A few advanced black belts are taking private Skype lessons with me, studying aspects of kuji no ho “nine syllables of aspects of power”.
I warned them that we can explore kuji, but it will feel different from studying taijutsu together. With taijutsu instruction, I tell you what to change, you do it, and you advance.
Kuji is vastly different. It involves not adding to your knowledge, but ”cutting away” aspects of your expectations. You go way into your barely remembered past to greatly bend your future.
Sometimes you will take a private lesson and it will feel like we are only chatting. But important knowledge is being transmitted. I need to find out “where you are coming from” so that I can determine where you will tend to block real kuji advancement. This blocking of advancement is perfectly normal, and to be expected. We have all developed habits of perception that protect us from what we believe might harm us or at least diminish us. We truly believe in those limitations, and are knee-jerk ready to fight to protect them, even though those limitations really do confuse us and make us smaller and more vulnerable.
We need to get back to a state of direct purity. We need to clean ourselves off. We need to come from a place unencumbered by influences encountered throughout life where we altered or skewed our beliefs about what we are capable of, and what we deserve. We have to remember that these influences were forged in tiny childhood and then expanded on throughout our lives up to today. What we think of as “only natural” in life is more actually learned restrictive behaviors, intensified and justified by our memories of our interpretations of our experiences. “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it” might be painfully true. How sad. How human.
True kuji skill is an ever progressing set of capabilities. You do not “get” a kuji ability and then move on to the next one. It is a whole lifetime of uncovering forgotten treasures.
Want to give it a try?
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