April 2019 – The Pain Issue

The anterior cingulate, a part of the attention network, tunes us to someone else’s distress by tapping our own amygdala, which resonates with tat distress. In this sense, emotional empathy is “embodied”—we actually feel in our physiology what’s going on in the body of the other person.  When volunteers had their brains imaged while they watched another person get a painful shock, their own pain circuitry lit up in what amounts to a neural simulation of the other person’s suffering.

When resources are scarce the need to compete for them can sometimes suppress empathic concern…

Sherington saw the brain as a complex building whose basic structure was the reflex, a simple chain of nerve cells. He thought that the progressive development of more complex reflexes and networks generates the properties that make the human brain unique and powerful.

…that the only way we have to assess pain is through communication with other human beings. Assessing the pain of others –either humans or animals—is not an easy task. When someone tells us that he is in pain, all we can do is wither believe him –or disbelieve him; there is little else that would help us to measure other people’s pain.

The classical connectivity model needs to be modified to take into account simultaneous activations of various brain regions whose contributions to the overall activity generate the individual pain experience. This is a distributed model of parallel processing—with several things being done at the same time—leading to associations between different patterns of activation of brain regions for a particular pain experience.

Show care and concern for the well being of your training companions. Take care the use of force. Student safety is a primary concern. If UKE feels that he/she is being placed in jeopardy, he/she may call out MATTE (stop), ITAI it (hurts) or may slap the mat or themselves several times rapidly. TORI must desist immediately. Any student who deliberately punishes another student via excessive force is subject to suspension or dismissal from the DOJO.

Dojo Courtesy, from Tsugiashi Do Training Manual Book One.

Illustration from Classical Budo, by Donn F. Draeger

Lately, I’ve been pushing our nidan and sandan candidates to draw the attacks in rather than wait still and wait for them to arrive. I sometimes refer to it as “The fight doesn’t start here, the fight starts over there.” Which is to say, “Don’t wait for the fist to be an inch from your face to start your defensive technique; start it when it’s still ‘over there.’ “

This youtube video, compliments of Sensei Eric Collazo, is a perfect example of this “over there” concept in action. Aikido Sensei Yoko Akamoto could be considered a textbook example of moving towards the attack, adapting to speed, to direction, and molding the attack into a defense. In this screenshot, she is not waiting for the attack to solidify and focus, she is coming toward the uki to begin to mold the attack into her desired defense rather than the other way round. Okamoto Sensei’s moving, blending, and adapting to her uki makes it tricky to see who’s attacking whom.
Watch this a few times and see if you think about dessert differently.

Illustration of how pain was though to transmit from extremities to brain, from Traite de l'homme, by Rene Descarte, 1664

In the Dojo, realism is strictly limited to avoid injury while providing a sense of what a combat situation “would” feel like. A wooden bokken is used to lessen the very real risk of death in Kenjutsu. Rubber knives, plastic bats, mouth guards are some of the air bags and seatbelts of the dojo. In unarmed martial arts, pain is carefully managed, and there is a Sensei present to make sure the balance of realism and artifice is sufficient for training. Kumite or Randori is monitored.

But in this controlled environment, it is easy for complacency to creep in under the cover of safety. It is easy to forget that in a true combat situation, there will be no Sensei there to yell “Yamei!” (stop). In military SERE training (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) great emphasis is given on simulating reality as much as possible with risking serious injury to the student. Even so, students know that they are working with a net and will likely not receive permanent injury, just as we are confident that Sensei will not permit us to get injured in the dojo.

In 2008, the concept of torture was being debated publicly and Christopher Hitchens, author, polemicist, and orator was asked to submit to being tortured by Vanity Fair Magazine. He agreed and arranged to be waterboarded by American ex-special forces volunteers in a pre-arranged and controlled setting, aware that even though these were serious guys, it really wasn’t “the real thing.”

It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed.

Determined to resist if only for the honor of my Navy ancestors who had so often

been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihiliatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine if I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheet panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

Christopher Hitchens
As a matter of fact, it is torture (first printed in Vanity Fair, 2008)

Sensei Mike Wilson, receiving Mochi Mawari during Sensei Shawn Witternberg's Sandan promotion demonstration.

Circa mid-1990s.

Summer of 1999
Soke Cohe conducted a series of weekend seminars on Hombu Waza, one weekend each month. Only two moves per weekend session, so the detail on each one was intense. In one of these sessions, Soke used me to demonstrate a concept. I was a brown belt and was very proud to be wearing Hakama. I took my place, seiza with Soke in front of the class, and grabbed his wrists, expecting Kata 1. I definitely received Kata 1, but it was the Sandan version, which I had never felt before. Soke was explaining some concept to the class as he performed the technique, and I experienced a pain I had never felt before, and because of the nature of Sandan Tekagame, there was no way I could move or bend to lessen the pain. Soke spoke to the class the way a trained educator would; studying the body language, looking into eyes to see if there was wakarimasu (understanding). However this took over his conscious thinking, leaving his unconscious to perform Sandan Tekagame. As it turns out, the unconscious brain is even better at Jujutsu than the conscious one, and I struggled to manage the shoulder and elbow pain I was receiving. I did not tap out, as I hoped to make Black Belt some day and assumed my pain tolerance was being tested as a prerequisite for promotion. (Ah, youth!)

Soke looked down at me, realized what I was experiencing, and immediately released me and hovered his hands nervously over my arm. He looked very worried as he began to perform shiatsu on my elbow, apologizing for not realizing how much pain I was in. “You need to tap out if I’m hurting you.” I told him there was no need, and that I could take the pain. He looked over to Shihan Mickey Bradle, and the two exchanged worried looks, as they had done several thousand times before at something stupid I said or did, and said quietly “We don’t give pain to punish; we give pain only enough to control or to move someone.”

Over the years, I have occasionally misinterpreted body language, or facial expression, or the lack of a tapout, and given Uki more pain that I had intended or wanted. I apologize to Uki, and I try to do better. I understand now that the object of our Style is to gain control while giving the least amount of pain possible. This balance of balance, pain, and movement, which shifts constantly based on waza and attack, is what requires study, and practice, and thinking. This is the higher technique and this is our higher calling; hurting people is easy.

And that’s “the Onions” of Pain.