WHAT WE ARE AFTER IS TO FIGHT BETTER.
This is pretty fresh in my head so it may be a little short on detail and quite loose, but I really wanted to get this out there so we can all stew on it a bit.
I had two small conversations on Thursday, one with Saleh and one with Costas, revolving around thoughts and actions, or what often gets labelled INTENTION in the M.A. community.
We experience the world we think we inhabit by creating a mental image of it, then describing that image to ourselves with words; that’s just how our brains process things.
The mental image, the self-talk, becomes INTENTION.
Back. When I would take begginer students I would always ask them “Can you fight”?
Probably hundreds of potential students asked the same question, and hundreds of variations of the same answer.
“No, I can’t fight, that’s why I am here”.
And I would say, “The first lesson is to understand that you are being dishonest, because we both know that you can ffight, but that you do not think that you fight well enough”.
Every primate, every monkey, chimpanzee, ape, bonobo and yes, human, has an innate ability to fight, an innate propensity toward violence.
What we are all after is to fight better.
When we tell ourselves that we cannot fight, then it is a new start, from scratch, an unknown challenge full of tribulation and doubt. We have already told ourselves, and the world, that we cannot fight, so what chance do we have of doing well in whatever Martial Art it is we are beginning?
The chance of succeeding is distant and doubtful.
However, when we change how we self-describe our situation to “Yes, I can fight, but I do it badly”, everything changes; what we are working on now is IMPROVEMENT, and even the most modest, insignificant improvement is progress; progress breeds progress, and we are up and running.
The conversations our mind has with our body shape more than just opinion.
Another similar situation, where word choice influences action, is based on having a clear idea about what we are in the process of doing.
Imagine performing Tarn Sau, with our training partner offering resistance: do we move our wrist forwards to our training partner, or forwards from ourselves?
This sounds like such a minimal distinction on the surface, but we tested it and found there to be a distinct and measurable difference.
When we thought “to” there was a sense of disconnection and a definite loss of intensity, but when we thought “from” the sense of connection to centre was massive, and the power was tangible.
We will work on this over the next few weeks; the implications for Chum Kiu and Biu Gee are really exciting.
