Month: October 2016

hunting with your kid

Here are several drills to practice with yourself and with your child or friends. These come to open your mind to the input of the senses and to allow the connection between you and your surroundings to thrive.

  1. Walk with your kid and choose an object to find first. First choose one item such as a cat and slowly evolve the game to finding a sitting cat, a Cheshire cat or a cat in the sunshine or shade.
  2. Walk with your kid and choose an object to find tracks of. It can be the trails of a plane in the sky, the footprints of a dog in the sand or the change in the color of the leaves where they were crushed by a moving object.
  3. Walk with your kid and look for a change in the status quo. A car that does not park in the usual place, a loud dog that stopped barking or a new bird in the bush that was not there last year.
  4. Walk with your kid and have one of you close their eyes. Find the source of the sounds and voices the one with the closed eyes hears and see if you can open your ears when your eyes are open.
  5. Walk with your kid and stop from time to time with your backs to each other. Note people animals and objects to each other and see if the other can find sign of it from their viewpoint. For example, you can find the shadow of the crane that was constructed last week, you can hear the miau of the cat that walks down the street or smell the dinner being cooked next door.
  6. walk with your kid and stop from time to time to lie down and watch. See how the ground sign changes from a different point of view and how we can learn more when we release the position we stick ourselves in. Take a white light flashlight with you to light the sign (animal print or another) from different directions and heights and learn to read the mark from any angle.
  7. Walk with your kid and visit the same sights every time during your walk. Mark the changes in the lighting through the year, mark the aging of the sign (leaves changing shape and color, dog leaving droppings, people littering or gardening and so on) and find why it works that way.

Paying attention pays more than you put in. The more you are open to your senses, the more you are able to act instead of react and the less you are a leaf in the wind.

Crowd Knife work

Here are ten knife drills to do in a group:

  1. Place a knife on your body without your partners seeing (blade on body is not advised) and walk calmly. Have your partners work to bump and touch you while walking in a casual manner and find out where the knife is. You work is to avoid the contact and to avoid showing in your movement where you placed the blade.
  2. Place a knife on your body and start walking in a crowd of your partners. Work to extract the knife with your hands and arms without showing it and the partners work to signal when they see the extraction. Switch roles regularly and remember the face is a signal map for the entire body. Breathe continuously and without excess.
  3. Hold the knife at your side and stand facing one direction. Have your partners walk by you and brush you. From time to time a partner will try to get a hold of your blade and hand and your work is to avoid getting tense and moving from your breath and body to avoid getting caught. Relaxing your mind and body helps in avoiding being a pin cushion.
  4. Place a knife on a table or on the ground and have everyone walk freely. At any time, one or more can go for the knife and everyone has to choose how to act and who to align with if any 🙂
  5. Walk with the covered knife in your hand extended away from you. Have people try to impale themselves on the knife and your work is to avoid cutting and stabbing anyone. Being able to cut the right  rope and not another is surgery. Cutting at random is a waste of energy and resources and nature does not waste.
  6. Place two or more knives within the group and have everyone lie down. Start rolling about freely and at any point start stabbing and move from where you were. Avoid being vertical as a default and see how it can be helpful at times.
  7. Start walking and talking freely as a group (if you don’t have something to talk about, just play a word game) and have two partners work to move the knife from one another without notice. The person who sees and notes the exchange first becomes the next partner.
  8. Divide into two groups with only one group with knives. See how you can manage as a group with the knife factor and how your opposition can be of aid when directed properly.
  9. Close your eyes and have a partner guide you along. Work on exhaling tension and building expectation and as someone starts stabbing and cutting you or if you feel something that you want to act on, Open your eyes and move. One of the main reasons people react instead of act is that they do not act to release themselves of excess tension and thought.
  10. walk in pairs with one partner with a knife and the other without. Have the pairs contact each other and work on how to maximize the pairing so all the hands and abilities come into play. The empty hand exist only in the mind.

Be safe in your work. The soldier who works to oblivion looses before he reaches the battlefield.

Ten books to open a window to your soul

Here are ten books to open a deeper portal to yourself. Through knowing ourselves we achieve freedom and are able to bring more good to our lives and the lives of those who surround us.

  1. Diary Of A Baby: What Your Child Sees, Feels, And Experiences – Learn the process of formation and patching things together from the source.
  2. The Hero with a Thousand Faces – Learn the anime behind what keeps us up at night and works of magic.
  3. The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success – Learn thought processes that are discouraged in formal educations but are important to acknowledged.
  4. Dune – A fiction that clothes the mind of man into an ecology unlike any other. Learn the static dynamic duo of the Author within his masterpiece.
  5. Black Elk Speaks – Learn the format of living where your existence is the one of your tribe. Many already have experienced it in uniform but have yet to understand how it molds us.
  6. Five Years to Freedom – Learn the inner discourse of a man held captive for years but free within. Learn to associate by choice and not by indoctrination.
  7. The Gospel of Thomas – Learn to look at the Work from another source that gives a different view of one of the main influences of Western civilizations.
  8. The Rediscovery of Man – Another fiction and this time a collected works of an author that learned under two different cultures and merges the viewpoints in the debate of its characters.
  9. Connecting Into Observation and Awareness – Learn to attune yourself through primal attention to your surroundings. Learn to let go of the dust that covers our senses in the bombardment of current “events”.
  10. Heart of Darkness – Learn the way a spiral spins within downward and outward. Learn through mistake to avoid and choose instead of drift.

Empty

At times we find ourselves with no reserves. No luck or shoulder to fall on. A moment of emptiness and void. A singularity with no shade as it casts no light.

Sometimes time drags us out of the void and sometimes the gear wheels of habit take us forward but not beyond that moment. Trauma and tears form  and we shift who we consider ourselves to be and how the world is in our eyes.

There are as many a key to open that empty door as there are people. I suggest you invest not in strength but in guile. Not in skill but in observation and you will find yourself within this moment both bare and free. Power and luck and skill will take you places. Letting go and going within will take you to yourself.