I passed my black belt test! 🙂

More on that later, but today is World Storytelling Day and in honour of that auspicious occasion, I offer this poor shot and extremely unflattering video of myself telling the story of (click to see it) Sekhmet, the Eye of Ra, the Goddess of Necessary Destruction.

         My black belt test is at 4PM today.

I am incredibly excited and incredibly nervous.

I keep telling myself that I don’t need to be nervous. I know my patterns, I know my step-sparring and my self-defense. I am prepared to spar, and I definitely know my theory.* I passed my pre-test, and several black belt friends have told me that I am doing well. There is no reason for me to worry. Yet, I am completely aflutter here today, and most of yesterday. Not panicky, I think even my brain has to admit that I know my stuff, but I’m still working through fear of the things I don’t realize that I don’t know.

The real key to getting into and even enjoying my test today is to bring my full focus to the task at hand. I know that and I am working on it. I have done these patterns a hundred plus times each, and I have been going to extra classes to really set them in my brain. I have been practicing in the test space**, both in order to get some extra practice time in AND so it becomes a more neutral space in my mind. I have been practicing relaxation techniques, and doing yoga to ensure that my brain can relax and I can be fully in my body instead of just being a jumble of flickering thoughts and what-ifs.

This is the hardest work – convincing my brain to just be where I am, not worrying about the next step, not wondering if I am doing okay, just being. The thing is though, I seem to have a very narrow sweet spot between overthinking and just checking out when I am doing my patterns and the like. It takes a lot of energy to stay in that place where I am focused on the now, without going right to a place where I am not thinking at all.

When I think too much, I hesitate and I lose my rhythm. When I check out, I make many micro-mistakes, slightly wrong stances, I put my hands too low, I don’t turn far enough. When I am in that sliver of a sweet spot, I trust that my body knows what it is doing, and that the next moves are there waiting for me. It’s great when it happens, but I have not yet figured out how to get there on command. I wish someone could wave a magic wand and grant that to me.

I know when I arrive at the test today, I will be told not to overthink, to just relax. And I will do my best. I will breathe deeply and I will try to keep my focus on the movement at hand – and at foot 😉

And in the mean time, I will repeat Dame Julian of Norwich’s wise words – ‘All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.’

*Theory is my strong point. Memorizing, comparing information and dealing with facts from my brain instead of depending on my body to do what it is asked to do? I’m all over that.

**Our school has two practice spaces – one is my regular class space and the other one I usually only go to for testing – even though students in that area attend classes there all the time.

I’ve written almost 20,000 words since the 24th of February. That’s fiction practice (writing exercises), part of short story, plus a number of blog entries. And all of it is self-motivated writing, not for clients, not for a contest, not for NaNoWriMo, just all for me, writing for the sake of writing.

This has never happened before. I’ve done lots of writing for one reason or another, but this kind of consistent, large scale writing-for-its-own-sake, has eluded me until now. At this point, the writing has just become a thing I do before I get to my other work for the day, and it’s all because of a couple of insights from the time management course I’m taking (Cairene MacDonald’s Foundations ).

The first was Cairene’s reminder that preparing for work was part of the work. It’s not an evil to get out of the way, it’s key, it’s foundational, it’s necessary. So any preparation I do ‘counts’ towards my work of the day. That freed me up to do my fiction practice, since I need practice to get better, and every word I write in practice will make my later ‘work’ words that much better. Practice will make the later work easier.

The second was my own realization, through Cairene’s exercises, that whenever I have been trying to work, and ended up stalling and procrastinating, I was actually dealing with the feeling that I *should* be doing something else. So, among other things, I wasn’t doing the writing I wanted to do because I *should* be doing other work. Yet, I wasn’t getting that done because of another layer of should. After some examination of the underlying shoulds, I realized that I need to do certain types of work at certain times of the day (routine tasks belong in the afternoon, for example), and that I need to start my day with my most satisfying tasks.

After that, my writing moved waaaay up my to do list and it has made a huge difference in my days. I have a few tiny routine tasks that I clear off my list immediately each morning, and then I dive into my writing for 30-45m. I don’t miss that time in my ‘real’ work at all. In fact, taking that time for my writing has seemed to create space for more tasks in the rest of my day.

I’ve spent a long time trying to fit my writing in and to find ways to make it somewhat automatic. If you have been reading this sporadic blog for any length of time, you know how often I have tried to establish a solid writing practice. This time, it makes more sense than ever and it has been easy, not a challenge, to fit the writing in. I have created my own motivations for getting words on the page, and it feels fantastic.

Of course, we’ll see how I feel about the whole thing when I get to editing that story I’m writing. 🙂

        In my first year of Taekwon-Do, I would watch the Black Belts doing their patterns and just be astounded at the vast difference in their knowledge and mine. I struggled to keep the details of my few patterns in my brain, the movements, how to turn, which stance to be in. I felt like they knew everything and I knew nothing and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to bridge that gap. I couldn’t think of how I would possibly be able to acquire the physical knowledge I needed to get to that point.

Now, I am days away from my black belt test, and every time I do every pattern I learn something new. There are micro-corrections to make in every stance, in every hand position. I couldn’t even consider that level of correction when I started because the macro-corrections were so challenging. There’s no point in considering whether your back foot is at 15 degrees or 25 if you are facing the wrong way, or if you have the wrong foot forward. I have the knowledge that I never thought I would be able to acquire, and yet I can see so much more to learn.

You know how when you want something done you should ask a busy person, because they will figure out a way to fit it into their schedule? It seems like it is much the same with reaching the black belt level of knowledge. Now that I have created space for the knowledge to test for my black belt, I have room to take in even more information. And, I have the context to understand more of the information that I’m given. I can see more ways to work on and correct my stances, my kicks, and my punches. I have way more power in my movements than I did even a year ago, but I can see ways to get even more.

A few years ago, I understood and could describe the means to generate more power, and, the ways to improve my training, but now, as I prepare for my test, I can actually put a lot of it into practice. It was if I understood it with my brain before, but it is finally seeping down into my body. My arms, legs, and abs are starting to understand what to do. But that understanding brings the realization of how much more I have to learn, how much better I can get.

Perhaps it might be discouraging for some people to discover that a black belt is not the end point, but for me it is exciting. This isn’t the culmination of my Taekwon-Do practice, this is where it really starts. Everything I’ve done so far has been in preparation for this first step.  This is when I am finally ready to learn to make good use of the knowledge I am acquiring. I feel like I have finally learned my letters, my parts of speech, and my handwriting, and now I am going to be able to start writing a book. That metaphorical book will take a lot of work, and a lot of editing, but the process will be a good sort of a challenge.

In my student manual, it says that a first degree black belt is a fledgling, someone who is really just beginning, and that really resonates with me. When I earn my belt, I won’t be an expert, I will be someone who is officially ready to learn at a new level. More will be expected of me, but I embrace the responsibility.

I’m really looking forward to wearing that black belt and starting my next set of challenges.

Ki-ya!

My friends and I used to play Rock Band a fair bit. At least several times a month and sometimes we’d play several times a weekend. We are all fans of a variety of music, and most of us like to sing, so it was a fun excuse to hang out and listen to music while trying some new things.

I always had big fun, but I often felt a little out of step with everyone else because even though I love music, I don’t *get* it on some level. I rarely recognize music by its opening chords, I can’t tell when to come in, and I can’t for the life of me tell whether I am singing well or singing terribly – but seeing as no ear drums started bleeding, I figured I mostly did okay. One of the features in Rock Band was your ability to increase your points by going into ‘overdrive’ – mode that you could earn by building up energy within the game (by doing well) and then releasing by moving the instruments in a certain way, or by vocalizing into the mic when the screen took on a certain pattern.

For the longest time, I didn’t activate overdrive because I didn’t quite understand how it worked and I didn’t want to ‘waste’ the energy I built up. Of course, I would end up losing that energy because the song would end without me having gone into overdrive. Then my character would be labelled an Energy Hoarder when the scores were tallied.

The idea of me being an Energy Hoarder just popped into my head again as I was practicing my plank for my belt test on Sunday.*

I hate to use up my physical energy. My emotional energy gets taxed all the time, I don’t notice my social energy depleting until it’s gone, but my physical energy? I always hold it back. I’m a physical Energy Hoarder.

I’m not really sure why that is, I don’t know if I have always done it. I know though, that it came to a peak when the kids were small – I always kept a little energy in reserve in case they needed me to drag myself out of bed in the middle of the night, or to carry them somewhere, or to do something one-more-time.

Now though, I should be able to use up most of my energy, to go all in, and not worry about how much time I will need to build it back up. I don’t though. I never go all in. I’m not even sure how.

I know part of it is that I don’t like the feeling. There’s a physical uncertainty in throwing yourself fully into an activity that is – for me, anyway- very unpleasant. I don’t know if that’s an introvert thing – most of us don’t get the same high from exercise that extroverts do, or if it is unique to me. I have to be very, very into my exercise in order to get past that mental barrier – seriously, it’s like I slam into a wall when I try to just go for it. It’s not that I am physically incapable of these things. It’s that I am hoarding my energy, and that’s all mental.

I think that will be my next project after my belt test. I’ll figure out under what circumstances I do thwart the mental barrier, and figure out how to replicate them in other activities. It’s going to be a challenge, but I’ll be a black belt by then – black belts can totally handle that sort of thing.**

* I need to be able to do a 2 minute plank. This morning was the first time I accomplished that, pushing past when I would have normally given up. Then I did it again this afternoon.

**Victoria tells me that with all the habits I want to develop, I must be trying to be a black belt in LIFE. I like that idea. 🙂