I keep my tempo slow and steady, feeling my weight shift from one foot to the other as I throw punches: jab, cross, hook… shift, shift… cross, uppercut, hook. Chatchai first watches me from behind, assessing my looseness, pace, where I’m holding tension that doesn’t need to be there. He’s not looking at my body from the back, he’s behind me and watching my reflection in the mirror – seeing what I’m seeing, weighing each small adjustment from there. I just keep moving, trying to feel my way through the shadowboxing, as I’ve done in practice both with and without a mirror. This is a significant thing for me: to be monitored and anticipating correction without feelin at all that I need to please my teacher. It means that the tensions he sees are not due to being observed; they’re always there, even when I’m alone. Chatchai moves around to stand in front of me and holds his hand up, palm forward, to tell me to stop for a moment. “I saw this the other day,” he says, then, in his stance, rotates his shoulders and reaches his right hand down to touch his left knee. I imitate him. I feel my left shoulder twist back behind me, my right shoulder stacked over my left knee as I put just a little weight through my right palm. Then he reverses his rotation and throws a left uppercut from that hand-on-knee position. I do the same. My comprehension of the movement is immediate – the hand on the knee necessitates the rotation of the shoulders, which loads the power of the uppercut, like the tensing and unleashing of a spring. Chatchai’s face lights up as he watches me and he lets out a, “ah!,” before asking me whether that seems right. I nod my affirmation. I do the motion a few more times, then load the opposite direction (left hand on right knee) and then start working it into a more general arrangement in shadow. These kinds of moves are calibrations, a position or “trick” to get yourself to feel a comparison from the shoulder fully rotated behind, to what I think has been a rotation but thus far just hasn’t loaded much at all for that uppercut. Gradually, I stop touching my knee and just repeat the feeling in the shoulders. Chatchai lights up again.
One of the reasons Chatchai is such a great teacher for me is his complete lack of criticism. I don’t believe I’ve ever, not once, heard him tell me “no,” or “not that,” or anything at all that’s a negation of what I’ve just done. Instead, he’ll just pause me, or come stand next to me and do the movements himself, letting me observe the mechanics in him and then try to copy with my own body. This is wordless, always. When I do get it right, he’ll make a little exclamation to pinpoint that movement. More often than not, I can feel that it’s right, simultaneous to hearing his sound of affirmation. His excitement of seeing the correct movement, then, confirms that what I just felt should be recorded in my body, then repeated. It isn’t that I pleased him and now I’m searching for what I did, it’s that he shares delight in my having just found the groove. There have been many times when I’m frustrated by the speed at which we’re working, hitting pads, and he’s just enthusiastically cheering me on as he holds for a series of punches and then forces me to chase him or pivot or retreat, just by his own footwork; I get frustrated because I can feel that there are tons of errors in what I’m doing, that my hook is reaching or my accuracy is falling apart. The natural inclination is to slow down, correct the errors as they come up, but that’s not how actual learning works. I’ve understood and had experience to proove, over many years, that continuing to move past errors and mistakes is a much better way to smooth them over – as long as you know where they are. Just feel that it’s wrong and keep moving. Feel that it’s correct and keep moving. When Chatchai doesn’t slow down or let me stop and worry about these errors, it forces my attention to keep up, rather than latching on to the mistake and dragging it with me through each new moment. Fix it on the next punch, the error is already behind us, let it go. Very often I don’t let it go; my mind can’t quite catch up and I try to make the adjustment but it’s still just too fast. I know the angle of my hook is wrong and I might know how to correct it, but my mind has to slow down enough to let the correction come out of feeling, not thinking. This isn’t tricky, but it takes a lot of practice. With my left hook, the issue is almost always that I like to keep my fist angled toward my collarbone and that causes my elbow to pop out, just a little. Then, the hook has to “reach” when I’m trying to throw it, even though my feet are doing what they should be doing. So, as I’m moving and throwing other punches, I have to feel my elbow tuck in and my fist angle out as I rotate around, so that it’s in the right position when it’s time to rotate and transfer my weight across for that left hook. When I make the correction in real time, while still moving and not stopping to adjust, it’s great – that’s what every legend I’ve ever talked to about yodmuay marks as being the sign of a great fighter: solving on the move, under pressure, in real time. There are times (many times) when Chatchai is much happier with my work than I am, because he lacks this critical tone to his teaching. I’m the opposite; I’m almost all criticism and real stingy on the recognition of improvement. And that’s the right word there: recognition. It’s not approval; it’s not praise. When you teach by feeling, like Chatchai does, there is a neutrality to the process. It’s not “good” and “bad,” it’s just recognition that something worked economically and felt right, or was awkward and felt wrong.
I’m still shadowboxing when Chatchai walks away from me and disappears behind the ring for a moment. I see him in the mirror as he re-emerges, holding two salmon-colored pool noodles. They’re short, maybe 18 inches each, and he makes a sound that lets me know to go put on my gloves. Standing in front of each other with those pool noodles, I immediately tense up. We’re going to be slipping punches, and he begins jabbing at me with the end of the noodle in his left hand. I slip to my right, leaning back a little, and completely miss the timing and smooth rotation to come back with my right hand after the dodge. He keeps with that same side for a while, letting me experiment with angles and where my weight is, both the slip and the following punches getting smoother as we continue. Then he does the other side, then he starts alternating without telling me. This just keeps going and he cheers for me when he sees me start to panic, trying to call me back to what I was just feeling. It’s incredibly hard for me to keep doing this without an agreed-upon number of repetitions, I need some kind of stopping point, but that’s not how this goes. As my brain starts stumbling because I’m clutching my mistakes, I start slipping into the punches. He shows me how a slight duck down or a subtle enough twist allows me to dodge in any direction, for either noodle jab – so I don’t have to think which one he’s throwing, I just have to move. I dodge a few and then start running into them again, panicked by the relentlessness of it. He laughs and releases me to a water break. I’m frustrated; both Kevin and Chatchai are delighted by my progress.
I’ve been working regularly with Chatchai for a little over a year now, and this is the first time he’s had me work on defense. Now, before you think this is some kind of Shaolin time-scale, like carrying iron pots full of water for a year before realizing you’ve learned a guard, that’s not quite what’s going on. I see Chatchai for one hour, every other week; 2 hours a month. So, in reality, this is like 27 hours into training with him (with tons of work done by myself between our lessons, shadowboxing every day), rather than a it-took-a-year-to-begin-defense kind of thing. I mean, both are true, but there’s context. From the outside (meaning anyone other than me), I did amazingly well, given I have not really ever practiced this kind of slipping in a significant way. Arjan Gimyu has me slip and duck sometimes, when he holds boxing pads for me, but I certainly never felt like I was doing anything realistic – mostly I felt like I was copying what I thought that drill should look like and it was slow enough that I could kind of get through it. Between some of the rounds with Chatchai, as Kevin told me how great I looked, I shook my head and told him I felt very unnerved because I couldn’t break out of feeling like I was just moving in patterns. I wasn’t really slipping the noodles by true, natural, automatic reaction-time; I was more or less following the same pattern of movement 80-90% of the time and it happened to be working. In fairness, or even just in a non-critical thinking about this, using patterns at the onset of learning a skill that will ultimately be improvisational, is not a bad thing at all. I’ve even made technique vlogs about the usefulness of memorized combos when you first start shadowboxing, just to get used to continual movement. Over time, you want to let go of the patterns in favor of true fluency, but look… I just wrote that this is my first sincere effort into slipping and I’m being a sh*t to myself about using patterns instead of just immediately being brilliant at it. That’s not feeling – that’s mental bullying and it suppresses feeling by amplifying emotional quicksand.
Having the opportunity to feel this – meaning, understanding that my critical mind and emotional trip ups inhibit my learning process – has been one of the greatest boons of working with Chatchai. Not only do the lessons he teaches in Boxing carry over to Muay Thai – the weight transfer, the rotation, the tempo and timing – but the actual ways of learning are helping my Muay Thai continue to develop and progress as well. I know that being able to receive these lessons is a matter of “now,” that all my experience has made it possible for these things to be so comprehensive and helpful to me at this moment in my path. I first met Chatchai maybe 8 years ago and even in our first lesson I could appreciate how fundamentally “true” his style is. I understood a lot of it, but I couldn’t actually feel it. This is one of the ways in which I am patient, even if it seems like I’m not, given how little grace I offer myself in what I think I should be capable of at any given time. I do recognize that there’s nothing wrong with having this moment be the time I “get it,” rather than 8 years ago. And there’s that word again: recognize. Neutral. Just know it, and let the knowing shape into being.
