No Strain, No Grain

My mom used to feed me Cream of Wheat for morning meal in the winter. With a minute salt and butter on it, it tasted roughly like sweetmeat to me except for the lumps. Before the advent of instant hot cereals, very fastidious mothers might put their newly heated cereal straight through a strainer to eliminate the offending blobs. Twenty five years later in an errant locker-room conversation with a friend, the branch of morning meal as a kid came up and I reminisced about the comforting, gather feeling that having a mother-prepared warm and lump-free morning meal provided. I guess, my friend responded flexing his ample biceps, "It was a case of no strain, no grain!" I moaned with the pain of pun-ishment, but now, more than a decade after that quip, I am recalling not only his play-on-words, but also the tried and sometimes true statement on which it was based, and the feeling of contentment in case,granted by Mom and Cream of Wheat.

Dream Interpretation Teeth

I worked hard in all the sports I participated in, even to the point of macho self-abuse. For football, I got out to the field early to work on the blocking sled with a buddy before the coach arrived. For gymnastics, I practiced on the town park's tool during the weekends until my calluses tore and my stomach muscles plainly could not sustain other horizontal-bar kip-up. In judo class, I drilled my uchikomi (fit-ins) as if each were a real throw and ended up nearly fainting on two separate occasions due to dehydration and fatigue. "No pain," all my coaches had said, "no gain." When I sprained the collateral ligaments of my knee in flag-football, I still showed up on crutches to teach my college judo classes.

In karate, when the repetition of basics got boring or when the constant blocking drills inflated my forearms with purple splotches, I gritted my teeth and fought straight through the pain. And, in aikido, when I barely could get up from a fall in the 95 degree temperature, I imbibed a integrate of glasses of water and returned to the mat. No pain, no gain.

Teruo Chinen of Okinawan Goju-ryu, during one of his clinics, interpreted Onegai shimas'!, a phrase which is recited by students in many original dojo at the start of training, as "Teacher, please punish me." The phrase as a matter of fact is translated more accurately as "Please give down to me," and by implication, "Please teach me," but Chinen Sensei believes in hard training to create strong spirits. Please understand that he is no sadist and students are never truly "punished" in the Western comprehension of the word, but rather challenged. My own karate trainer told me that which his trainer had told him concerning hard training: Students can learn karate without even breaking a sweat...but they feel cheated. Sense no pain, no sense of gain.

Martial arts are not unlike other bodily endeavors in which, at least to a inexpensive extent, no pain means no gain. But martial arts also hold out for their adherents the promise of spiritual amelioration and the calmness and security that implies. In this, they differ from sports. The fighting arts become training, so the adage goes, in not having to fight, and at last mastering oneself so as to achieve Enlightenment, Nirvana, Higher Consciousness or what have you. Pain produces gain which somehow magically gets converted to the warm, fuzzy feeling connected with Mommy and strained grain for breakfast.

I would like to think the plan of No Pain, No Gain and spin it to the process of Life Mastery straight through the martial arts.

There are dojo, dojang, kwoon and studios which think the martial arts a means toward exercising the bodily virtues of the ideal warrior. Being able to take it and being able to dish it out is the highest achievement of their students. If you "take care of a injury" you are being a coward, and if you don't put your body on the line every night, you will never achieve whatever in life. Although I do not think that attitude the essence of original budo philosophy, I must admit that it is prevalent in many original Japanese dojo as well. In all these schools, bodily pain is a rite of passage, a modern version of The Red Badge of Courage. The qoute is not that these values are invalid, but that they are too exclusive and often too extreme. Are there no other values one can gain by martial arts training? And must one ruin one's body to gain the status of a "warrior"? What kind of a warrior cannot pass his/her induction bodily due to recurring injuries? No Pain, No Gain works physically--up to a point...

The plan of using attempt (rather than pain) as a rite of passage is, in my opinion, more valuable. This is not to say that attempt will not be accompanied by pain nor that failed efforts will not consequent in thinking anguish. But pain is incidental to the No Effort, No Accomplishment philosophy, not its main emphasis. To me, the first step in comprehension how No Pain, No Gain can become a pathway to Life Mastery is to be able to relegate pain to effort.

Now ask yourself, after the attempt (with or without pain), what have you gained? And, are you willing to pay the price? attempt pays for whatever it is you are trying to gain. In the martial arts, it may be a trophy (self-worth), self-defense skill (control over one's environment, security), rank (self-evaluation straight through the estimate of others) or any whole of similar goals. But the Gain always has to do directly or indirectly with self-improvement. Some of the Gains may be relatively shallow, but you may need them in your personal amelioration at that stage of your life. Ultimately, however, if one gets caught up in shallow achievement, rather than looking it as merely a step on a longer pathway, the attempt may not have been worth the Gain. So, the second step toward comprehension how No Pain (Effort), No Gain (Accomplishment) can become a means to mastery is to understand one's motives as stepping stones to a larger even more personal goal.

Often when your objectives are attained, you are not happy for long. And, naturally, when your objectives are not attained you are not happy at all. Contentment seems impossibly illusive. You have worked so hard for so long to get where you are now. Possibly you have spent 10, 20, even 30 years as a budoka and have devoted a good part of your waking hours (and many of your dreams) to achievement in your martial art. You look back to see that you have in fact made great strides along your pathway, but you haven't gotten as far as you had hoped. The attempt has produced Frustration, Disenchantment, or even Despondency. You do not necessarily like what you have gained. This however is the next step and the most prominent one for those using the martial arts as a pathway toward higher self-development. True spiritual growth comes out of hardship: what doesn't kill you makes your stronger. In other words, you learn straight through sense that Pain can be converted to Growth. No Pain, No Growth.

Pain is, at first, a price we pay, but later it is just a point of view which we can pick not to take. It is not that nothing painful ever will befall us--indeed that which we ordinarily call painful is as prevalent for masters as it is for novices. It is that an event termed "painful" by others is seen as "gainful" to masters. It is just a test on the pathway toward security and contentment. Happiness is converting pain into effort, attempt into gain, and the converting the whole process, flourishing or disastrous, into growth. attempt always produces a result, so that any martial artist is always efficacious! The scholar however takes joy that he is able to yield a result, and that he evaluates a result, no matter what it is, as a gift for his own supplementary development. He may prefer to have a loving mom serve plane porridge, but he is just as happy with lumpy Cream of Wheat.

For many, many years I thought about settling for the lumpy cereal a lowering of standards. Why should I treat myself that way? I am worth more than that! I quiz, my Cream of Wheat lumpless! That was a fine and requisite stage in my amelioration which I believe every person should go through. Not settling for less is an expression of self-worth and salutary pride. A clear self-image is so prominent that hundreds of books have been written on its value in just the last ten years, as if the previous decade discovered the plan for the first time! "Never settle for less!" the saying goes. But if you are used to having strained grain served buttered and salted by Momma-san and one day Momma-san passes away, you must learn to settle for less. You may be worth having a loving mom to make you feel gather of a winter's morning, but if your worth is based on that, her passing makes you value yourself less.

You do not have to settle for lumpy cereal if you can supply your own fiber in a flatter form, but if you are distressed and disheartened by not having what "makes" you feel good about yourself, Possibly you have not as a matter of fact mastered feeling good about yourself. Your tools are not Mommy or milled meal, but your mind.

If I teach a defense to a punch in my karate or aiki class, there are inevitably those students who learn the technique with a fervor bordering on obsession and as a consequent feel clear that they now can defend against that specific attack. When they change partners however and the new attacker throws his or her blow at a slightly separate angle or speed or intensity, those obsessed with the extreme punch-defense find their egos sorely tested and their security threatened. It is not that the defense does not work, not that they had learned the technique poorly; it is that they had fallen in love with the waza and could see nothing else. No variation, adjustment, or "settling for less" had entered their mind. Instead of appreciating the technique as a tool at their disposal, they used the tool in a manner which nearly disposed of them. It is desirable to be committed to mastering the tools of one's art, or to mastering one's art so that one may create into a best person; it is not desirable to be obsessed by it. Obsession (according to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary) is"a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling." Steps on the pathway toward Life Mastery should be a preference, not a disturbing preoccupation.

The scholar might prefer the same feeling which that lumpless and lovingly ladled Cream of Wheat gave you or I as children, but if an occasional blob appears or if it is not served so tenderly, the scholar still appreciates it and is not diminished or disturbed by it. He appreciates the Grain without the Strain.