Tag: philosophy

Hara Centre: Centre of Creation

Posted on Last updated on by joeharman8 | 16 min read | 111 views

“The earths atmosphere, which is electromagnetic, would not be possible without the earths core being the way it is. The Earths core is hot and high pressure, like our own physical centre. The surround electromagnetic atmosphere of the Earth can be likened to the nervous system. So the core directly affects the nervous system, and the nervous system is not possible without the core. So you can transform you energy and situation by working with this core in ways that are not possible otherwise. “

When you perform an action from the core, it radiates outwardly to the periphery. This is the case for any martial arts movement. In fact, it takes a lot more competence to do this than to perform the move superficially. So the idea is to move the core, the abdomen, and then extend out from there. It does not happen the other way around, that you start with the limb first, and hope that this creates a whole body motion.

It is like how the Earths rotation begins at the core, and this moves the mantle and the plates. The plates and the surface do not move the core. In the same way, the chemical receptors on a plants do not make its roots grow. If pesticide is used too much, then this just impedes the plants overall development of certain internal processes which produce these things naturally. The same thing goes on in the human body. In terms of movements, the internal signals which are related to the core, function much better if the core is the initiator of the movements. This helps you memorise and imbed certain movements more deeply. Even on a superficial level, it is better to perform core movements because the core leads all basic movements. In this way the only things that changes is the particular limb you are using when driving from the seat of the abdominal core. So your kicking and punching becomes very similar.

Knowing the Unknown

When you do a punch, it is only a punch from the core if it starts at the core. This is why in martial arts they say “Hit from the core”. This core is the abdomen or Hara Centre as it is known. “Ha” means Sun in Chinese. According to the Indian Sutras, “Ha” means the same thing too, and “Ra” refers to a radiant sun, the centre of the Universe. So together, “Ha-ra” can be taken to mean the earths centre, or the universal centre. It is from the centre that the rest of creation happens. You can only illuminate the vastness of the unknown from the high pressure centre which eventually creates light. In the Solar System, energy starts as non visible. This energy only becomes visible light after some time when it extends out from the Sun and certain particles react at a certain distance from the source as the pressure drops. This is the case with Martial Arts.

The Hara Centre, the physical centre of the body, is the only energy centre which can transmit itself anywhere in the body directly. It manifests differently depending on the action. In terms of technique, it can go to the arms, legs, or elsewhere physically. This is why it is universal in nature. In others words, it is not just located in the abdomen, the energy can be transported anywhere. The lower abdomen is the source. For example, if you drive a nail into a block of wood, you do so from the core, just as you do with say, a golf swing. This applies to everything. It starts one place and ends up somewhere else. All these things are driven from the core. It is impossible to start from the end, because this isn’t yet in your experience. This is why in the traditional arts they never rushed learning, nor were they given to over analysis.

It is just because you don’t know how to do a movement before you have learnt it that we say “drive from the core”. You cannot do a complex kick before you have learnt to do this. So you practice something you don’t know by doing something you do already know. This is why I always say “drive from the core” first. Personally I don’t bother with explaining all the details of a particular move because this becomes obvious over time with the right fundamental platform. This platform is a strong core. It is not necessarily an athletic strength, but the right energy and maneuverability. 

So develop the Hara Centre first. It is only possible from there to know the unknown. It is only when this unknown comes into your direct experience that you learn the mysteries of martial arts. The core functions much better in children. this is why they learn everything naturally. The adult core usually becomes lazy from excessive sitting and poor lifestyle habits which we develop in society. The point is that we can switch on this source to learn anything like a child does, even as an adult. So this core is like the little white dot in the Dark space of the Yin Yang symbol. This is called mastering technique, so that it manifests properly.

Drugs and Chemicals

The expression Energy takes can vary dramatically depending on a number of factors. But when it originates in the Hara Centre and finds expressions elsewhere, then there is some discretion and volition as to where it ends up. Otherwise, if it starts elsewhere, it is often an unconscious act, or simply accidental. Conscious acts are always intentional and consciousness is always a choice. Let’s say that the energy is taken in from external sources, such as some sort of chemical supplement. Such chemicals tend to inebriate the system so that it acts purely from a chemicals basis, or dampens other energy sources in the body. This is the problem with drugs and chemical supplements1.

So chemical energy is itself a manifestation of pressure and heat. These are naturally occurring when things begin in the gut. For instance, many chemicals can be created internally which people are now ingesting more and more because their system has gone taken a kind of backwards step. This takes a bit more time and particularly a mediative digestion, so that the body can rest and regenerate properly2. But people are “Go, go, go” all the time. It is for this reason that Excessive physical training can happen at the surface level, because the chemicals are just being replaced by supplements. It is like with plants. The soil quality is going down, so fertiliser and chemical sprays are needed just to get some fruit and ward off disease. None of this is necessary until you exceed the natural capabilities of the earth. The Hara Centre is like the Earth.

So chemicals come in, then they will run their course over a certain period of time and then dissipate at some level. Often, these chemicals are being abused, so the natural production goes down and a kind of external dependance happens. Of course, the biggest intoxication from outside occurs when greed and corruption take over in the mind. It is for this reason that in the traditional arts, they urged against competition and prestige. Competition is fine once you have develop the necessary mental fortitude. In my experience, there are so many life lessons which I have absorbed that it almost derailed me completely. So if I didn’t have the necessary inner tools of development, I would have been broken by certain experiences. This is why I stress “Meditation, meditation, meditation”, or some kind of meditative dimension and development of this. 

Overcoming Self Deception

The biggest deception if from the intoxication of conquest. The lust for conquest brings about the same disorders as actual chemical abuse in many cases. This is a false high. This is referred to as Maya in the Indian systems, or simply self deception. This is because when you overcome the need for these things, it is as if they never happened and the events become meaningless. This is not so with any reality which is learnt from the core of truth, which is the Hara Centre. There is nothing wrong with chemical supplements, they can be taken if needed. But the very same things can be created internally, setting in process and lasting mechanism. The results are often the same but more sustainable. But what a difference it makes if you can produce these things internally.

Inter Transformation

We have looked at how the Hara Centre can transmit itself anywhere in the body. With the other centres of the body, such as the chest or head, these act as relay points, so the energy takes a more roundabout route. There are exceptions to this, such as Martial Arts masters whose physical body’s have failed them but they have developed the proper energy channels. These are exceptions however. With the Hara Centre, it can reach anywhere. It is like how you can create a heater with the use of electricity, there are transformers involved in that kind of technical process to convert energy. If you want to create heat, movements is needed for example. Movements is a kind of transformer in the human body. There is all sorts of mind work that goes into it, such as knowledge and motivation to move. This is why in many ways, reality begins in the mind. Importantly, the mind is linked to the gut, not just the brain.

The earth itself transforms heat into water, and then water into steam. All of these processes are only possible because of the earths core dynamo, which is molten iron largely. This is like the Hara Centre. The earths atmosphere, which is electromagnetic, would not be possible without the earths core being the way it is. The Earths core is hot and high pressure, like our own physical centre. The surround electromagnetic atmosphere of the Earth can be likened to the nervous system. So the core directly affects the nervous system, and the nervous system is not possible without the core. So you can transform you energy and situation by working with this core in ways that are not possible otherwise. 

Let’s look at technique. If the punch begins at the shoulder, then you are not punching from the core. You can still do it, but a lot of additional steps are taken, often unconsciously. So the idea behind “using the core” or the abdomen, comes from this idea that from this centre of mass everything spreads outwardly. There is an inner intelligence that grasps this intuitively. So if you get this, then you are 90% of the way there. Why 90%? because the microorganisms of the body account for 90% of the body’s make up. And these guys are largely in the core and work according to the gut primarily. From the core, the rest radiates outwardly. In terms of cognition and learning, if the brain and nervous system attempt to perform a particular movement without the cores involvement, the results are limited. This can produce many problems, such as over use injury and a whole host of physical ailments, particularly later on in life.

From Gross to subtle 

If you point a finger, this can be performed from the core, or you can simply wave the arm out and point the finger. If the action is led from the core, then the finger pointing is just the final expression at the end of the movement. In other words, it is the end phase of a core movement. You might say, that everyone can point a finger, what’s so special about that? However, anyone who doesn’t pay attention and concern towards these things on the path of martial arts is setting themselves up for problems. This is why in the traditional systems, the master would look at how you conducted yourself in every aspect. So to take care of the large, you can pay attention to the small things, which is required if you wish to transform these initial steps into greater possibilities. The idea that you can do something carelessly but repeatedly and yield good results is completely wrong. You go from basic to complex, from gross to subtle expertise. 

So one initial movement sets up the possibilities for the next. It is the same with a punch. You rotate the core into the punch and there is a lot more power and transmission of energy as a result. This is because it began from the centre of mass and transformed into a punch as part of a complex process. It’s not like you get each phase technically correct separately and then it works. No, instead you have to transform one phase into another. It is like the pressure of the earth gradually dissipates as you move away from the core. This creates the complex physical reality around us. Due to this pressure release, other forms of energy, such as gravitational energy and electromagnetic energy, gradually express themselves. These act upon the physical word we experience. This is a complex process, but it is an intuitive one. Gravity can then act upon larger masses, whereas it is weaker the closer you get to the centre. This is because other more powerful forces of Chi energy, or radiation in Scientific terms are happening closer to the centre. This is also known as dark matter1. 

So in the human being, when you perform a punch, it is only possible because of a release of energy which gradually takes another form. This is how you create something from nothing. This nothing actually contains the whole possibility, it just that this has not been Brough to bare in your experience yet. But it will the more you work with it. This is why there are no set traditions other than oral transmission in most traditional systems. You have to work for it internally.

Self Creation

If you just swing the arm at the opponent, then there is an entirely different effect even if it looks the same as a punch from the core. This is why there is so much emphasis on breathing from the core, digesting properly from the core, and moving from there in the traditional systems of martial arts. The diamonds are produced there. In the Earths core, Molten Iron erupts out of the surface from the core. It is only when the atmosphere changes that we see the diamond formation of this same heat energy, which has now solidified. These diamond are what we create in martial arts, expressions of high pressure which have materialised. The Earth doesn’t think about it, it is an energy intelligence. These diamonds can absorb electromagnetic waves from the earths atmosphere. So the Earth itself generates an electromagnetic fields which sustains the outer surface. The same thing happens in us, and this is entirely intuitive when you develop the right perceptions through practice. When you rely too much on physical strength of the limbs, you can easily forget about using the core properly. This leads to various injuries, which although inevitable sometimes, become chronic and excessive. It is just like if you exploit the nutrients of the earth more quickly than they are created, you will likely have issues. 

Let’s take the example of digestion. If you eat whole foods, or healthy foods generally, then these have to be digested in the stomach properly. The thing about sugar is that it goes straight out of the stomach and into the blood stream. It doesn’t go into deep nourishment, such as bone and deep tissue regeneration. This is why it is linked with so many internal problems, even if it gives you a sugar hit. Healthy whole food on the other hand, goes into reproducing the cells and creating an entire person. Over the course of around seven years, Science has show the the entire organisms cells are likely to be replaced. This isn’t so if degeneration is happening too much at the same time as replenishment. So when anything is done at the surface level, whether that is learning or nutrition, there is a certain level of nourishment which gets neglected and undermined.. 

When blood sugar builds up too much, you can get a range of health complications, such as nerve damage, and inability to produce enough insulin. We have also looked at how osteoporosis may happen too, because the bones need nourishment, not just the muscles and blood. So when a person exists at the surface level, what you end up with is an irritable or excitable mood with a kind of frantic and compulsive disposition. This undermines health obviously. This can in itself lead many of types of mental health conditions, as well as physical ailments. The variety of these are countless, and exploding across the world. From this, we can see that a physiological problem can become a psychological one quite easily, once certain patterns of behaviour become habitual. So certain patterns of behaviour are thought replenish or undermine ones pre birth energy, or chi. 

The point is that what appears to be a mental health issue, often has its origins in the physiological or energy realm. So by taking care of the physiology, you end up taking care of the mental side. This is the same with martial arts. It is often the case that people train with all sorts of gels and sugary liquids, just to keep certain chemicals active in the blood stream. From a performance perspective this has some benefits, such as making one more aggressive and reactive. This comes at a heavy price, because it intoxicates your system just like a drug. Drug and chemicals are just a different part of the cycle. You take them in and perform some activity. It is possible to take in various supplements properly, but that is something else. It requires a level of self restraint and awareness to perform certain activities properly. From a health perspective, over supplementation is not only stupid but disastrous. So when the body eventually breaks down with age and wear and tear, the solution for many is to take a cocktail of supplements to keep the game going. But this only hastens decline or fails to get at the source of the problem to change things.

References

  1. https://wordpress.com/post/intuitivemartialarts.com/2227 Conquest at all costs: Drugs in Martial Arts.
  2. https://intuitivemartialarts.com/2024/02/02/how-to-use-stress-for-your-own-health-and-the-importance-of-the-hara-centre/ How to Use stress for your own Health, and the importance of the Hara Centre.

Sound and Form [Part 3]

Posted on by joeharman8 | 9 min read | 107 views

When you laugh you might make the “Ha” sound with the breathe. If you laugh very loudly you will hyper ventilate unless you set yourself properly. This requires internal and external aspects. For example, you want to feel comfortable and open enough to stretch your body to create the necessary space for the sound to loudly roar out. There are many everyday examples of sounds which happen naturally. This is what working with the sound in martial arts aims to achieve, a natural expression of the sound with added awareness and control over the body

The Moving Sound

With the help of certain sounds, we can express various sentiments and feelings. There are various techniques for this contained in martial arts to this end. For example, the physical forms in Taekwondo, called Poomsae, are used to express proper breathing and flow. I use this Taekwondo example because this is what I’m trained in formally, but the similarities hold true across the various martial arts. To do the forms properly, one needs to develop mastery over the breathing as well as the movements. Some forms of martial arts don’t do much in the way of movement and focus more on the sound. Other arts focus on slow and controlled breathing, which is also useful for different reasons. In this way you aim to become one with the movements by synchronising with the breath.

According to the mood of the form, or Poomsae, that is how it is performed. Some are faster, some are slower. I won’t go into the details, it will take too long, but you can look all this up online. You will see how some are slower, and others are faster. Others will go from fast to slow in moments. This is all common sense but there is a science to it. So you would move differently to enhance well being than you would to secure survival. and once you have attacked, it is useful to reset. You would however want to work at both levels, of attack and resetting, according to what needs to be done at different times.

When you look closely, it is not just speed and pace, but different qualities that are expressed. Some movements have a certain swing in them, just like music does. This cannot be demonstrated on the music sheet or in a book. If you try to perform a swinging motion or sound in a step by step way it just doesn’t work. This is why physical demonstrations are needed, rather than step by step instructions alone. Because a form can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end, doesn’t mean it is performed that way mechanically.

The main thing to remember is to control the volume of expression, which brings about all kinds of different effects. If you create a huge volume of sound in the movements, and you create a lot of noise, you obviously want to spread this across a big space. This is the reason for stretching the body whilst remaining rooted. You are fixed and stable, yet able to contain a large volume by extending the body.

The Twelve notes

Before you do any of the forms, you first learn the techniques individually. There are said to be 14 different movements in the Korean System of Taekwondo. Actually there are twelve, but more were added in, such as flying kicks and twisting kicks. So it is likely that various adaptions have been made for various reasons over the years. However these are really just variations of the twelve techniques. The number twelve is significant because there are twelve colours and twelve notes, so there are also corresponding movements. Of course there are many more movements than twelve, but the relevance of the number twelve is that there are twelve notes, and an infinite variety of combinations.

In the classical forms on Indian music there are twelve ways to perform a sound. This is the case for sound more generally too. For instance, we will take the example of the “Aa” sound. You can perform it rapidly, as in when doing a punch. As noted in the previous post, the “ah” sound is for engaging the abdomen or Hara Centre in martial arts. You can perform it in a circular fashion, as when performing certain circular blocking techniques. This means it goes up and down, such as when parrying an attack and blocking in a circular fashion. This would make it more drawn out and up and down a certain scale of volume and tone. These variations although subtle, create huge power and output.

There are also twelve colours, all represented in different ways. In Martial Arts, there are normally seven belts, just as in Western music there are seven main notes. Each colour represents a particular quality, so they are not just arbitrarily chosen. At the same time, the different colours are given different meaning in the different arts. This does not matter about the different interpretations, because one who is fearless as a blackbelt, should also aim to be as cautious of danger as a red belt. So you want to encompass all the qualities in one. Where you start just depends on what is being emphasised in what system.

So each system represents itself differently according to what it wants to promote. Some are hard styles, such as Karate, others are soft styles, such as Tai Chi. Obviously they will have different representing qualities. You wouldn’t put a competitive athlete on the Tai Chi notice board, not would you put a mediator on the Karate competition flyer. However, both qualities of meditativeness and movement are contained within each system.

There are also around twenty five forms to display these movements in Taekwondo, which is roughly double the number of twelve. This is because the later half of the forms are reserved for blackbelts, so you effectively start again learning a different set once you reach black belt level. The reason I’m mentioning this is that the numbers are related to the sounds and colours on a spectrum, which is itself all blended together, even though distinctions can be made. So these sounds and colours feature all over martial arts, and go back to ancient tradition and knowledge. So the number twelve is defiantly relevant.

Today, they focus only on the movements and try to make them look flamboyant and flashy. This is not the way, but it’s a cultural thing that has developed in terms of technical appearance. Actually, the real centres which preserve the arts are still alive and kicking. It’s just that they have taken on some back of shop role because they don’t do the whole Pr thing well. This is certainly true in Taekwondo. There is nothing wrong or right about this, it’s just that there are other measurements as to what is the correct form other that the visual aspect, which is kept in tradition.

So finally now we will look at some more applications.This is impossible to explain fully here, but essentially whatever you do with the hand supports what you are doing vocally. This is the case with anything. So the hands are used to follow the sound and create a form out of it. this is the case with the other limbs too. If there is a rapid up and down sound, then the hand follows this. In meditation, the hands go up and down with the breathe in some forms. When you make a more audible vocalised sound, rather than the so called “unstuck sound” of the breathe, the hands play a role in further emphasising this.

So you might punch rapidly and powerfully in a shaking kind of way, or you might push outwardly and then swing back before doing something else. This is obviously too detailed to cover extensively, which is why there was so much emphasis on practice and experience rather than book learning. The above video goes some way to demonstrating what I am saying. It appears as though you learn quite quickly with a book, but you want to bring these qualities to the practice within. This is the main purpose behind the more traditional training forms which emphasise actual experience rather than theory.

There are many different techniques to produce the various sounds. Some of them use the diaphragm and chest to support movement. This has obvious benefits to the cardiovascular and postural system, which directly affects health and physical capability. When one is performing such movements, you make a rapid up and down ascending and descending noise with the mouth and hands. This draws the sound and therefor the energy up and down. So the “Ah” sound links the abdomen to the movement, and the ascending pitch brings it up. The descending one bring sit back down. One example is that you tend to descend down when kicking, because the kick is directly related to the hips or lower body. The opposite is true of punching, which tends to draw the energy up in a more rapid way. This all requires experience and practice to get to know all this.

Much of this would have been originally improvised according to certain rules as the situation requires. Later these forms were to be handed down rather than spontaneously realised on the individual level. This is the problem with the written tradition, it is taken literally as it is written. At the same time, it helps to persevere the physical visual aspect, so on balance there are strengths and weaknesses here. The problem is today that we are to obsessed with the visual aspect often at the expense of the inner dimension of sound. The previous generation were not so lopsided in their development, because what they could see was so limited. So they needed these methods.

Once again, this is difficult to put into words, and has to be experienced directly. At the same time it is common sense and accessible to anyone. When you look at the snake like waving movements of the Chinese forms, these faster forms represent this idea of rapid escalation and deescalation. The snake symbol is actually used because its form best demonstrates this quality, rather than the human body. So to demonstrate the waving movements which go up and down, the snake was used to clearly make this obvious in such a way that words could not. The snake is used because its being is closely related to the human beings energy form, not because the human wants to physically mimic the snake.

Sound and Form [Part 1]

Posted on by joeharman8 | 5 min read | 101 views

The Yogic culture has a form of practice known as the Yoga of sound, or Nada Yoga. In martial Arts, the sound is used to support the various movements. This involves knowing about proper breathing and how to do it. Just as the painter knows which brush stroke to use on the paper, so too does the martial artists know which sound form to use. Both do it as it needs to happen. The painter strokes up and down in a descending or ascending order. The breathe works the same. So even if you are breathing rapidly in and out, it is even possible to follow a certain ebb and flow, which is actually going on outside of you. So these are universal laws rather than artificial ones. Otherwise you end up cacophonous and out of sync.

In martial arts the sound form can be audible or inaudible, that is, it can be silent or external. When you are meditating, it tends to become silent. You can even get to a point where the breathe becomes still, although there is still an in and out happening. This is because there is a flow which happens externally too, which has to do with the atmosphere and the subtle universal influence. So generally speaking, the slower breathing is less taxing on the body and lowers stress. The more rapid breathing create a certain inner pressure, which also creates lower pressure elsewhere. In this way, the Hara Centre, which is in the abdomen, creates a sustained pressure through martial arts practice. This naturally creates a lower pressure in the upper aspects of the body such as the chest and brain.

So even if you are doing heavy work, you will benefit from a lower base level or an ability to slow down at will during certain periods. These low pressure periods also create the opposite tendency elsewhere, and one who is aware of this can use such changing weather states to their advantage. It is exactly like the changing of the weather, high pressure creates a vacuum somewhere else. This is why warriors of the past spent around half the day meditating and the other half fighting. It was understood that by creating a certain inner pressure, and then moving this upwards, you could create the very basis of growth and power. There are many aspects to this. This is known as separation of charge, which essentially means that you are both high pressure and low pressure, which creates the right kind of atmosphere for development and evolution.

When you are exerting yourself physically, the breathe becomes more externally bound. Even then however, you may want to control the breathe rather than let it all out. For example, if you want to control the breathe so the opponent doesn’t perceive you as scared, this obviously has practical benefits. In the past particularly, warriors would have to hide from deadly animals who could pick up faint breathing sounds, so they disguised their breathing in many ways.

Because of various constraints in the past, such as lack of writing tools, the sound forms were passed on from generation to generation by physical demonstration only. This is known as the oral tradition. The oral tradition was effective for demonstrating the quality of a form, so that that this would be kept. The physical details were not so important as they are today, because everybody has their own different physical expression. This is particularly so with adepts, who look to become something unique rather than what has already been produced.

In martial arts there are particular subtleties which do not lend themselves to the written form. For example, the up and down movements of a block come out and then go back in the reverse of it rapidly. This is similar to how a snake snaps out and then goes back along the same path. So the snake was used to demonstrate this particular sinuous quality, which is considered more like the human being in terms of energy. Obviously another man looks more like a human body, but the energy aspect was what counted here. It is like going up and down an ascending and descending scale, rather than a beginning, middle and end. So in the book it will look like a preparation, execution, and recovery as demonstrated by a person. This is not how it is in reality. Everybody knows what a snake looks like and how it moves, so this picture paints a thousand words.

In the next part we will look at the particular syllables and utterances used in martial arts. We will also look at how the coloured belt systems represent the twelve and seven notes of sound. There are of course also seven or twelve colours depending on the system. This is not arbitrary and played in important role in the formation of traditional martial arts. Each of these sounds and colours represents a particular quality. For example, the “Aa” sound represents the beginning, and is used to relate the breath to the physical centre of the body, the Hara Centre. The breathe is used as a thread, just like a thread holds together beads into a structure. So the “Aa” sound links the sound to the form, ensuring that you have a stable base. This is why in martial arts you shout “Ha!” or some variation of this sound in a forceful exhale.

Fullness and Emptiness

Posted on by joeharman8 | 9 min read | 98 views

Fullness and emptiness are two aspects which work together. Say you have a cup of water. You will drink the water, which will lubricate the system and go towards creating energy. This energy can be used to do various things. If you eat food, then it becomes part of your body in various ways. It can be used as energy which you immediately expend, or it can be used to regenerate cells. If you wish to regenerate cells, this takes a lot more time and energy than simply eating and then rushing off somewhere to do an everyday task. this is why various forms of energy healing rarely work in peoples experience, because in todays world they are often expected to rush around from one appointment to the next as if they never run out of energy. Either that or it is as if you just go and get a job done, and then rest if there happens to be time. However, there is never Time unless you see the value of waiting and slowing down from time to time.

When you eat food, it can be delivered to the blood, or stored in the liver. This happens in different proportions according to a persons lifestyle and approach to nutrition. Today it is common for athletes top eat blended food. This is because due to their demanding schedule, they don’t seem to have time to sit down and eat. Digestion takes a lot of time and energy if it is to be done properly. This is why elaborate rituals in the past have been established around eating. For example, in fast food restaurants you sit in an overly stimulated environment and eat sugar and salty foods. this is because the senses have been ramped up to cause a kind of craving, whether you are hungry or not. So for someone who is always stimulating the appetite unnaturally, they want to be full all of the time. This has caused all kinds of health complications. However, if you can find some time to sit and eat quietly, this not only improves digestion but also helps restore normal appetite.

The air you breathe can be used to fuel digestion, or it can simply be used to get through the day in a haphazard manner. You can use it to deeply stimulate the internal organs, or simply breathe in an everyday shallow way. All of these things, nutrition, water intake, lifestyle, and breathing, form a complex interaction which produces various results health. So the more you become conscious of all of these things, the more you can make an informed decision. If they are simply done unconsciously, the body’s processes will function just enough to eat reproduce and sleep. However, this kind of ordinary functioning can be ramped up in various ways. One such way is to become empty. As we have seen fast food environments make you feel empty when in fact you’re full. if you sit quietly, or go for a gently walk in nature for example, you are able to increase digestive functioning so that you are more aware of when you need to eat. You then eat what you need rather than out of some kind of built up compulsion through habit.

If your cup is full, then you must do some work in order to empty the cup. Emptying the cup happens in different ways. You can exert yourself in the gym, or simply sit still and let the food assimilate into the body. Or you can do both in varying degrees. So training in martial arts involves converting food into some sort of output, which shapes the person into a martial artist on the physical level. This is why in martial arts, the clean diet was stressed. By clean we simply mean not too much additive or artificial chemicals. Then you are responding to the food rather than the additional chemicals added into the food. Chemical dependance becomes a problem over time, and it is much more difficult today to find food which doesn’t have artificial elements to it. So a good ways to ensure that you diet is healthy is to not eat food which is as untreated as possible, and according to the body’s needs rather than in response to the taste buds only.

So by filling the cup, you create the conditions for emptying it is you are able to take some simple steps. Filling the cup well becomes part of emptying it properly. Emptying the cup properly happens according to certain patterns of energy which can be built up and experienced. These are the reasons for focusing on the energy meridians and chakras. When you focus on maintaining and upright and relaxed posture, you will increasingly feel these established channels operating. They do not happen at random and are a reliable source of feedback as to whether your energies are functioning well. This is known as the way in martial arts, which is beyond form because it is the basis of creating the form itself.

So when you have experienced emptiness, this creates a different kind of fullness on another level. You become more full or vigour and enthusiasm, rather than lethargic from overeating. This is so even if you don’t eat. At the same time you appetite will increase because you are more able to perform work properly as the demand is there. It is not overeating itself that creates lethargy, it is just that if you try to eat a lot of food and then set yourself down in a lazy inert way, then this energy does not convert particularly well. So there is sitting meditatively, and sitting casually. Whereas if you go for a gentle walk, or sit in an upright relaxed posture, this in itself can be a good way to burn clarions in a slow way. More accurately you are converting calories. So there is fast burning, which uses up quickly, and slow burning which happens as a long term process of transformation. it is not a question of good or bad, but if you overdo the fast burning then the need for slow burning increases due to the level of stress hormone which can build up in the body. This is why athletes are continuously looking for recovery solutions artificially.

many people only sit down in an lethargic manner. They believe that you should sit only when you are exhausted. However, you won’t make the most out of this time if you don’t put any kind of effort into the process. I’m not talking about mental or physical effort, only momentum of energy which requires a different kind of effort. For example, you can sit and perform various breathing exercises, which cause deep pressure on the organs and breathing muscles, which give you a deep core workout without moving the limbs around. This is why people athletes often go to high altitude when they train, to stimulate the core breathing muscles. This then clear the lactic acid away from the body effectively by increasing blood flow and circulation. You are then more effectively able to train even though you have not done much in the way of conditioning exercises. The same thing happens in deep breathing without the need for high altitude. Otherwise various drugs can be the way. So you actually want to be full of energy in order to do perform breathing exercises effectively, rather than just as an afterthought once you are empty in other ways. Eating food stimulates the core for this energy, which requires a certain period of rest before you can engage properly. This is why digestion is so important.

Becoming empty pesters the system into various states of need and demand. This is why people who are always exhausted can still remain active even though in many ways they are empty. They are full of a certain kind of anticipatory agitation, which is a kind of energy spike. Such people can go all out but then often require days to recharge. This kind of expenditure is enough to ensure survival, but because it is unstable requires various other kinds interventions to support. For example, the mind and emotions play a big role in supporting such states of stress, whereas one who has done the necessary preparation can become self supportive because when the energies have built up to a certain level, these energies are never wrong. The mind however can be wrong, just as emotional response can be wrong. But when the energies are driven in a powerful way, the emotions and mental energies follow in their rightful place. This is a kind of intuitive intelligence. It is not a question of better or worse, it is just that when the energy systems are cultivated to a certain extent they are able to see much more of reality than the normal mental and emotional states of energy alone.

So in Martial arts we say that to become full you need to empty the cup. At one level, this means expenditure of energy. At another level, it means conversion of energy. To heal the body after a fight or stressful situation? This obviously takes a large amount of energy if it is to be done quickly. This means that you apportion a certain amount of energy to stretching and breathing exercises for example. There are many such exercises, which can be easily found online so I will not go into detail right here now. Even a small amount of this will have some effect.

To engage in a fight or stressful situation recklessly, this is a certain expenditure of energy in itself, which obviously cannot then be converted into something else. If people thought about it carefully, they would see that massive expenditure has a knock on effect the next day. It is not that you just get though the stress of a situation and then back off and hope for the best. This is a limited approach. If you recognise the toll a situation takes on the energy systems, then it becomes immediately clear when these systems have been compromised because they reflect the tuth of a situation. Mentally you tell yourself you’ll be fine. Emotional, you are involved. There are many deceptions here. However, once the mental, physical and emotional energy shave found their appropriate place in the hierarchy, they will follow the high systems of energy, the energy body, which actually overlaps the other physical and mental bodies, and has an entire reality of its own. This is why the bodies were so called in Indian systems, because they are entire realities of experience rather than just offshoots of the physical body.

What is Real Martial Arts?

Posted on by joeharman8 | 14 min read | 100 views

The purpose of traditional forms was not to practice them as though you were fighting. Obviously, fighting proficiency is best achieved by actual combat practice, otherwise it’s predominantly in the imagination. This largely took place experientially rather than in theory. There was no shortage of the threat of combat in the past, as it was all over the place, so it was a constant pre occupation. When something is constantly around you, it is natural to want to move beyond it. This is the case with war. It was not by avoiding it that we become more civilised, it was because we knew the serious consequences if severe efforts were not made to avoid it. This is how the world moved on from World War Two.

The question is, did the fighters of the past believe that by practicing a martial arts form without an opponent, that this was the way to learn how to fight? No, because they already knew how to fight, just as the people involved in World Wars one and two did. They could not have just picked it up before hand, because a lot of them were Youths. So it was not through training, which was very rudimentary, but through an awareness that it was needed. When people put their very lives into something, then there is no question of holding back or being unsure. You simply jump into it without thinking much, overriding the cognitive process altogether.

Today, the cognitive process is often what people validate everything with. So today, like never before, people are thinking about everything and overthinking things. this can be good or bad, however it makes everything much more complicated in many ways. However, It is this awareness of what is needed, rather than theoretical knowledge, that makes apparently difficult concepts obvious, such as what works and what doesn’t in so called real martial arts. so condition can point you in this direction, or make you avoid it altogether.

If you have got to a certain stage of development that requires survival skills, then there is no question that you will fight. You may also choose to rune away, but the important point is that you are shown through experience what needs to happen for you fighting capabilities to work in some way. This isn’t so much a training principle, but of an awareness and perception of certain realities in life. Today, we are shown different realities predominantly, for example that it is important to win a contest rather than to simply get through it irrespective of the result. However, the reality is that for many who won a fight or war, would anyway be dead slightly later, because they would be infected with something and there was no medicine, or even clean water. This is why, certain codes or conduct and moral teachings prevailed over brute force in societies. However, there is no need for this and more than there is for ongoing organised training, if you become profoundly aware of the consequences of your own actions.

Training makes the learning process a habitual one rather than simply one of life and death. This can be good or bad. Say you know how to fight, but you want to train for a particular style of competition. A certain habitual practice is engaged with to channel your activity towards a certain goal. This can be beneficial or not depending on what your circumstances and goals are. If for example, you learn to grapple properly in a match, you may be taught to avoid punching and kicking. This is wrestling. However, in a no rules setting, this attitude may make you miss what is obvious to an untrained fighter, who may even be a savage. So for most people, the middle way is best, to channel the innate aggressive tendencies into some for of productive exercise or skill set.

In the past, survival and enemies at the gates were just part of everyday life for many people. It is commonly believed that Buddhist Monks or whoever else, practiced the so called traditional arts as if they lived in total ignorance of what worked in fighting. In fact, they had usually chosen to renounce certain survival based ways of life, in order to live the temple way of life. There were many who did so out of fear or societal pressures, but there are those who did so for reasons of self evolution. This in no way presupposes that they avoided violence altogether or had no experience in it.

Say, for example, that you had numerous fights in your life and were sent to prison. You then get out, and feeling the same pattern of dishing out street justice to anyone who you think deserves it, you decide to break the cycle altogether. You can sit around in sorrow for all the bad you have done, or you can skip this step as well and go straight into action for your own development, regardless of your past. This is to become free from the cycle of karma, by taking on a new body. This is not a new physical body, but is the energy body, through which you alter the physical and mental bodies. This is the reason for imitating Buddha.

New brain patterns, habits and cellular growth can occur in the right internal environment, and it is as if the physical body becomes invigorated by the new energy systems you are working with. This is why the internal systems work from within, you can begin this process of identification before results start to show outwardly. This can be done with behaviour too, however, this is more easily achieved with the youth who naturally want to copy a role model. Another way is that it all starts with the mind, which is actually related to the body anyway through the neural pathways and other systems. This is the meaning behind the internal arts, it wasn’t to satisfy the needs of the existing nature, but to create an entirely new energy nature and form, which altered the physical in many ways. There were many ways of doing this, but essentially cells come and go, being replaced every few years, so it is important to establish new patterns of growth too over time. This is different from just copying a system of martial arts superficially and expecting such impressions to make a profound inner change.

So breaking the cycle of the past is known as breaking the karmic bond, which means through your actions you overcome your limitations. This is obviously difficult, because others around you may assume you’re getting soft or not understand. However, the reality for many fighters is that they feel the need to break free from certain societal pressures which they react to with violence, but they don’t have the tools. Otherwise the fear ending up in prison and wasting their lives. It is obvious to them because it is something strain g at them constantly. It may be realised intellectually too. The point is, that when you are familiar with something intimately, you naturally want to see what’s beyond it rather than just stay there. If something is fleeting anyway, then you just want to hold one to it in many cases.

For the people of the past, it cannot be the case that they were somehow ignorant of stress and violence. In those days society would have been steeped in war and threat for ones survival, if not from an invader then from the natural conditions of the environment. Growing up in such circumstances, it wasn’t that you could just chose to take part of not. The situation melded you. These threats included simply getting infected by a blade someone might be carrying, or poisoned by an animal for instance. This means you can’t hunt for food and you can’t feed your family. You had to be clever. Then, there is no question of honour and victory because the basic conditions for survival have not been maintained if you slip up.

So for one who is constantly engaged in holding onto survival, there is no spare resources for much else. at the same time there is a driving force to move beyond it. So this is the Yin and Yang, the push and pull, which are very much connected. At the same time, if your whole life becomes martial arts, then you do not need to rely on theories and styles. This does not mean that you training repeatedly, only that you whole being becomes martial arts, which simply means turning warfare into an art. Art is war, and war is art. This can be the inner or outer form of warfare, depending on the individual and context.

So due to the fact that an opponents blade could infect you and you would lose an arm, it was not considered particularly good to go out and look for a fight. It was not considered glorious as it might be today. There were no such pretentiousness. There was an inner sense of who could pose a threat and who couldn’t, which is still true today. When you know the consequences, no one can tell you “If you do this technique, you will be safe”. The stakes are too high and you know better through your experience and life knowledge. In society nowadays there are still such dangers, but these are in the back of peoples minds. This is particularly the case when people try to learn martial arts. For example, you might try a techniques on someone without the awareness that at any time, there could be an opponents friends ambushing you at any moment. The attention gets fixated on a techniques rather than the environment. This is good practice but a bad habit to get into in the wider environment.

So when there are so many considerations, multiple opponents, dangers of minor injuries having fatal consequences, it is not so simple as dedicating your time to practicing a particular style. You cannot formalise something into a system in that sense. You have to bet your life on it, otherwise it’s not worth it. You also had no theory about what worked, because necessity is the mother of invention, which means if it didn’t work you were dead. This sense of urgency brings out a whole new level of attention to detail and awareness, which is rare today. Therefore, to make up some theoretical system of self defence against an opponent was not a luxury that could be afforded to most people at many points in human history.

Once violence and day to day strife is assumed to be a given, you no longer need to condition yourself to some kind of fighting system, because war is an everyday reality. Even if it doesn’t happen to you, you may still sense a deep feeling of loss or victory, depending on the situation. For example, because communities were much tighter in the past, what happened to you happened to everyone nearby. On the individual level, when you develop a certain inutuitve sense of empathy, it is possible to feel the loss of you opponent as if it were you. This has always been my experience, that I often can’t tell what is my victory or my loss. On the other hand, you can also feel victory yourself without any need for a particular result1. It is not that it needs to affect you directly, but you feel it like you might watching the emotional ups and downs of a reality TV show which you experience through others and yourself.

If you go out looking for a fight, it means your family won’t be fed if you end up in bed for a few days recovering. This was the reality for most of human history. If you get through a fight and injure ankle for instance, then your ability to work the land all day is impaired greatly. You’re as good as dead. Emotionally speaking, engaging in fighting is a costly endeavour, so bringing up the family whilst being a fighter and waking up emotionally drained from a contest has to be factored in. Contests of high intensity are costly in terms of energy, which is a pre requisite for serious spiritual training. By spiritual I mean inner martial arts. So serious competition and violence costs a lot. This is even the case today with modern comforts and systems of recovery and medical care, and many athletes put life on hold until they retire. So it is not difficult to imagine what it would have been like to become a fighter as well as raise a family, have limited life expectancy, and no medical care in the not so distant past. The life expectancy up until relatively recently may have been around 30 years old, so to get everything in order before then would not be possible if you were constantly battling the people unnecessarily.

It is only in modern times, where we are fortunate enough to live in relative ease and comfort, that we have the choice whether or not to engage in some sort of martial arts fighting system. Before, you’d better be ready to fight at any time, and more importantly you’d better be aware of how to strategically avoid fighting most of the time. It is possible even today to obtain this level of awareness but it is increasingly rare. The systems of martial arts were set up to fulfil certain social obligations to society, much like the systems of sport are today. There are other ways of going about it, and other things that can be done, but for the most part people equate an organised system with the practice itself. This is a goos starting point and it is not necessary that everyone achieved the same mastery, but it gives everyone the opportunity to become aware of certain possibilities. So today, this is the role of martial arts, to demonstrate how to improve and progress, which is up to the individual to decide for themselves.

When I look at the forms of Tai Chi for instance, it is obvious to me that these things were performed as an internal medicine because that was what was missing then, not the ability to fight. Now that health is taken for granted through medicine, it is equally obvious that there is a need to remind people of their roots by engaging in martial arts. If this is obvious to you, then there is no need for such organised practice, except for such things as competition and social recognition. Anyone who has practiced these for a number of years and looks at themselves will see the possibilities contained within some of the most simple exercises.

Avoidance is not necessarily through incapability but through necessity. Anyway, anybody when they are under constant pressure all the time is vulnerable to collapse. we are beginning to see this more and more, as for various reasons stress is happening more widely even with increased comfort and ease. The societies of the past obviously knew how to survive, probably better than now, and their well being was completely related to competence and survival. So to combat the modern problems, I think it is essential to become aware of the same level of urgency towards health and well being that was the case for our ancestors regarding survival. Because really there is not much difference whether you are lieing in bed due to injury or due to certain states of depression. Both are dangerous to ones physical and mental health in different ways, and certainly your energy for supporting life. This is the value of the inner practices, such as breathing and traditional forms.

References

1 How to experience Victory all the time http://intuitivemartialarts.com/2023/08/23/how-to-experience-victory-all-the-time/

Martial Arts is a Chess Game

Posted on by joeharman8 | 13 min read | 98 views

It is often said that martial arts is like a game of chess. What does this mean exactly? Well, a game of chess is not any different from any other game. You plan the moves you make, expanding your repertoire in preparation for the game. These are typical exercises in martial arts, such as punching and kicking drills for instance. And then when you go into the match, you concentrate your focus, moment by moment, on the move you are about to make one at a time. This one at a time is not in terms of stopping and starting the match. This happens in real time, like driving on the motorway. If you over think driving on the motorway, you will likely miss what’s happening on the road and suffer from anxiety about the whole thing. this is what happens when we overthink martial arts at the wrong times, outside of specific drills and scenarios. This doesn’t mean we forget the drills, these become imbedded in our procedural knowledge. It’s just that too much output from thoughts prevents enough input from the unfolding experience of reality that is in front of us.

So it isn’t that you gather a collection of combined movements and try to play those out in the match. we are not repeating history This may be what you do in training, but not in the live situation of a martial arts match, or self defence. In the match or contest itself, you only need to think about one move at a time, even if you end up doing several. These single one moves blend seamlessly together as if they were rehearsed, but in fact this is the dance itself playing out spontaneously and fluidly. If the mind becomes flooded with too many thoughts when this is going on, then all that tends to happen is that anxiety builds up and emotions take over. In a way this prevents overthinking by provoking an emergency burst of energy to ensure your survival instincts take over from thought. But this is a back up system, what we want to do is find a method to get it right in the first instance. This is why, in a chess match or martial arts, you think one move at a time, but with the utmost intensity. In this way your thoughts transform into effective action rather than a distraction.

So as in Chess, the same for Martial arts. This is a game that plays out fluidly, and can be broken down and analysed post mortem, after it has finished. If you try to process what’s in front of you at the same time as trying to remember what you did in training, then basically everything, thoughts, emotions, and information, comes in at a rapid pace. At this pace, everything becomes excessively stressful and impossible to process as events happen in from of you. This is the cause of competition stress, it becomes too burdensome to do this. Then, you will probably end up going behind in the match. People hold on to their thoughts because they haven’t found an effective way to transform them into action. However, the natural transformation of thought into action can happen only when the mind is free to evolve and respond as needed.

This was my experience early on in my competition years. I would try to remember what to do, and then all of a sudden the match would be over. The opponent was more present than me, and I was trying to condense the experience to my limited sphere of understanding at the time. As time went on, I learnt to have a basic strategy that my instructor would shout from the side lines, such as “Step outside” or “Left Kick’. These were just reminders rather than commands, and I was familiar with the terminology so it triggered a certain reminder of what to do intuitively. This allowed me to react more swiftly and in real time. This cannot be taught, it can just be experienced and transmitted to others for them to put into action themselves.

Having a rigid plan just causes too much tension within the system to respond properly. This is alright if your opponent is handpicked or not very competent. In any case, it is not about beating the opponent, it is about performing and experience life at the highest level possible. If you strive for this, then many of your illusions about your own limitations will simple fall to the floor. They are largely imagined because you think of yourself as a beginner or an expert, or some other conclusion you might have made for yourself. But even then, anyone can rise to the occasion surprise you. When I used to watch other competitors, one strategy I used was to watch fighters who were beaten badly and kept fighting. This is how I wanted to be. So I looked for those fighters who were completely able but took on a situation that didn’t favour them. I found that usually this helped them evolve as competitors, whereas fighters that had it easy early on where often protected and stagnated when things got too much later in their careers.

If you just focus on what you have to do in the moment with total clarity, then not only will you react faster, but you will also respond appropriately in ways you could not pre determine in advance. A whole new possibility is then opened in your experience as you go with it. This involves a level of reckless abandon, which if handled appropriately with the right discipline, ends up being the safest option. This is the case if you have already assimilated a number of years of training and are familiar with the basic movements which make up a martial arts contest. You also have to develop an iron will and an unstoppable attitude. So you want wide exposure to various exercises, but it is not necessary to win these training exercises, just to gain exposure1. If you have no experience, then of course a limited game will play out. So familiarise and plan to the extent that you can, but don’t make the mistake of thinking this will make the process happen by itself. This is because the training is not the contest, they are two separate things. You can train to get more familiar with the live situation, or to get familiar with the various movements. But you can never train the perception, because it is at the core of who you are.

The core of who you are is your perceptual awareness. This need not be trained, it needs to be released and unhindered, that’s all. If you are worried about the outcome, who you might let down, whether you’ll lose sponsorship, or whatever else, then you are not functioning from the core of who you are. Therefore, you will be less than what you are capable of. People rely on you, that’s great. But you can never live up to this anyway. They will rely on your still even if you lose, if you become an evolving process of success. In martial arts, it is said that you must be the best you can be. This says nothing about winning or losing, because these are self defined2. This does not mean you practice the moves and then try to make them happen in a live situation unconsciously. There needs to be awareness, full consciousness, then you are becoming what you really are. Otherwise it is a shadow of what you are capable of, even if you win this or that. This is why, traditionally, the outcome was not planned or worried about in advance. Not because they didn’t want to win or become good, but because the only crime in martial arts to is become less than you can be, which is to divide you attention in critical moments.

If you get beaten in a match, then there is nothing wrong with that. If you lose because you didn’t play the game with enough involvement and attention to being present, then this is not acceptable. If that happens, the only thing to do is learn and move forward. This can be a vital lesson, so there are no mistakes really. If you train hard for as longs it takes, and then fully immerse yourself in the game, then this is the best way to maximise your chances of success. I understand this goes against every competitive mindset in the martial arts industry, but don’t go out and try to reduce it to the exercises you have performed in various scenarios.

Don’t try to win everything, just focus on what needs to happen right now, al, the time. If you increase the scope of your experience, then naturally growth will happen. Your focus on one thing will come to encapsulate everything. This is why I’m always talking about increasing your awareness and being present, because then you become increasingly aware of what isn’t obvious at first rather than just what is immediately obvious. So start with a punch, and then see that it naturally relates to other things. When you were a baby, a staircase seemed like a mountain. It wasn’t a mountain, because you saw it later for what it really was rather than retaining this limited vision. So when you work on your vision, and see things for what they really are, then everything fits together properly. you can then analyse everything properly because you are seeing it from a transformed perspective which is less and less limited. This is chess in action. So you can only do the right technique one move at a time. If you do that with full attention, then the next move is taken care of too because one leads to the other. And so on.

So we have looked at how to make sure you are present, and doing the appropriate move, making the appropriate response in that moment. So any talk about the right move, or the correct technique to use, has to be understood in terms of perceptually seeing one move at a time. It is only in the mind that these things are one at a time or disconnected. One move is actually many when you experience it totally immersed in the game, whatever that game is. You cannot do any more than this, but you can do that well or not so well. This knowledge will prove decisive in whatever you do if you apply it properly. this doesn’t mean you need to disagree with others, who may be of the opinion that planning needs to be excessive.

Excessively planning is exploitative or exclusive, because it includes only the educated in a particular style or discipline, leaving out vast sections of society from participating. This is business, to respond to the market. When the potential market is untapped, this is where the true opportunities lie. So my approach with this website is to hopefully one day include many more rather than just working with the existing numbers. Those who are established move beyond their confines anyway at a certain point, so they will know what I’m talking about.

Say you want to win a contest in a particular fashion. This situation may or may not present itself, because it is in your imagination. It is not necessarily doing the right move for that present moment in front of you, which is reality. The mind grasps little bits and pieces of the past, which are a reflection of the present moment. Many competitors who were good in the past lose sight of this simple fact, and get beaten out of nowhere seemingly. Even memories are distorted, taking on new shapes as time goes by which is why the mind remains flexible, grasping onto different possibilities and changing those as the situation in front of you unfolds. This is adaption, and it means the memories of the past were never fixed. This can be liberating. So in reality you can only make one appropriate move at a time, because the past impressions are not complete by themselves. They need to see the light of day in the present experience.

You can plan, to some extent, what the opponent might do. However, if they themselves do not know what to do, then they are as clueless as you. This cluelessness is called nothingness, or letting go. Actually, this is the most dangerous kind of opponent, because they are just responding rather than thinking and then responding in a two step process. There is only one process here, which is precisely what is meant by emptying the mind. The mind is emptied when it contains a thought which you let pass and unfold as need by the situation. So you can only give your attention to one thing at a time. If you are trying to think of a tune in your head, it is impossible to think of another at the same time. at the same time it can evolve into something else and take on a new tune. So becoming mindful and present in this process is more important than any plans and conclusions you may have planned.

If you are playing chess, you can only move one move at a time.You then observe the opponent, what they do, and how they respond. They may not respond appropriately, so you dominate in the exchange by imposing your will on them. If you don’t see this and you respond according to what you think should happen, you end up missing such an easy opportunity. This happens all the time in martial arts, and elsewhere. People miss such easy opportunities because the respect the oppoionet t too much, or miss what is obvious because they are not paying attention consciously to the present moment unfolding in front of them. In other words, theory gets in the way of reality, and it becomes a two step process rather than direct perception. It is then like experiencing things through a mirror rather than as they are totally. This is because they think they’re so good that they need not pay the proper attention.

Play the chess game well and everyone will see whether you’re good or not. Attention is everything and opens up all possibilities. The good thing is that this can happen right away without training. Then your existing training begins to make more sense. So what I’m saying does not invalidate anything else, it’s just about experiencing things more absolutely. Experience has nothing to do with thoughts and imagination about how good or bad you might think you are. To experience the contest in thought only, rather than the perception that makes these thought even possible, is too limited by itself. So go direct to the source, the human attention which perceive reality as it really is.

References

1 https://wordpress.com/post/intuitivemartialarts.com/2572

2 https://wordpress.com/post/intuitivemartialarts.com/2576

How to Experience Victory all the Time

Posted on by joeharman8 | 11 min read | 114 views

When somebody wins a contest, they are ecstatic. When they suffer a loss they begin to doubt themselves, because their winning streak is over. This is a misunderstanding. It is because they have begun to doubt themselves that victory leaves them. Victory is not something that happens and then fades away the next day. It is something to pursue directly rather than dependant on some kind of situational advantage. If you sat on a chair in an unbalanced state, disorientated and irritable, you would naturally feel uncomfortable. However, someone who has attained a certain ease within themselves would feel comfortable on any kind of chair. So it isn’t to do with the conditions of the chair, the comfort level or the appearance, it is to do with the inner reality of the individual and the state they are in. This is what victory is.

Victory cannot be stolen by anyone, except by that person themselves. For many people, the sense of victory, or the inner balance within, has left them. This may or may not correlate with outside circumstances. These are just happenings rather than casual agents. Simply being able to train and to accept wins and losses as they are is victory. Victory has nothing to do with the contest of the social situation you’re in. These are just ways of defining it in a small way. For example, it was once understood in martial arts that you got better by undergoing constant challenge, whether or not you won. This prepared you for any major contest or life and death situation, not some prior experience of success or failure. It wasn’t necessary to win anything, just to undergo the most challenging situations that was appropriate for your development. This would vary from one person to the next.

Let’s look at a sporting example. To make an olympic wrestling team, it might be necessary to lose against the number one and the number two guy. This is normal, it just means you have lost to the best. This in fact means you have won in terms of extracting for yourself the best level of challenge and ensuring that you are motivated to improve. This stops stagnation which comes with being too satisfied with past results or limited expectations. So it’s just a case of following this process to the conclusion and eventually reaching the top. Many people drop out prematurely from similar situations when they are not used to this kind of atmosphere. This is why in Martial arts, one of the main tenets is humility. This does not mean getting used to being limited, it means embracing the best conditions for your development even if they are outside your comfort zone.

Victory is a process

So winning is not about a result but is a process. This includes ups and downs. In the situation of the olympic wrestling team, the number three wrestler might not know they are good for many years. this is necessary for their development, all they need to do is wait. If they can wait, without achieving what some of the others in the team are achieving, then that is all that’s needed. It’s just that people can’t pay attention to the process and just wait. This is one of the hardest things to do, because it seems as though others might be surpassing you.

If you can just train and wait for the process to take place within you, then everything begins to take shape naturally. For example, if the plant establishes a strong root, grows daily in a supportive environment, and takes its time, it will eventually become a big thing. It’s then able to create more leaves for itself, more pollen, more seeds, etc., Similarly, when you have created the right conditions, even the outside situations can be greatly enhanced. This increases your potential, even if there was none in the first place. So first of all, martial arts is about cultivating an inner potential. This is the reason behind the internal practices. They can be used to heal, in the so called healing arts, but at the same time they can be used before any damage has taken place. This is why traditionally, the Master in martial arts did not heap praise on the disciple, and in some cases didn’t even talk to them. All they needed to do was wait and to generate a potential which may or may not have been there or laying dormant.

A waiting game

If you take a nap under a tree, you do not call this losing at life. It is just taking a rest. It is a form of recuperating, so that the system can balance itself out. If you are asleep in the womb, the same thing happens. So each victory or loss, or growth, requires some kind of rest, which is not a loss but simply life functioning as its should. This is how growth happens, during some period of rest or down time. This can be done before or after a particular contest, for example. It can be done for no other reason than to generate some kind of energy, as in meditation. Sitting under the tree can mean sweeping the floor, or joining the lowly ranks for a time, symbolically speaking.

The fundamental reason why people don’t reach their potential is because their system is not kept in balance. In other words, they have not taken time away from the stresses and rigours of the external life. In martial arts, exceptional balance is needed. In this way, it is sometimes necessary to develop this balance with a persevering attitude by first establishing harmony, instead of plunging in before this balance is achieved. This is the reason for waiting. It is possible to charge ahead recklessly, as is done in the more athletic styles of martial arts. There is nothing wrong with this, it can be a tremendous development. But after some time, the natural urge to dominate and compete leaves the martial artists and after some accomplishment, it is natural to want to break free from it and move beyond it. In other words, to detach from identification with some kind of status, which becomes a limitation.

Planning the Process, not the Outcome

You determine what is victory, and what is defeat, just as you plan a strategy to win a contest. Exactly how the contest plays out and the conditions of your winning and losing are entirely in your hands. So you build the very victory in your mind, rather than the stipulations of the contest. When I say you build it, I mean the intelligence functioning within you to the best of its scope and ability. Whatever is built around that physically in terms o capability, is the outcome. So it is entirely up to the individual which kinds of conditions for victory they create. This requires a balance to be established, so that the system can functioning easefully. It is then possible to become a live process in the making rather than an outcome. In other words, you become the fight itself rather than an outcrop of it. Otherwise, all sorts of distortions and malfunctions can take place. So when you see things clearly, there is less of a need to do everything in such a conquest fashion. It is a disturbance in the system which creates this excessive need for conquest.

A grain of wheat contains within itself the means to create an entire plant, as well as to pass on itself to the next crop. In other words, it can reproduce what’s there, or transform itself into a growing life. At the moment, we are using our seed just to produce what’s expected of us in various situations. When the Art of war discusses the similarities between large scale and small scale war, this does not mean that you just fight like an army would on the individual level. Instead, what it means is that you mobilise the forces in order to change the world.

Inner Warfare

Depending on the situation in front of you, you either take over the world, or maybe bide your time. You don’t chose inactivity just because its not the situation you want. It’s about being active but receptive to the actual possibilities, rather than imagined ones. So you have spies, which give you feedback as to what is possible, where your weaknesses are within your kingdom, that sort of thing. The internal mechanism of the human has similar network which can be tapped into with such activities as meditation, mindfulness, and breathing exercises. It becomes obvious to even one who cannot see, because it is felt though the organism, through the to tissues and fascia for instance.

Your whole system is like a spiders web, and like the spider there are vibrational forces which you send through yourself by tapping into the breath. It is only though the subtle movements that the spider is able to send sonic forces through the entire web whilst maintaining its integrity. These forces or vibrations are not for therapy but to gather information, which is contained within an energy form. In the human, this is known as the energy body, which is said to have eight limbs like those of the spider, which includes the physical as well as the sensory aspect of the body. In other words, the sensory aspect of the body supports the structural capabilities of the physical. This is because if you become more intuitive, you can more easily sense damage and incoming threat by using this internal network effectively.

In the same way, you can mobilise the forces of your inner army to become the general and the troops at the same time. This means you plan the very process of engagement with the battlefield, the time and place, what you are willing to spend or sacrifice, all of these considerations. Otherwise it’s just endless skirmishes which go nowhere. When you think of victory and defeat in such a narrow sense, then war makes no sense at all. Unfortunately, increasingly martial arts is being throught of in such a narrow sense.

Victory in Defeat

You can work towards some outcome or become a process. Obviously, you can also fall somewhere in between. If you think of yourself as a winner or loser because of some result or some training you have had, you should know that you and a result are different things. A prisoner of war can be captured and then survive through sheer determination of his interior will power. It is not the house that stays standing but the experience of living in it, even in trying times. The blue print of a house might be good or bad, but it still has to be lived in. The builder may or may not know what they were doing when they made the house, and in any event, they may not know certain laws of living. However, when you learn to live in a house properly, it needn’t matter whether you are in a hut or a palace, you make the most of it either way. This is making victory out of nothing.

Victory is born within you, so in striving for it you will include everything that is involved with it. This includes defeat where appropriate. For example, you might think it’s all about winning over the enemy. This kind of thinking came about because somewhere people started thinking that they don’t need a rival to bring the best out of them. With the arrival or increasingly scientific methods, people started to think it was all about technical skills. This is like thinking a cultivated flower will be a tenacious as a wild one. It may look better, but it needs all sorts of artificial supports. This accounts for something but not everything. It is like if you fatten a pig on a farm, it seems like this is what a pig is. But as soon as you open the gate and it runs in the wild as nature intended, then its starts to drop the fat and returns to its usual state. Such a pig would be more adapted to the wild even if it lost its comfort level. So this is not really a defeat for the plug, only the owner.

The contest is half going on in the opponent and half in you. In other words, it’s inside and outside of you, it’s just that there is a thin bubble which separates the two which we are seeing as big barrier. This bubble is the boundary line between your inner experience and the outside, which are one and the same. So when the experience is felt only from within, you become like the fat pig on the farm which is functioning outside its environment. You don’t realise it, but you need the outside will environment with less comfort. The grain of wheat that came from a plant, doesn’t know where it came from originally nor does it care, it still was born of a process. In the same way, the pig that finds its freedom does so of its own nature, but with the existence of a wider experience functioning through it.

Feminine Energy and Intuition [Part 2]

Posted on by joeharman8 | 16 min read | 92 views

When it comes to training, the level of structured organisation often means that the athlete has to experience the fight largely in terms of imagining the outcome in advance. For example, they train various scenarios, and then think back to what they did in the past rather than responding in the moment spontaneously with something new. So they are in the moment, responding to the past. This can be disastrous for the creative energy of an individual, even if it yields short term results. It is as if you are looking at the truth of something evolving and you are trying to make sense of it by historical facts only. Obviously this is not enough.

So, often, when when martial artists are in the ring itself they have to experience the contest through memory of what they planned to do rather than what actually needs doing. This is ok as a support system, but not as a long term solution for growth. The common argument here is that it’s supposedly too difficult for intuition to govern response. If this is the case, it just means you aren’t good enough to use intuition effectively as a faculty, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong in that, it can be great to develop the more masculine side of doing things, although it is still possible to express intuitive action even under rigid social structures.

Actually, it isn’t necessary to burden yourself with knowledge, carrying it around like a collection you’ve gathered. When the integrity of your physical structure is bent and stretched through training, you might think that the body then resets to a state that it was in before. No, in fact it the body is warped by gravity and the space you create. So you take on a new composition. There are several ways of looking at this. In terms of the Karma you carry, whatever you do creates new possibilities. It is not a case of repeating the same karma, although that is a choice. It’s not like you are doomed to repeat things over and over. It is like how sometimes people are defined by genetics. This is the more modern way of enslaving people to certain societal notions which have no existential basis. This only becomes reality in your experience if you continually make the choice, consciously or unconsciously, to remain in a fixed state. So in a way, rigid training which does not evolve keeps one in a state of sameness. This is good until you have worked out your karma, or what is known as pre birth Chi in Chinese systems, into a greater possibility.

Stretching the Gravitational Pull

When you act according to the body’s intuitive need to expand and work with gravity, for example when you stretch a punch out, sinking down into your centre at the same time, you are stretched one way, and pulled in another. You take what you are and expand it. This can be done in a seconds, for a minute, or for year. There are different ways of going about it. The idea is that you transform you capabilities and potential through training, rather than just refine the existing capabilities. This is a subtle yet powerful way of transforming yourself over time. Because your composition is always changing, your potential is also changing. That is why genetically it is possible to overcome hereditary dispositions, just as it is possible to develop the same dispositions later even if there is no genetic basis. For example, say you inherit a bad heart. It is just as easy to develop this later through various lifestyle choices, and there are many examples of people overcoming such conditions through life. This is done in various ways by stretching out what was weighing them down.

The direction of your movements in space as well as the waves of energy you send through the body create what scientists call “Gravitational memory”. This has a universal as well as individual basis to it. This gravitational memory leaves a lasting impression on the body’s centre of gravity, the Hara Centre or abdominal area. This is stretched continuously as a child, when you run around endlessly. This is actually the body’s maintenance and growth centre, which means you experience yourself from here in many ways as well as the possibilities presented to you. So this growth happens unconsciously in children, but it must be done consciously in adults.

Just as gravitational memory happens in the universe as it interacts with energy, this is what happens in your own centre of gravity when you take action. Your own centre mixes with that of the wider environment, just as your own inhalation takes from plants and gives back to them. So half of you is actually outside, and the other half is inside. So as one gets older, they tend to move towards stretching themselves, either as part of a family or into wider society for example. This can be done on the individual level by bringing a more meditative dimension to your practice.

Changing Your own Memories

The body remembers just like gravitational pull within an object remembers. Memory is not just remembering in the brain, it happens outside too. For example, the brain and gut interacts to produce various hormones and states within the system itself, which we call experience and we remember this. This is because the memory is contained between two objects, the body and brain, it’s not an isolated system. So the more activity you perform, the more this impacts the memory. This memory builds up in terms of substantial potential energy over time within the human system, much like the karma you accumulate through action. For example, say you do a good deed, immediately you might not see the benefit. But the congruence and harmony you create in yourself and others around you allows energy to function within you more smoothly. So the wider environment impacts you, and you impact it. Your experience is to do with both. It is not a case of doing a good deed to be congratulated, I’m just talking in terms of causing less friction within yourself and therefore others. It’s then a matter of time before the structure begins to experience visible change, but it’s a process going on all the time. It’s the same with martial arts movements.

When you follow the line of least resistance physically, you are actually lightening the load of karma and becoming more receptive. This changes the foundation of your memory. It is even possible to experience many different lives in this one. This means in many ways you are becoming more feminine, as if you were creating a new child and experiencing its needs and life energies. Instead, you are becoming life’s creation rather than forming a new separate body. This is the meaning behind reincarnation, which is not separate from this life. You are part of the cycle itself. It is possible to become a process rather than an outcome. It is not necessary to die to be born anew, but death happens anyway. So this self transformation creates new memories or interprets the impressions you have received up until now in a new way, transforming your experience right now rather than the next time round. Otherwise there is no point in striving for much more than your allotted karma or pre birth Chi energy.

From Feminine to Masculine

Obviously, you need to work out the masculine side of your energy first, which is what the forms are all about in martial arts. So at first you are just working your way through the inherited karma, or what the Chinese systems refer to as pre birth Chi. This is used to create a platform rather than establish anything. This is known as the fire element, which requires activity and is the masculine in action. After a while of doing this, say ten or twenty years, you end up providing yourself with immense potential energy for conscious activity. Then if you chose to continue the same training, it becomes conscious rather than routine and becomes more to do with the water element, which is to say the feminine. So whether you are a man or woman, you move towards the feminine in the same way. You include both of course, its not an either or thing. The post birth Chi in Chinese systems in known as the Water Chi, which is to say what you acquire after birth. In other words, you move from masculine to feminine.

By making your actions conscious, as in becoming aware, you more wisely utilise energy which would otherwise dissipate at a more initial level during compulsive unconscious acts. This is what martial arts competitions were historically about, working out the fire element within the fighter. It was not about winning but transformation. It is only in recent years that the notions has come about that this could become a commodity or system to be sold as a solution. But if you get rid of the karma only to create more of the same then this is known as getting caught in a cycle. It is believed in Tibetan Schools of buddhism that the path to enlightenment involves escaping this cycle. So accordingly, once you evolve and transform yourself , you have done just that and you have become a life process rather than a repitition of the past. This can happen only by embracing the feminine, because the feminine does not know organised repetition.

Organised Repetition

Obviously it is is normal to act according to institutional demands in sports situations, where the athlete is paid to win. Here, in martial arts research on the opponent is done in advance, as well as the setting and other details such as time and place. However, when the outcome cannot be known in advance, nor the weight of the opponent or their character, this approach hinders direct perception of the unfolding reality in front of you, as in the self defence situation of life or death. Acceptance of death was always talked about more traditionally, but today this is seen less and less. This is like avoiding the elephant in the room, it just becomes more and more obvious. Because martial arts has largely moved away from matters of life and death, there has been an increased movement towards the theoretical rather than the experiential learning. All of these things were normal in the past, there were no weight categories or advanced preparations, time constraints, etc., so there were different ways of preparing. You needed an attitude of fearlessness, which is what black belt means.

This attitude of plunging into the unknown can be seen in mixed martial arts as early as 30 years ago, where there were no rules. You needed to be more spontaneous and exuberant in the moment, which is what the feminine energy is all about. Too much organisation simply dampens such faculties. When spontaneity and aggressive energy mix together, you can create an entirely new energy, which is at once intelligent as well as reckless. This cannot be understood theoretically, but experientially. So there is a need for the feminine, unbridled striving, fuelled the masculine, which is is raw externalised energy. If raw energy has nothing to aim at, then it just ends up blowing up. If the famine is not brought in then it just remains outside your experience, even though it is there.

Becoming Receptive to Transformation

The dimension of thought which is to do with acting in the real world, in the present moment, was in the past kept clear rather than stuffed with ideas. You cannot ascribe meaning to the process of martial arts, because martial arts is what is. Traditionally, conclusions were not formed in advance, but rather during the unfolding situation according to time and place. This was to develop and cultivate the feminine aspect of intuitive knowing. Any number of temples were consecrated so that this space could be supported in society. In terms of martial arts forms, any exercises were based around performing them until the raw energies of youth were worked out. Afterwards, it becomes choice.

So the true disciple in a way was willing to waste their time repeating the same things over and over again. It was only after some time that the value of this was perceived rather than known in advance. The platform for the development of the feminine is the masculine energy, which has to do with fire or heat. The heat needs something cool to temper it and channel it into something more than it is. At the same time, the feminine needs some energy to express itself. The fire is used up in this exchange to create an entirely new expression of energy. This is the meaning behind the burning of devotion, or the fire of belief. These were just things to get you to act, rather than conclusions to understand in advance. Whether this is religious fervour, or martial training, these thing shave been used to make the recipient more receptive to transformation by channeling the energies. Of course there is potential for misuses, but that’s true of anything.

According to modern notions, it seems as if little is being taught in terms of practical value if people are given space to transform themselves from within. For example, in traditional martial arts they told you how to do the move exactly, but never how to apply it in every situation. You were to go away and ponder rid. When you look at the temples of the past, they were wide open spaces, which would seem boring by todays standards, which are characterised by busy and colourful gyms. In addition, people are often sold conclusions rather than ways of seeking. If you have been sold a conclusion, it looks as if someone who is seeking is simply clueless. However if you make a conclusion, that’s the end of seeking. So to question and to believe at the same time, this was the way the masters encouraged seeking as well as activity. This ensured progress and transformation, if the disciple became receptive enough to the process.

Evolution cannot be known in advance, even if there are various possibilities which can be practiced in advance to reach some kind of end point. So these conclusions we make are just tools rather than outcomes to prove or disprove. These scenarios were seen as a support system rather than as a reality to aim at. However, those who practice martial arts with a spiritual side to them, are considered frauds in many circles. This is because their styles have been proven wrong in various scenarios. Anything which is not practical is often considered totally wrong, and especially if you have a master to guide you in this. such masters are considered total idiots by pragmatists. There are many instances of how people go and challenge martial artists from schools which are considered impractical, and the first thing they do is beat them up. However, some of them are able to fight back well, and the others are quite capable of socially handling confrontations without getting physically embroiled.

The need for planning everything derives from fear of the unknown. This modern variety of the fear of the unknown is largely a western phenomenon, which probably started after the Second World War due to the massive wars that went on previous to that. Following the Second World War, there was a move towards planning in terms of industry, education, and peace, which had been existentially threatened severely. In martial arts, this meant that the largely traditional arts were converted into exercise regimes and outcome based practices with a mass production framework to them. This is not a bad thing, but if structures are to function properly, there needs to be an element of spontaneity to compliment this organised structure so that it can evolve naturally.

Prisoners respond to excessive structure and routine, and are known as hard men, but often they lose all hope and competence when the certainty of their environment is gone and they get released. For example, prison has certain rules, and you just put fear in everybody to get by. On the other hand, there have been rare individuals who have functioned well in the outside world, and then if they end up in prison they just go with it without attachment.

Upgrading your Hardware and Software

In martial arts, the physical form is considered exact, but the expression it takes in changing reality must be kept fluid and formless. So the form is the dimension which should be analysed, the energy must remain fluid and open to evolution. The physical form is the hardware, the way it is used is to do with the software you upgrade. The capability of the software does not decide the potential of the hardware. Its just running at a certain point in time. This software also impacts the hardware and how it is used. This develops the form from within, rather than from the outside.

The problem I that today the hardware is hardly used in people, so for the physical movements to evolve their capabilities need to be stretched rather than becoming inert. Just going through routines isn’t enough to do this. The expression which martial arts forms take in various situation cannot be known in advance, except by those who have been through it. Even then, each individual is different, which is why there have been many factual versions of one truth. For example, it is a fact that many different martial arts are effective. But it is true that in order to reach a competent state you have to work and overcome many difficulties.

So this is the difference between fact and truth. It is true that in order to win, you need to overcome many difficulties and work. However, in fact, not everyone who wins has done this sufficiently to ensure their evolution. So in a way, winning does not represent truth. Truth is an evolving state, whereas a fact is according to time and place. Obviously all individuals want to win. Take the example of two competitors. They can win according to the process of the contest, or simply gain from it in a more personal yet limited way. So they can run the software as it is, according to a particular situational demand, or they can upgrade it. There is an in-between way too. So the contest is not entirely logical, or though logically it makes sense to win at all costs. By logical I mean the masculine aspect of the mind. So the feminine, which involves respect for the situation as a whole, rather than how it can be exploited, is a completely different way of looking at it. It even has a logic of its own which you can experience as truth.

Overcoming Tension – Stretching: Your Experience [Part 2]

Posted on by joeharman8 | 16 min read | 78 views

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

Overcoming Tension – Stretching: Your Experience [Part 1]

Posted on by joeharman8 | 8 min read | 86 views

The fear of loss in martial arts is not only to do with the fear of getting hurt. Essentially it has to do with losing face, or damage to the ego and reputation. This causes a tension within the system, which can create a fear state. At the same time, today fear has evolved with increasing pressures from society in many ways, which are different in nature from the past. For example, people now fear the taxman rather than a sabre toothed tiger! This is not to trivialise the matter, it’s just that fear has taken new forms and other dimensions. This is because fear does not have a basis in one particular situation or another. It varies between individuals as to what triggers it. There is no right and wrong here. Fear arises from the pressures we tend to put on ourselves for various reasons, whether this is to do with social situations or physical hardships. What can be done to alleviate these pressures, or more specifically, what mechanisms are there to decompress from these pressures?

Physiologically, pressures have always been there. Today, we have largely removed physical pressures, which have been replaced by mental pressures. In some ways this is more difficult to manage. In the past, between threats to ones life, which were few and far between, there were parties and celebrations within the local communities. This all changed perhaps around the time of the world war, where fear and suffering in the trenches became the experience of many who fought. At the same time, increases in communications left us feeling less tribal and less fixed to particular groups. For example, many people now associate across the internet rather than locally, and are even brought up on there from an early age in terms of socialisation. This involves a level of risk, because everyone is living at close proximity, yet who knows what their beliefs and values are. In the past, densely populated communities were managed by strict codes of conduct, which made for less friction in day to day life. The challenge now is to somehow blend diverse beliefs into a kind of organised chaos, rather than a melting pot in which everyone assimilates into the same beliefs.

For many people, fear and stress has become the norm. The world has changed dramatically in recent years, and it is difficult to predict what will happen next. So this is the basis of fear in the age of technological advance, fear of the unknown rather than fear of something in particular. This is largely the case today, even if it gets attributed to other happenings and gets labelled as something in particular. So in an age of uncertainty which is unwisely navigated, fear is inevitable. One way to get around this, as we will see, it to stretch the body and mind to experience something beyond the tension and insecurity which is felt during increasingly pressurised environments. One way of looking at stress and pain created by chronic tension is to see that it is not so much the result of the load being placed you, but the absence of a method to re lengthen the compression which has taken place. This is what martial arts is about, the balance between pressure and extension.

In martial arts, there is a certain fear of physical pain, but once you get used to and conditioned to it, it often becomes diluted down anyway, at least psychologically. You see that once you are capable of fighting back, there’s not much to fear other than being unprepared. So you just do the necessary preparation. Past a certain age, more physical preparation to restore the body to its natural state of balance is needed. this is not so for children, because their natural tendency is upward growth against gravity. So it happens for them usually automatically. So whilst a certain conditioning is needed, it is not good to get into the habit of experiencing pain. It will just be experienced elsewhere if it is blocked out. However, it does have some practical benefits for survival in the short term.

A certain experience of pressure and tension within the system is inevitable. For example, the tension experienced within a muscle helps to stimulate growth and activity within that region. So not only does it teach you that you need to extend yourself and grow, but tension is a kind of initiator, like an instinctive drive. The drive is a potential energy that is yet to spring fourth in a fully fledged way. So expanding the boundaries of the muscles afterward tension and compression creates new space for growth so that the pressure does not build to unmanageable levels. Animals do this when they stretch out after eating a meal or just to stretch for a variety of reasons. This is why stretching has always been important in martial arts. It is not just about flexibility of the muscles, but of the entire system. You also want to make space for organs to function properly1. This is particularly important after a stressful or traumatic events to flush out the build up of stress hormone.

Martial artists often describe how they couldn’t feel pain due to the adrenaline rush at the time of a combat situation. This is necessary when facing life and death situations, which if they become chronic can actually undermine the life process. Life is not survival, this is confusing a downward movement of life for the upward process of growth. If the system is not returned to a functioning state, or if chronic tension becomes the norm, this is the beginning of all kinds of ailments and diseases. This is why in the traditional systems of Chinese medicine they say the the cure for any disease is self created. One way of doing this is through stretching the body and organs, to create space for growth rather than increased tightening over time. There are other aspects such as diet, sleep, and just about everything else which are beyond the scope of this article. But basically, when a person needs to defend themselves against someone, that’s one thing, but when survival becomes the main goal and an entire pre occupation, then this becomes counter. Stress is important biologically, but relaxation and slowing down of the mind is needed. In the Chinese systems, Yin was given as much prominence as Yang. In other words, compression and decompression are equally important, but in different ways.

During a combat situation, there’s so much experience going on that it’s difficult to process just one aspect of the whole as though it were the defining factor. For example, there is fear, there is anxiety, and all those intense feelings. There is also awareness of the opponent, the environment, where the exits are to the area, and all such external considerations for safety. So to experience all this as though it were entirely yourself is a distorted view. You are experiencing what is not you as you, but it is not you. At least not entirely. Stress depends on external factors as well as internal, which means the burden or load is spread across the external and internal, and experienced across both as though it were one.

When the ancients talked about “There is no enemy”, this is the same as saying that you can learn to stretch your experience to include everything as one, and everything as yourself without discrimination. They didn’t say there isn’t an opponent, just that they aren’t your enemy, not really. This is symbolised by the yin and yang symbol according to Chinese tradition, which includes two aspects as the whole experience. This is why it was never the result of a situation according to personal outcomes which was considered the important factor traditionally. Separating victor from loser was necessary for the more theatrical events. Nothing wrong with that. However, the famous swordsman Myamoto Musashi said that it was a sickness to always be obsessed with winning. why is this so?

It is possible to make the fear of pain, or perceived damage of ones reputation, an all important factor. However, in doing so you lose contact with the reality that these things are not so important. It is even possible to experience the exhilaration of a contest as though you were a winner, even if in the eyes of others you are considered a loser. Personally, I have never cared about the result of a competition match. When I was involved in competitive sparring in Taekwondo, I just wanted to lose my sense of individual self in the experience as a whole. This has stuck with me ever since, and is a method I have used to contribute me individuality towards a higher purpose for myself. This is my experience at least. On a more practical level, my physical practice revolves around getting lost in the dance, rather than to focus on one aspect or the other. This may seem stupid to someone who sees things in terms of outcomes rather than processes. But even on the outcome level, you will find that your performance is better the more fully involved you are in paying attention to the whole process.

References

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