A-ha! or uh-oh...

I had a flash of insight today. On those few -- truly few -- occasions when I have these breakthroughs, they're cause for great satisfaction. But satisfaction quickly yields to the difficult work of applying them to life through practice.

The setting for this afternoon's insight was the karate dojo.
I'm a brown belt in Okinawan Goju-ryu karate. At this level, I'm expected to have a fair foundation in the basics -- stances, punches, kicks, forms and so on.
This afternoon, we worked on those basics, with focus on stances.

In this style of karate, there is a basic stance called sanchin, which means "three battles." The toes of the forward foot are pointed slightly inward, the knee is bent over the big toe, the heel of the forward foot is on the same line as the toes of the rear foot, legs are shoulder-width apart and the knees are squeezed slightly toward each other. The idea is that this stance protects the groin if done correctly.
In the couple of years that I've been studying with this instructor, he always tells us to scoop our hips and butt slightly upward when doing this stance, which gets the body in the proper alignment to stand correctly in sanchin.

"Scoop the hips and butt slightly upward."
I've heard this instruction literally hundreds of times.
And literally hundreds of times, I thought I was doing sanchin correctly. My feet and toes were positioned in the right way, my knees were squeezed slightly together. There I was, in what I thought was acceptable sanchin.
Except that today, I realized that from Day One, I wasn't scooping my hips and butt slightly upward.
I was hearing sensei's words, but I wasn't listening.

He used the most descriptive and simplest language possible to help us learn this stance and he reinforced this simple instruction with his own textbook example of how to stand in sanchin. But until today, I didn't get it, and until today, I didn't realize that I wasn't getting it. In fact, I thought that I had already gotten it.
Despite his simple words and his own example, I had to arrive at the insight myself.
I don't know what led me to it. All I know is, one second I was standing in sanchin with a droopy butt and lazy hips, and the next second I felt as solid and immovable as a boulder. (If I'm still struggling with basic stances, you can imagine how much work lies before me, brown belt or not.)

This leads me to my point, which I state here not as "wisdom" I'm proudly trying to share, but as a reminder to my very forgetful self.
I read a lot of Buddhism-related blogs and books, and no matter how much the writers break down and simplify what they regard as their own flashes of insight into "what is," I'm left with the clear impression that I have to experience it directly and in its entirety. Otherwise, I feel like a blind man trying to describe an elephant.

I was reminded today that in the dojo and in life, I really don't know, despite what I may think I know, thanks to my stubborn ego.
But, when I feel I know -- I mean palpably feel this knowledge to the marrow of my bones -- then it seems as if it has been a part of me for 10,000 years.

"Scoop the hips and butt slightly upward."
What do those words mean? I don't know, because evidently I was interpreting (or misinterpreting) them several ways. Therein lies the limitation of language.
But I know what it feels like to be in that physical posture. The thing is, I can't describe it for you. Not because sanchin is so esoteric a stance that it requires decades of practice (though many would argue it does). In fact, I think it's just the opposite: It's so simple that I can never muster the eloquence to describe it. It has to be felt.

A former karate instructor of mine who is still a mentor and one of my dearest friends used to tell me that insight can happen in an instant, like a bolt of lightning.
Neat description, I thought.
But now I truly feel what he was telling me.