By Martin E. Hansen, Member until 2018

Yakami is to the highest degree about training yourself and finding yourself both in the martial art but also in the rest of life. The special training had begun and with it a lot of thoughts both about Yakami, but also my own personality. Now it was my job to train and train and train, but not practice. I make no secret of the fact that it takes a lot of time to complete a special training program.

For the middle part, it probably revolved around 4-5 hours of training a day, as I also have other things on the program than Yakami. But here you ask yourself the question (you've probably figured it out) "Do I want it enough?". I was lucky, if you can call it that, that I had quit my job before the special training started. Of course, the special training wasn't the only reason for that, but it fit together well when the occasion presented itself. Kimu Sensei, like me, believed that time should be used wisely, and what is more sensible than training Yakami?

Many will probably think "you can't train the basic techniques for so long!!" I immediately thought the same at the beginning, but this is where the question of trust comes into play. My own ego says "It's completely pointless", while conscience and Kimu Sensei say you have to train, why do you do it. You quickly become aware of how much there really is in the basic techniques. When you practice the basic techniques for a long time and intensively, many thoughts emerge that come from the subconscious and elsewhere. The first thing I naturally experienced was a fight against what we in modern language call "the gider".

So what do I mean by that? You get up in the morning to start a training program that should last 2-3 hours, which you know it takes. You know you have to train basic techniques and nothing else. Then you might find yourself drinking a little more morning coffee, being more careful with your shave and reading the newspaper an extra time………..but what is all this? It's the resistance to training what you know deep down is a necessity, but can't handle having to train exclusively for the next several months, and then almost every day.

This is where you have to see Kimu Sensei for his inner look with crossed arms, asking "Do you want it enough?". Then you train, and from here you have to learn. As far as I am concerned, I can only say again, this was of course a touch of making a decisive choice. The choice here should of course be that you want to train Yakami and learn from this and one day become Menkyo, and if it requires you to train basic techniques, then it will be basic techniques. I myself had expressed it to Kimu Sensei in the following way, which he had naturally taken to heart: "I feel as if I have one foot in Yakami and the other in ordinary life and I don't know if I should "surrender" "me all the way to Yakami"

Here I was honest and said what I felt, which is everyone's responsibility when training Yakami. If you are not honest with yourself, you cannot be honest with others either, and thus you can e.g. nor be a chief instructor, because are you so honest in your techniques? This can also be expressed as we have all heard it before “Do you do as you say and do you say as you do?” If you live in the belief that you do as you say and say as you do, but do not actually do it, you build illusions for yourself and others. I have learned and been told that Yakami is about breaking down illusions, starting with one's own. When there are no illusions, only the pure Self remains. It sounds undeniably beautiful and beautiful and he can easily say that, you think!

But think about this: When you train and are told by the instructor that you must correct the technique, e.g. to clasp the hand all the time and then repeatedly still do not do this, then what is the reason? that you can't? or "I don't think it's important then", "I don't mind because that's how I've always done it" or, "I just do it that way!" These are all illusions, perhaps not that one is aware of it, but it is based on bad habits or goes against one's beliefs (ego). When you can start to put this aside and constantly look after yourself and try to correct even the smallest things, you break down the illusion and see the technique as it should be, with all the details. Of course, you can't just do it like that, as we all have a filter called the subconscious that takes care of sending noise in. At the same time, we may not know exactly what the technique is like when it is completely optimal. If we could do it from one day to the next, Kimu Sensei was probably not the only one who was 7th dan.

I fought my own case with ground parades and ground kicks. As previously written, I trained for a long time and many times and naturally began to have different experiences with the techniques. One of the first physical things I relied on was the pain of all the repetitions. I have not normally had problems with pain as I have been playing sports for many years and am used to pushing myself to the extreme. I used that in the training, because if you start focusing on the pain, the real purpose, namely the technique, disappears. But at the same time, you have to learn from the pain that helps push boundaries, but you also don't have to completely ignore it, as it is the body's sign that something is wrong, or could be. Furthermore, it can be a sign that you are doing the technique incorrectly, i.e. tensing the wrong places, or using the wrong muscles. Without sounding masochistic, I would call pain a friend, since it helps you to push your limits and notice when you are doing something wrong. Use this the next time you stand in a zenkutsu-dachi and think "it hurts a bit, I'd better stretch my legs" and stay a little longer in the position.

I was in a lot of pain at one point and toyed with the idea that the body was just a shell and tried to tell my subconscious this by repeating it to myself several times and it actually worked as I could mentally shut down to some extent the pain out and center myself around the technique. This brings me to the next experience with the special training and what I will call center training. I had been told during one of the lessons, which I had heard before (probably most of the old guard have) "Imagination is very important". I have had an incredibly difficult time with that, but I have managed to do it sometimes. I allowed myself to ask a "stupid" question "What do you mean by imagination and focus?", "It's up to you to find out!" I was told. I tried and tried as you do now, but what are you supposed to imagine. The answer is of course individual, which is why I also had the resolute answer. You can definitely have images of you fighting yourself. Why not try to process a problem by imagining that every time you bump tsuki you get one step closer to the solution, who knows, maybe the solution will appear? It is entirely up to the individual to find their imagination that works best.

I had trained a lot in the run up to my second meeting with Kimu Sensei, who now really spent most of his time talking about my problems and thoughts that had come up during the training. But I couldn't avoid having to show what I had trained on. I was asked to show some of the basic parades once. A lot of excuses appear "well I'm wearing shoes, I haven't warmed up, well...", either you can or you can't was the answer. I hardly need to tell what happened, but a clairvoyance arose again! I simply had to go home and train again. You naturally speculate a lot about things, and occasionally you also curse someone whose master is far away. But you come to your senses and start thinking clearly, and then the disappointments come, not about the training, but about yourself. Again you think am I good enough? Shouldn't I just give it all up? and live a "normal" life. When you can look past the disappointments and see the opportunities that are waiting out there, you go home and give it another shot, and try to see the training from new angles.

Gradually things started to happen, firstly I could better understand having to train for a long time and I saw new things in the parades and understood the importance of all the details (hidén) in the techniques. You could suddenly see that the simple basic techniques are actually very difficult if they are to be performed optimally. It is also at this time that I get the first "hovsa experience" with a basic parade that almost makes me break down, when I suddenly saw the whole or the beauty of uchi-uké. "Now it must be rabble for the man!!!!", judge for yourself: I prepare thoroughly, nothing is accidental, consume heiko-dachi, clasp hands - little finger first, then the other fingers, roll together into a perfectly clasped hand, sends the left hand off in a tsuki right on the center, the right hand is perfectly at the arm of the kyusho, the hip sends the parade arm off, suddenly there is a connection between the elbow on the parade arm and the "tooth", which cannot be seen, but feels like a bar of energy. In a perfect zenkutsu, the parade ends in a quiver that feels like a spiral of energy sent out through the hand. You stand back and don't know what to do with yourself. At that very moment I think I hit the nail on the head and the body told me the truth, wherever it came from.

It's a great personal experience that I wasn't sure I wanted to share with others, as you have to experience it to feel it. The experience gave me the belief that I was good enough, that hard work and trust in the teacher is the right and true path to the optimum - Yakami. Perhaps the above reflects that preparing the technique and leaving nothing to chance creates a good technique, in this way you choose yourself during the entire execution whether it should be an optimal technique. Expressed analogously to life, you could say that it is not random actions that create the life and future you would like, but the choices you make, something I have thought about very long and deeply. I had now created the training myself and the results, which were the original goal and requirements of the special training.

The special training was expanded with some Jo techniques and some of the techniques I had written down myself, thus also the training time at home and in the dojo. But now I had something to deal with and accepted it unconditionally, as I knew that it brought something good with it. But had I grasped anything of it all? Were some simple grains ready to be harvested? Or to put it another way, the techniques were integrated and optimized so that one could rightly call himself a practitioner of Yakami Taijutsu and thus a martial artist.