Empty Your Cup

[sleigh]

One of the things I’ve learned as an aikido instructor is that to learn a new art, you must first “empty your cup.” I’ve seen students come into the dojo who were highly skilled in other martial arts, yet -- for some of them -- that knowledge was a detriment to their learning aikido. They kept trying to do what they already knew to do; they responded to the attack with old reflexes; they continued to use the moves they already had instead of doing the technique the instructor was demonstrating.

Their cup of knowledge was already full, and so nothing new could be poured into it. To learn a new art, you have to first be willing to empty your cup so the new knowledge can be poured in. You have to allow yourself to return to being a beginner -- which can be difficult to do.

Emptying the cup… it’s something we have to do continually throughout our lives if we want to continue to grow and progress, to learn new skills. We have to learn how to keep that beginner’s mindset rather than telling ourselves “I know that won’t work.”

To me, the concept is also linked to the largely Western idea that there is always an “end goal”: a point of total mastery. The truth is that most arts--martial arts, music, fine art, writing, etc. -- don’t have end points. You’re never, ever “finished.” There’s always more to learn, more to understand, and you can continually improve and change and expand your skills no matter how long you’ve studied or how long you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing.

In the arts, at least (though I suspect it’s a universal truth), you’re never really “done.” But what continual growth requires is that you also continually know when to empty your cup and enjoy beginning again.

Comments

[chasophonic.livejournal.com]

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. ~W. B. Yeats

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

As much as I love Yeats (and I do), that analogy bothers me. A fire requires fuel. What is the fuel in this metaphor, and what happens when it's exhausted?

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

We talk about that same metaphor in SanchinRyu, and I've seen some of the same things you're talking about. Both people who come from a different style (I had to work on this myself, and still do on occasion), and the people who think their cup is full and they already know something, so they're incapable of learning more.

[chasophonic.livejournal.com]

OK. The fuel is knowledge. The fire is learning. The metaphor fails in that fire consumes fuel. Can it be exhausted? The message is that learning should be unbounded.

It speaks to passion vs. passivity in learning.

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

The image I take from that metaphor is that a full bucket remains a full bucket, but a well lit fire can spread.

I struggle constantly with the problem you disucss, by the way, in two areas:

1) Simple descriptions that mean something wildly different to me than they do to the instructor, most commonly "Like a sword blow."

2) Relearning things that have become spinal reflex. Two issues with that, actually - modifying the motion to aikido is relatively easy, but sometimes relearning to take the motion down into its component parts for reconstruction is much harder.

Worth the effort, though, even if I do sometimes feel like the slowest student in the class.

[buttonlass.livejournal.com]

My sensei would tell us "Practice does not make perfect, practice makes better." Perfect is not an option, there is always more to learn.

I feel blessed that I like learning so much I would miss it if I tried to stop.