Month: July 2015

The trident of martial art awareness

Ask yourself why you train and for what ?

Do you train for an event or do you train for life ?

The trident of martial art awareness comes in the simple timeline. There is a before, during and after to a fight. Three prongs as military educators love to indoctrinate 🙂 I ask you to think of nature and the nature of separation. We live in society and die in society. There is no existence aside from it and if you remove yourself from it, then you carry it with you. The same goes for the barriers we place between events such as I go out, I get into a fight, I survive, I cry in the shower when no one is looking or someone cries over me…

All events and ourselves are connected and intertwined. The same way the wolf does not exist without the leaves the pray eats, the same goes for us and our awareness, state of mind and body we carry along the adventure.

An art that ignores the whole picture and lets you focus on just one unnaturally divided part of the whole is doing you a disservice. Be aware of the connected moments that make your life. Learn to live and be in each connected moment. Otherwise, like a character in a Lewis Carrol novel, you will be running just to stay in the same place.

Life is one whole piece that takes a lifetime to digest. Keep breathing, keep noticing and build each moment both anew and connected to the ones coming and the ones that are in your memories.

Drill:

Have a partner swing a stick or his fist at you. Focus unnaturally on his fist or the end of the stick and move to keep your comfort and facial structure in tact.

Remove the fixation and allow yourself to note both the middle of the stick and the elbow in the work.

Remove even more and allow yourself to see the shoulder movement and the held stick.

Be free and note how your eyes and senses create part of the picture unfolding in front of you. Freedom comes from removal of self imposed limitations. Return to being part of the movement instead of swimming upstream.

1+1=EVERYTHING

We all think of how to grow. How to better ourselves and how to see and know more of ourselves and others. There is a very simple template to this which I will share and give examples down below.

1+1 = Everything.  Simply put, this means that you start doing one thing such as paying attention to your breathing and when you feel some level of competence in this one thing. Add to it. This means you add a parameter to the work such as paying attention to your breath under pressure or paying attention to your breath as you focus on driving to work or shooting your rifle up the hill or down in the sewers.

That is the entire progression which is very simple but will keep you going all your life and without any hitches in your wagon trail.

Examples to incorporate into your life.

1 Counting up: Start your daily mental work by counting things that you are happy and grateful to have in your life. It can range from your sight to your belonging and extend to the good people in your life and your faith and paradigms. Simply add one thing to the list every day or every week and enjoy the growing awareness to the good things in your life. (The more you are aware of things, The more you can do with them).

2 Parameter up: Start doing pull ups every day. Start by looping a rope over an anchor such as a tree branch or a playground swing and doing pull ups with both legs on the ground. Continue to doing pull ups with one leg on the ground, Continue to doing pull ups with only the toes of one foot on the ground, continue to doing pull ups with one heel on the ground and with your body in an angle to the ground (reverse push up) Continue to doing pull ups with both feet off the ground and so on. You do the same thing only with different parameters and progression.

3 Quality up: Start with ten minutes of walking outside a day. Start with lowering the sound of your walking to a minimum and be in sync to the surface and growth/structures above ground to avoid making any sound. Continue with being aware throughout your walk to more and more of the array of life and movement around you from the movement of the clouds to the reaction of the birds and cats to your passing by. Continue in maintaining an active line of thought throughout your walk and recognizing and releasing of thoughts that are not your own from remembering an ancient scuffle to being caught in an add on a store front.  The progression of this simple walking drill is endless. You can call it mediation with purpose or avoid giving it a name and thus remove self imposed restriction any name would give it.

And Smile.