Jim Wing wrote a fairly thoughtful  article on “flow rolling” a few months ago to which I intended to respond… as soon as I got around to reading it.  Why didn’t I read it at first?  Well, I saw the first few sentences appear on my Facebook news feed, and I was already pretty sure I knew where the post was going.  I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. I knew where it was going because, like Jim, I’ve been around the Jiu Jitsu block a few times, and I know that accepting an invitation to  “flow roll” often ends in frustration and–somewhat ironically–injury. This is because when beginners ask to “flow” they are generally asking their seniors to give them a little space to work their game–to attack, maybe play on top a little bit. This can be done in a way I will elaborate on later, but if it’s done without caution and control it can sour one on the whole experience of “flow rolling.” Increasing the irony of injurious “flow rolling” is the fact that the more skilled practitioner is usually on the receiving end of “flow rolling” injuries. This is because the less experienced practitioner often, like a growing puppy given too much leash, can’t resist transforming the gracious gift of uncontrolled space into an irritating, if not dangerous, velocity. I can’t count the times I’ve been elbowed, kneed, head butted, fallen on top of, just because I was trying to give a frustrated student or classmate a little room to move.

So now I have to admit that in my school, which I named Flow (for reasons I’ll go into later), I have taken to answering the “can we just flow roll” question much like Professor Wing.  I say, “let’s just roll.”  Sometimes, answering the implicit question, I append it with, “I’ll keep it light.”  Sometimes when I’m working through an injury a well meaning student will ask me sympathetically if I want to “just flow,” and then I preface my previous statement with an involuntary laugh and I don’t add the postscript about going easy, because the more ragged I feel, the tighter I like to keep the reins.

But I do flow roll–all the time.  Flow allows me to roll with all my students–the women, the kids, the lower belts, some of my older students, in a way that, I like to think, we both find interesting and stimulating.  Jiu Jitsu, “the gentle art,” is more than simply gaining position and submitting.  It is about developing sensitivity.  In our practice we work to heighten our awareness of many things–physical and structural weaknesses, the repetition of patterns that signal and predict these physical and structural weaknesses, the tells of cardiovascular exhaustion and false positional confidence.  We gain a sense of what kind of pressure can make an opponent crack.  In competition we use our sensitivity to break down our opponents, but at the academy we try to use the same awareness to build up our classmates.  We feel how much pressure they can take physically and mentally and we bring them as close as we can to the edge without taking that final step.  The stronger they are, the more they offer the academy, and the more secure they feel in their rolling with us the more spontaneous and creative will be their escapes, and that creativity will build the level of jiu jitsu in the academy by posing physical questions that otherwise would have gone unasked.

When we allow escapes, we are also developing a sensitivity to where our partner/opponent wants to go and, in training, this requires us to loosen the leash a little and give him some space to run.  Then we can develop our sensitivity to follow.  We can metabolize complicated patterns of escapes and counters which, in time, might appear to “flow.” Soon we will be able to guide our lower level classmates through these sequences with an effortlessness which appears almost presentient–as though we were standing on the ground controlling the movements of a kite through slight modulations in the tension of our hands.  In the heat of competition these same movements might appear to the uneducated eye as a scramble of near escapes and recoveries, but the person who understands and has worked on this sort of flow will recognize the intense, following-energy, and understand that the submission that arrives from here is the result of hundreds of hours of give-and-take practice.

This sort of practice was spoken of most memorably by Marcelo Garcia in Arte Suave.  Marcelo is rolling fairly lightly with a purple-belt level training partner.  We watch Marcelo move toward submissions, lighten up to allow escapes, and then continue, transitioning through to new attacks.  He has the enthusiasm of a sort of explorer of the jiu jitsu landscape. His voice overlays the training session.  He is talking about his training philosophy:

It is important to open up in the academy.  It is important to loosen up, let the guy go, to see how he is escaping.  What will happen during a competition when you need to reason fast on certain positions?  It’s dangerous that the guy does not have escapes, because then I will not be able to train.  But if I let him escape, I can see the kind of escapes he can do.  It gives me a wider array of options, and it will be easier when I fight in tournaments.  I will be prepared for what will happen.

Like most of us, I’ve followed Marcelo’s career with a sort of wonder, but I’ve also spent a good many hours training and rolling with the man.  I remember vividly the feeling of my first roll with him at Studio X in NYC.  I was a new blue belt, though I had ten years of serious martial arts training and quite a bit of experience in competition and stand-up grappling.  I was aggressive.  I was used to rolling hard.  I’d never heard of  “flow rolling” or been invited to “flow.”  I went at Marcelo with everything I had.  I was greeted with a sort of lift–that feeling a surfer gets just before he’s hoisted up on top of the wave–and then I was abruptly tossed into the torrent below.  And then there I was, caught in a series of near escapes, pulled below, struggling to the surface, gasping for breath, dragged back down, twisted around, rising up to catch a quick glimpse of the wave of Marcelo, flowing, smiling, the white of his gi washing over the top of me,  then back down again, tossed about until a few taps spit me out, and left me gasping in the salty surf of my own sweat.   I was rolling hard, but Marcelo was flow rolling.  I wanted to learn to flow roll too.

If one studies Marcelo’s book, The X-Guard, or his instruction at his online academy, it is not difficult to get an idea of the excruciatingly integral web of his technical repertoire.  Every one thing seems connected to every other, by several hundred strands.  In X-Guard, one can get a sense of how this sort of web develops.  Without entries into X-Guard, there is no X-Guard, so first one learns sweeps and attacks from the seated guard–a series of ifs and thens–which cause the opponent (if she escapes the first attempts) to post on her feet.  Only then, as the partner neutralizes the initial attacks, does one enter into the web of attacks from the X.  In the video segment referenced above, Marcelo is working an omoplata series that was part of the wave of attacks I was caught in during that memorable first roll.  It took me about six years to put all those transitions together and make them my own.  Any one technique from that series could have been (and was) learned in a fraction of the time, but connecting those strands into a web is a far more demanding and intricate practice which requires a willingness to offer partners the space to escape, and the patience to try to stick to the escapes and direct them with flow.

But flow, as the late Terry Dobson said about Aikido, is “a lot like dancing.”  It requires a leader and a follower.  And this brings me to the reason I rarely make the agreement to “flow,” except with a select few people who seem to grasp the importance of this requirement.  When there is no clear leader and follower there is just that spatial clumsiness which results so often in bumps, bruises, tweaks and frustration.  It is much more painless for me to, in the midst of a roll (assuming I’m the more advanced student), transition between the role of leader and follower.  With the kids and the lower belts I practice creating the openings that lead them to the techniques we learned in class.  I do my best to guide them into the techniques without using language, and when I am successful it is as much a victory for me as when I work through the same sequences as the aggressor.   As students get more advanced I can guide them through a network of attacks, allow them to find escapes, and then I’ll transition to the role of follower.  I’ll search for their flow,  a sequence of movements they have started to metabolize.  When I find that, I try to move through it in a way that allows them to explore a little and expand their web.  Meanwhile I can study transitional escapes and counters which I will perfect in my work with my tougher students.

The most important component in flow rolling, in my mind, is connection.  Physically this is a sort of stickiness–that following-energy that mitigates spatial gaps and lurches.  Mentally, it is focus, a whole-hearted and minded connection to the energy of the roll.  It is that quality that brings a sort of timelessness and egolessness to the rolling–not the put-on, banal sort of  “I don’t care how many times I got tapped,” because, I “left my ego at the door,” egolessness, but the kind of accidental egolessness that comes from being so absorbed in “the roll” that you can momentarily forget about “me and  her” or “me and him” and just participate fully in the energy of the event.  It is like the way a surfer can become part of a wave rather than pitted against it; a kayaker can become part of a river…  This is the Flow I took for my school name, a state of mind defined by the Psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book of the same name.

It is this state of complete absorption in activity that has always made the nightly pilgrimage to the martial arts school such a powerful retreat for me.  It is a place–or brings me to a place–that has always seemed to exist in its own dimension–the dimension of flow.  And while I am admittedly dubious about accepting invitations to “flow” from fellow students, I am always looking for the flow within the roll, searching for the exact amount of give and take where it can be found.  I am also certain that the best technique is to be found in this dimension, in this state that exists somewhere between combat and play.  It is a state which nurtures discovery, spontaneous creativity, effortless solutions.  Lock yourself out and you will forever be limited to the instruction of others; your jiu jitsu, like all derivative art, will only mimic greatness.  It will remain plain, linear, two dimensional.  Give your self up a little, wander, get lost, find your way back–you might just find a jiu jitsu that’s all your own.