All budo originates in place and culture that is alien to everyone who starts training in it. Even for modern Japanese, the world that molded Kano Jigoro and Ueshiba Morihei is strange and hard to imagine. Do you do anything to fill in the your understanding of the history and culture that shaped the creation of your budo, or do you practice it in a vacuum? I wrote about filling in historical details and how they can illuminate training in this blog post http://budobum.blogspot.com/2017/03/...in-vacuum.html
What do you do to illuminate your training beyond just repeating the techniques?