Overcoming Tension – Stretching: Your Experience [Part 2]

Psychologically, people build up winners and losers in a contest. But experientially this makes no sense because the whole thing is experienced as one. This occurs in many different situations other than martial arts. Say for example you are on stage and lost in the music you are playing as part of a group. Where it comes from is not important, it’s that you feel it enlivening you that counts. It’s not that you cause it it someone else doesn’t, how you feel is how you are. So here there is a fusion of people and a union between them, which is experienced in the situation as a whole.

Psychologically, you might get some boost knowing that you were at a certain situation, like a music concert. But there is no need to see this from the egotistical point of view. None of that would be possible without the atmosphere, the onlookers, the rest of the band, all of those factors. So when a start is born, it comes out of that atmosphere. So when you experience something to the full extent and it becomes part of you, it doesn’t matter where it comes from particularly, only that you are receptive to it. This is important in martial arts. Even the air you breathe isn’t fully yours, it’s coming from outside and you and running through your system, which you count as you. So in this way, you are both in and outside of the physical structure in your experience. There is no need to think it is you that produces all that you are doing by yourself. I use the example of breathing because this is the basis upon which all other others experiences are lived.

Create Room for Growth, not for the Ego to Take Over

When you stretch your body, or its capabilities, you are creating a space for growth. For example, if you stretch a muscle, you create new room for growth. This allows extended possibilities which have yet to manifest. It is not about cramming this space immediately. If this new room for growth is not established, there is no gap to fill, and there is no space to grow. When it comes to the body, If the muscles are continuously compressed over long durations, the cells actually actually die off eventually or degenerate into a fixed state without the flexibility they once had. They change composition, allowing less pliability and transformative properties. Modern science has proven this, because the wisdom of the body is such that compressions from every direction can cause tumours to form in otherwise healthy cells. This is because the fascia of the body stiffens. For example, you have two muscle tissues that begin to fuse together which were once two differentiated separate connective tissues gliding over each other. This is the beginning of problems.

So when cells no longer feel themselves being stretched, they begin to reduce the production of fibres and the entire structure becomes more hardened. This is because your cells no longer respond to the need to expand because there is no demand. The ego likes this because it means an easy existence where everything is in an established way. So you can become a tree that is solid but snaps in the wind. Instead, you want to become solid yet flexible, which involves challenging the ego.

How do you become solid yet flexible? We will look at this. Basically, the body naturally sinks to the earth through gravity, and it is you who must trigger and expansion in various ways. The higher nature within you, which is consciousness, needs to work against the natural earthly tendencies of inertia and stagnation over time. It is not a question of excluding this inertia but of working with it. This arrangement of expansion of consciousness and compressional forces of nature mutually interacts to produce an ongoing journey. This is what we call the wheel of life, because the inside forces are compressed by the outside forces to produce a certain stability.

Shaking the Bottle

There is so much going on in the ring or in a fight, that you tend not to notice the pain at the time. For example, you might get punched but usually the adrenaline will cause your energies to become so external that the pain is not experienced at the time. It is there, it is just that it is beyond your awareness. This idea, that you override potentially negative influences which are present, is true on many levels. This allows you to shake things up rather than stagnate. It is as if you are shaking up the bottle so that the bubbles expand into a given situational space which you are filling by your actions. They then go back down again changing form into a settled surface film1. This process has a survival basis to it too. By externalising the energies, you don’t notice you are in pain so you survive an event because you have changed your state in that moment. You have expanded the bubbles.

If you go to the office, once the initial apprehension is over with you fly though the day with nervous energy that gets channeled into productivity. You are more flexible. More than that, your state has transformed. Have you noticed this? Living in a state of perpetual anxiety is largely avoided by staying busy and channeling the energies properly. For most people, if they can find an activity they enjoy and can engage with, this sorts out the problem and they can convert their energies into something positive. They expand their experience to more than themselves.

Stretching the Bubble

When you consciously apply yourself to a task, you realise that there is nothing to lose because everything has to be gained. It is not that you need to seek reward, but that you become receptive enough to open yourself up to the changes experience within the system if it is kept in a certain healthy way. It is as if the bubble is being blown bigger as it takes in more air. When this is done for a long enough duration, as well as repetitively, you self initiate this process from within.Just as the stretching of a muscle can produce changes in gene expression, you can produce changes in yourself by making yourself more flexible when needed, like a bubble that expands.

When a muscle is hydrated and the surrounding fascia is flexible, this fascia acts like a bubble containing pressurised air. This allows for expansion of the muscle tissues, and greater oxygen flow to the muscles. Blood contains a larger percentage of oxygen than air. So it makes sense to increase circulation of blood more than it does to just increase the size of your lungs or the amount of chemicals in the blood stream. For example, it is common for athletes to turn to testosterone replacement therapy2. But these are back up systems. By expanding the bubble, which means increasing blood circulation to the muscles and creating that space for oxygenation, you bypass the need for external supplements to a large degree.

Testosterone is needed to produce heat and increase oxygen levels in the blood. So when you perform certain breathing and physical martial arts exercises which demand you to warm up and circulate energy, there is an increased amount of these chemicals produced. This is because there is an increased amount of oxygen in the blood which you obtain outside of yourself which transfuses into the blood. This is why traditionally, before artificial methods, certain martial arts forms and breathing exercises were taken seriously. The difference is that they are used up in the process rather than externally manufactured and placed into the system artificially. The problem today is that athletic performance has become totally disconnected from this process and in many ways seeks to extract work from an athlete in a non sustainable way.

A way of life

It’s not like you one day make successfully and you no longer have to put effort into transforming a given situation to your advantage. It is an endless cycle in which your are in the middle. You are the dot in the middle of the circle. So what seems like chasing your own tail becomes a journey towards self fulfilment. Like I said before, gravity pulls you down and creates a certain stability and compression when you counteract it with efforts to expand. Your efforts to expand create space. This goes on and is the life process in action.

In martial arts, it was traditionally the effort which was sustained for as long as possible rather than the results or outcomes. This is why it was a way of life rather than a results driven thing. In other words, the effort to support the life process was seen as more important that gaining this or that. For example, note taking did not take place traditionally in the Chinese Monasteries, for example the Shaolin Temples. This was not to keep anything secret as is popularly believed, but instead this was to ensure that knowledge was experientially transmitted rather than intellectually studied. It is useless to take notes unless you understand somthing through experience, you can only get a theoretical grasp. When something is analysed intellectually it is bound to be misunderstood. When it is experienced from within properly, there is no question of misuse or misunderstanding, there is just an evolution which goes on and on.

This is why there was an insistence in experiencing the training with full involvement, you wouldn’t notice anything in particular, it’s just that you were just observing a particular exercise until at sank in over time. You became a process of doing this, which was a way of life for those who chose to. You didn’t need to remember any secret moves, because when it is known from within, when the time comes to act the wisdom of the body knows what to do and it happens naturally. This is if your perceptions are fully switched on. It makes no sense at all to know somthing and then switch off the machine and expect it to work somehow. This is mastery, which initially takes a leap of faith according to some factual studying, but then becomes an experienced truth.

A change of State

Even if someone was totally inept, transformation is possible. In this way it is even possible to transform if you start out with no potential. Potential has to be created in an ongoing way. The potential for growth, that is. If you throw a stone in the air, it can easily come back down unless it is kept up. When you sustain an effort towards expansion, you welcome in change and transformation. Eventually this cause a change of state within, because the energies running through you allow for more experience as well as better health. With the example of the stone, you are not changing the stone, but you are changing how it operates by making it airborne. In other words, you are not transforming the aspect of you which takes flight, you are transforming the part of you which is a stone, which sinks you to the earth. The stone is becoming airborne. In this way it is like you were a meteorite which came from space as a meteor. You are just returning to a more original state, which you forgot you were.

The part that expands limitlessly, the spirit as we might call it, does not need to be transformed, because it includes everything in its experience ultimately. You just need to rise to meet it. This need not be physical effort, it may be energetic effort in maintaining a still posture in meditation for instance, or simply keeping the system in an optimally functioning way through day to day tasks such as walking, or even actions in the service of others. There are many paths. This is why students traditionally served the master, it was not for his benefit but for theirs. The Master asked them to work, that is all. So with positive action towards extending your range of activity, In doing so, the fear of loss or decline in motivation is largely taken care of because you have created a change within the system itself. You have created an upsurge that requires maintenance not only to keep it that way but to continue transformation. This is the nature of transformation, it is a continuous state not a fixed one.

Fear of Loss

There is fear of losing financial independence through some sort of debilitating injury, or losing the respect in the eyes of others. But this has no real basis in fact. For instance, when two warriors go at it in the ring, this makes for an exciting exchange where both fighters are immortalised in the eyes of others. Many fighters fear that they will never make such an impact. They play it safe and never get fully involved. This has some advantages, but will never be fulfilling totally. So the key is to become the best possibility that you can, always striving towards improvement and expansion of your own possibility. This will vary according to each person developed capabilities as well as circumstances outside of their own control. This is why it is important to focus on what you can control, which is your own conduct and behaviour, your own effort.

Outside of the ring, even if a person dies defending others, their memory is also immortalised. It’s not about glorifying death, it’s just about realising that no one actually loses face going out as a full blown expression of courage who has surpassed themselves. It’s not about going out and dieing for some cause. But in various situations, people that push themselves develop their capabilities by stretching themselves to the maximum. Once again, they can come back down just as a stone does that loses momentum. It is a question of keeping up that momentum which creates the best state. So in a less extreme example of losing a martial arts match and giving it your all, there may be a loss, but it’s a good one if it inspires many others and even yourself. There is no failure in taking flight only in landing and never taking action. Many fighters have felt honoured to be involved in a contest which was a full expression of the human possibility. An empty victory is less impactful in this way. So whether one wins or loses, both parties gain from the exchange if they prize the importance of the contest above their own personal results.

Some people may fear looking less powerful to their children or spouse if they were to lose a fight. So the biggest fear people often have is whether or not they can provide security for those around them they have chosen to defend. However, opening oneself up to the vulnerability of caring for others more than themselves has been a method employed in various ways by people to overcome their own self importance and limited identification. For example, when a monk is sent to a temple, they are charged with feeding others ahead of themselves and looking after those weaker than themselves. This means even looking after the humanity and life of an attacker who opposes them. This is why there is respect for the dead, even if they are your enemy. For instance, if an attacker is seriously injured by you when you defend those weaker than yourself, you at least must respect the life process acting through them, the same one you are reaching for. It is not about respecting their cruelty. This means constantly being aware of the humanity within yourself which does nothing unnecessarily gratuitous to a violent attacker. There is no need to respect the cruelty within yourself, so you just transform it. With the enemy it is the same thing.

The Purpose of Stretching

When you stretch the area of you concentration, you widen your awareness. In other words, you experience a larger expression of life. This can even apply to the somewhat distorted expression of life which is the violent attacker. If you can do that, you have ensured your own evolution because you have understood the reasoning. It’s not a moral thing really. This is the fundamental reason for showing compassion to the opponent. This doesn’t mean that you go and beat them senseless, and then if there’s time you think about whether to hold back and show some mercy. If you know this is what you are likely to do, then I suggest some preparations. For example, after you have performed your martial arts training, try returning to a state of relaxation in the muscles and system via stretching activity. You keep vibrant and fully alive, but the muscles are relaxed to circulate the energy. it’s not a passive state. This can last just a few minutes, and may seem a bit pointless, but in fact in doing so you will come down from the stress of intense training. By coming down, your energies are actually raised to a higher pitch and less rigid. This will allow your to become less hyped up about yourself and view things in a more balanced and reflective way. It might even save your life.

If you performing some stretching exercises before performing some activity, your system can take more pressure before fatiguing or stiffening up. If you do so after, you can return yourself to a less reactive state so that you can more appropriately respond to any kind of stressful situation more consciously and with intelligence. If the strength of a wheel were on the outside, the inside of the wheel would break. Essentially, this is what can happen to the human being if the energies remain too externalised for too long. This does not mean you do nothing in the face of danger, or second guess yourself when it’s time to act. It just means that you judge the situation more effectively so you can deal with it with confidence. Otherwise, it is easy to slip into a pattern of chronic stress and externalising thre energies as a matter of compulsion rather than choice. This is the danger of the macho martial arts practices.\

In the same way, if your temperament thickens in such a way, it is easy to become attached to this identity as an alpha, and fail to let situations slide over you. This is why so many martial artists have become so hyperactive over time. So situations often get out of hand not so much because this is what needs to be done, but rather because of a lack of return to a normal state of decompression. This dampens the faculties of rational thought and perceptions over time, leading to largely non voluntary response to stressful situations.

References

1 https://intuitivemartialarts.com/2023/06/29/inner-physical-practice-karma-and-riding-the-wave-of-the-inner-fight/ Riding the Wave of the Inner Fight

2 https://intuitivemartialarts.com/2023/04/24/conquest-at-all-costs-drugs-and-the-evolution-of-martial-arts-part-1/ Conquest at all costs