Sweat streamed down my face, into my eyes. My glasses slipped down my nose, the strap that held them to my head barely enough to combat the onslaught.

The tendons and muscles along my shins were burning. My muscles were sore and heavy. Every time my body hit the mat, part of me said, “Stay down here. Just stop moving. You know you want to.”

I had been at the dōjō for about a month, and the honeymoon was most definitely over. My ukemi (falling technique) had improved enough that I could do a slow front-roll. I could tie my belt. I knew where to line up. I was always at the dōjō the minute the doors opened so that I could get as much training as possible. I was meeting expectations.

So the expectations increased.

Before I had joined the dōjō, I had never done a regular workout. Push-ups and crunches were foreign to me. I couldn’t keep up with the group. And that was OK in my first week.

But I was a month in, still training. So it was time to get with the program.

No one ever said anything to me, or told me to step it up. I just knew that I had to do more. I would dread the opening of class, the conditioning set followed by the group ukemi practice. My legs would burn, my lungs would struggle to breathe air that was suddenly liquid with heat and humidity. I longed for a rest. I longed for a drink of water. I longed to lie on the mat after a technique just long enough to catch my breath.

When I threw them during practice, my seniors just got up and let me throw them again. It was the rhythm of things. They would teach me: a pointer here, a subtle hand-shift there. My technique was improving because these men and women kept getting up and helping me get better.

So I hauled myself off of the floor again, judo-gi heavy with sweat, short of breath, full at times of fear, at times of weariness.

I didn’t want to. But I owed it to these people to get up, and to attack again, and to be thrown again.

No one ever needed to tell me that.

***

Just a day before, the room had been a middle school basketball court. But today it was a dōjō.

This was Tai Kai, the annual gathering of our ryu. We come together and train hard, and party hard, and part ways with the regret and sorrow that can only come from intense and challenging activity done in the company of your brethren and in the service of something larger than yourself.

The morning session was physically demanding, a series of exercises that focused on shikko-sabaki, the Japanese method of knee-walking. We moved around the mats, shins and thighs burning with the exertion.

The most junior student in the room was to my left. He had only been training for a matter of weeks, and I could feel his suffering without needing to see the rictus on his face or hear the hiss of his in-drawn breath.

He was ready to quit.

I grabbed him as the room split into pairs to do the next exercise. It wasn’t a matter of encouragement, of supportive, kind language. It was a matter of pulling his spirit up. In between drills, I would bodily lift him to his feet and drag him along as I ran back to our place in line, push him down to a kneeling position as we received instruction. I would pull him up and drag him to the next drill.

He didn’t quit. He wanted to. It was written on every part of his face, on every line of his body. But he didn’t.

I nodded at him, said “Good job,” and watched as he ran off to scribble a few quick notes before the next session. I had seen what he was made of. So had he.

He was strong the rest of the day.

***

Giri, or the “burden of obligation,” is the debt you incur as you follow the path of budō. It takes time before the student realizes the full impact of this.

You start in the budō with red in your ledger; you owe giri to the men and women who have been working for decades to preserve the art, to give you a place to train, to get good enough to teach you. You owe them a debt that you literally cannot ever repay.

Giri doesn’t flow one way. When your juniors meet expectations, when they ask you to teach them, when they show up and work hard, they have placed you in debt to them. Their care and education are your responsibility now. You must give them your best. I owe my juniors a debt that is every bit as significant as that I owe my Sensei. They struggle in the trenches with me, doing their part without question or hesitation. I have to be the best model I can be for them, be able to answer their questions, be the example they deserve.

I remember being promoted to a green belt. It is the first formal promotion ceremony in my dōjō, marking the first significant step on your journey through budō. Sensei called me up in front of the whole class and presented me with the new belt. As I bowed and took it from him, he whispered to me, “Thank you for doing what was expected of you.”

We say these words to a newly promoted student as a reminder. No one gets here on their own. Everything I have that is of value to me in the budō is a gift, given to me without expectation of recompense. Everything I do, I do with an eye to this fact — that I must carry this debt, and that I must be worthy of it, and that I owe everyone, senior and junior, to be the best that I can be in all areas of life.

I shoulder my burden, and bear up under it for another day.

Growing up, I wanted to be a Jedi like my favorite characters in Star Wars: training with lightsabers, using the power of my mind to control my environment, and realizing galactic-sized accomplishments. Mostly, I associated being a Jedi with power and running your own life. (Of course, that isn’t entirely accurate, but 9-year-old me liked to pick and choose the information I absorbed.)

A decade and a half later, I decided to revisit my ambitions of becoming a Jedi, but not for the power (which leads to the dark side), but for the mindfulness.

I didn’t realize it when I was younger, but being a Jedi has more to do with your mind than with your body. And on my quest to improve my physical health, I discovered that yoga and Jedi training have a lot of similarities. I found that not only were the physical benefits of yoga amazing (greater flexibility, less muscle soreness after working out, better posture, less pain in old injuries), but the mental and spiritual benefits far surpassed my expectations.

Like a Jedi, who needs a master to train him, throughout my own mindfulness practice, Yoda frequently pops into my head. This funny little green man with his backward phrasing whispers words of encouragement as I try to align myself with the Force.

I had read up on yoga practices before attempting any poses, and my anxiety had already gotten the better of me and psyched me out. I had to win at this. I kept thinking that maybe if I were as prepared as possible, I could be really good at it, blow through the different yoga positions, master each one in turn. But I couldn’t relax and enjoy the moment.

So I began my first day on a yoga mat with the book The Yoga Body Diet in front of me. When I couldn’t balance in several poses in the workout, I immediately became frustrated, angry with myself for not being able to do something I viewed as simple. I couldn’t do it. And just as I was about to scold myself for being incompetent, a voice popped into my head.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.

I feared I would fail. I became angry when I didn’t immediately master the yoga practice, and if I continued down this path, not only would I suffer, but those around me would as well. I didn’t want to turn into Darth Vader.

Shannon Paige, writer, sacred activist, and yoga teacher, said during one of her TED talks that yoga doesn’t solve depression or heal broken hearts, but it works as a mindfulness tool in overcoming these parts of life because “yoga works by creating the mind, body, breath connection.”

To connect mind, body, and breath and create self-awareness. To connect with yourself and with what’s around you. To tap into the Force. That’s what I want. But I knew I wasn’t in a good place to start with in that moment.

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

Thank you, Yoda.

And light my way it did. I started with step 1 instead of jumping into the poses. I started with breathing. It was time to “unlearn what you have learned,” as Yoda would say. I learned that the body interacts with the breath at a specific point in the respiratory cycle to give you a place where you learn new information, both mental and muscular.

“At the very emptiest point of every breath that you have, just before the breath becomes an inhale, you have the capacity to learn something new. Just depends on what you’re learning,” Paige said.

And with each breath, I began unlearning and letting go of 25 years of backed-up negativity: my fears of inadequacies, rejections, disappointments, failures, and what-ifs. Because I had held onto everything for so long, I couldn’t even imagine being happy, let alone actually experience it. But with each deep breath — the kind that fills your entire body — I began to look at my accomplishments, relationships, and friendships and restore my belief in myself.

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
— Yoda to Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith

I fear so much, but in letting go of some of those fears, maybe I can find some peace and calm. The fears will always exist, as will the negative things and tragic occurrences in this life, but it’s how we react to them that allows us to experience peace and a connection with the Force.

I had wanted yoga to solve my anxiety and depression problems, but yoga isn’t about solving problems to create peace and calm. It’s about what goes on inside ourselves each and every day.

Most modern yoga actually creates tension in order to teach you how to release it. Breathe in tension and then breathe it out. It’s not about our weight, anxiety, depression, illness, or heartbreak. Yoga is about connection and those links between our mind, body, spirit, and the Force. And now I feel that connection each day.

What you get out of daily mindfulness practice is what you put into it. “You only find what you bring in,” the Jedi master said to Luke Skywalker before he entered the cave in The Empire Strikes Back. Similarly, if you go into yoga with your type-A personality and think it’s going to solve all your problems, you’re sure to be disappointed. But if you start practice with the mindset that you’re going to understand yourself better and that this will help you take control of yourself and your surroundings and your interactions with others — Do or do not, there is no try — if you can do that, then there’s no telling where you may end up and what you may discover about yourself.

And if you start to feel disconnected again, just remember to breathe.

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
— Yoda to Luke Skywalker on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back

“When you started, we didn’t think you’d keep training,” my sempai told me.

I asked him what he meant.

“We just didn’t think you’d make it. You didn’t seem cut out for it.”

When I began training in martial arts, I was a college sophomore. Academics had come fairly easy to me, and so I had never learned to work hard. Near-sighted and bespectacled, I had never been very physical.

Seventeen years later, I have no answer as to why I am still training. If pressed, I would say it is because it has never been easy. It forces me to struggle every day.

There are two characteristics that are essential to the pursuit of budo, or martial arts training: a bullheaded stubbornness, and nyunanshin. Nyunanshin, “pliable mind” or “malleable spirit,” allows a person to continue to force himself to change, to empty his cup each and every day. It forces the budoka never to cease the quest for self-improvement, to view his study not as a destination to be reached, but as a journey to be taken.

It is necessary to cultivate this flexible, malleable mind, lest it harden.

Jungian psychology deals extensively with the shadow-self, the aspects of our psyche of which we are unaware, that we suppress. According to Jung, we encounter the personifications of these shadow-selves in dreams and visions. Though the shadow is not uniformly negative, Jung did say that “the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” When we meet our shadow self, we meet a dark reflection of our own positive aspects, and we must choose: either continue to live in ignorance of the things that influence us, or confront the shadow.

Wrestling with the shadow illuminates parts of ourselves that we are ignorant of. The process is unpleasant and uncomfortable. Marie-Louise von Franz, who worked alongside Carl Jung, said in her work Process: “If and when an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others — such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions.” It is, she continues, “…[a] painful and lengthy work of self-education.”

Joining a dojo is like becoming a member of a family; you inherit a teacher to guide you on the path and brothers and sisters who will support you, push you, challenge you. When you begin to lose your pliable mind, more senior students are there to set you back on the correct path. When it comes time to fight your shadows, they will stand beside you.

As one grows ever more senior, training becomes an ever more solitary effort. The work is something you must do on your own. You don’t spend as much time with those who are your seniors. It becomes easy to presume you are in the right, both in your training and your life.

Seniors are seen by their juniors as examples, models to follow. This is the challenge of all people in positions of teaching authority: those they teach will look to emulate them.

Despite the many portrayals of wise masters of martial arts in the media, the raw fact is that mastery of budo is exactly that: mastery of budo. Nothing more. There is no inherent morality to a proper sword cut. This lack of morality complicates the task of being a responsible senior, because it is inevitable that juniors will emulate their seniors’ behaviors, both for good and for ill. The onus, therefore, is on seniors to strive to be excellent examples in all areas of life.

There is a saying in my martial tradition: “My sensei didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.” It was not until recently, when I found myself confronting a dark aspect of my own personality, that the ramifications of this saying became evident to me.

I owe a debt to the ryu to be the best example that I can be. This is how I honor those who have come before me and strengthen those who will carry on after I am gone. Over the years, I have observed my seniors, and my sensei, and seen that they are men of discipline in mind, body, and attitude. They are thoughtful men who speak only after deliberation and consideration.

When I look at myself, I find the difference between my reality and my aspiration is far greater than I had hoped. There are aspects of my own personality that I am unaware of, and that I must confront, understand, and acknowledge. I have become rigid in my thinking, and my nyuanshin needs to be strengthened.

Obviously, it is not wrong to support a belief or a position. Nor should one change his or her opinion simply to fit in. But it is dangerous to avoid looking into the “why” behind one’s beliefs and opinions. Ignorance of your motivations is a weakness, and a warrior cannot allow himself the luxury of deliberate ignorance of his own mind. The enemy we face most often is not external; it is ourselves that we must fight and overcome every day. It is through awareness of our dark side and willingness to confront it and change our actions that we prove to be worthy exemplars.

There is no excuse for leading those who look to you astray. They are the future, and we must be worthy of them.

I sat down today to capture moments in my training for posterity. Instead, I find a reminder of how far I still have to go before I am worthy of my ryu and of the respect of my fellow travelers along this difficult path that is budo. There is no excuse for my actions and no apology that will take back words already spoken. The only path forward is to own my choices, strive to be better, and leave these thoughts as a guide for those who follow after me.

The road is hard.

I sit in a quiet space, and do battle with my own shadows.

Traditional Japanese martial arts training takes place in a space that is set apart from the work-a-day world in many ways. In the dojo, there is a strange time dilation, like an adrenaline dump, that stretches the smallest moments out into impossibly long events. There is an informational density that is hard to explain to the uninitiated. Body, mind, spirit, history, and technique layer endlessly, one atop the other, stratifications of tradition and knowledge and intense physical activity. It is a transformative process.

I am often asked how martial arts has shaped my life. I can’t answer that question. My life is ongoing, my training is ongoing. The man I am today and the man I have been along the timeline of my life are only part of a narrative if I force one onto it. Real life is not a story.

---

The room is quiet. The mat spreads out before me, glowing in the last light of day that comes through the single window. The high ceiling is lost to shadow, metal rafters just visible through the gloom. It is a spare, uncluttered space. The few things hanging on the walls accentuate the emptiness, the blank space. The wall on the far side of the mat is covered with racks. Bright, colorful bags protect the live steel swords, the katana, that are prominently placed above the rows of the wooden bokken, aligned in precise, identical fashion. There is the sense that everything is in its place, and that there is no other place it could be.

It is the same room it has been for my 17 years of training, though it is not in the same space it was in 1997, when I climbed to the second floor of an office building in Camp Hill, Pa., for my first lesson. The space has moved, but it has not changed.

High on the front wall, right below the shadow line, is the shrine: the kamidana. My eye is drawn to it, the same as it always is, and to the banner above: bold kanji spelling out the name of the dojo. My body snaps to attention, a subconscious reaction, as I turn to face the kamiza and bow, back straight, hands sliding down the seams of my trousers, an action that I seek to make as precise and correct as I can every time. Every time it falls short of the ideal.

The room is quiet, still, ready for the students to arrive, to fill it with the noise of practice, of bodies slapping onto the mat, the war-eagle shriek of kiai, the distinct shuffling-sliding noise of feet gliding across the mat. It is patient, existing in a space both physically and spiritually different from the outside world. It is a room with its own rules and demands, and it brooks no deviation.

It is still and quiet and ready. But it is not empty.

It is never empty.

There are spirits here.

---

“Remember,” Sensei said, “people died for this.”

We stood, sweat-soaked, in a circle on the mat. Our wooden swords hung at our sides, hilts stained with the sweat of hours and days and years of practice. We were studying a classical system of swordsmanship, with an unbroken history hundreds of years long. The swords were heavy, the techniques subtle and powerful. Sensei had decades of practice under his belt, and was skilled and fast and strong. Working with him and with his senior students was an intense experience. Knuckles got busted. Heads got smacked. In the heat of the clash, minute mistakes in technique would be exploited.

In short, it was a demanding practice session, as all sessions with this Sensei were.

“People died for this,” he said.

Formalized swordsmanship emerged from combat. The winners would return home, and share the tricks and techniques that they had discovered and with which they credited their survival. If those techniques and tricks continued to work, they would be further refined. Successful schools were founded by men whose hands were bloody with victories.

The techniques we have today, the arts we practice, are built on the foundations of the defeated. We show up at the dojo and put on our uniforms and have a blast training for a few hours, but the fact remains that what we do is based on the skills of war and grounded in the deaths of those long-forgotten vanquished foes, the ones whose techniques and tricks were not quite good enough.

The Japanese are a complex people, with a language that can be exactingly technical and beautifully poetic, often at the same time. They talk about the meaning and the “meaning behind the meaning.” Ura and omote. Front and back.

Four times a week, I walk into a room that exists because people took the time to study the arts I love and to pass them on. People spent the currency of life: money, time, moments with family, friends, and loved ones. They sacrificed for us. I can name two men without whom the dojo would have folded, both deceased within my lifetime. I can name several others who have passed through on the journey of their lives, enriching all of us in the process. Kami is alive, and it retains some of everyone who passes through the dojo.

I am a lapsed Christian at best, and a man who feels that spirituality outside of religion is a pretentious concept. I am not superstitious. And yet when I speak of spirits and kami, it is as real as air, as water, as food. And as vital. Paradox and dichotomy. The budo are full of these contradictions.

When I walk into the dojo, these are the spirits that are waiting for me. The honored dead. They demand that I be worthy of them.

Someday, if I am strong enough, if I stay the course, my name will be counted among those who died for this.

The road is hard.

I take the next step, onto the mat, and practice for another day.