What hurts, teaches

Quae nocent docent ("What hurts teaches")
~ Adages of Erasmus Erasmus (under 31. I, I, 31. "Malo accepto stultus sapit" in Latin text )

Last week while I was sparring in my kali (stick fighting) class, I took a blow to the middle finger of my left hand, resulting in a finger sprain: a swollen, stiff, bruised finger that hurt whenever I tried to bend it.

The lesson I could have learned from this was that maybe I should try something with less risk of injury! But this would have been the wrong lesson. After all, in learning to use any martial art effectively, sooner or later you are going to be injured. If there is no risk of injury, there is also no way of truly gauging the effectiveness of your defensive technique.

This is the problem when we encounter pain, difficulty or struggle when we are learning anything. Is it a signal for us to give up? Maybe the first lesson that 'pain' teaches is a lesson about ourselves, about our tolerance for discomfort in the pursuit of what we purportedly wish to learn. The pain doesn't come with the lesson presented to us on a platter; more often we have to look for the lesson.

Some of the things that I learned from my experience:

• I chose to spar with less protection, using more heavily padded sticks, whereas I could have fought wearing more protection including padded gloves and heavier sticks. So lesson one: sometimes what appears to be the safer option is actually the riskier option.
• I couldn't have been struck on the hand unless my hand was in a position to be hit. So lesson two: keep my empty hand out of harms way (or at least use it effectively to ward off an attack) when defending myself.
• I wasn't even aware that my hand was exposed as a target. So lesson three: Be mindful of where all of your body is and what parts are exposed to attack.

All of these are useful lessons that will stand me in good stead the next time I fight.

However, the experience contained further lessons.

Since I couldn't bend the finger completely under its own power, as part of rehabilitating it, I've had to carefully force it to bend using my uninjured hand. This hurts a lot! But the choice is between experiencing some pain now and rebuilding flexibility while the healing process is taking place or risking not regaining full function. So sometimes short term pain is necessary to prevent future harm.

Pain isn't my teacher of choice. But by listening to it, I may prevent even greater pain in the future, as well as becoming more effective in one of my chosen martial arts.

Worthy opponents

Without the aid of a worthy opponent, who's not really an enemy but a thoroughly dedicated adversary, the apprentice has no possibility of continuing on the path of knowledge.
~ Carlos Castaneda Tales of Power

There is another reason to love our enemies: They force us to become smarter. The riddles they thrust in front of us sharpen our wits and sculpt our souls
~ Rob Brezsny Pronoia


Last year, apart from starting Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I also started learning Kali (Phillipino stick fighting, also known as escrima or arnis de mano, a martial art possibly related in the distant past to the silat of Indonesia and Malaysia.) Whereas BJJ is empty hand and mostly horizontal, Kali uses weapons (sticks and knives) and is mostly vertical.

One of the key things we do in Kali is sparring, and what I have found is that I learn more from sparring with a superior opponent than with someone I am more evenly matched with. When you have what Castaneda calls "a worthy opponent", you have to stay in the moment and fully alert, you know when you get hit, so you get more experience in learning to evade a serious attack and you learn from watching your opponent what worked when they attacked you, so you can see whether the same approach may work with another opponent. As a result your skill grows: in effect your opponent becomes the whetstone against whom you sharpen your edge.

And while this is a clear lesson in martial arts and in competitive sports and games, it is also true of learning in general. If you are able to just phone in your performance then you tend to become complacent. But when the result is in doubt, you have to stay focused in order to have any hope of victory.

Often your "worthy opponent" is your personal best. For example, if you have previously been able to bench a particular weight at the gym, then if you add 5 kg to that weight, it may become a more worthy opponent and it is the "struggle" against that opponent that increases your strength. If you are learning a language then if you set yourself a target of learning 10 new words a day when previously you have only managed to learn 5 new words a day then you have to find new strategies in order to succeed against this more worthy opponent, and thus become a more effective learner.

The flip side of this is making sure that you are yourself a worthy opponent: you must compete hard enough so that your opponent has the opportunity to learn from you. If you go too easy, your opponent may acquire habits and patterns that will fail against a stronger opponent or in a life-or-death situation. Instead, you must give them the opportunity to test for themselves what works and what doesn't. Unless your opponent has the opportunity to fail, they can't have the opportunity to honestly succeed.

While the examples I have given above have mainly regarded competing, they also apply in other contexts. For example, if you learn a partner dance such as salsa or modern jive, the women are often told to follow what their partner leads, not what their partner intended to lead. This is the only way that a guy can learn what works and what doesn't in leading a woman in particular moves on the dance floor; it is only by trying and not getting the result they expected that they can modify what they are doing until they succeed. In this case, even though the situation is one of cooperation, the woman can still act as a "worthy opponent".

The two take ways lessons here are:

• always seek a worthy opponent if you want to improve since a worthy opponent acts as a mirror of your faults and weaknesses and makes it clearer what you need to work on.
• seek to be a worthy opponent for others so that you help them to build their skills in turn.

Surfing the Edges

Far from slighting the hard parts, we need to embrace them.

~ David Perkins Making Learning Whole


In anything we wish to learn, there are things that we can do easily and things that we find difficult. And there are edges where with a bit of effort we can turn difficulty into fluency. It is these edges that provide us with our greatest opportunities for improvement.

If you only do the things that you are currently able to do easily then you won't increase your skills. Instead, it is better to adopt a strategy of stretching and then consolidating.
You first work out what edge you want to work on, and then use focused and structured practice in order to increase your facility on that dimension. Once you have pushed this edge out further, you then work on consolidating your new gains. (If you solely focus on stretching without consolidating, whatever skills you have acquired may collapse on contact with the reality of actual performance.)

If the skill is a physical skill then there are many edges you can work on including:

• physical capabilities such as flexibility, speed, stamina, smoothness, balance, agility
• broadening repertoire (extending the range of techniques that you can draw on)
• deepening technique (becoming more aware of the finer points of a technique and refining your performance.)
• flexible performance (increasing the range of entries into a technique or the range of techniques that can flow from a given technique)
• varying context of performance ( learning to function under pressure or in adverse circumstances or in circumstances where a technique is ruled out.)
• exploring the limits of a technique (when it will or won't work, when it can be made to work, how it can morph into an alternative if it fails.)
• increasing control ( intensity, stopping, starting, shifting in mid-technique)

These 'edges' can pertain to activities as diverse as martial arts, performance arts and sport.

In relation to yoga, Ganga White puts it this way:

"Every yoga posture has different levels and intensities of engagement, and every body has its own limits. You can learn to adjust and modulate these levels or edges, in order to get different effects and benefits out of the asanas. This technique was also pioneered in yoga in the sixties by Joel Kramer, who called it "playing the edges". I use the term "surfing" because it implies flow, balance, adjustment, and enjoyment - while riding on a wave of energy. Learning to surf and to experiment with many different types of edges can add beneficial dimensions of subtlety to your practice" (from Yoga Beyond Belief, p.95) 

Parallel edges can be found for other skills you may wish to learn such as learning a language, mastering laboratory skills, programming a computer, editing graphics...the list is endless.

The key is to know what your performance edges are and being committed to working on them. Doing so is a surefire way of enhancing your skills in any area in which you wish to excel.