Bujinkan

Really frustrated by training tonight. Not because it was anything hard, but because E.'s teaching style drives me insane. I get where he's coming from. He teaches the way he wishes he were taught and the way they teach in American schools which is repeating information a million different ways in the hopes that one of those ways sticks. The trouble for me is that his favourite method is talking verbally about everything. I pretty much hate it because I'm not a verbal learner, so someone saying more than a sentence or two at me while training forces me to stop giving all my attention to my body and movement and try to decipher the torrent of words that just keeps coming at me (It has literally taken me 12 years to reach the point where I can demonstrate a technique and talk at the same time and even then I have to know what I'm saying in advance (or be doing something easy)). E. almost always says and demonstrates what he wants you to do right when he starts talking. If he stopped there, I'd be fine, but instead he keeps going and not only do my eyes glaze over but I have to keep focused on the concept that he demonstrated five or ten minutes before at the beginning of his monologue. I told him part of this that I wasn't a verbal learner and his technique doesn't work for me and he was like, "But I've seen you do it even when your eyes glaze over." and I should have pointed out to him that in fact, I'd have a much higher sucess rate if he just shut up. Part of me is just offended by how inefficient the whole thing is too. He averages 1 technique per half hour which is kinda ridiculous for a 1 1/2 hour class.

It's really frustrating too because I think he knows a lot and has a lot to teach, but it just gets buried (for me) in a verbal rush. He talked at me a lot tonight and while I recall something about car repair and different ways of teaching, what I really thought was useful was when he asked me to punch him and leant into my fist. I was solid so he asked me to draw my punching arm further into my shoulder and I could feel how now it was my back foot supporting the punch. That was the most interesting thing he did all night and he barely said a word.

Some of my frustration tonight is with myself. I enjoy training in the nine different schools we teach at Bujinkan, but I really don't know their names. And this was hard to get through to E. He was all, well even if you don't know the name, you should know what it's like and I was like, uh, no cause I don't know the name so I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never really cared what school I'm training in, I just note the new positions of the feet and different stances or different ways of dealing with things and go for it. It used to be that every year we'd train a different school so I recall a whole year of one thing or another, but I still can't tell you the names of those schools. E. thinks that you have to know each individual school to play around within that school - this is true. But, on the other hand, I have never felt the need to play around in one specific school. While not all of Bujinkan is homogenus, one of my favourite things about this art is that it all operates on the same underlying principles. I'm not thinking "would the bone breaking method or a arm lock me better here," I'm thinking, "There's a space there I should take. Is my space also good?"

So, right now I'm icing some bruises and my poor GPS seems to have suffered heat death in my glove box because it died on the way to training. I thought it was just a one off but it wouldn't turn back on when I tried to go home so I crossed my fingers and hoped I remembered the way back which thankfully I did.