Frustrated

 “working on what you’re bad at is the best way to get you excited about training, once you start to analyze, apply your eye-for-detail, and put in mindful repetitions you are bound to improve and that improvement will spur your forward, but even when we know this on an intellectual level, we don’t want to practice what we’re bad at, because it makes us feel bad”

Not me though, I love to find what I’m bad at because it gives me focus, it gives me something specific to work on and I almost always find new insights! I like to approach things with curiosity rather than frustration, ‘hmm why is this not working?’ rather than ‘wHy iS tHIS noT WORKING!!!???’

Or that’s what I used to tell myself, but recently I have found something I am truly BAD at, and now I feel like I actually understand the last half of the opening sentiment.

We’ve been working on lion dance stacking in the blackbelt class and I feel frustrated, and incompetent, and frankly like a bit of a failure. The closest thing I can relate this to is when I was first working on my spinning-back-kicks, I like to take things very slowly in the beginning and really break things down and analyze them, but the technique happens so fast that if you slow it down, it doesn’t happen at all. This stacking has all the troubles of high speed PLUS each repetition requires much more exertion so you tire a lot faster, and so technique becomes a lot sloppier faster too, making progression even slower PLUS on top of that you’re working with a partner. I don’t consider to have done a single one right so far and when I left class I realized it was getting to me. But I wanted to understand, I wanted to approach this with excitement and determination, rather than frustration and failure so I though about it the whole ride home. The thing about stacking is almost all of the responsibility falls to the “tail” (and I have only been practicing as a head). The problem with this is I want to take on all the blame myself. It probably didn’t help that I worked with 4 different tails tonight and none of them could get me to single stack, when I had seen almost all of them do it with other partners, which made me feel like I am the one at fault. In any case, I want to do what I can to improve because I’m the only one I have control over.   

Problem 1) I don’t trust any of my tails. While they’re trying to adjust me, I am usually undoing their work and trying to make the adjustment myself, ultimately making it harder on them. I also realized that because I don’t trust them I am always uncomfortable in the air: I hunch over trying to maintain my center (where I feel comfortable) rather then opening and straightening and letting my tail move my skeleton where it needs to go. I am throwing my lead leg around to maintain MY center rather than OUR center as a lion.

Problem 2) I am uncomfortable impacting others: this is a problem that surfaced in my 5 applications last year, and again in the fight choreography this year, my partners are always telling me to hit harder, hit closer and I always find myself pulling just short or only letting out a bit of power. This is becoming a problem in my stacking because I am hesitant to push against my tail, I am worried that I will shift my weight too much and topple us both over. It comes out in my landing too, I am scared of kicking them, I am scared of landing too hard, I am scared of where I’m landing, etc..

Problem 3) I black out at the apex. Whether it’s because things happen too fast for me to process, or I am panicking in the air, or I can’t see where I am supposed to be landing. I can’t see what’s happening  or control what I’m doing most of the time (i.e. my intent vanishes). 

So now that I have identified a few problems that I think are giving me the most trouble, I need a plan to work on them.

1) While I won’t be able to fix this one quickly, being aware of it might be the first step to becoming ok with letting go of some of that control. I also plan to practice my handstands so I can get used to the feeling of going backwards out of my center (i.e. legs going past my head) without so much panic.

2) I need to practice taking up space while we’re stacking, getting closer to my tails chest and trying to be mindful of when I am being hesitant.

3) This one seems so obvious once I gave it some thought, but next time I’m going to film it so that I can watch back and slow down everything that’s happening when my brain fails to record any memory of what happened.