Honesty: Its place in training

How should we define honesty? What is it? Is it just; 'not lying to people', or something deeper? How does this apply in the context of karate?

I imagine the definiton of honesty that springs to mind for most of us is, as previously mentioned, 'not lying to people'. In other words, we instinctively define 'being honest' as something we do around other people; how we appear in public. We do not initially consider applying 'not lying' to ouselves.

Generally, and certaily in the context of karate, I think honesty runs much deeper than just appearing honest to other people and our concerns ending at how honest we appear to them. Certainly, in karate, honesty means not lying to ourselves as well as others. It means to face those things about ourselves we'd rather ignore and doing something about them. Instead of pretending they don't exist and hiding them deep within ouselves so nobody else sees them insread of tackling them head on; 'To Seek Perfection of Character', sound familliar?

My point is that this kind of honesty in karate is really important and as I've discovered, increasingly so as a black belt. This is the stage where a karateka has to take full responsibility for their training if they don't want it to detiriorate. This full responsibility means looking at oneself in an honest light, finding strengths and weaknesses in technique, character, etc... and deciding what kind of progerss to make and what direction to go in based on these findings. It's not flattering what we find a lot of the time while tackling and working on those things we'd rather ignore isn't always enjoyable. But otherwise, we wouldn't make the right progress and we'd always be deceiving ouselves in training, messing about on the fringes of karate and not going deeper; which isn't its purpose.

For a while after my 1st dan grading, that's how I felt. I felt directionless, living up to black belt was demanding more from me than living up to brown belt and below had, I wasn't doing my training justice and I couldn't find the strength to change that. My training felt like a lie. It's true that I'd let my training reduce to quite a sorry state, that's what I found if I was honest with myself and, looking back on it, I was hard on myself about it too.This was my mistake, it's important to train honestly but there's a difference between this and being hard on ouselves; we should look at ourselves and our training honestly but that dosen't mean beating ouselves up about our findings. When I eventually stopped doing that to myself, making progress became more manageable. Sometimes a: ' this isn't good enough, you can do better' is healthy but it's all about striking a balance.

Training honestly is important in karate. As is examining the nature of honesty and how to apply it in training before we do so.