I absent-mindedly run my left index finger along my jawline, something I do when reading, speaking, or watching a movie. Just where my last molar sits, but on the bottom edge of the bone, I feel a tender spot. That’s odd, I think, and check the opposite side. Also a little sore, but less so. I push my fingers into my lymphnodes… not notably swollen. My fingers press incrementally along my jawbone, from one side to the other; only those two spots have any sensitivity. I decide I don’t have an explanation and leave it alone, filing the notice into the back of my brain.
A few days later, I’m in Bangkok at Chatchai’s gym in Lam Luk Ka, where I’d fought my 5th Boxing fight for him 4 days prior. We both stand together, warming up our limbs and twisting our backs a little, before I start shadowboxing and Chatchai complains that his whole body is sore, everyday, because he’s holding pads for his World Champion, Knockout, in the mornings. His remarks on this are cut short as he claps his hands once and makes a kind of, “oh-ho!” sound, to compliment the pop in my shoulders as I throw punches through the air. This is what we’d worked on the last session before my fight (3 days before the fight, 1 week before today) and I’d worried that I’d forget it – forget the feeling – before the day of the fight came around. To my surprise (and delight), the feeling had come back almost immediately when I shadowboxed at home the next day. One of the more satisfying things about training with Chatchai over the past year has been my ability to take what we work on in each session home with me, work on it in my own training, and then come back improved. I am noticeably better every session, to myself, to Kevin, and to Chatchai. This has not been the case for me in nearly any other endeavor in my life, including over a decade in Muay Thai. This isn’t a rag on myself, improvement is often non-linear, imperceptible, and overall very slow. I’m grateful that 15 years into my career, I can still experience growth spurts. But this particular element of developing a craft or artform is a bit of a complex for me.
I started learning violin shortly before my 3rd birthday, and continued with lessons and playing in recitals and orchestras all throughout elementary, middle, and high school. I finally stopped playing in my first year of college, when I failed to get into the orchestra and sent my instrument back home to my parents’ house for good. That’s not the complex. The issue is around practice. Taking violin lessons was not an insignificant expense for my family, and I had weekly lessons that my mother would have to rush from work to pick me up and take me to; as well as group classes on weekends, which complicated soccer schedules and whatever else was going on in a family with 4 children. I can still feel the heat crawl into my cheeks in response to my various teachers noting that I had not done the necessary hours of practice throughout the week; one teacher, my last, Paul Rowinski, would marvel that I had a kind of talent that allowed me to hear and memorize music rather easily, but my resistance to practice meant I rarely smoothed out the rhythms, lags, or sour notes that come with a first-time readthrough of a new piece of music. I felt such shame about this, like I was disappointing my teacher and burdening my family’s budget by not making the best of my lessons. But I also felt very shy to practice at home, with 3 brothers who would complain about the noise and repetition that is required from steady practice; I don’t think they actually made a stink of this more than a handfull of times, but like all criticism to a sensitive person, just once is enough to stick to your brain for the rest of your life.
Chatchai shouts, “one more!” about 10 times before finally calling the end of the round on pads and we both go get a drink of water. I slip my right glove off and unscrew the cap to my water bottle, while Kevin beams at me in approval of the round he just watched. “I figured out why my jaw hurts,” I say to him. His eyes widen, “really?” I put the water bottle on the floor and get into my boxing stance, then throw a few sharp jabs and point at my jaw with my right index finger, showing where my shoulder is slamming into where my last molar sits. “Proof I’m doing it right, I guess,” I laugh, and Kevin grins before saying, “Iron Dynamite!” This is the chaiya or alias of a former trainer of mine from Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai. Nook, the oldest trainer, would throw straight punches and let his shoulders slap against his jaw, which made a sound that could be heard from across the whole gym. The association with Nook is a joyful inside joke, but the fact of this tender spot coming from repeatedly slamming my shoulder into my jaw on punches (both in shadow, on the pads, and in the fight) makes me immensely happy. It is proof that I’ve been doing something without realizing it, something that, for a long time, took a great deal of effort to do at all. Recently, Chatchai was praising my padwork (I believe the session before my fight) and he used the phrase, ไม่รู้ตัว mai ruu dtua, which would probably translate to “un-selfconscious.”
The words literally mean to “not know your body,” but that’s not the connotation. It’s a positive thing, a lack of self-consciousness that lends toward being natural, automatic, and fluent. One of the greatest lessons Chatchai has ever instilled in me is that feeling is the most important thing in learning. By learning to feel your way through movements, you no longer need an outside instructor to judge for you whether something is “right” or “wrong.” You feel that it is wrong, until you feel that it is right. In my Vipassana meditation practice, the Arjan who advised me on my first 3 day retreat referred to this simply as knowing. You might be doing it right, or you might be doing it wrong, but the first step is simply to know it. But there is another phase to this learning process, and that is to no longer be aware of it. So, first you know the thing, like that I’m supposed to touch my shoulder to my jaw on the punch. You know when you’re doing it and when you’re not doing it. And then, gradually, you stop knowing it because it just is how you punch. When Chatchai told me that my movements were mai ruu dtua, he didn’t mean the shoulder and the jaw, he meant the overall flow. He held his palm out in front of his chest, like holding a small mouse cupped in his hand; then he used the outside blade of his other, open hand and chopped it into his open palm to create a rhythm. “Not,” chop, chop, chop, he demonstrated. Then he sped up the rhythm of the bladed hand hitting the open palm, so that it was like a rapid drum roll, rather than single beats: chop chop chop chop chop chopchopchopchop. Know the division of my strikes, remove the separation, then know the continuity… and then stop being aware of it.
The minute hand of the clock above the gym’s entrance to the sauna and ice baths is reaching toward the 12, and the time for our session is nearly done. I move my feet with as much continuity as I can, allowing my strikes to just come out as they wish, without thinking, although I do recognize more patterns than I think is ultimately the goal. In the mirror, past my own dancing reflection, I see Chatchai facing Kevin and hear the shift in his voice that happens when he’s speaking in English. It’s more percussive, like when his bladed hand lands in rhythms too set apart from one another. “Her strike can see better,” he says, meaning me; then he says something to imply my opponent’s strikes were muddled, something that in Thai is called มั่ว mua and I can’t recall how he phrased that in English to Kevin. But we both knew what he was talking about. After I’ve changed my clothes and crawled into the back of our car to stretch out my back, while driving over to train with Namsaknoi, it’s only then, laid out in the back of the car, that I really feel the impact of what Chatchai was saying to Kevin. It isn’t that I didn’t understand, in fact, I’ve noted dozens of times in my voiceovers for the Muay Thai Library, or in commentary on fights, or in my writing, how important “legibility” of strikes is for traditional scoring in Thailand. I’ve likened it to stage acting, or perhaps Ballet, that your movements need to be read from the back of the stands, the audience farthest from the stage; this is in contrast to film acting, when the camera can be right up in the face and a subtle shift in the expression in the eyes is sufficient. Muay Thai is, properly, a stage performance and a bold, clean, clear strike or defense or pivot is the most beautiful when it can be read from the nosebleeds. But, while I’ve known this and tried to convey this for many years, I’ve always been talking about someone else when I reference it. Video of Golden Age fights, or when I’m learning from the Legends and Krus of Thailand who simply move this way out of the habit of their own bodies. It struck me, lying prone in the back of the car, that when Chatchai told Kevin that my punches were legibile and my opponent’s weren’t, that he was saying what I’ve been saying, but he was saying it about me. I felt at once a little catch in my breath and a little leap in my heart. As if I’d braved so many years of playing sour notes, knowing they were sour, and only just now was told by a meastro how sweet the music from my fingers sounds.
