Lessons from My Masters 28 Observations - Synthesis Part IV

“Only a Warrior can choose peace, others have no choice...”

                 --Grandmaster John Perkins

Folks thanks for all the feedback that I received on my last post about Grandmaster Carron. It had the intended effect that I was looking for and that was a lot of questions about him and his training methods etc. Like I said I really appreciate the feedback.

“If we do not expect the unexpected, we will never find it.”

                            --Heraclitus

So one thing about Grandmaster Carron that folks have recently asked me about since my last post was my comment,

“Tim, regardless of what people think had a very logical and methodical, well thought out way of how he went about his own training and that of others. There was a method to the madness a sequence of how and when he did it and taught you things…There was nothing willy-nilly about the way he trained himself or trained others.”

Like I said Tim was very matter of fact about some of his teachings so when he said to me, “You have to be obsessive about it.” I knew he literally meant every word of what he said. As Tim would relate to me from time to time,

“Most people want magic they think there’s some kind of trick to this… you’re just dealing with motion…”

In that statement and others was a lot of information that had to be deciphered. When Tim trained he never and I want to be clear about this, never trained an exercise or drill that didn’t have a clear purpose for what it was intended to develop. Moreover, in everything he did, it was always about training you to win in combat. If you did a balance exercise or whatever in the recesses of your mind or wherever you store stuff was always asking the “Why?” question.

I believe and this is just my opinion is something that is lost on a lot of folks. They do the exercises but they do them for the sake of doing them sort of like people who go to the gym more to be seen than to actually develop their body.

Into the Fire, Into the Mind

“Now listen Marines look at these images, when you look at your sights there’s only one thing I want you to see. Not the picture on your left but the one on your right. I want you to burn that image in your mind. When you go to sleep I want you to see that image and when you’re on the rifle range tomorrow that’s all I want you to think about.”

                                 --SSgt Amodae, Weapons Co, 1^st Bn 2^nd Marines

I got what the good SSgt was talking about, there are a lot of distractions when folks are on the range. Lots of people giving all sorts of advice on how to shoot better. But being a Range Instructor and also once having shot for the Marine Corps Shooting Team he knew what the Hell he was talking about. He wanted Marines to only focus on one thing, the front sight post of their rifle and nothing else. Of course, he knew they had to line up both posts but his experience had taught him that those who focus only on that front sight post especially over time shot better on the range because there was not only greater concentration when they did that but less eye strain. Whether he knew it or not he was teaching Marines how to focus their minds in their training or as he used to call it “Zen Out” with the weapon. So that they could achieve maximum results on the range especially since for your Marines it was critical towards their ability to get promoted. 

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”

                 --Leonardo da Vinci

When it came to his own training Tim was the same way and from what I gathered, Tim understood differently at least from my experiences training with him of how he should focus his mind when training. Like I said he was always seeking the essence of what a thing was and then he would go practice it until it was flawless or damn near it. Granted this is a rare quality in people but Tim had that quality.

For example, for Tim the Ninja Walk wasn’t about the walk or the technique but what it was doing for his body. The feeling of his balance, the relationship of his body, the feeling of his own weight in his body. The subtle shifting in his body. How sinking affected his balance etc. and on it went. Granted he wasn’t thinking about this in the way I’m describing it here but he was “intuiting” it through feeling what was going on and how his movement affected his body.

The other thing that I gathered from my training with Tim was how he was always observing how movement felt, not to just how he moved with other people but internally within his own body. Because at the end of the day it was always about crushing people. In other words, he would just “Zen Out” with whatever he was doing and there was nothing else. His mind was one with whatever he was doing, there was no over complicating it. He did what he needed to do at the time being in the moment of whatever he was doing and that was all there was too it. I remember once asking Tim how he goes about training that to where you are able to go into that state at will or words to that effect. He said, 

"You have to do it all the time, you have to practice it all of the time in whatever you do... a good book you should read is 'Zen in the Martial Arts'... But the thing is whatever you are doing you have to practice just doing that thing and focus on what you're doing at that time. When your training you need to do it, when you're taking out the trash you need to do it, when your washing the dishes or cutting something with a tool you need to do it. Whenever I have a chance to practice it especially when I'm working with people I'm doing it. I practice it until I don't have to think about it."

Or words to that effect. He said a lot of other stuff but I'm just trying to capture the essence of what he was talking about and meant. The point is as John always discusses and that is the importance of learning to be "in the moment" or "in the now". It's just a way to focus your mind to develop the ability to go into the zone and focus your mind especially if you are under duress. As John would like to say it is just, "a thing". 

“Without training, they lacked knowledge. Without knowledge, they lacked confidence. Without confidence, they lacked victory.”

                            --Julius Caesar

Like I said in my last post, Tim became “Tim” because he worked his ass off. Now I’m sure there is some level of natural ability with him because Tim, as I've said before was "very adept" at a lot of things and like I said he was probably one of the most talented people I ever met.

For the remainder of this post, I’m just going to go through a few exercises from the way my Masters taught me how to look at them. But also since I’m discussing Grandmaster Carron, I’m going to focus on my observations and experiences with him and what my impressions are as to what he did. Once again these are just my observations so like I said in my last post this is all subjective based on my experiences and I’ve already discussed what people can do with their feelings so I’m not going to rehash it here.

While this stuff may seem like “common sense” once you read it, like the Evil SgtMaj Miller-Perry use to say to me when he was still a Gunny, “Remember Lieutenant, common sense is uncommon...”

Ninja and Vacuum Walk

“Purity is something that cannot be attained except by piling effort upon effort.”

         ― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

When you’re doing either of these walks what you want to focus on is once again how it feels to your body. You want to feel that internal feeling in the muscles, your joints, you want to feel your balance, your center of gravity and how the movement affects your balance and you want to then adjust. So that you find within your own body what is the optimum range of motion where you’re not moving too much but as little as you need when you perform the movements. If possible from time to time you want to get as low as possible if for nothing else but to develop just a little more balance and coordination. However, I caution that you don’t do this to the point of pain but just low enough for your body. In other words, use your common sense. In your mind your trying to develop not only a root like an oak tree but a root that cannot be found or like what our good friend Jan Bloome said, "Dynamic Stability".

I like that ;-)

Long Step

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” 
              ― Aristotle

So… one day I ask Tim,

“So, I understand the importance of not moving your feet too much but what if you have to close the distance on someone?”

He sort of laughs and says, “Watch what I’m going to do…” and I kid you not in basically one step maybe two at best he closes the distance on me and puts me on my ass. So I’m like, “WTF?” He starts to laugh and after I get up he says, “Okay, get out of my way…” then he steps and literally as I try to get out of the way I end up in the same position only this time he catches me to prevent me from falling on my can.

He says now watch, and he proceeds to teach me the Long Step but as he taught me he explained something to me that I want to share here,

“I really don’t like to have to step but if I step I’m going to cut you in half.”

My friends, when he said that to me there was no illusion in my mind that he meant that because that’s how it felt when he stepped in on me. He practically levitated me within my view no effort. But he went on to explain,

“When you do this step you want to keep your hips level to the ground you don’t want to bounce up and down. You just want to step and elongate your step a little further than your normal step. It basically allows you to cover more ground in one step in the same amount of time.”

Folks, I can tell you people screw this drill up “all-of-the-time” and it’s no wonder that they can’t step the way they want. When you practice this, focus on stepping in your mind as if you were going to cut someone in half and with the determination to mow them down. Feel the power as you move emanate from your legs and hips, allow your body to naturally “glide” through the motion. This movement should be smooth and as effortless as possible in your upper body and there should absolutely be no bouncing or raising of the shoulders when performing this exercise. This will only teach you to unnecessarily raise your center of gravity for no reason and screw up your balance as you transition. If you do this and I’m going to say it for the 57,000^th time, this is incorrect, it is plain out “wrong” and will screw your movement up. Don’t do it!

On Hitting

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” 
              ― Aristotle

When you strike you must learn to focus your mind and strike to kill, and you can only do this by hitting people there can be no ambiguity about this. You need to feel this in your inner being, in your soul so to speak and focus all of the Ruthless Intent you can muster and begin to not only focus your mind when striking but feel the relationship between your body and theirs as you make contact. You must always focus on penetrating whatever you strike focusing on penetrating the center and not striking at the target. When you hit you must imagine the damage that you intend to cause and focus your mind toward that end. If you saw the movie “Terminator 2” one of my favorite dialogs goes as follows:

Terminator: “I have detailed files of the human anatomy…”

John Connor: “Why?”

Sarah Connor: “Because it makes him a more efficient killer.”

Terminator: “Correct.”

Damn straight!

I can tell you right now that Tim was like that, like “The Terminator”, he had “…detailed files of the human anatomy”. Tim had an understanding of how people moved and where to strike folks that was uncanny. It was like getting a painful anatomy lesson from the Terminator.

Just like he always seemed to know where you were going to be before you got there, he had already predetermined what he was going to do to your body based on his knowledge of how people moved and how to manipulate joints etc. resistance was “futile”. But he also knew how to hit to rattle your organs as well as cause your brain to bounce around in your skull. And he had, “juuuuuuust the right touch” to bring you to the edge of eternity where you’d probably rather die if he meant it than to end up breathing out of a tube in your neck for the rest of your life. In other words, he could bring you to that place all while not allowing you to pass over to the other side.

A "mercy" not granted…

When I train as my Master’s taught me you had better believe that shit is in my head. Always! Not for the sake of longing to do it but for the sake of developing an ability that should I have to go there to protect my family. It's already developed because the time to figure that out is not when in the heat of battle. You have to build this up “beforehand”.  You cannot, I repeat, cannot build this level Ruthless Intent through touch overnight. But it first has to be in your mind.

Drop Hitting

 “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

                 --Albert Einstein

Same as the above the only difference is when I Drop Strike I’m literally trying to take a huge chunk of them out of their body so no matter where I strike I want it to come apart. I want to flesh to rip from the bones their organs turn to jelly. I see it in my mind first then through the proper training, I set about developing it and constantly refining it. How you think influences how you move how you move reinforces how you think about your movement and capability in your body. The two cannot be separated so imagination is important here because if you can't see it in your mind you can't see it with your eyes. 

Getting Ahead of Movement (as it Relates to Contact Flow)

“When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.”

                             --Leonardo da Vinci

Tim used to always talk about dealing with motion and how you need to look at it. I remember one time him telling me, “It’s something you’ve heard John say before, that your arms are equal in a fight so both arms are the same. If I know where one hand is I know where the other is. You see when dealing with motion or movement Tim never guessed nor was his movement random it only felt that way if you were getting hit.

Now obviously he couldn’t know everything but because he had developed his ability to a high degree to know where things were or as he used to say to me all of the time you have to, “feel everything”. Tim was always able to deal with another person’s motion with little to no effort and so even if he made a mistake he could compensate faster than they could anticipate and counter them because he never moved more than he needed to because he was always trying to feel everything.

You try to lift your arm? Well, because he would feel that if he chose to stop you he could, or he could just let you enter into the space he wanted you to enter into and reward your face with his fist.  You try to step on him? Oh, I don't think so... He could stop you on a dime. You try to go fast with him like you were going to take a swing at him or sucker punch him? That my friend would be a bad thing, "for you"! Oh yeah, I've seen that... It was usually times like that where I would accuse Tim of "levitation". Sometimes it would look like that magician's trick where they float a woman's body while running that hoop around her to show there were no wires being used. Yeah... like that!

Tim was always, always, "always",  playing off the relationship between your body and his body or what John likes to call the ability to “listen” to another person’s body so even in what appeared to be a guess in his movement, even if it was a guess, it was an educated guess where he had the highest probability to achieve his desired outcome. The truth is Tim, to the highest degree possible, never, ever, ever "guessed" when he was dealing with another person. There were things as I like to say, "just shit" that he just did not do. Tim was all about developing what he called "purposeful habits" or "useful habits". He never trained people nor allowed himself to develop poor habits when performing any exercise whether it was Ninja Walk or Contact Flow. In his world, that way of thinking just did not exist. 

Tim was all about getting the “Shadow Impression” of another person’s movement this foreshadowing of movement the adumbration of movement where if you observed him long enough nothing he did was random. This is an important point because I get into this with folks all of the time. If it is random as some believe then how is it that the more advanced practitioners of Guided Chaos can seemingly strike people at will? It’s because there are things that we are doing (or not doing) that are very specific things such as not moving more than we need, or waiting too long to make a decision that gives us the edge. Otherwise either no one would be able to hit anyone or we would all be landing an equal number of strikes on each other. It can't be anything else. So if you think this stuff is random and you keep getting punched in the face during your training? Well no shit! And trust me the beatings will continue until your attitude improves. But the sooner you can get on board with this understanding the sooner you're going to improve your own skill. Otherwise, why bother training if there is no way to improve? You get my point. 

This is something that I observed in Tim and John very early on. There is nothing, let me say it again, nothing willy-nilly about what they do or how they move and there are very specific things they learned how to do over the years whether formally or informally. It makes no difference because they are able to do them.

Which brings me to another point and this also applies to Grandmaster Perkins, now it’s not like Tim sat around calculating angles of attack like,

“Now when I turn my left foot moves 30° offset from the Equator, then I’m going to turn my right hip to True North…”

Get the Hell out of here!

But what it is, is a way of making decisions based on lots of proper training too include doing the Contact Flow Exercise within the proper context to the point of "unconscious competence".

This is important and I’ve spoken on this before in various ways, because there’s a school of thought that views even Contact Flow from the perspective that if they just do Contact Flow long enough as students have heard me say, that somehow through the “ether” of the universe they’re going to get it and develop all of the skill they desire.

Utter nonsense…

Let me draw an analogy, you know I'm a huge Van Halen fan, but I have to tell you. You can listen to Van Halen all you want, you can even buy a guitar. But until you put your hands on that instrument and gain an appreciation for the pentatonic scale you’re not playing “Eruption” on the guitar either in this lifetime or the next.  Folks this is the same attitude that many people have about Guided Chaos. When you place Contact Flow in the realm of you just have to “feel it” or you just have to “play around” with it, or you have to do “lots and lots” of Contact Flow to develop something, and think that there are not specific things you have to practice and develop in the proper context in order to do the things you want to do.

At that moment you’ve placed it in the realm of “magic”. You’ve just closed off your mind to the learning that was possible because you think it is something that it is not. And no matter how many times Tim or John would try to dissuade people from this sort of thinking they would always fall back into this.

Final thought, just because John says, “You have to feel it” because I say it as well, doesn’t mean it’s magic, he’s trying to get you to understand that there are some things that really cannot be adequately explained so you’re going to have to use whatever he showed you as a basis from which to build from. When I get into some of my observations about John I will delve into this a lot more or at least to the best of my understanding. It is wild stuff!

As always thanks.

LtCol Al Ridenhour

Senior Master Instructor

GUIDED CHAOS

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