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 one, it was probably about 4-5 hours of training a day, since I also have other things on my schedule besides Yakami. But here you ask yourself the question (you've probably figured it out) "Do I want it?" I was lucky, if you can call it that, that I had quit my job before the special training started. The special training was of course not the only reason for that, but it fit together well when the opportunity arose. Kimu Sensei, like me, believed that time should be used wisely, and what could be more sensible than training Yakami?

Many will probably think, "You can't train those basic techniques for that long!!" That's what I thought at first, but here comes the question of trust. My own ego says, "That's completely pointless," while my conscience and Kimu Sensei say you have to train, so why do you do it? You quickly realize how much is actually in the basic techniques. When you train 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 bother."

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 should see Kimu Sensei in your mind's eye with your arms crossed, asking "Do you want it?". Then you train, and from here you should learn. For me, I can only say again, this was naturally a bit of a decision. The choice here was of course that you would like 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 had expressed it to Kimu Sensei in the following way, which he had naturally accepted: "I feel as if I am standing with one foot in Yakami and the other in ordinary life and do not know whether I should "surrender" myself completely 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, and thus you cannot be a head instructor, for example, because are you that honest in your techniques? This can also be expressed, as we have all heard 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 up illusions for yourself and others. I have experienced and been told that Yakami is about breaking down illusions, starting with your own. When there are no illusions, only the pure self remains. That sounds undeniably nice 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 should correct the technique, for example, clenching your hand all the time, and you repeatedly still don't do this, what is the reason? That you can't? or "I don't think it's important", "I don't care because that's how I've always done it" or, "That's just how I do it!" These are all illusions, perhaps not that you are aware of it, but it is based on bad habits or goes against your beliefs (ego). When you can start to put this aside and constantly be 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, since we all have a filter called the subconscious that sends in noise. At the same time, we may not even 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 probably wouldn't be the only one who was 7th dan.

I fought my own case with ground parries and ground kicks. As previously written, I trained for a long time and many times and of course began to have different experiences with the techniques. One of the first physical things I came across was the pain with all the repetitions. I have not normally had problems with pain, as I have been doing sports for many years and was used to pushing myself to the extreme. I took advantage of that in training, because if you start to focus on the pain, the real purpose, namely the technique, disappears. But at the same time, you have to learn from the pain, which helps to push your limits, but you also shouldn't 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, as it helps you push your limits and notice when you are doing something wrong. Use this the next time you are standing in a zenkutsu-dachi and think "it hurts a little, I better stretch my legs" and stay in the position a little longer.

I was in a lot of pain at one point and played 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 was able to mentally shut out the pain to some extent and center myself on the technique. This brings me to the next experience with the special training, and what I will call center training. During one of the lessons I had been told, which I had heard before (probably most of the old guard have) "Imagination is very important". I have had an incredibly hard time with that, but I have managed 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 then told. I tried and tried as one does now, but what is it that one should imagine. The answer is of course individual, which is why I had also received the resolute answer. One can have definite images of oneself fighting against oneself. Why not try to process a problem by imagining that every time one encounters tsuki one comes 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 for my second meeting with Kimu Sensei, who mostly talked about my problems and thoughts that had come up during the training. But I couldn't help but show what I had trained on. I was asked to show some of the basic moves once. A lot of excuses come up, "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 you what happened, but a clear vision occurred again! I simply had to go home and train again. Of course, you speculate a lot about things, and occasionally you also curse someone 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 up on everything? and live a "normal" life. When you can look beyond the disappointments and see the opportunities that await you out there, you go home and give it another try, and try to see the training from a new perspective.

Things started to happen, firstly I could better understand that I had to train for a long time and I saw new things in the parades and understood the importance of all the details (hidden) 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 have my first “hoof 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 a mess for the man!!!!”, judge for yourself: I prepare myself thoroughly, nothing is accidental, take heiko-dachi, clench my hands – the little finger first, then the other fingers, roll them together into a perfectly clenched hand, send my left hand off in a tsuki right on the center, the right hand lies perfectly at the elbow of the kyusho, the hip sends the parade arm off, suddenly there is a connection between the elbow of the parade arm and the “tooth”, which cannot be seen, but feels like a rod of energy. In a perfect zenkutsu, the parade ends in a quiver that feels like a spiral of energy being 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 my body told me the truth, where it so come 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.