Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Sun and Rain

Almost all of my training for the past few days has been rather quiet and internal rather than external. That's primarily because of the sun and rain. Due to my rather severe sunburn, which is now subsiding (and peeling in sheets), I've been hiding from the sun almost all day long every day, saving my outdoor training for the early mornings or late evenings. Unfortunately, almost every evening or night, we've received a fair amount of rain, turning my circle into sticky-then-slippery mud that is almost detrimental to turn on. Therefore, I've put forth a greater effort in reviewing the videos, practicing static striking methods (and three-step in my living room), standing practice, and lots and lots of much-needed stretching, qigong, and seated meditation. While this hasn't really netted a strong increase in my ability to perform the techniques of baguazhang in a martial way, I believe it has really strengthened me by allowing me to express some of the more yin aspects of my training, balancing me and allowing me to recover from some of the seemingly chronic fatigue and soreness that plague my efforts to become the Lion.

That's not to say I've ignored turning entirely, of course. While today offered me no opportunities for turning (though I did perform qigong and meditation for almost two hours), I've managed thirty-five or forty-five minutes just about every day since the two-hour marathon. Hopefully the weather will be agreeable enough to get in another hour or so tomorrow afternoon. If not, I may have to suck it up, open a bunch of windows, and turn inside or maybe out in the driveway. For some reason, I really don't like turning on the driveway, though. I think because it's not level, but sometimes I like to pretend that it has something to do with the poor qi conditions of asphalt.

My brother is arriving tomorrow evening as well, coming in from his abode out west. He and I began our baguazhang journey together, and yet he had to move to the desert for school soon thereafter. His interest his high, but being a bit of an island of bagua out there, he trains very little. Also, the sun in the high desert and its inhabitant fire ants aren't the most welcoming situation for performing the exercises, and standing practice is still notoriously difficult for him, apparently, after last summer's little fire-related incident. Speaking of fire, I'm looking forward to passing some more of the bagua flame to him this time, hopefully enough to give him something to drum up interest in some of his crew when he returns there for the summer. At the least, I think at least four of the "magic eight" forms are in order: those from the sweeping, cutting, seizing, and grasping palms. If he gets into it enough and trains over the summer, he might be persuaded into going to see He Jinbao up north with us this fall, which I think would be awesome for him and totally light his fire. In addition, of course, I'm looking very much forward to having a partner with which to practice techniques again.

On a side note, some of my training partners here in Knoxville and I have been discussing the possibility of making a video of one or more of us turning for an hour or so in Lion's representational posture without putting our hands down (or perhaps without even changing directions) to post on the net. I think it would be interesting, but on the other hand, our main motivations are rather egotistical, which can't be right. Maybe if there's interest. Of course, for me to hear about it requires someone to actually read this other than myself and perhaps my wife every now and then. She already knows about our crazy ideas.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Kilocircle, plus

I'm striped with radiation. In fact, I think I have the worst sunburn of my adult life, and circle walking is the method by which I put myself into this state. I went out to turn today at 1:30, taking advantage of the full sun, which I like to try to get 15-20 minutes of per day if I can. That's how long I intended to turn on my circle, but sometimes, things go well and the turning lasts a bit longer. To deal with that, I chose 1:30 pm not just because of the high sun but also because after a few minutes, before 2, actually, most of the circle is in the shade of a large maple in our yard. That means if things were to be going well, I could easily have an additional half hour or hour in partial shade, only dipping into the direct rays for a fraction of the time. Like I said, though, some days go well. Some days surprise us.

I started off going 300 revolutions in one direction, netting 30 minutes without changing the posture. That's usually very hard. In the other direction, my shoulders held out for 150 more, which put me at the 45-minute mark, roughly, and poised nicely to catch my "hour a day." Something happened when I switched again, though.

The plan was to try to execute 108 revolutions on my second go-around "to the left," and to follow it, if I could, with 72 to the right, which would put my time in Lion posture at just over an hour. Rock. When I got to about seventy, though, something weird happened that caused me to remember more words of He Jinbao: "I would just circle until the pain didn't matter any more." That's not exactly what happened, but it wasn't far off. I think it was a bit like runner's high, but stronger. I stopped hurting. The suffering ended, and I turned as comfortably as if I were walking down the street despite my low stance, sore legs, and ridiculously challenging posture (involving one hand arched above my head and the other extended outward and upward directly into the middle of the circle, with a twist that keeps the tendons in the shoulders building and aching). Like this, in fact, but probably considerably sloppier because I, unlike the photographed He Jinbao, am not He Jinbao and need to practice a lot more:

So, I rode out the wave of pain-free development all the way until I reached somewhere around 300 revolutions, which I pushed up to 330 for posterity's sake. At that point, I realized fully that what I was by then calling a "kilocircle" was possible: turning one thousand revolutions on my circle without putting my hands down from the Lion posture. I decided to do it. When I got close, I suddenly realized that I still wasn't feeling awful and could endure more, so I asked about the time and found that I'd been at it for 88 minutes. That meant that I was much, much closer to a full two hours than I would be the next time I tried for a marathon turning session, and so I should probably shoot for it. All in all, I ended up with 1320 revolutions for a total time in the Lion posture of 2:06 (126 minutes) - without putting my hands down. That's a new record, big time, for me; my previous best being about 80 minutes. Since my circle is six feet in diameter, it is 18.85 (roughly) feet in circumference, which means I covered 24,880 feet on it today, give or take a few, i.e. 4.71 miles. That means I turned, on average, at 2.24 miles per hour, which is completely irrelevant.

By then, my legs and ankles were ruined, and I could feel the sun doing terrible things to my pearly white skin, which meant far more damage than I wanted to have done had already occurred. When I put my arms down, they felt as if they belonged to someone else, a feeling that persisted for fifteen or twenty minutes. My hands felt like they were still squeezing the ox-tongue palm position even though I was deliberately spreading and stretching them. The only negative sensation I experienced the entire time, in fact, other than fairly severe discomfort and fatigue at various times was my right hand going half-numb for about thirty-five or forty minutes near the middle (but nearer the beginning). It was a bit weird but totally awesome and, I think, worth the sunburn. When He Jinbao said to get good, one would need to endure a lot of suffering, I think the turning is more in line with what he meant than the sunburn, though.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Circles at Dawn

I'm fairly impressed with myself. For a long while now, I've been telling myself that I would get up early in the morning, do some training, have a great day that includes more training, and then go to bed satisfied. I did all that today while dealing with the funny farm that equals the children. Notably, I was turning today when the sun came up at six-early-two a.m. I feel might nice about that. Also, I was dedicated enough to do nearly forty-five minutes of good meditation before bed last night, and a repeat performance, if I'm not too exhausted (might be...) is due to start as soon as I finish this superior beverage. Maybe beer interferes with meditation, but I got a new one that promised to be good and then delivered, so I had to give it a try.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Turning Through Pain

Turning is an uncomfortable endeavor. Today, like so many days recently, I set myself to the idea of turning for a long time only to find myself unreasonably uncomfortable within the first fifty or sixty revolutions in the Lion representational posture, which is to say after walking and holding my arms in the position for five to six minutes. In fact, as has frequently plagued my turning practice recently, I felt like aiming for seventy-two revolutions and then changing sides, which kind of stinks because that's right about at the seven-minute mark. I compare that with the last day that I turned in front of He Jinbao (last September) in which I maintained a single direction of the Lion representational posture while turning for some thirty-five or so minutes. Today, though, I decided that I should force myself through to at least the magic 108 revolutions, and suddenly, almost bizarrely, at the point when I got to my eighty-some-oddth time around my little circle, the pain severely lessened. I continued on, getting a decent turning session twice today, both pushing close to twenty-five minutes. Since my wife was planning to go out of town this evening for a few days, I kept them short to try to catch some time with her before she left.

After my second turning session today, I did strikes around the loop in my driveway. It takes anywhere from seventy to a hundred strikes in the one-step, or zig-zag-stepping, method, and I work my way all the way around, usually changing the strike without stopping for as many revolutions as I can maintain. This depends on the strikes I chose, and the double opening hooking strike and rolling shocking strikes today wore me out so that four times around was good enough. I finished the striking aspect of my training by doing the lying step in a box in both directions until I couldn't put my feet in the right places consistently. My butt, after that, was on fire.

I'm going to try to do a lot of meditating since it's just the kids and I until Sunday. They're pretty frustrating, so I figure the extra meditation time will do me good. We'll see if it actually works out or not, though....

Friday, May 16, 2008

Tao of the Home

Last night I got so into my reverie about nature and becoming more in-tune with the tao of the place that we live that I entirely forgot to talk about another of my musings on the tao: the tao of the home. I live with a family that includes one teenage step-daughter and and a second that is knocking at the door to adolescence. There is in this, of course, also my wife. This situation creates quite a bit of the dynamic of my day-to-day existence as well as hindrances to adopting a life like those of forgotten days in which I spend six or eight hours training. Dishes need to be washed, rooms need to be cleaned up (we don't clean the kids' rooms for them!), meals need to be prepared, shopping needs to be done, and, then, there's that whole "job" thing that requires some attention. Since I'm a teacher, I'm technically "off" for the summer, so I assume many more chores and much more housework than usual during this period. Since I'm a researcher, I'm technically never "off" even when I am. I spent a fair amount of time, for instance, poking around (fruitlessly, I'll bet) with the Bell and Lah numbers today instead of training in the overcast and uncharacteristically cool weather we're having post post-alluvium. All I did, in fact, was a few forms and a few hundred strikes in the one and three-step patterns.

The tao of the home is something I'm learning about daily. When I first moved in, my normally flourishing meditation and qigong practices dropped off nearly entirely, though not as much as before my wife and I started spending more nights than not together. I had been in the habit of doing zhan zhuang each day a couple of times, once for close to an hour, followed by an equal or up-to-double time in seated meditation, including a typically fairly long session of each right before bed. Moving into the family environment cut that down, essentially, to a short sitting session about three nights a week immediately before bed and almost no standing. My practice was largely cut due to the nearly constant presence of other people, whom I felt I could not meditate around due to the fact that they would directly and inadvertently bother me. For the past couple of weeks, both my standing practice and sitting meditation have increased again, though not nearly to my pre-serious-relationship levels of some three years ago. Now I'm usually able to steal five to fifteen minutes in a corner or empty room to stand, and I find that unless havoc or chaos is reigning in the house, I can sit nearly anywhere at any time with almost anything going on around me. This is what I've decided is adapting to the tao of the home.

Our homes are rarely ideal sanctuaries in which we can withdraw for protracted periods for serious neigong, but they are the environments that we have chosen to live in and with. Our practice is ultimately our own, and neigong is, literally, the practice of that which is within us. That's just the thing, though. Modern life is not and cannot be the life of an ascetic who has the luxury of forsaking all in life except their development. We almost must live and interact in communities, with careers, and in families, and yet practicing development is as important, or more, as ever. In our houses is where this deep internal process must begin and will take place in the primary. Hence, learning to ebb and flow with the tides of our home, including those challenges and gifts our families bring us, is of equally high importance, or perhaps higher, than learning to live with the world outside our walls. If we cannot find and then be ourselves and practice development in the place and situation we live in, then we have no hope for developing at all and may as well be in a prison.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Tao

Whether it was He Jinbao or Dr. Xie Peiqi or someone even earlier than that, perhaps even Dong Huichuan, who served as the progenitor, it has been said that by training outdoors every day in the same location, you will learn the tao of that place. Usually, I have no problem turning or training outside in my yard all year long. I'm definitely more sensitive to cold than to heat, but with time, that should change. I'm unsure if I'll ever become less sensitive to mud, though, and I try not to turn much on my circle when it is a mud-ring in my yard. Still, important lessons are here, and some of them are those I ruminated on today while it rained and rained and rained some more.

I feel we're quite separated from the tao of our particular place, both on mesoscopic and macroscopic scales. By that I mean that the place we live is unfamiliar to us because we shelter ourselves from it, and the world we live in is unfamiliar, in large part, to us because we shelter ourselves from nature. I'm definitely not a "return to the cave" kind of thinker, but I do believe that we can help ourselves tremendously by getting more in-touch with our world and region. I couldn't help but notice while washing dishes earlier, which we do by hand at our house -- we don't even own a dishwasher -- that it is unbelievably artificial, for instance, that our modern homes are filled with seemingly unending fountains of clean, disease-free water and are filled with tens or even hundreds of long-lasting, relatively efficient torches that have separated us from darkness on the one hand and from the humiliating (in a positive way) experience of drawing water from a well or river and preparing it for our uses. We're also segregated from our food almost entirely, except that it usually comes in its ultimate or penultimate stage of preparation for us to eat, usually gluttonously without a second thought of what we put into ourselves or how it came to be that we had the privilege to do so.

These mundane tasks, like doing the dishes by hand, are the sort that our ancestors did in far greater quantities than in modern times. We like to believe that our quality of life is raised by being freed from the mundane, the boring, the humble activities that can easily consume a large part of our day, but it may be the other way around. Much of the musing in this short, likely-to-be-unread article came about while engaged in such a task, or rather in several of them throughout the day, during which time I thought. Many of these mundane tasks, I think, require little in the way of concentration, and so while full enough attention can be given to the task at hand to perform it quite well, the mind is semi-free to wander through the meaning of the things we do and have done. Again I'm reminded of stories about Dong Huichuan, who is said to have traveled while learning the roots of baguazhang from a Taoist and a Buddhist monk, to have had to dehusk for himself all of the millet that he wanted to eat that night, always after a tremendously difficult and long day of training. Surely he put attention into the task, and certainly he ruminated, even meditated, on the value of the exercises he was being taught and routines he was performing for long hours throughout the day preceding this deeply humbling and difficult exercise. Removing the husks from millet is apparently quite difficult, particularly without fancy machines, and so a balance must have been struck in his mind each day between what was physically worth the effort and the demands of his taxed body. Such things are unheard of in the modern world, and such gains in ability and character probably are as well.

For several weeks now that my (too heavily indoor) work has been settled down, I've been getting more in touch with the tao of my region by spending plenty of time outdoors (and away from this infernal contraption) and bringing that outdoors into myself, not just with training. The air in our houses, I think, is too stagnant and too treated for our own good. Most of the time, it sits and accumulates the oils and vapors of our cooking, our waste production, our washing, our building materials, and our exhalation. The air is too stagnant, and one really only needs to go outside for a few minutes to understand the difference. Many of us move our air, but it's merely stirring up the muck for the most part. I see into my neighbors' house sometimes in the evening, while I'm outside and they are all indoors. Their fans are running. Their air conditioner is on, and it's not even hot, for God's sake. We're too accustomed to our treated air and our own stink for our own goods. Therefore, I've taken to trying to be outdoors for a minimum of a couple of hours every day, if not more, if for nothing else than to breathe in deeply of the air that moves and which blows away and disperses my stink (n.b.: I don't usually smell bad, this is a metaphorical stink) nearly as readily as I can emit it. Much of that time is training or gardening, and all of it is worthwhile.

Gardening is a wonderful way to put us more in touch with our surroundings. The soil in our hands sometimes feels good and sometimes screams out to us, by its very feel, look, or smell, that it needs something, something it probably had before our heavy machinery terraformed our land into our neighborhoods. The plants we grow are almost extensions of ourselves, nourishing our minds and souls until the harvest is ready to nourish our bodies and our communities. It's humbling and challenging to squat down low enough for long periods to pull weeds, feel dirt, toss root-eating grubs, and preserve earthworms. For us today, it was even more so, as we did it for our requisite few hours out in the rain I already mentioned. At first we considered avoiding it, but it was rewarding to let it wet our hair and shoulders and feet through our shoes, and it feels all the better to believe that the garden and subsequent harvest will be all the better for our efforts despite a little rain.

I connected more directly while there, in another way I've been trying to keep up on a regular basis for some time now. I gathered several of the wild-growing things in our yard and made another cup of what I call "yard tea" today. The recipe varies by the day and by what I find, meaning both what I come across in the yard and what suits my interests. In the spring, it's easier. The dandelion leaves and flowers are still young and are readily included; the black spruce is offering its bright green new growth, which can be guiltlessly harvested from the lower branches to provide a semi-sweet slightly piny dose of vitamin-C; and several other plants offer their wild goodness to us. Today's recipe included dandelion leaves and blossoms -- it's funny they are now a bothersome weed but were previously a valuable and nutritious springtime food source -- the pine needles, a couple of varieties of mint we've planted and which are happily taking over, wild false strawberries, young bee balm leaves, rose petals, clover flower heads, wild grape leaves, honeysuckle flowers, and, though it does not grow in the yard (yet!), a pinch of schizandra berries and a bit of green tea. The flavor is fuller and rounder than that of usual green tea, and it's starkly pleasant, despite the wild and sometimes bitter ingredients. I feel more connected to the little plot of earth I live on when I walk in it, feel it, smell it, and ingest it.

Did I train in the rain? Yes, I did. I only did a few strikes and forms in it, though... no circling today. The reason was already mentioned: MUD. In the rain, my circle turns into a ring of very, very slick mud which happens to be dominated in staining ability by red clay, making my shoes, my porch, and the inside of my house poorly decorated. I like nature, but I don't like cleaning up mud inside my house. Also, slipping three out of four steps on the circle isn't really pleasant, whether I undertake the task in shoes or with bare feet. To top it off, my circle has a definite yin and yang character to it, being that no spot in this entire portion of Tennessee is flat. The high side, facing East, incidentally, is yang. The low side is yin in the West. Weirdly, by the lay of the land and our trees, the yang side is the eastern side, the higher side, the less shady side, and, obviously, the side that dries out first after a rain. The yin side is the western side, the lower side, the shaded side for more of the day, and the side that accumulates a freaking puddle in the rain and stays wet, slick, and potentially staining sometimes for days afterwards. I like to think of that when I turn after a rain: even my little circle is a beautiful demonstration of yin and yang, which brings us full-circle back to bagua. It's mentioned in the Yijing, the canon upon which baguazhang is based, that the tao is simply yin and yang.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The Harmonies

Happily, I found my way onto my circle again today. Circle walking is quite bizarre in that it simultaneously is very uncomfortable, even painful to perform, and yet it strangely fills the body with, for lack of a better phrase, an overall good feeling. I feel healthier, happier, and more vital every time I turn, even if I only walk my circle for a few minutes, though longer seems to be far better. This sensation seems separate from any sense of failure or triumph that the particular day's practice brought as well, and it lingers for some time after training.

Today's post is less about turning and more about the harmonies, which I've written into a small poster that is plainly visible from where I'm sitting and where I feel I spent too much time, about half of which is necessary. I'm not sure I was ever clear before today on exactly what the six harmonies are, but I knew clearly that there were three "external" harmonies and three "internal" harmonies, all of which are important, and just one of which has been a stressed point in my training.

The external harmonies are straightforward but difficult, perhaps because we have, in modern life, alienated ourselves largely from our body. Perhaps it's due to the philosophies of DesCartes, encapsulated nicely with "I think, therefore I am." This syllogism (thinking implies being, and I am thinking, therefore I must be) is a two-way street, though we don't often think of it that way. "Ah ha!" a fool might add, "You think, therefore you are, but you are, and only therefore can you think!" In any case, bases for Western thought aside, it seems the harmony between hand and foot, between elbow and knee, and between shoulder and hip should be straightforward and easy to implement, but we just don't move that way. Hand-foot harmony has been an active part of my training for a year now, and I feel that I'm getting quite good at it now. It seems natural. Knee and elbow harmony refers mostly to providing the body with the necessary structural strength for a good result, and with a reasonable martial background and a little attention is accessible. Hip and shoulder harmony is, I think, mostly postural, and it is perhaps one of my bigger weaknesses in terms of the harmonies.

The internal harmonies are interesting because all three involve Chinese ideas that don't cleanly translate into English. The first is the xin should be in harmony with the yi. Xin means heart, which does, on the one hand, mean the organ by the same name, but, on the other hand, does not mean that here. It means, instead, the "heart" we use to describe someone's spirit, courage, and mental-emotional kernel. Yi means "intention." Last year, we were told by Dan Crescenzo that we, meaning Bradley and myself, have excellent yi. To put these in harmony is difficult. I often feel that when the desire to train is there intellectually but doesn't actually manifest, resulting in skipped or sluggish, short, ineffectual workouts that the xin and yi are out of harmony. This is a difficult harmony to master, but it is critical for becoming proficient in anything, not just Yin Style Baguazhang.

The second internal harmony is between the yi and the qi, where this yi is the same yi as before, and this qi is the same qi in qigong. Of course, qi is a multifaceted term in and of itself, meaning breath, energy, and motive, to name a few of the concepts encapsulated within it. This harmony is even more difficult than the first and is, I think, outside of my immediate experience. The third internal harmony is similar, I believe, being between the qi and the li, where li is probably best translated using the words strength, power, and force. Ultimately, I'm beginning to feel that the three external harmonies are central to proper movement and use of the body and force while the three internal harmonies are essential to development. The three internal harmonies together, for instance, suggest that the heart must be fully in the training along with the intention of getting better, doing whatever it takes, enduring whatever challenges and discomforts it presents so that our goals are accomplished, and our force emitted, essentially from our heartfelt desire to see them succeed.

The only observation I've decided upon in this with certainty is that doing the standing practice daily has a profound effect on helping harmonize xin and yi, among other things (it's supposed to be fairly effective qigong as well, and so perhaps eventually my practice will become profound enough to sense that it is harmonizing yi and qi as well).

Anyway, this is quite long enough. If real life doesn't bog me down again for the remainder of the evening (I think the grocery store is a requirement at this point), then I'll try to put in some more effort tonight.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Standing

The last couple of days have again brought slack training, though the ones in between were pretty good. Nature brought some fury our way, and between wind, rain, mud, and Mother's Day, my weekend training was rather slight. I got in some decent application experimentation on the happy subjects at the karate school I work out at on Saturdays and did a little turning after that, but the rest of the weekend was pretty much a wash.

I did, however, spend some time re-reading the notes I wrote about last year's seminar in Northampton, something I'm quite glad I did. I noticed the commentary that He Jinbao made to us concerning the importance of standing practice, which is an aspect of my training that I've been particularly lax in for the last month or two. It's easy, I guess, to justify each day that "there's just so much to train and so fixed a reservoir of energy and time to train it in," but my inattention to standing practice has been just short of criminal. Weirdly, my desire to practice striking and forms has also dropped off the map in the last few weeks. Every time I would attempt it, I'd either feel sore or weak or tired or disinterested, and forcing myself into it was almost a worthless endeavor. At least no fruit came of it. Then, yesterday while at my mom's place for Mother's Day, I sneaked off while being mostly ignored while all the women talked to each other and did some meditation, stretching, and, for the first time significantly in over a month, Lion Opens its Mouth static posture, along with the strengthening postures for the seizing and grasping palms in the Lion system.

Instantly, my attitude was transformed. I wanted to do strikes, as in I really wanted to do them. After I got up from a very productive moment of stretching, I began performing some of the Lion system basic strikes, and I found my power and excitement and interest and ability had all returned to their normal state. It was as if the six or eight minutes I spent standing revitalized my striking practice entirely. I repeated the exercise today, stealing a few minutes a few different times today, in between working in the yard and on the garden, to stand for two or five or eight minutes at a clip, whatever I had. My strikes still feel strong, and my motivation for them is still up.

He Jinbao said: "You must spend a long time standing each day in order to have good development." I'm glad to have been convinced experientially of the power of standing, and of not standing, because it brought those words back to me in a powerful and meaningful way.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Inspiration

School is over. April's impediments have healed themselves. I'm renewed in mind and body, and I've applied my restored strength primarily in training physically for the past week, ignoring largely the desire to chronicle or even to much discuss my endeavors. I've averaged around forty-five or more minutes per day on my circle, earned over a solid hour of turning a few times, trained my striking moderately, and put forth a tremendous amount of effort with a saw on some woefully deformed trees in my yard that have built me up into feeling very strong.
Some of the things I've learned:
  • Turning more than once in a day is an excellent idea.
  • Turning in Lion until I cannot turn in Lion any more and then turning in Dragon or Phoenix only to return to Lion again enhances my training.
  • Even if I turn for obscenely long on my first time in each direction, the benefits are multiplied enormously by turning in each direction at least once more, though more here, within the limits of my physical capabilities, is more.
  • Watching demonstrations of techniques and the applications of those techniques is incredibly important to do on a daily basis if possible, even if only for a few minutes.
I've decided to try to get onto my circle in a significant way two or three times every day that I can this summer, hopefully averaging 60-90 minutes per day in the effort, and at least once or twice per week, I'd very much like to do a workshop day for myself, wherein I emulate, to the best of my abilities, the rigors of a day at a workshop with He Jinbao. I've decided that I must heed his advice carefully and fully: "steady practice over a long time will achieve a good result."

Just today, though, I found myself down about training and felt more lazy than usual toward the effort, and as if in answer to my attitude that training is a horribly lonely activity, I found the following quote by Kozo Nishino: "When one carries out the training of an art to the limit, the body exhibits individualism for the first time." I hope it's inspiring enough to pick my practicing back up.
"The most important thing when studying the martial arts is not to be lazy. These skills are not easily attained. For them, one must endure a lot of suffering." -He Jinbao