The Inverse Relationship to Movement Part III

 “Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye.”

                            ― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

If you ever saw the movie Fearless with Jet Li or Chinese Connection with Bruce Lee then you’re familiar with the legendary fighter, Huo Yuanjia (1868 – 1910)

He was the co-founder of the Chin Woo Athletic Association, a martial arts school in Shanghai and practiced the fighting art Mizongyi.  Huo Yuanjia was a hero in China especially for defeating foreign fighters in highly publicized matches at a time when Chinese sovereignty was under Japanese imperialism. Due to his heroic status, the legends and myths surrounding events in his life make it nearly impossible to discern fact from fiction.

Anyway…

Mízōngyì ('Lost Track Skill'), or simply Mízōng, is an art based on deception and mobility. It is also known as Mízōngquán or 'Lost Track Fist', sometimes as called by Dragger and Smith in their awesome book, Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts, "Labyrinthine Boxing" stressing the deceptive nature of the art (no such thing as a fair fight). They described it in this fashion because of the way in which the art when applied was constantly changing in its attack preventing a person from forming a defense against it. In other words, they put the other guy on the defense and didn’t wait for them to do something.

First of all, you have to love these names to describe the art. This is the stuff that when I was younger would make my eyes water while watching Kung Fu Theater as a kid. I am so all about Lost Track Fist or Labyrinthine Boxing (a.k.a. sucker-punching people in the mouth). Because it goes to the heart of what I’m talking about at least conceptually regarding movement and understanding Inverse Relationships.

The Paradox of Movement

Okay... this is wild stuff because this is where I start bending spoons so to speak.

This is what we call in the Marine Corps and the Army the "Deep Battle".  The battle that is only seen with the mind and can only be envisioned. Where the possibilities and probabilities must already be understood to some extent and built-in beforehand to get ahead of movement and play where the puck is going to be. 

Most people in the martial arts are familiar enough with the concept of Yin/Yang so I don't need to get into it here. Other than there is probably a deeper level of understanding of this than we think. Meaning this concept or expression of duality, of relationships, of the inverse, is probably much, much deeper (and older) than we understand and that there are paradoxes of how things work beyond what we are able to see. Thus the photo of the first-ever captured image published last year (July 2019) of what is called Quantum Entanglement. Once a concept, a theory now apparently a fact.

Remember, no theory no learning, without thought or at least thinking about the problem there is no theory, even if it's just a hypothesis or what we call in the military a "SWAG" (scientific wild-ass guess). Without theory there is no focus, without focus, there is no movement in the direction to at least begin to ask the right questions to get to ground truth, wherever that truth may lead. I also put the image in here to note the eerie similarity to the Yin/Yang concept and even the very symbol expressing the duality of things and the interplay of relationships and on and on...

Sort of like the discovery of the Monolith in the movie, 2001: A Space Odessey, maybe someone is trying to tell us something? Who knows? But I find this more than just a coincidence.

Just sayin...

Anyhow, when we are talking about combative movement in Warrior Flow what we are really talking about is a paradox that exists where we can appear to exist in two or more states, even places when moving all at once, or a polarity if you will (yes you read that right). Where we can seem fast while moving slow and or almost appear is if we don't move at all and then swing like a big-league slugger and knock it out of the park. Where we seem to be going one way when in fact we were already somewhere else. Where we appear hard in one area yet seem to disappear in another or are able to stop person momentum before the can get going with just a touch. Or all of these things at the same time.

While this shouldn’t seem possible... it is true. When discussing the Inverse this polarity or paradox is always constant and as a result, if you can understand and just accept it you will begin to see all of the possibilities because they are always right in front of us all of the time.

As I discussed before this is more of a way of thinking than anything physical but if you can get your mind to that place it opens up a world to you that cannot be seen with the eye and only in the mind. Like I said Warrior Flow is a completely different way of thinking about the battle. 

But in order to get there, you have to also have the capacity to ask the right questions.

And therein, as they say, lies the rub...

It's interesting because I was having a discussion with one of my Instructors some time back and one of the things he said to me was that he noticed was that I present Warrior Flow as a thinking man's art. And I told him, "Well, as one of my masters once told me that after a certain level it's all mental". 

He really hit the nail on the head because in truth it really is a very mental thing even if you're only thinking it in the body. If you can't get your mind to that place then it doesn't exist for you. But in order to get it into the body, you have to first accept that it exists otherwise you don't even think it is even possible. Trust me I see this in the martial arts all of the time. People creating rules that don't exist so it cuts off the learning before it even starts. 

"Superficial goals lead to superficial results."

• Attila the Hun

Folks, I don't care what you train let me tell you that the main reason many people cannot achieve the level of skill they desire is they're really asking the wrong question so... they get wrong answers.  However, if they learned to ask the right questions the answers over time become self-evident. 

This polarity if you will within the inverse relationship to movement is ever-present so to reiterate.

• Your pull is my push,
• Your push is my pull,
• Your sliding is my skimming,
• Your skimming my sliding,
• Your oversensitivity and overreaction to my movement becomes my pulse,
• Your root becomes my opportunity to root you and fix you to the ground so you can’t move or isolate around that point to break your balance elsewhere,
• Your forward motion becomes my opportunity to redirect you on a different vector,
• Your attempt to stop my arm becomes my fulcrum and kill you,
• Your creation of space my space,
• Your attempt at deception my deception,
• Your speed becomes my speed to misdirect, redirect you to your death or penetrate you sooner,
• Your awareness of my movement becomes my awareness.

And on and on it goes... there is no end…

In other words, if I can perceive your intention and feel your motion all of the above are always, always, "always" available to me.

I don't care who you are, what you have done or can do in the heat of battle there are only two things here, your sword and my sword and nothing else. If you do not have the development and the proper understanding and thought process to go with it in the microsecond between this and that, you have nothing. Your head is mine because you don't have enough time to deal with all of these things in the microsecond they all take place.

Think of this and I've written on this before so it is not new. Everything that you can do within your body right now, every movement, every strike, every evasion or step, everything that’s possible within your body,  already exists. The key is you have to first believe that so that you can develop your body to take advantage of it.

Why would you deny yourself this ability?

Again, because what I am describing is a mental process as much as a physical one in order to take this to the higher levels you have to literally alter the way you think about moving in general and how you interact with another person’s motion.

The Interconnectedness of the Whole

Like I said in my last post the one thing you need to be able to do in the fight is to move your body. But it does no good to move it if you don't, in my opinion, understand how it moves or can move. In other words, you limit your options when you don't expand your understanding of well... how shit works. 

When we discuss movement in the body the reason why it can seem like there is this paradox or why things seem to contradict one another. It is because nothing in the body moves independently of the body. It only seems that they move independently of each other when we are not engaged in gross movements where the whole body is moving or when we are performing a fine motor task. Everything works no matter how slight off of something else. This is the essence of the concept I call the Quantum Sphere of Warrior Flow.  

You see, no matter where you move your Center of Gravity is “always” at the center of your Sphere of Influence. Allowing you to “control the space” within your Sphere in every direction.

Inside of your body, each one of your joints can move “with” yet “work” at times seemingly independent of each other and the rest of your body. The truth is they don’t actually work independently of each other as much as they play off of each other or reinforce each other depending on what you choose to do within your “Sphere of Influence”. 

Study this image above because while not exact it is representative of how our bodies actually move when we go into action. This is the understanding you need to develop to free your body and become creative in your movement.

Notice how all of the cogs work off of each other?

How they are all interdependent on one another while serving their own simple function?

It could almost be said that what one cog does impacts the machine as a whole. In this same fashion, you want to develop your body to respond even in the slightest movement even if the reaction is to recognize you don't have to move at all (in the next blog post I'll probably get into the understanding of recognition and choice as it relates to this because there is both an external and internal component to it).

Such movement can only produce greater efficiency over the overall structure of the movement since each cog is compensating for the others and so on.  It is both mechanical and yet organic. In this same way so does our bodies. 

It is this lack of understanding of the interconnectedness in the body between all of your muscles and joints and how they are always working off of each other that denies many practitioners of the martial arts the level of freedom and creativity with their bodies that is available to us.

One of the keywords here is compensating for when the cogs work together they can also nullify or negate the negative effects on the overall structure. 

But there's more...

So from a more mechanical sense, that is sort of how our bodies move but there is another thing we do and that is where we can move in an almost omnidirectional manner where we seem to be moving in two diametrically opposite directions at the same time as in the image below. 

As demonstrated in the image above, these points of rotation are not just limited to your arms and legs but extend to virtually every joint within your body. Within reason of course. For example, while each bone in your arm is linear in structure too include those in your hands. However, when combined with the other joints in your arm, it creates a “spherical range of motion” which is sort of what I'm trying to show above. 

The more joints that are involved within the body even in the slightest the greater the freedom of movement. This is what allows you to move your arm in a graceful, fluid fashion as if your arm were like they were made of rubber while the rest of your body seems to remain stationary even though it isn't but it is actually adjusting to facilitate the movement in your arm. Our bodies do this in everything that we do so even the act of sitting up as I type this my body is doing stuff to hold itself upright and position my arms while my hand's type. And there's more but I'm not going to get into that here, just suffice to say that the more you incorporate this understanding in your martial training the more capable you will become in what you do. 

Now imagine this type of movement in your body as you are throwing strikes, evading, or using a weapon?

I was recently discussing this with an instructor out in Spokane, WA, who does a lot of self-defense training especially weapons training and I said to him something along the lines of, 

"What if I told you I could train you to move in your body in a way where you could increase your proficiency of movement in whatever it is you do by 5% percent? 10% percent? even 25% percent? and I could help you achieve that not in 10,000 hours as people have incorrectly been lead to believe or even 1,000 hours but in 30 days. What's that worth to you? Because that's what I'm talking about. Trust me, my friend, this is not hyperbole or bullshit, because I've done it with folks. Again what's that worth to you? Now imagine doing that over and over compounding effort on top of effort? Getting better say 3% to 5% every few months? What's that worth to you?" 

He was all about it...

But this level of understanding starts between your ears. When you understand these “Inverse Relationships” to movement, when the glass is always half full, when your mind is in the right place combined with the Ruthless Intent it’s a whole different game. In order to achieve these efficiencies in movement as I've discussed, you have to get control over your body. 

You get to see this not only in your mind but experience this and how it works in the body.

I was recently working  with a student just the other day and I asked them,

"You feel how your body feels now? How free it feels when you move to hit? How effortless it moves when you step and strike? Your body almost feels like it just glides to where you want it to go right? Almost like there is no effort as you move as if everything you do is just a matter of thought and, a focus of your will, right?"

He agreed and I said,

"Well, I feel like that all of the time. That feeling that at any moment my body is capable of springing into action or moving as little as I need, to do what I have to do but at no time do I feel trapped in my own body."

When I move, the freedom I describe in these examples is how I feel all of the time.

All of the time...

In my next installment, I'm going to get into some other stuff for you to think of and some things when developing the ability to see the inverse relationships, to move in this fashion and increase your ability to take action sooner before a situation becomes a problem in the first place. 

Thanks.