Let It Go
The first day of jiu-jitsu class is probably the hardest. It’s not because you’re going to train the hardest and it’s certainly not because you’re going to get hit the hardest. It’s because you will have to walk into a new gym where you may not know anyone and you will have to be absolutely terrible at something. More than that, you will have to be terrible in front of all those people.
Failing in public takes a lot of courage. It takes courage because you have to overcome your ego’s desire to be in control and to be invincible. You will have to swallow your pride because you will be bested physically by another person.
Despite how humiliating this may seem, it is something that everyone who trains martial arts comes to terms with. Training requires failing. From the perspective of defense, it serves as a great teacher because it reveals holes in our game. From the perspective of attacking, it pushes us to refine our techniques so that they are more effective. If you want to get better at jiu-jitsu, or anything worth doing, you are going to have to learn how to fail gracefully and to learn from the lessons that failure imparts.
Attachments and Suffering
While this blog typically doesn’t venture into the world of religion, a monk from the Mahamevnawa Buddhist Monastery in Sri Lanka recently posted a video about the concept of letting go that seems relevant here. In the video, the monk explains one of the main concepts within Buddhism is the idea that attachment leads to desire and that desire leads to suffering. As the reasoning goes, we can avoid suffering if we avoid desires and we can avoid desires if we avoid attachments.
However, this is not as clear as it first seems. As he explains, the concept of attachment is not the same as being physically connected to something or having possession of a thing. You can have possessions without having attachments. The monk quotes the Buddha: “They are not sensual pleasures, the pretty things in the world; a person’s sensual pleasure is lustful intention; the pretty things remain just as they are in the world, but the wise remove the desire for them.”
In other words, suffering doesn’t stem from attachments, either the mere possession of objects or the existence of an ego. It stems from desire.
Desire and Ego
As the monk explains, desiring something means wanting to hold onto it and this inevitably means keeping it from change. As an example, the monk tells the story of how he went on a hike recently and was struck by the beauty of the view once he got to the top of the mountain. There was a little bit of mist over the nearby valleys, but he could see other peaks and rivers far in the distance.
The scene was so pleasant that he decided he wanted to take a photograph. However, he couldn’t immediately find his phone, and by the time he had pulled it from his bag and got in position to take a photo, a far denser mist had moved into the area. The peaks and rivers in the distance were hidden. In that moment, he realized that his desire to hold onto the moment had ultimately led him to miss the opportunity to simply enjoy it. It was gone.
One lesson here is that we should simply enjoy things as they are. If we try to preserve it or capture it, we may spend so much time trying to do so that the thing or experience we’re trying to possess slips right through our fingers. The other lesson is that desire’s purpose is to limit or prevent change. To hold onto something, you must inevitably keep it the same.
Your ego, meanwhile, desires an image of itself that is pristine. To satisfy that desire, your ego tries to keep things the same. Your ego wants you to stay comfortable. Your ego wants you to be protected from failure.
However, when you practice martial arts or try to learn a new skill or hope to achieve anything, staying comfortable means never growing. It means never getting better. To advance as a martial artist, you need to be ripped out of your comfort zone. Your ego needs to get bruised. That desire for a pristine image of self needs to be abandoned.
Within this context, letting go of attachment means welcoming change and welcoming failure. It means allowing yourself to be humbled so that you can grow. This is a lesson that everyone learns as a white belt, but it’s something that every person who practices martial arts needs to keep in mind so that they don’t become too comfortable or set in their ways. Even as a black belt, there will be holes in your game. To improve, you need to be able to silence the desires of the ego to expose whatever imperfections remain so that you can resolve them and more precisely refine your technique.