I was out to dinner the other night with a friend of mine. We were talking about teaching yoga. She's well on the path to becoming a brilliant yoga teacher. Some small tweaks here and there and a bit of seasoning and she will grow into a fine instructor and an even more compassionate caregiver. She asked me about my goals, whether I would continue to advance my studies and teach someday. I am and will I'm sure but I had to tell her that I'm not ready to teach yet. Not simply because I'm still new at this yoga thing with only a couple of years under my belt but also because the role of teacher to me is sacred and it requires an intense period of self study before I can honestly commit to this intention.
Thinking about this took me back many years to one of the first lessons I learned about teaching. When I was young, so very young and so very foolish, I entered the military. I was full of Hemingway and Kipling and thought how romantic it was to be a soldier seeking adventure in foreign countries. This was before these Gulf wars, at a time when it was generally smaller teams that went into the mountains and jungles and performed various tactical maneuvers. I became very good at what I did and eventually found myself in charge of a small unit training for eclectic sorts of combat missions. While on an exercise I made a decision that ended in the death of one of my men, not a bad decision, just the wrong one. It struck me harder than most and it became clear to me that I was not meant to be a soldier, I could not accept this kind of responsibility and still function, still be human, so I left the military.
I drifted then for a while, west and south, heading for the Mexican border. Drinking a good deal and not caring about much. I wanted to forget the past and I knew, instinctively, that if I crossed the border into Mexico I wasn't coming back. I found myself in Tucson and in a bar one night this woman picked me up and took me home. I was too drunk and ended up passing out on her couch. The next morning she cooked me breakfast and we spent the day talking. She had a spare bedroom and I moved in, instead of lovers we became friends.
Bear with me now, this is where the story begins. She had recently joined a judo club, a dojo, to get in shape and she invited me to attend one night. We went to a small concrete building with no windows in an industrial park on the edge of the desert. I'd never done martial arts before but wasn't too worried. I was very well trained by the military in hand to hand combat, in great shape, and knew I could probably handle anybody in there. Such is the cockiness of youth. Well I entered and there was this class being taught by an old man, I say old, thinking he looked ancient, the difference between twenty-something and sixty-something being far greater then than it seems now, now that I'm on the far side. He welcomed me, got me dressed in a Gi which is the formal attire of one who practices Judo and took me out to the middle of the mats. Then he said, let's spar, you try and throw me.
I was thinking, oh no, I'm going to hurt this guy and everybody's going to be upset with me. So I went in easy, a quick grab and push. The next thing I knew I'm on my back and he's bending over me smiling, asking if I'm ok. I was, a little surprised, the ego a little bruised, but I got back up and went at him again with more intensity and vigor. Again he threw me, and again, and again. That night he threw me many, many times until I was exhausted. He never broke a sweat and I never once seriously got him off balance.
I found out later that he was one of the first westerners ever taught the art of Judo, one of the first to open a place of practice in the United States. That he was a gold medalist in the Pan American games in his youth, five times in a row. This was the preeminent competition in the world of Judo in this hemisphere before it was accepted into the Olympics. That he was a renowned Judoka, meaning one who practices Judo and follows it precepts, and people would come from around the globe to study with him, at this little concrete hut in the middle of the desert. He held advanced degrees in Judo, Karate and Kendo, a master in each field.
So I went back and started to learn. He wouldn't teach me any throws for the first months. He insisted before I threw I had to learn how to fall. So I spent my initial days there letting everybody in the dojo throw me and learning how take a fall. Everyone threw me - I was thrown by white belts, by women, by children. My task was to accept the throw and master the fall and then jump right back up and let them throw me again. At the end of some practices he would take me in the corner and he would throw me, hard, fast with no mercy, just a little smile on his face as he waited for me to get up over and over. I think he expected me to leave after the first few weeks and I almost did, several times, but I stayed and eventually learned how to throw and fight in the judo style. I stayed for many years and he and his wife, also a black belt in Judo, helped me grow towards who I am today.
I became a good fighter and quickly got my brown belt. Eventually I decided it was time for me to attain a black belt and I told my Sensei this. Sensei is the Japanese term for teacher, literally meaning "one who is born ahead". This was how everyone addressed him, even his wife, as Sensei. He laughed and said no, I wasn't ready. I knew Judo, knew the moves and the terminology as well as any black belt but a black belt is a teacher and I was still a fighter.
I fell in love with Judo, mastering it, and over the years the relationship between Sensei and I grew but I always remained a brown belt even as those who started after me garnered their black belt. I was so full of ego back then, so full of myself. Sensei, bless him, didn't give up on me. He was determined to teach me what I really needed to learn. I was still wild, just in my twenties. I had gotten a job and was going to college, doing quite well but I had a streak in me of pure selfishness and I wasn't above hurting people to get what I wanted.
One day he came up to me and said, I'd like you to come work with me, help me in my garden. This was something I didn't want to do. I had a full time job, carried 18 credits at the university, and practiced judo or danced whenever I could and generally slept only a couple of hours a night. Giving up what little free time I had to help him out on weekends was not high on the list of things I had planned. Still, I felt I owed him a great deal for what he had taught me over the years and I began to show up Saturday mornings to help him tend his cactus garden.
Now he had this fantastic garden that was laid out in the Japanese style of zen formation with exotic cacti and small gravel gently raked in various patterns. People would bring him cacti as gifts from terrain around the world and he would place them in his backyard just right. It looked wondrous but taking care of it was a nightmare. I would spend four to five hours there, weeding, trimming, raking and leave bleeding, my skin punctured in multiple places, cursing under my breath, swearing that I'm never coming back. But I always did.
He never said much to me, a sentence or two pointing out what needed to be done. I had thought that I was going to be introduced to some great secrets here, he had studied with Masters and was a Master himself. Yet there were no profound lessons, no deep philosophical treatises on the meaning of life or the inner way of Bushido. We didn't really have conversations, we just worked side by side in silence most of the time.
He was a simple man and he reveled in the non complex ways of life. He said as few words as necessary to convey a point and then he left me alone to figure things out. He could see how frustrated I got sometimes, working in temperatures over 100 degrees, how angry I became when I studied the welts on my arm from brushing against some poisonous plant. He knew that I hated coming to his garden and toiling in the hot sun. But he requested that I return each week and because he was my Sensei, I complied.
This went on for several years until I graduated from the university and felt, for the first time in a long while, home calling to me. I'm a New Englander by nature and this is always where I will feel most comfortable. Before I left we talked about my journey with him and reflected on our time together. It hit me at some point as we reminisced that I had changed drastically. It had never occurred to me to compare myself to who I was when I first arrived in Tucson but he pointed out poignantly what he had seen as I had grown.
His observations cut me like a scalpel, not in a bad way but deep and clean, exposing truths about myself that I had not admitted. I left Tucson a man, having arrived a boy. I could now smile at adversity rather than running from it. I was someone who could face uncomfortable, demanding situations and prevail with calmness and equanimity. A ship built for sailing cross deep waters, far from shore.
He had given me a profound gift and enlightened me to the first lesson of being a great teacher. I learned that in actuality, it is the student who teaches themselves. A teacher can really only guide and support. Honest mentoring provides a point of stability not a dominance of will. The gifted teacher will give their charges room to discover and blossom on their own yet not be afraid to demand growth when necessary. This is a fine balance that many who claim to teach cannot comprehend.
A true teacher is only a guidepost and not the goal. A true teacher recognizes the traps that the ego can fall into. Many would come to our dojo just to honor Sensei because of his fame, practice at his feet so to speak. He would humor them and then send them away after a time. Whenever I fell into this silly kind of thinking he would point to the nastiest corner of the garden and say - go in there and clean things up. My adulation would quickly dissipate, this was his intent. A true teacher understands the difference between respect and servility and moves promptly to prevent the latter.
In the end, in the last days as I was leaving I thought about taking the test to acquire a black belt, then I realized, no, it was only a color. I had all I needed.
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