Since she was (thankfully) right near me, I coughed loudly a couple times to try to keep her from dozing, and a couple times she snorted uncomfortably enough to wake herself. In the end, we were saved by the bell, but next time I’ll be sure to bring my keys, so that I can accidentally “drop” them in such a situation to startle the person into wakefulness!

The night included one final irony… The speaker that night was Winnie Nazarko, and the title of her talk was “Perfectionism”. Kind of appropriate, since perfectionism was the topic of our most recent Kalyana Mitta meeting; it has been the subject of my own recent contemplation of late (something for a future post); and it was the foundation of my desire to do a perfect job on my first night running the Wednesday evening dhamma talks!

So that’s how it went. I’ll probably do 3-4 more Wednesdays between now and September. While I’m pretty comfortable with the idea of running the show on Wednesday nights, I’m still pretty stunned to find myself in the position of being one of the primary public faces of the center. But it’s gratifying that they feel comfortable that I would do a creditable job in that capacity.