MIZU NO KOKORO

 by Phillip Starr

Back when I trained in karate, my teacher mentioned the phrase, “mizu no kokoro”... This is a Japanese expression that means, “mind like water.” What exactly did he mean when he said this? Oddly enough, it was my gong-fu teacher, W. C. Chen, who explained it me.

“In a fight your mind must be still, like the smooth surface of water in a pond”, he said. It (the unbroken water) is like a mirror and will clearly reflect what is placed in front of it. Thoughts and emotions are like pebbles and stones tossed into the water; they cause ripples, which distort what you see.”

He told me that ANY emotion, anger as well as joy, can cause such ripples. Extreme anger or fear is akin to dropping a small boulder into the pond; they do more than just create ripples and subsequent distortions... they create WAVES that are almost blinding!

How is the mind to be calm during a frightening and/or very tense situation? The answer can be summed up in one word...TRAINING! Realistic, traditional training. Learning to breathe correctly and maintaining breath control under stress is also key. There are those who espouse the “lizard brain” theory, saying that in times of extreme stress we lose fine motor control and so on and on, ad nauseum. Let me state for the record that this undesirable effect is to be overcome through regular, repeated training. I know. I've been there. More than once. More than twice... If one does not train regularly or repeatedly, certainly the undesirable “lizard-brain” theory comes into play.