movement – Intuitive Martial Arts

In order to learn certain techniques, it is important to go over them in a simple, detached way, so that the limitations of your understanding can grasp something new. In other words we look at things purely technically at first. But we don’t stop there.

A tree separated from the forest may have the same qualities as the forest but it is not the forest. Similarly, a drop of rain may share some of the qualities as a thunderstorm, but it is not a force of nature. However once one of these elements joins in with the whole again, it becomes part of it. In the same way a technique grasped on the technical level needs to be embodied in the organism to be understood and effective. That is, for it to becomes a force of nature within you.

When you feel as though you have a good understanding of the technique this gives you some confidence. However it doesn’t give us the confidence to go out there and really put things in to practice, or even go beyond the basics. We need some authority over it, a way of verifying that we understand how it works properly.

When you have embodied the techniques properly, you are confident to go out and relate them to everything you do – like a bird showing its feathers if you like. You will be proud to show your colours and cultivate them in the wider environment. You will want to, rather than seeing it as an arduous exercise. Even if you are not very good yet, it’s something. It is instinctive to radiate this confidence if you have a proper grasp of how to apply and embody a technique or skill, even if you haven’t mastered it. This will drive you forward in your practice. In fact I would go as far to say that when this confidence radiates from you powerfully, and if you know how to demonstrate it without arrogance, people will know they are dealing with someone alive and powerful. And no Mugger can possibly victimise such a person, they target someone else weaker.

How do you explain the idea that skills and techniques can be “forgotten” over time. I’m afraid this is impossible if it has become part of you, if you have embodied it like a tree within a great forest. The only way to forget about something is if it was only learnt superficially. And if something is learnt superficially it won’t relate to everything you do. People invent all kinds of excuses, they need to train again starting from scratch, they’re too old to do it anymore, or they lost interest, but they fool nobody except themselves. The fire and aliveness has gone – There aren’t any feathers to wear.

If you form a habit of relating a certain universal principle to your everyday activities, you will be practicing all the time, or as much as time allows. Because a universal principles relate to everything. Therefore, the best way to embody a skill or discipline is to work on the intuitive level, according to universal principles1. The only way to do impregnate your organism with this understanding is to mindfully practice all your everyday actions. Say you a practicing a punch, then play it over in your mind and think how it relates to holding a cup, grabbing an apple, or swatting a fly, for instance. The when you are doing one of those actions, you relate the punch to it. You ill find many overlapping similarities when you investigate this question.

The way I do it is I don’t bother learning all the holds, moves, and stances. I don’t even know which boxing combinations are supposed to be taught. It takes a lifetime to understand properly and intuitively the depths of any one good stance, so it would be a complete waste of time to go over them all superficially. Know one discipline properly and you will have access to them all, because everything else will follow as you gradually increase your fundamental understanding of universal principles and the laws of nature. This is the highest form of understanding, a lifetimes work. It has been called “Form without form” in certain Japanese Traditions, or fighting without fighting2, which is to say the same thing.

Get into the habit, whether you’re shopping, sitting in the pub, or waiting in a queue, of taking a minute to centre yourself physically in all sorts of different stances and positions. This is something Steve Morris Recommends, so that you can be training under any circumstances, remaining linked physically and mentally. This is in order Feel the alignment so that you are for a moment embodying the posture necessary to deliver a particular move you might be contemplating. Then go back to whatever you are doing3.

The point I want to make is that you don’t so much see these similarities, as appearances are deceiving, but you get to feel them. In fact, I don’t see much at all when I am training, I relate things together by the way they feel internally. You don’t need to necessarily do the move externally, just to feel it and relate it to your organism and its other movements. You will soon see how similar the sensations of moving are, and in this way you will be able to determine whether you have got it right or not, according to this “wisdom of the body”, as they call it in the Chinese systems. If it feels right, it is absorbed subconsciously over time quite naturally, but don’t delude yourself, it takes a certain amount of experience and knowledge to feel the right thing! This method can be done as much or as little as you like, and nothing is better for results than this habit.

If you take make it a habit to practice inwardly and feel these moves in action, then the outer manifestation will take care of itself. You will feel such satisfaction, such motivation with your progress, that you won’t bother with all the thousands of tried and tested mechanical routines. You will be working on your subconscious instincts, and moulding them intelligently. This is the aim of the disciple in Martial Arts. You will reach the level of skill you need just with this one habit, provided it becomes a dedicated method of practice. The power of this approach is beyond explanation, and its important to go over it again and again until you do it instinctively and you can’t do without it.

When you have an intuitive feel for how movements should feel, learning particular skills will then just be a formality. You’ll hit the ground running when you pick it up. You go over it for a short period of time in depth, as a separate part, and then integrate it back into the whole. This is the way to practice any particular skill you want to analyse in depth (just don’t get obsessed with the details). Steve Morris calls this “Zooming in” (to analyse something in particular), and then “Zooming out” (to then udnerstand it as part of the whole more generally).

The only thing you need to remember is to work4. Work at this idea of relating all the moves to your more mundane movements and the progress takes care of itself. Put in the practice of doing this, that is work at it, so that this becomes the work – not the individual drills. But nobody bothers with this, they just see everything else outside the special moves as unrelated and a waste of time. This approach may shock you, when you see so many people going over mechanical routines, but these traditional moves are just forms, appearances. For a long time I have been baffled that things continue to be presented in this way, and it’s not the way I think.

If you don’t relate everything together, from, say walking to sewing, then the drills never make any sense, because they don’t relate to the wider sphere of existence. You will say that you can make a certain amount of rapid progress without wider understanding. Yes, but for how long? If you never apply the wider laws of nature to what you are practising you will never see the connections between things, because it is these connections which verify the truth. You will say “So what you are saying is that all the drills have been a waste of time?” No, don’t hold yourself back with this attitude, just disengage with emphasis on differences and make the wider connections. One skill acts as a stepping stone to another, see them all as different forms of the same idea.

So my advice is not too bother so much with the idea of mastering one system in the small sense. You’re just then doomed to remain trapped within this small sphere. As time goes on the apparent gains to this simplistic reality diminish. Whereas, when you work with certain fundamental principles for a long time, you embody them and they help you learn everything else. You no longer need to see with your physical eyes to know how it works, you feel it. “Don’t think, feel” as Bruce Lee once remarked. The more you work with the underlining fundamentals – the universal principles – the more you understand them and the more they work for you. It becomes more and more automatic.

First of all you might refuse to think that one thing relates to seemingly separate things, but your intuition later insist on it without you even thinking. You succeed in spite of yourself. Then you have reached intuitive understanding and can trust your senses rather than being mislead by appearances. You will then observe other talented athletes and pick up revealing behaviours in them, embedding them in you, like a kind of osmosis. You will also be able to identify aggressors in the street effectively. But you only know this by studying yourself5. What can you do then, except have access to all disciplines intuitively? Of course this takes time and effort, from humble beginnings. What is a belt or a medal, even a world championship, compared to this understanding?

The problem is in Martial Arts people don’t know what kind of activities to devote their time to. Since you can only devote your whole attention to one thing, not two, or three, or four, then it should be the most important aspect when represents everything else. Whatever the opinion of others, it doesn’t matter when you are in possession of this kind of intuitive understanding. You are then wearing the inner black belt, because all individuals, systems, and techniques start with an idea. And it is the quality of the idea that counts.This idea then works through us and becomes a physical reality. No amount of inferior physical practice will disprove a truth of this kind, that is a high ideal.

This brings us to another important point. A state at war with itself will not reach understanding, not with all its constituent parts acting according to different laws. There will just be anarchy and break down. Yes, there might be some mutual coincidence, but there will not be time to devote to unified cooperation due to all the conflicts of interest. There will be lots of contradictions, confusion, and suspicion. Progress will be limited because everyone has a different conception of the truth – of the laws. Each is as good as the next. However, if all the members share access to the same higher truth, even if they apparently work in different directions they will work in a kind of dynamic harmony. The human organism is the same. You can acquire all sorts of knowledge as long as it conforms to proper understanding of Unifying laws and principles, these very ideas validate truth, and seductive but bad ideas betray themselves. Otherwise you will be divided and trying to give your attention to everything at once, rather than dominating this situation with authority.

References

1 see Which Moves? https://harmanater.com/2020/04/30/which-moves/ ,

2 See Self Defence without violence https://harmanater.com/2020/06/14/self-defence-without-violence/

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

4 See The Skill is not separate from the work and contemplation https://harmanater.com/2020/07/04/the-skill-is-not-separate-from-work-and-contemplation/

5 See Identifying Aggressors https://harmanater.com/2020/07/30/identifying-aggressors/

Most people engage in Martial Arts practice solely to keep fit or to learn to defend themselves from physical threat. These considerations are important, but they only scratch the surface. All martial arts practice worthy of the name is symbolic of something else, some other useful life lesson to be learnt. If practice doesn’t inspire us to look at broader considerations, then for me it is a waste of time. It’s got to be seen as part of something else.

In the act of breathing, we don’t just breathe to take in air, we breath to compliment the actions we are performing and everything else, even our mental state. We must breathe and move slowly in order to wind down, so that this also calms the mind. Similarly we shouldn’t just practice moves without any purpose behind them. For them to be effective and meaningful they must adhere to certain laws inherent in all dynamic and powerful actions. For example, martial arts utilises many different basic movements, from gripping to throwing, even in something as simple as a punch.

All effective movements share a common core. It’s just the expressions, or if you like the details which are different. One scientific version of this theory is called the “Generalised motor program”. For example, the punch uses the same rotation of the hips and shoulder as the kick. The trunk moves in the same way. This is why you can learn any skill from a true knowledge of one discipline. But you might say “In boxing they do it like this, and in Taekwondo they do it like that, they’re not the same at all!”. All I would say to that is, there are certain laws of nature upon which all movements are based and which nobody designed. These should be the main focus of training, not the thousands and thousands of details which just confuse everything. By knowing these fundamental truths, you can practice a simple set of skills which represent everything else. Steve Morris talks about this in depth on his website and DVD’s. I recommend searching them out. Steve says on his website:

“There’s lots of ways we can move. The combinations through the number of joint articulations makes for a lot of movements. But there are only so many successful ways we have moved over the course of time. Standing, running, climbing, pushing, pulling, swinging, catching, throwing…you know. All those things kids do! Those are the fundamentals. And beneath these, in order to facilitate a dynamic equilibrium of change, are the reflex patterns which allow you to work at an instinctive level. We’ve inherited them from our animal ancestors. You don’t have to think about how to maintain this equilibrium of change; the body is reflexively designed to do that for you. Indeed, any attempt to interfere with this process by motor oriented response, negates it. That’s why you end up with robotic movement patterns.”

What all this means is that you have every opportunity throughout the day to practice what we already intuitively know. There are instinctive actions we perform to achieve more complex movements. More complexed movements spring from these. These “Blueprints” are evident in everything, from when you reach towards the shelf for a cup, to when you tie up your shoe. Someone who is very conscientious of these things will see this in everything they do, and use the most mundane situations for effective training. All movements contribute to martial arts practice, and the more of these you turn into training exercises, the more effective your practice becomes.

Even breathing can be turned into an exercise. Just focus on breathing rhythmically, fast or slow depending on whether you’re relaxing or training intensively, and this will have a major impact on your energy levels and attentiveness to yourself and what’s around you. But look at how many people walk around mindlessly, thinking about what a chore it is to so much as walk to the shop or get out of breath They’d rather take the car! Avoid this kind of thing, and see every moment as an opportunity to strengthen yourself where possible. Again Steve Morris makes some interesting points about breathing:

One of the things is that your breathing mustn’t be timed to your arm movement, but to the body movements which are producing the shots. And it’s that movement of the body including the rectus, the obliques, the diaphragm and muscles of the pelvis (all those muscles that support ‘core stability’) that produces the basis and dynamics of the shot.

From this is clear that whatever we are doing, breathing and movement must be in synchronization. And if that’s true of punching then it’s true of all movements, because they all share a common core. In other words, the more you practice this principle in everyday situations, the more it will come to your aid when needed unconsciously. In this sense all movement is training.

For martial arts practice to be effective it must be inherently interesting and be intuitive. It should draw inspiration from all forms of movement, from everyday gestures to athletics. In this way it will relate to our subconscious mind, our instinctual side, and influence it. If training doesn’t do this then how can it be reinforced by our powerful motivational behaviours? Not only does it become dull, it becomes ineffectual. You’ve got to draw upon the same states which motivated our ancestors if you want to achieve anything and remain motivated long term. You might well get away with routinized training if you’re young and are just doing what everyone else seems to be doing, but eventually mechanical forms simply wear out the joints and muscles.

Many people think that performing violent actions will simply encourage unbridled aggression and bring out our worst instincts. This is sometimes true in testosterone fuelled environments where violence is glorified, but really these tendencies are already there. They certainly don’t need to be encouraged! How many people find this out to their horror when they end up behind bars? Instead, our instinctual side needs to be controlled. I don’t mean controlled as in repressed because this is also damaging since our vitality depends on these forces. But harnessed and developed in their capabilities through training.

The real idea is to develop our subconscious instinctual side and cultivate it towards a constructive goal, such as self mastery. In this way we are using powerful raw materials for modern circumstances. As I said at the beginning, training is simply symbolic or something else, and personally I have no desire to go out and fight anyone. It’s channelling energy and fighting to realize my ideals which interests me. Our instincts are there for us to evolve for new purposes. There functional operations include elements from our more primitive past. However, the laws of nature upon which they are based are still the same. This means that we have to build on the past because it lives in us and we can’t erase it. It doesn’t really matter what we are doing as long as we are practicing these timeless truths.

Tag: movement

Embodying the Technique

Movement and Breathing