"And what advantage does a wrestler gain from his training partner? The greatest. And that man, too, who insults me becomes my training partner; he trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle."
-Epictetus
I've been training in some form of martial arts for quite a while. I suppose the first official training I received was in 1992 in the form of Tae Kwon Do classes as a kid who had just been punched in the face by a random boy on the playground for no other reason than he wanted to.
Since then I've been to a lot of different schools all over the world. However, in all that time I've never had a training partner become angry with me. That changed a few days ago.
I was in my usual noon BJJ class and was working with a guy who was fairly new to me. I'd seen him a couple of times before and had worked with him in the past. He'd always been friendly and chill.
After warm-ups we partnered up to do some drills. I wanted to work with him since I didn't know him very well and asked him if he wanted to work together. The instructor showed us what we'd be doing and we started the drill.
While I was attempting to do the drill, he did something weird that made it hard to do the drill we were practicing and essentially left his neck open to getting choked.
I mentioned he might want to protect his neck better and he suddenly flips out and says: "You'd never get that on me in a roll" ("roll" is our term for a match) to which I respond: "Ok, I just need you to act like it then, so I can do the drill."
He rolled his eyes and shouted: "REALLY?!?!" At which point the teacher came over, reiterated the same thing I'd just said and then asked the guy to step off the mat to talk to him for a minute.
I was planning to circle back with the guy when he came back and ask if I could've worded things differently... but instead he just stormed out.
The whole weekend I oscillated between wanting to try and get the guy to tell me about what's going on so we can talk it out. Or on the other end, just repeatedly choking him with the move he claimed I wouldn't be able to get on him.
What was apparent was that my own ego was in need of further training. I thought of the quote from Epictetus above, specifically:
"And that man, too, who insults me becomes my training partner;
he trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle."
The subject of anger is one that comes up a lot in the classics.
One that I particularly like is attributed to Buddha: "Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."
And from the Judeo-Christian Proverbs: "A hot-tempered person stirs up conflict, but the one who is patient calms a quarrel."
The health and safety of a training environment is built on the trust that training partners have for each other. If you can't trust that your training partner, it can be very difficult to train over a long period of time.
Anger is one of those poisons that can quickly turn a wonderful martial arts school into a dangerous and unhealthy environment. Be careful, watch not only the egos of others, but also your own ego. Our ego is an important part of our psyche but it can be the source of much anger and with it the training room becomes poisoned.
Listen to the podcast "Walking With The Tengu" at: https://anchor.fm/walkingtengu for analysis and thoughts on how classic works are meaningful to the modern martial artist.
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