“When you treat an object of desire with a level of deep respect, then you no longer view it as something to acquire and gain conquest over. So it is not a question of doing away with passion and desire, but of treating it with the same level of respect as you would a prize of some sort.”
When it comes to martial arts, many people believe that they must get angry in order to summon the energy to defeat an attacker. It is not so much that you must not get angry or taken by events. This happens whether you like it or not and is out of your control to a large extent. At the same time, it isn’t about becoming excessively reactive. What isn’t out of your control is where you steer this anger. In other words, it is about how you respond to the emotional situation.
The confrontation you enter into is fraught with emotional energy. It’s in the air. It is an emotionally charged atmosphere. So it is important to accept this within yourself. Planet earth would not exist without this kind of atmospheric pressure. Only when you accept the situation as it actually is, can you steer the emotion in the right way. This is why traditionally, martial arts involved dropping the idea of winning and losing. It was a tool to make you focus on the process rather than the result. It wasn’t to stop emotion from happening, but to stop emotion from becoming unbridled and leading to all sorts of excesses.
In the past, the master would put the disciple into some kind of aimless work. The more they did this aimless work the more they retained a sense of balance and equilibrium. This could be something as simple as carrying a pot from a well. In the past this was needed before taps became widely available. But long after it was needed, the rituals stayed. However, nowadays this sort of aimless work has lost all meaning. You simply call for a delivery. So we are becoming far removed from normal work which we now see as pointless. However, in the past cultivating the right state within oneself became paramount, rather than the fruits of this labour.
If you try to become devoid of emotion in a confrontation, you will not summon sufficient energy to survive an attack. You cannot shun or suppress emotion in such a situation, or any situation for that matter without become dried up and lifeless some degree. At the same time if emotion becomes unbridled, it becomes a kind of passionate madness. In the ancient past, you would be dead at a fairly young age in many places. So the game was up fairly early. Today however, people are living in states of stress and tension into later years which leads to inertia and chronic fatigue. This is why so many martial artists have taken to performance enhancing drugs, their sense of ambition becomes uncontrolled and has turned into a pursuit of stimulation to overcome inertia.
“The Master would put the disciple under such pressure, and then all of a sudden they would burst open. So after a certain period of incubation, the seed shoots out and grows. In this context stress must be understood as a stimulus for growth.”
When you become dried up, you will look for scraps or left overs to feed off of. For example, some sort of reactive situation to get into, like fighting someone. These are what stimulate such people. This includes all sorts of reactive states. This is why Martial Arts is often depicted as a struggle rather than a liberation. Initially, this is to be expected, but is not the end goal.
Unfortunately, many martial artists have learnt to associate deep experience with pain and loss. They toil and toil, and then at the end there is just pain. The majority of people don’t tend to develop pleasantness to its full extend. We will look at how this is done in a moment. So the long term progression of work became associated with pain and loss. No wonder people give up, if that is all they see for their efforts. They have seen drugs and heightened stimulation as a temporary escape to lift them out of such a pit. In doing so it is only natural to consider emotions as a problem to escape, because it carries them off into an abyss. The majority of the time is spent functioning in a state of stress rather than pleasant emotion. This is because many of the institutions and ways of society exploit the human being as a resource.
You don’t need to go about supercharging yourself full of rage and passion. Yes, this makes you more reactive, but it also makes you less responsive to more possibilities. This is why people become mad about beating people up. They become averse to losing and so they gain pleasure from winning. This is an instant gratification due to indulging in a state of reactivity. So it is said that you must fight someone in order to win some contest down the line somewhere, otherwise you will be unfulfilled. But this is not so.
However, if you were more pleasant in your experience, you would not think about objectifying some person as a means escape from stress. All sorts of alliances have been formed under such a limited understanding of emotions and how to handle them. With such a mindset, there is a deep sense of enduring struggle, there is less and less room for any kind of pleasant experience other than the pleasure of winning or beating someone. Of course, struggle is natural, but it is what we do with it that counts.
What to do about emotion? First and foremost you must make them into something very pleasant, rather than experiencing them in shoot form. The shoot is an initial burst of life which occurs during certain contrasting weather conditions. For instance, after the cold months, the air pressure changes and you get spring. This understanding of human beings is what gave rise to various master disciple relationships. The Master would put the disciple under such pressure, and then all of a sudden they would burst open. So after a certain period of incubation, the seed shoots out and grows. In this context stress must be understood as a stimulus for growth.
Various systems of martial arts have told you what sort of emotions will arise during a confrontation. Psychological studies have also shown what sorts of emotions are felt most deeply during such situations. But no one talks about how these can be incubated. More than that, emotions have been treated as static and unchanging. This is ridiculous.
Incubation means keeping emotions warm rather than burning them out. When you incubate something, it transforms under such heat. There are ways of doing this, such as mediation and mindfulness exercises. Mediation simply means sitting still or directing the energies in some way. Mindfulness means you concentrate unwaveringly on whatever it is your are doing, such as martial arts form. This is a way of quietening the mind so that you become focused.
So we end up studying emotions and theories about them in the initial stages rather than experiencing them to the fullest extent possible. But this is a stagnant analysis, rather than a live observation. When you become mediative, it is not that you become passive. It is just that you have travelled through emotion and come out the other side. You have used it for your growth, rather than being used by it and the provoking situation.
When you sit with pleasantness for a long duration of time, you begin to experience every emotion differently. This requires a certain experience of stress as well as a Deep acceptance. There is also a time lapse, because the chemical nature of the body requires time to process reactions into new solutions. The mind can get there straight away. This is the meaning behind deep focus. This does not mean you just sit with stress and accept it as it is. Instead you are transforming it with the right vision about what to do. Once you have done this, emotions are no longer a problem because they act as a springboard to something else. This is the true meaning of emotional development. Only when your emotions have transformed into something else will you take the time to look at anything other than survival and conquest over others.
For most people, the fullest extent of their emotion is passion. This could be passion towards sex, drugs, fighting, or whatever else. Whichever way, passion is used as a way into deep experience. The only problem is, the journey often comes to a halt prematurely. It is is like jumping off of a cliff to experience the rush. It is right to take the jump, but the problem is you didn’t think of hitting the ground hard! As a result, peoples deepest experience becomes associated with risk taking and pursuing some object which eventually causes them suffering. There is no limit to the madness of unbridled emotion, anymore than there is for your capacity to develop.
It usually never occurred to people that when you treat an object of desire with a level of deep respect, then you no longer view it as something to acquire and gain conquest over. So it is not a question of doing away with passion and desire, but of treating it with the same level of respect as you would a prize of some sort. This is why traditionally martial arts always aimed at inculcating a deep reverence and respect towards the Master or the forms of practice. The idea was to observe the thoughts and emotions passing by, just as the wind turns from high to low pressure. This is why it is important to reduce the hype of your activity and slow down the breathing and movement in mediative practices.
In martial arts, risk taking heightens the sense of adrenaline. This can become a powerful tool if you learn to use it wisely. This increases pressure within. It causes butterflies in the stomach, and anxiety associated with loss and overcoming pain. This is why some people develop heightened appetites and abnormal sensitivity to the environment. At the same time, when you learn to respond to intense experience towards martial arts practice rather than simply reacting, you are released from the fear of losing and the negative emotions associated with it.
It is all about searching for a bigger experience of life, which is what everyone wants anyway. So you have to become conscious of this. You need not stop at anxiety and adrenaline rushes. You use these reactive states as a root to spring from, a core of experience rather than a peripheral one. When the flower sprouts out of the seed it is no longer a seed. In the same way, when you overcome fear and anxiety, you no longer experience difficulty and pressure in the same way. You create a certain distance from it even though you feel it.
Say for instance that some weeds are growing on your flower bed. At certain times of the year, weeding takes up most of the day. The flowering happens as a consequence of working the land properly. Only then can you cultivate the flower bed expertly. If the weeds go unattended, then they can grow out of control. So you need to understand that you are working for something greater.
You may have noticed when it is cold and wet, and then the following day it is hot and sunny the weeds grow tall and gangly almost overnight. This is due to a collision of atmospheric pressures and weather conditions. Amidst this collision of these forces the weeds take full advantage. The same is true of your own pleasant experience. In other words, the same conditions which create negative emotions are the fuel for positive ones. This needs to be understood.
Most people have taken stress and anxiety as their own experience, and pleasantness and joy as some sort of fantasy land. However, it is just a case of putting in the necessary work. When you experience some level of heightened emotion, you go from low to high pressure. This is a stimulus, not a goal. This is particularly the case when you are in survival mode, the pressure suddenly increases. This is why in martial arts, you are taught to become always fully aware. This does not mean hyper vigilance, but perception of danger and readiness to act. They said stay ready, not stay reactive.
When you let the emotions develop within you, they can spring forth and take over the flower bed. These outcrops can be of different sorts. You can have weeds that take over, which is to say negative emotions of hatred, envy, and other reactive states. These flower into certain forms too. At the same time, the weather conditions permit the growth of other flowers. These other flowers include less reactive states which are a result of responding to situations consciously. For example, you can distend the Hara Centre or sink into a posture, rather than become rigid and tense in the shoulders and back1. Tension held in the shoulders and back leads to fatigue, stress, and headaches. This is a breeding ground for certain negative chemical states within the body.
Initially, there is always a reactive state of tension which you then respond to with a postural adjustment.This can be in any situation. It is not that reaction is better than response to it, it is just that tension is an initial stage in the cultivation of kinetic energy. This is just one example. If you don’t make this dimensional shift, then you leave yourself open to stresses and the build up of negative emotions from reactivity to events. You must instead be like the plant which uses the heat and energy of the stressful season to convert energy into transforming yourself. You then don’t let the weeds which have made there way onto your land define who you are as a person.
So it is about experiencing the storm to the full extend whilst doing the necessary work to create something pleasant out of the situation. When the branches of a tree bend in the wind, this sends a signal to strengthen the roots. If it snaps, this sends another type of signal that says it’s all over. This is the reason for pressure testing used in the traditional systems of martial arts. Pressure testing was used to develop flexibility. This has almost disappeared due to obsession with winning contests rather than being open to the possibility of losing. There is nothing wrong with winning, obviously it is a good thing, but the aim and orientation of your work needs to be correctly understood in order to get the most out of competitive forms of martial arts.
So when you have too many weeds in the garden, flowering is no longer your goal anymore, the flowers are a side effect of weed infestation. You then see these flowers as outside of your control, which they are not. You then become a bed of weeds, which take over the nutrients of the soil. More than that, the whole flower bed becomes distorted. Of course, you can weed it out, but it becomes a lot more difficult than if you had been aware of this happening initially. Better to start off properly. There is nothing wrong with weeds, but they share the same plot of soil as flowers and prevent the possibility of flowering. I hope you understand what is meant by this.
A martial artist must ultimately learn to treat emotions with reverence and respect. Only then will you be able to express them beyond their crude forms. If you are going to experience these things, why not cultivate them further than their initial expression? This involves accepting them and nurturing them as you would an ally or a friend, for this is what they are. The moment you accept a friend they way they are, they are more pleasant towards you than if you try to use them for some objective means. You then develop as a result of that relationship. Otherwise there is only suspicion and a mutual distrust between the two of you. Whole communities have developed out of both crude expression and cultivated expression. It is time to develop the right communities in martial arts.
