Shugyo Fit

By Rodney King

In his latest book, Shugyo Fit, world renowned modern martial artist, Rodney King, redefines the warrior spirit and brings artistry back to martial arts. In Shugyo Fit, Rodney teaches you how to tighten the slack of your inner game through martial arts training, using your body as the only tool, and in so doing, polish your spirit. Shugyo Fit equips you with the necessary tools to maintain balance between Fighter and Artist and to create personal mastery both on and off the mat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rodney King
• Release date: Jun 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9780620689434

Book preview

Shugyō Fit

The Balance between Fighter & Artist

I'm full of fire, full of anger, and full of hate.

I'm haunted by the dreams that keep me up late.

I'm full of love, full of happiness, and full of joy.

But I still am confused if I'm a man or just a boy.

—from the poem My Native Warrior,

by Mikela Jones (age 18)

Shugyō Fit

The Balance between Fighter & Artist

Rodney King

Published by Full Contact Living

2016

© 2016. Rodney King. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher/author.

ISBN: 978-0-620-68942-7

For information, contact: [e-mail]

Printed in the United States of America.

Visit:www.shugyofit.com

Dedication

Dedicated to all my students, who kept me motivated, inspired, and truthful over all these years.

Contents

Introduction      01

You Have Always Been Fighting Yourself!      03

Bringing Balance to The Force      07

Putting ‘Art’ Back into ‘Martial’      18

Lesson 1: The Warriors Journey      32

Lesson 2: Shoshin: Beginner’s Mind      47

Lesson 3: When Slow is Fast      53

Lesson 4: Wei Wu Wei      58

Lesson 5: Yin Yang      63

Lesson 6: Dvandva      68

Lesson 7: Koru      71

Lesson 8: Shibui      73

Lesson 9: Zen Mind, Warrior Body      76

Lesson 10: Sati      80

Lesson 11: Mantra of Prana      91

Lesson 12: Wei Ji      96

Conclusion      99

About The Author      102

Macintosh HD:Users:rodneyking:Desktop:shugyo book photos:rodney-1.jpg

Introduction

To say that I’ve lived an unconventional life is an understatement.

Growing up on the gritty streets on the South side of Johannesburg, South Africa, in government housing (similar to housing projects in the US) taught me early on that how smart you are means nothing compared to how tough you are. I was bullied relentlessly as a kid, to the point where I had to take ‘secret’ routes from school and within my neighbourhood just to make it home safely.

But home wasn’t safe either. My mother, a raging alcoholic would fly into fits of anger, smashing things against the wall—or more frequently, my head. When I was 17, during yet another one of her drunken outbursts, she kicked me out of the house. Destitute, alone, and with less than $20 in my pocket, I found myself sleeping on a bench in the park where I used to play as a kid.

My future, if I even had one, consisted of a giant neon sign, blinking: FAILURE. I was destined to become another statistic, eaten up by poverty, poor parenting, and lack of education.

But, somehow, I beat the odds and proved everyone wrong. Although I didn’t know it then, through my passion for martial arts and the lessons learned on the mat, in the ring, and on the streets, I would reach the pinnacle of personal and professional success.

This book is a modest attempt to outline some of these lessons. More than the lessons of fighting, it focuses on the lessons of becoming a martial artist. Through seeing the importance of what is often considered the softer side of martial arts (and sadly overlooked today), I was able to break free from my past, and carve a new path to personal mastery.

- Rodney King, 2016

You Have Always Been Fighting Yourself

For the past two decades, I have been punching people in the face, and those people have been punching me back. When I wasn’t doing that, I found myself rolling around on the floor with sweaty people, where we tried to take each other’s limbs off (metaphorically speaking, of course). As if that wasn’t crazy enough, people paid me to do this to them. If you don’t know much about me, I am a full-time martial arts coach. I have taught special-forces military units, world-champion fighters, and everyone in-between.

In all the years that I have been fighting, my final realisation has been this: I never fought anyone. The only person I ever fought against was myself. Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German philosopher, wrote In times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself. I would say, that a warlike man uses violence against others, precisely because he is too afraid to know himself (I guess we are alluding to the same thing). Because he fears his inner demons, he chases darkness on the outside to avoid facing (and bringing light to) the darkness within. If martial arts has taught me anything, it has taught me who I really am, and that who I thought I was, was never who I really was to begin with (how’s that for a bit of Zen?). The experience of martial (meaning warlike) performance, on the mat against another person, brings to life the truth of who you really are in that moment, or at least that’s what I have been telling myself. It’s true though, if you are afraid, you know it. If you feel anxious, you know it. If you doubt yourself, you know it. But you don’t show any of this to the person in front of you, because staying stoic when you are shitting yourself is a good strategy when someone wants to beat the crap out of you.

In those moments of truth, you can use that insecurity, that fear, that anxiety, as fuel to beat the person in front of you with martial skill, or you can chose to use that fuel to face down your inner opponents with art and turn them into character strengths. This book is about the latter (albeit built on a foundation of the former).

I have realised that my martial art journey has been about what the Japanese term shugyo. This word translates in different ways, and is used differently depending on the circumstance, but for the purpose of this book it is meant to imply ‘determined training that fosters enlightenment’. For the past several years, I have gone from focusing purely on the effectiveness of martial technique in a fight, to seriously becoming a student of the art. I have been criticised for it, too. Pundits of the hard-core reality-based martial-arts world have characterised my approach as new age-y. This attitude alone points to a kind of institutional cancer within the modern martial arts world. More often than not, the focus seems to be exclusively on the fight, to the exclusion of anything that aims at personal mastery. In other words, using martial arts to do less violence, not just against other people, but especially against oneself seems to be frowned upon. In contrast, I have chosen to find (and then create) a positive expression of modern martial arts—not only for my own sanity, but to help my clients steer clear of the negative side-effects of modern martial art training. Unfortunately, the media celebrate the hype of the fight and ignore the dark underbelly of modern martial arts. Hardly anyone talks about the potential negative psychological and emotional side-effects of training for a career (or even a hobby) where, trapped in a cage, your sole goal is to beat the crap out of your opponent.

Over the past few years, martial arts has become, at least for me, about transcending the need to fight, both myself and others. From this perspective, we are moving from simply the martial to a more balanced approach in which  art plays an equal role. My practice of shugyo fitness has become a way to tighten the slack of my inner game, through tough martial-art training where using my body is the only tool, thus allowing me to polish my spirit (or at least get a slight shine on it). My dojo, the experiential ground for this personal test and transformation, has been a simple padded floor, or what I call the mat. The mat has been my teacher, my opponent, and my protagonist. I have both loved the mat and hated it (at times, I could