Letting Go and Letting Happen, or Kickboxing as Meditation (the preceding phrase is a clickable link)

 

Essay text:

Think about a time when you had to power through something very short. Maybe a metered dash. Maybe a cold walk to the subway. Maybe an urgent piece of writing that had to quickly go out. Did you think you couldn’t do it? Did you try to find ways around it? Did you find some reserve of energy or creativity or stick-to-it-ive-ness that powered you through? Did you just accept the reality and go with it? The more I kickbox, the less it’s about powering through and the more it’s about being in a moment, one after the other.

Kickboxing is a martial art. This characterization isn’t anything new; it’s actually kind of boring until you unpack it. Calling kickboxing a martial art can mean that it’s considered violently beautiful, and there’s productive tension in that combination of ideas. It’s so much, and so obviously, about motive force, but it’s also about trust (which is both active and passive). There’s more passivity in it than its intensity often allows to be seen. You have to trust in your own power, especially during an attack round, a few minutes where you fight your bag freestyle: you are meant to move freely, as your own energy dictates, as fast and as hard and as fluidly as you can. For me, that’s where the meditation comes in.

An attack round is where, for me, the mind can really clear. I uppercut on the right, uppercut on the left, spin for a backfist, let fly a low roundhouse kick and then a high one. I’m always thinking on some level, because I’m usually attuned to performing the same movements on both sides of my body, but I don’t usually think too far ahead. I feel in pieces. I let my muscles and my memory (both physical and mental) dictate where my body will go. I don’t have many thoughts that land outside the bag. Sometimes I think a little bit about the music that’s on, or I picture n image, but mostly I’m glorying in my own movement, my own power, my own inventiveness. I improvise. I move with my own breath. Sometimes the world blurs. Sometimes time slows. It’s just me and all that I now know how to do. I move intentionally, but I also let the movement happen to me. I let certain movements dictate other ones. I think less, I think less deeply, I think less quickly.

Similar trends in my thinking happen in yoga, but now that I’m a teacher, I tend to notice the patterns of the class rather than to lose my body and mind within it. In an attack round, there are no patterns. There’s nothing to analyze that’s been set before you. There’s just what you decide, from what you know, and from how you feel. So kickboxing is more than martial. It’s mental. It comes directly out of me – from the space between my heart and my core, because that’s where my arms and legs extend outward from. It’s thinking that doesn’t look like thinking. It’s thinking with the body, letting the body go, letting the body’s energy happen.