embodied – Intuitive Martial Arts

Martial Arts and Health

Posted on 3rd August 2020 Last updated on 3rd August 2020 by joeharman8 | 11 min read | 92 views

We can think of health as energy available to us to live an intense meaningful life, free from disease and debilitation. It is this state that we should reach in order to train properly in Martial Arts. And so we must cultivate and live in this state as much as possible, so that we can put this energy into everything we do. That is, of course, if we want to devote ourselves to this path. We don’t need to go looking for this energy outside ourselves by learning all sorts of complicated moves, hoping this will give us power. No, instead we should move naturally in ways which correlate with the intuitive rhythms of nature.

Now that science has given us complicated explanations and exact methods of technical performance, we exploit the resources of the body in order perform these techniques. And yet, many people find themselves more unhealthy than ever and plagued with injuries, not to mention lacking in energy. This is because people think about performing certain moves, like a punch, rather than strengthening the body which animates them. They do all sorts of robotic moves unthinkingly, which just causes wear and tear as the years go on. In truth, much of scientific advancement has made us lazy and unwilling to do work.

Whilst skilled people don’t wear out overnight, the abilities they have developed, often during youth, don’t last forever, and before too long they end up stagnating or in a sorry state. Many people put all their energy into the move instead of cultivating health through exercise. What they are forgetting is that the move is just a means of expressing the goal of perfection. Instead they get it the wrong way round, thinking that the move itself is the goal, and perfection of this will lead to truth. They think “I’ll perfect this move and one day I’ll become perfect”. But really, People are deluding themselves if they think they will make long term progress in this way, because once they are worn out and no longer able to animate themselves with zest, they lose the impetus to grow and develop. The real goal is keeping this zest, as this is the means of evolution.

Yes lots of people get big muscles first, but even a giant brick wall will develop cracks and fall down if the foundations and alignment are incorrect. And it is the same situation for Martial artists. Say, for instance, you are driving a stake into the ground. If you take the mallet and hit the stake off centre, it might bend. If you hit it dead centre it will drive into the floor creating a stable root. In the same way, if you direct pressure through the ground using gravity, aligned from head to toe, you will be much more structurally sound and dynamically stable (Steve Morris, the authority on the subject talks about alignment and whole body tension extensively on his website). On the other hand, if you contorts the body in all sorts of unnatural ways, without the means of stability stability, it’s only a matter of time before you damage your structure2.

How do we learn these “Fundamental” means of action? There is an imprint of how to move, breathe, and learn correctly inscribed within us. If we follow these intuitive pathways we can, with work, learn anything relatively easily to our own specifications. Think of the body as your instrument, you might be inspired by other peoples music, but you yourself produce the harmonies which resonate with your requirements and tastes. You might copy someone else at first, to create a stereotypical impression, but this is not the end of it. You continually develop. This will ensure you never lose interest and keep on growing, which itself is the only real indicator of success. When you train intuitively, all the knowledge is already in your possession you just need the inspiration and living examples around you to bring it out.

So what about adding our own flavour? After we have a fundamental knowledge of how to train and work, we can then add certain embellishments on top of this these forms we create. What Most Martial Arts practice involves is putting on the embellishments first, rather than making sure the basics are in order. It takes many years to learn to walk, so how do you suppose you can embody more complicated actions quickly? This just shows how much work needs to be done, and if the great fighters have to do this, how much more so for the rest of us?

In other words, many people go for the martial arts form without working on their body’s structural capabilities. Many of them go on about persevering through difficulty, and being patient, but in reality they are often looking for the easiest way to learn as many moves as possible to earn a certificate or belt. When you see a fighter in action, ask yourself “Does this form or style embrace universal principles of development and practice?” And, “Can I embody this practice so that it relates to everything else I do?” If not then it does not represent the truth3. There is no point is beating others up around you whilst your practice becomes devoid of meaning.

A true Martial Arts Master takes no interest in mechanical dead forms. There is no point because they do not relate to everyday matters of health and life. In fact they often ruin health because moving so violently without art or grace wears out the joints and causes fatigue. The temptation to stop developing, through pride, dogs the heals of even the best Martial artists until the end.

Routinised, meaningless practice has a terrible effect on health and energy. And then what weapons will you have when you are older and worn out? What will happen when your inner weapons of energy and enthusiasm has gone? You will have nothing. But if you learn to increase your health, training intensely for only short durations4, you will be able to have a profound effect on your abilities whilst not squandering your reserves on mindless work. Yes it is possible, through intelligent work, to remain healthy and vigorous even into old age. This is how you know you are following true Martial arts practice, you will increase your abilities, happiness, and senses.

To the extent that a form of martial arts is useful, you should integrate this with your everyday behaviours and gestures which underpin movements in all domains. Obviously, this works by degrees. Then martial arts simply becomes another way of moving more generally. You simply take the forms in homeopathic doses, letting them colour your existing movement repertoire, and receive a new expression of the same intuitive movements you already posses. Yes, because we already have within us the means to learn, intuitive movement, enthusiasm, and intelligence, combine all three and you will learn anything naturally.

All movements share intuitive gestures and actions with which we should mindfully engage in order to connect the dots between seemingly different activities. In this way throwing a ball, swinging a bat, etc., is fundamentally the same as throwing a punch or kick. They are different expressions of the same truth. It is up to us to become aware of these connections. To divide is to destroy, what you must do is unify everything. You divide up simply to analyse, and then it becomes part of the whole again. Otherwise it becomes dead and disconnected. This is why once analysed, it must come back into our being adapted to the wisdom of the body. We want to work on this wisdom of the body, in other words, to embody knowledge, but what we often end up doing is practicing nonsense. The form is merely the model to aim towards within a discipline, but the greater form, the true form, encompasses everything.

We practice according to a perfect model, that is a representation of the higher self. This mental model, and physical representation, is always better than we ourselves are. It assimilates what is useful, in other words the essentials, and discards what isn’t. These are the fundamentals, and the intuitive movements we all posses like walking and grabbing are used as building blocks. I have no objection to practcing a specific style, they are good as far as the go, but the problem of inner evolution and and progress cannot be solved by an existing physical forms. But back to fundamental building blocks.

A baby can learn to crawl, and then walk, and then run.But adults often have difficult applying the concept to even more advanced movements as they grow in intelligence and power. Because they fail to capitalise ion this, they stagnate and go backwards. Martial arts is just an extension, and evolution, of these basic fundamental actions. Once they are tapped into, these basic movements stimulate and trigger the development of more advanced skills such as punches and kicks. They are not simply new movements disconnected from previous learning.

The flowers of one plant spreads and multiplies new plants which then blossom into new flowers. In the same way humans learn one skill and then cultivate it until it is ready to spread into new domains. The whole thing then goes on and on again, even into later eras after the death of the practitioner. These ideas are then passed onto someone else and then come back to where they began, inside the individual. That individual is then in possession of certain knowledge that he must then pour out onto others. If the flowers are uninspired, dull, and disfigured no one looks at them and it is as if they never existed.

By helping other develop, you will find solutions to your own questions due to this effort applied to the process of “blossoming”. Others around you will be attracted to your flowers as a bee is around nectar. Naturally, this is how ideas spread. In this way your own practice will develop, fuelling your optimism and abilities. There is no escaping this process. I know that this may seem naive and childish, and it may not be taken seriously, because as everybody knows that you need to flatter people and quote recognised authorities, otherwise you don’t get anywhere. This just proves that despite of the hostility and hazards around you, you must keep fighting, and it is these trials if you like which oblige you to develop will power and evolve. I will go further to say that this is a blessing in disguise.

People tend to be happy one minute, unmotivated the next, always changing theirs moods and ideas. The least little problem knocks them off balance. This is why we need a high ideal, or if you like a perfect model to orientate ourselves towards. Compared to this ideal we are weak and ignorant. We keep failing, making mistakes, making enemies… We then think this weakness represents truth, and we bring everything down to this level. And then progress stops because we have focused on our lower nature and its insecurities rather than treating the high self as a living being. So many people have received so called wisdom in this form, and became disillusioned by it. They think “That’s just the way it is, I’ve invested so much time is this big lie, and since my livelihood depends on it I’ll just be the one to lie to others as I have been lied to”.

But perfection does not have an enemy, nor does it make mistakes or errors. Perfection, of course will never be achieved, it just orientates us in the right direction. That is why it is without form, and greater than form.

Like the earth around the sun, we must become “Centred” around the high ideal5 which inspires us and keeps us in motion, keeps us revolving. All people posses this faculty, but they often spend their whole life not knowing how to use it. Some people think that they must resemble exactly the perfect form, other believe that having an ideal is a waste of time because it can never be attained. But really it is something for our will power to strive towards, representing essential truths symbolised by martial arts practice. All the forms are merely different representations of the same truth.

Our will power must desire perfection, because it has an infinite scope which can reach far beyond physical limitations. Only the best satisfies it and will empower you towards real success, and by success I mean reach your full potential6. It does not matter if you achieve the ideal, but the important thing is to keep trying.

1 Steve Morris http://morrisnoholdsbarred.com/

2 Alignment and Tension exercises https://harmanater.com/2020/03/22/alignment-and-tension-exercises/

3 Which Moves? https://harmanater.com/2020/04/30/which-moves/

4 High Intensity Work and Balance https://harmanater.com/2020/07/05/high-intensity-work-and-balance/

5 The High Ideal https://harmanater.com/2020/07/26/the-high-ideal/

6 Will power https://harmanater.com/2020/05/10/will-power/

The Skill is not separate from Work and Contemplation.

Posted on 4th July 2020 by joeharman8 | 11 min read | 114 views

Many people believe that if they practice the right skill a few times, such as a punch, then they will simply have it at their disposal. And if a teacher fails to give them the right instruction they go off and find a better one. If the instructor doesn’t have the right paperwork they are ignored. The problem with this attitude is that it robs the student of the only resource that matters: themselves. In fact, if you go about practice the right way, working hard and honestly, even if you didn’t plan to be very good success will be unavoidable. You bring it on yourself through cause and effect. What the Martial arts community thinks of you is then of no real interest.

The skill is only a small reflection of the reality behind it. It is the outer appearance of the inner evolution, and present form, that appears on the outside of a fighter. It is this attitude that should be embodied. I don’t wish to spend time instructing others on the “technique” aspect, as you can find all the details you want everywhere. However, what is often missed is the spirit of perseverance, overcoming adversity, time and effort spent, etc., which are all inseparable from the physical manifestation of any punch, kick, throw, or whatever. Like a shoot from a seed, the seed must be planted in fertile soil otherwise it cannot take root and flower. The fertile soil, symbolically speaking, is the mental attitude and work.

When a fighter “effortlessly” Ko’s an opponent, it is often imagined that he did it easily. Or when they are “super fit”, people think that this grace and physical prowess are obtained through some kind of external fitness program. However, as I have explained before, the skills that can be acquired from instruction are mainly superficial aspects. The source comes from within the fighter 1. It is this source of motivation and drive that you must aspire to work with, rather than have someone else manipulate your energies from the outside. Of course, if a coach or teacher has your best interests at heart, and knows how to bring only the best out of you, by all means allow them to work on you. However this is often not the case.

The inner states, such as motivation and energies, are the essential ingredients, the factors that count. The various expressions of these, such as specific skills, I have called non essential, because their form changes, and in any case is context dependant. Form is therefore unreliable as a source in itself. Focus on what is essential, the driving force. You might say “That isn’t fun, and it takes to long without all the answers given to me”. How do you know that? If people worked on themselves diligently and took their time to acquire knowledge and experience, rather than rushing towards mediocrity, they would be amazed at the discoveries they make. The work is too hard, supposedly, but because so many people don’t bother working hard to to think for themselves they lack all inspiration to go very far.

People argue about and try to imitate the perfect from. They work for years imitating a tiger, crane, or professional fighter, and end up exhausted and injured from copying these superficial aspects. They have never been taught that is is important to use these things as a guide only, or if they are to identify with them it should be in the spirit of full commitment rather than passive observation. It is far more important to maximise motivation and health by pursuing what matters, or the meaning behind performance. Neither moves nor world title belts are responsible for this. In other words, it is essential to embody the work that goes behind achieving any great goal.

Specific skills are the peripheral details, the mere expressions, and the central central prerequisites are work an energy. In other words, these existing natural resources must be given direction and specific form, or meaning. It is not possible to perform a skill properly otherwise. And also, it is not possible to think you have learnt something by going over some mundane exercises, and then hope to inject a bit of energy into afterwards. This is why the Masters of the East used to give their disciples symbols and parables to contemplate: It would draw on their internal resource in a specific direction without working everything out for them. Through this method of teaching the disciple embodied the skills they practiced and became inseperable from them. I wonder if this is at all clear? The work and ideas come before the skill, there is no other way of thinking about it in my opinion. If so few actually achieve what they set out to do, it is because this basic truth goes unnoticed.

Of course any ideas conveyed in stories and parables must be symbolic of some truth so that the disciple will later come to understand. Through certain powerful symbols2, the student of old would meditate on images within the mind until the physical manifestation later emerged. This tradition is virtually lost today with advent of scientific detailed explanations. Such explanations rarely inspire any kind of intrinsic motivation within the student, they do all the work for him.

If you want to understand how martial arts works, you should use your mind to contemplate and experiment with ideas. For example, Snake Style kung Fu is really practicing skills using the imagery of a snake. You can do anything in this way, and the mind has an innate tendency to work like this. You must imagine yourself darting in and out from various angles and snapping at your opponent. Your attacks should have venom and bite. Any skills you then practice will take on a life of their own. Hopefully you can see how symbols such as this become reality having started as an idea.

Alternatively you can imagine actually defending against a Snake, as Steve Morris often suggests. Here you can use your mind which is a tool that, unlike the body, never wears out. It is an inexhaustible arena of practice, and limitless in its scope. But it needs to be exercised by creative thought and use of the imagination. It is then that your ideas become materialised physically. I hope this is quite clear. When it comes to images in the mind, I’ve never found it very fruitful to imagine mundane things that correspond to some dull lifeless training centre. Although this is what is typically recommended. Instead I prefer to imagine myself on a mountain fighting some larger than life opponent, but more about that another time.

Another symbol used in martial arts is the circle. In Tai Chi for example, circles are made with the arms. It is very easy to practice doing this in your minds eye, because a circle is an accessible symbol recognised by anyone regardless of their training. Therefore, a beginner can begin to practice, awkwardly at first, until they are adept, with just this symbol alone. Such is the power of symbolic explanation. A simple idea such as the circle can undelie more complex ideas later on. This is why babies play with shapes in early development. They later understand more complex things. This is seen in all areas of life, for example the world is round, and so are stones, both of which rotate around an axis.

All I am saying is that we should have the same child like inquisitiveness for martial arts, which is only beyond the scope of out understanding if we have failed to contemplate what its all about for extended periods of time. We would not expect a child to understand, say, rotation around an axis or the solar system without first playing with circles and hoops. It is the same with martial arts, we cannot learn complex fighting movements and skills without first drawing upon our knowledge of symbols, shapes, and ideas which have created meaning for our adult lives.

But most people say “I get it, it’s easy”. As long as they’re having fun, the musics blaring, and the coach is shouting commands at them, they’re quite satisfied. They are like dough in the hands of a baker, tossed around and pounded into submission, which they call work. I’m not talking about that kind of work, I’m talking about inner work which is the real reason for martial arts practice4. Work is not just going through the motions and simple amusement, it is a chance to contemplate and accomplish meaningful pursuits. Many people would like an approach that inspired their better nature, and it is them that I write for.

At the professional level, it is very much the same story. Many athletes wear themselves out looking for some medal or glory, and end up so jaded and worn out by all the politics, deception, and debilitating training, that they ruin their health. “I’ll do it whilst I’m young and able” they say, not matter the cost. If they had thought about it, these athlete “development” programs do nothing but exploit their limited resources of youth a lot of the time. They draw on their reserves, absorbing them in some “peer system” of similarly naive athletes, rather than a wise guide, and then as their enthusiasm grows fainter and fainter they are left on the scrap heap. This is all considered perfectly normal, since this counsel of “talent development” specialists has given them a livelihood and has a right to use them as it sees fit. “Here is a guy who is driven!” They proudly proclaim. Not that they have particular admiration for the superstar, they’re just proud of their hold over him.

What is the point in pursuing all these achievements if you are incapable of enjoying them and lose all inspiration and spirit? In my view “A living Dog is better than a Dead Lion”. In other words, a lion who becomes worn out and incapable of anything is useless, no matter his past glory. He was living on borrowed time. Whereas a dog who is still going and has some fight in it will outlast the Lion in the end. I don’t wish to upset anyone involved professional competition, and anyway there are some exceptions, but it is up to individuals to chose their path. Everything can be found in the manuals of technical instruction, except what I am talking about here. The thing to know is that training is all dependant on how the energies are expended. Are they being absorbed in mindless labour, or is there some left over for contemplation and mental work?

Most animals die in mortal combat in the wild. Clearly, this is the law of the Jungle. However, if we wish to understand how to survive longer than animals we must take the perspective of the child who starts at the beginning. In other words, imagine that you are thinking about martial arts for the first time and work to gradually understand. This is really the case, when you consider how many years it takes to learn even the most simple tasks properly, like writing perfectly. Using the perspective of the child, even in adulthood, you can use advanced knowledge of walking, crawling, rotating the body, etc., and apply them to still more advanced moves like punching. Yes, having spent 18 years learning to walk, there is a further evolution. And then tactical applications. You should then feel as though you are approaching everything for the first time, rather than strutting around as if you are some hard nut looking to prove himself. Here is another example of symbols.

In boxing, you circle the opponent. In order to practice footwork it is a good idea to imagine doing this in your mind. You can first imagine circling round an opponent, and once this idea has been set in motion you can begin contemplating what the steps might look like in relation to this circling. Lots of people get mixed up with the footwork because they contemplate all the details of the footwork separately. Instead, it is better to think of the circle, everything else will begin to make sense when you hold this idea and work with it in your mind. Otherwise, you just end up learning some complicated footwork and it never becomes embodies or feels natural.

Symbols, work, and perseverance. Never rush this process!

References

1 Signs and Symbols in Martial arts Part 2 https://harmanater.com/2020/06/06/signs-and-symbols-part-2-pedagogy-and-the-art-of-war/

2 Signs and Symbols in Martial arts Part 1 https://harmanater.com/2020/05/16/signs-and-symbols-part-1-the-way-and-the-number-ten/

3 Movement and Breathing https://harmanater.com/2020/04/17/movement-and-breathing/

4 The True Meaning of Martial arts https://harmanater.com/2020/05/18/the-true-meaning-of-martial-arts/