Seme, Kata, and balancing the Force...

Late last night, after a bad training session (well, bad for me...) I was reflecting on a few things.  Sitting in a subway car with no air on, in the middle of a hot summer night, is good for this...

I was working on Kata that night, and technical issues aside (there are many) one thing came up that always seems to come up.  The issue of seme, or pressure.  You see it referenced in many forms of martial arts...sword spirit, warrior spirit, spriritual pressure (for you Bleach fans...) etc, but the feeling of being able to pressure your opponent by projecting a certain intent, and serving to control the fight with it, it should be part of everything we do.

My issue, and perhaps some of you suffer from this, is that I have difficulty getting into the mindset of projecting this.  In turn, this makes everything "weak".  Part of it is of course due to lack of confidence that I know what I'm doing - something that I personally overcome by training productively and improving my skill/technique (and staying not injured).  Beyond that though, the issue for me personally is finding the proper motivation to project the pressure without having to resort to "the dark side of the force".  Namely, anger and aggression as opposed to confidence in one's skill and ability.

Though certainly pretending you're mad can work, I find it doesn't transfer well to real-life fighting.  If you've ever been in a fight, getting angry can help you win, but more often than not, it usually just leads to getting hurt yourself.  So, there has to be a different type of motivation.

I'm not sure what it is yet.  Perhaps it will come only when I feel improvement and feel greater mastery of kihon and kata.  Perhaps it will come only if I find self-confidence that I am improving and are making progress.  Maybe it will only be found through combat, even if that combat is Gekken.  In any case, what I took from yesterday's training session is that without intent, the movements are just an elaborate dance, and with poor technique, not a very pretty one.  Of course I've known this, but when you see complete beginners generating greater intent than you, and you are supposed to be sempai....well, it's really kind of telling!

So, finding motivation - and using it to generate proper seme....that's my personal homework (one of many).  Technique aside, which is a completely different subject, if I can find my own seme, I'm hoping it will improve Kata dramatically.   After all, if I wanted to do a dance, I would just take dance classes :)

Maybe the next subway ride through hell in NYC will give me an epiphany...