The Thing of Mastery Part II
Dec 04, 2019
Picking up where I left off now I’ll get right into the nitty-gritty.
“Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Please re-read the quote above because this is important you see more often than not the reason people fail to develop the level of Mastery they desire is that they start their training at the wrong end. They want to throw a baseball by throwing a fastball before they even know how to throw, they want to dunk before they know how to shoot a basketball and so on. They want to run before they can even crawl let alone walk. They don’t want to pay the price, the butchers bill. They’d rather their souls wander for eternity in the land of the dead instead of paying the price of admission. In this case both in time, physical and mental energy. They want to bypass the first step along the thousand-mile road.
“The path that leads to truth is littered with the bodies of the ignorant.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
But… but even worse they don’t want to learn the essence of a thing and how things really work on the most minute level or how the universe works because they think they know more than God.
“Whatever your determination or will power, it is foolish to try to change the nature of things. Things work the way they do because that is the way of things.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Interoception - is an internal sense that provides information about the internal condition of our body—how our body is feeling on the inside. Interoception allows us to experience our body’s internal sensations such as the tension of our muscles, the movement of our joints, the weight of our body and shifting of our balance, the flush of the face as blood rushes to it, or the racing of our hearts. Once we understand it, we can develop a level of movement in the body that allows us to not only gain greater control over our bodies but reshape how we move on an almost Quantum Level of Movement (I’ll probably explain this in another post).
Now, by learning to focus on this or what is called mindfulness practices, which have been shown to be one of the most effective ways to develop Interoceptive Awareness. We are able to develop the purposeful habits in the body that serve as the foundations for developing the type of movement we desire in the body. This awareness is a component of what we call in Warrior Flow “Perceptual Awareness” and places the information we perceive in context as well as allows us to develop the ability to “move sooner” through Anticipatory Movement (i.e., the thing you do before you do the thing you’re going to do). This is what I mean when I discuss developing the ability to move with every fiber of your being.
In order to accomplish this, you have to develop the proper focus and level of concentration not only in the mind but the proper discipline in the body to move the body almost as one when you go into action. Additionally, it is the ability to control your body to such a level where your body becomes so responsive that even if you choose to stop you are able to move at full speed and virtually stop on a dime and change direction if necessary with little to no over-travel in the body.
What I just described above is a rare quality one that most martial artists never developed because they have the wrong understanding and mindset of human movement as to what is possible and how we actually do what we do when we do it. So they never develop it because they won’t let themselves get there to develop it. They deny its existence so it doesn’t exist for them. They resist the truth and as Musashi would say, they “live a lie”.
The Thing Part II
“There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
When discussing “The Thing” when it comes to Mastery, I’m talking about the essence of what the thing is. In the martial arts, we all at some point in our development learn strikes, blocks, and throws or whatever to include weapons training. But rarely, I mean rarely do people examine the lynchpin that makes it work and that is our ability to feel our bodies move within time and space.
This sense of positioning, this sense of balance, this sense of equilibrium control. The movement of our arms and legs, the contraction and subtle muscle control as our muscles contract, relax, stretch, how our joints rotate, pivot, and how it all plays off of each other like a tight symphony where all of the various instruments come together each with their own sound and function yet all coming together harmoniously to make music.
Pillars of Bodily Wisdom
“From one thing, know ten thousand things.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
It never ceases to amaze me how martial artists are some of the most physically active and fit people on earth. We’re able to still do things at advanced ages that defy logic and conventional wisdom yet very little attention is paid to how our bodies actually work. Now I’ve discussed some of this before in other posts but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten into the weeds on this so I’ll try to do my best to explain this to aid in your development. But before I go there here’s the deal.
I don’t care what you do or what your art is because what I’m talking about here has nothing to do with style and everything to do with how we as humans move. The last time I checked everybody’s arms and legs worked the same way so whatever you do is irrelevant. Period. What I’m going to explain here will help anyone and that’s all I care about, helping people. I consider martial artists as the good guys so as long as I can help martial artists then great. If you think your Kung Fu is better than mine then fine, just focus on what I’m, going to show here. By the way, this is stuff that I do all-of-the-time you can never get too good at this.
Okay, here we go…
“Once you have sharpened your intellect to the point where you can see whatever in the world is true or not, where you can tell whatever is good or bad, and when you are experienced in various fields and are incapable of being fooled at all by people of the world, then your mind will become imbued with the knowledge and wisdom of the art of war.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Know where your body is at all times – easy to say but once you start this and begin to develop an intuitive feel for this. You’d be shocked by how little awareness we can have of our own bodies. The good news is the fact it surprises you means your mind is focused in the right direction and you’re doing it right. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know enough to be surprised. Make sense? When you move you want to develop a deeper sense of where your body is at all times. As crazy as this sounds, we live in them yet can be unaware of our own presence at times unless of course, something is wrong then we are fully attuned because something doesn’t feel right. It’s like our brains, we carry them around inside of our heads, yet often people act like they’re not even a part of our bodies yet its main function is to move our bodies. Go figure. I have students who are orthopedic surgeons and physical therapist and they tell me about this sort of thing with patients all of the time of their lack of awareness or how little they understand their own bodies so I know it’s true. First of all, you always know where your body is even if not consciously aware of it but what I’m talking about here is to develop a level of “internal awareness” where you train yourself to feel your weight shift, feel your balance shift, feel the rotation of your joints, the smoothness of your joints moving, your muscles contract. It’s always there because that’s how our bodies work but you have to focus on it in order to develop the level of awareness to access and use this knowledge. This will give you the ability to move freely in the body because you can actually feel where you are. It will also help you develop how to move with another person in relation to how they respond to your movement and how your movement affects their movement and so on, and where you need to be when moving with another person. This is the essence of what I mean by the adumbration of movement.
From large movements to smaller ones – whatever you do, whatever the movement you want to refine you want to start off exploring what the maximum range of motion is. Next you want to learn to not move to a point where you either max out at this range to where you lose balance and control over your body, and then set a limitation of how far you will allow your body to move in any given direction that is less than the limit of the range of motion. Once you develop this range of motion you want to then focus on developing as much refined economical movement and fine motor coordination as possible to hone your skills. This is not an easy as it sounds because it takes a lot of patience to do and you have to be patient with yourself because you don’t know what you don’t know and you won’t know what that is until you know it. It’s just the way it is. This is something that I do with students, in the beginning, to train them to not move beyond what their natural range of motion is because you can’t, but even if you have advanced skills you can always refine and polish your movements. So when whether you’re doing some sort of strike or whatever the technique you want to constantly refine the movement starting off in this fashion to help establish a baseline of what is possible for your body and what is not.
Start slow gradually build up speed – now here’s something that I’ve’ debated with folks back and forth over the years. True if you want to learn how to do something fast you have to practice doing it moving fast buuuuut…. You still need to start slow in the beginning. You don’t have to stay slow but you have to start slow. The reasons for this should be obvious in order to develop greater subtle muscle control you have to start slow to train the muscles and begin even at the gross movement level to develop the neural pathways to train yourself to move the way you want to. Understand that when you move faster it changes the whole movement dynamics and the movement does change especially since people are prone to over travel or lose control as the pick-up speed. The reason for this is they don’t build in the subtle muscle control upfront before they add speed so, to put it bluntly… they fuck it up. Just like you didn’t learn to throw a baseball full speed when you started out, well throwing a punch or learning to move your body at what I call supernatural speed is no different. It’s just movement and how your body develops the ability to strike like lighting starts by developing the proper coordination in the body and then picking up the pace whereas you move faster you then can focus on controlling the over travel. However, how long this takes varies depending on your body, whether you’re in shape, or you’re physically talented, etc. because there’s something to be said for talent. I can tell you right now to reiterate at some point and not after fucking “years of development” as some would have you believe, that’s just bullshit. But as soon as possible and in many cases, even within the same training session, you need to do this gradually building up your speed. As I’ve said in the past I teach people how to strike for effect in as little as 30-minutes and that’s including while I’m drinking coffee. It only takes years to get people there if you don’t know what you’re doing in training. It’s simple if you don’t make them do things with their arms that their arms are not designed to do then they can do it. But I digress. As you refine this even to a small degree you’ll want to repeat this over and over and over as you build up, refine, build up, refine, etc. “…piling effort upon effort” until you reach the point where you are able to do what you want to do under control without thought. Then, wash, rinse, repeat focusing on other skills.
Make incremental jumps not ones that are too large – I know in the world of fitness one of the things that’s all the rage is the concept of muscle confusion. This is a concept built around the understanding that if you do something long enough the same way eventually you reach a point where your body “plateaus” where you no longer make gains. So in order to get the body to continually make gains, you have to periodically confuse the muscles to stimulate them to grow, gain strength coordination, speed, etc. This is because within our genetic limitations, of course, there is a period called adaptation, this is where the body as it is exposed to something new like resistance training begins to develop the neural pathways and build muscle, strength or whatever, necessary to carry out the task we are trying to accomplish and develop the abilities we want. Once our bodies achieve what we want it to do we plateau so we can use muscle confusion to breakthrough by causing the body to constantly adapt. Since movement requires muscles the same applies to martial development. However, in order to improve and refine movement and skill, this has to be done right and just like weight lifting if you put too much weight on the bar either people get injured or their muscles believe it or not will actually shut down to prevent injury. It also has to be methodical and consistent and not some willy-nilly bullshit that relies on revelations from the ether of the universe. The point is when practicing refining your movement and developing your body you want to focus on incremental increases in the level of difficulty (I’ll cover this more when I discuss smoothness) so that you do not overwhelm your body by trying to make it do something it is not even remotely ready for.
“Whatever your determination or will power, it is foolish to try to change the nature of things. Things work the way they do because that is the way of things.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Power is being present to the moment and accepting reality. Force is resisting what is. Power is working with the Universe, and force is working against it. Power is effortless and easy. Force is…well, forced. When you accept reality for what it is and stop resisting it, you’ll begin to unlock all sorts of abilities you never even knew existed. British philosopher Alan Watts called this “getting out of your own way.” Eckhart Tolle author of The Power of Now calls it “presence.” The Buddhists call it “enlightenment.” It’s known by many words, but it’s all the same. Truth is truth. I see this all the time in people, they want to move like the wind but you’ve got to be water first and they don’t want to start at the most basic level such as being able to control their body to get there. So they gain no Mastery. They want to be as supple as a blade of grass but don’t want to develop the subtle muscle control to do so because you’ve still got to be rooted to the earth. So they gain no Mastery. They want to learn how to manipulate space or create it, collapse the sphere, stop time, etc. but not develop the necessary interoception of how to do it. So they gain no Mastery. They put the cart before the horse so they go nowhere. So Mastery eludes them. Folks, if you do this, aside from burning in Hellfire it will only serve to discourage you as well as warp your sense of proportionality as to whether your making gains or just trying to skate uphill backwards. In other words, be realistic in your training and you’ll see vast improvement before you know it. I guarantee it!
“Without any confusion in mind, without slacking off at any time, polishing the mind and attention, sharpening the eye that observes and the eye that sees, one should know real emptiness as the state where is no obscurity and the clouds of confusion have cleared away.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Be smooth – folks, smooth movement is where you want to be with everything that I’ve said above, you want to learn to be as smooth as possible in all that you do. Smoothness is hard to define but when you feel it then you will know for yourself. What I'll do here is describe what the sensation feels like all of the time because we've all felt it at one time or another we just didn't know what it was but we know whatever it was it was just right. I’ve alluded to it already but a major part of learning how to move smoothly is you have to slow down and become aware of the movement of every fiber of your being. You want as you move in this fashion to focus on removing any and all jerk movement when practicing this and you have to practice it in all that you do. Filling in the gaps in your movement ridding it of all of the little ticks and quirks we all have until the subtlest movements are capable of creating great changes in your body even if they cannot be perceived by the eye. This s an internal feel more than something that can be easily seen and something to be cultivated even in the most inconsequential of movements until it just becomes the way that you move. The reason is smooth movement is not possible unless your whole body is working with whatever you’re doing with your limbs. Your muscles and joints are always, always, always playing off of each other. They cannot not be doing this. There really is no such thing in the body as an independent movement per se. Because in order for you to really do anything other parts of your body have to be in action to stabilize your body. Even just standing there are over 300 muscles in the body that are engaged. The point is none of this happens in isolation. It’s not even possible. When practicing the above keep this I mind and focus on developing that smooth feeling in your body. Now how will you know when you’re doing it right? Here’s the deal, smooth movement feels effortless, there is no undue tension in the muscles the joints move freely. While you can still feel the weight of your body and how it shifts as you move it is as water sloshing from one place to another with ease smoothly, fluidly. Your body as your ability to control your equilibrium improves will begin at times to feel lighter where your step becomes almost silent. Your body feels like you are moving through an aqueous medium like walking in water your hips and shoulders move with precision almost like an ellipse your hands can feel the air moving through your fingers like placing your hand in a stream. As your weight transfers on the ground your body feels like it just glides as you walk. When you move your body your joints feel free, unencumbered. When you use force your ability to respond feels effortless as if you do things where your touch feels like magic. Obviously it isn’t but at times it can feel that way. It is the same sensation of hitting a baseball on the sweet spot of the bat just right. It’s that sensation we get from time to time where we feel as stable as an oak tree yet it’s as if we don’t even feel the weight of our own body. The ground feels like it cooperates it’s like that sensation you had in the body the first time you jumped across an expanse and landed like a feather or jumped up onto something with the silence and control of a cat. Finally, your body always seems to know where to be when moving not where they are but where they are going to be before they arrive. It doesn’t just feel the pattern but the shape of what it is yet to become. Yeah… it really feels like that.
Anyway, if you practice what I’ve discussed above and are patient with yourself. You will discover these things for yourself and know them to be true.
“Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Well, that’s it for now. In my next installment.
Thank you.
P.S. for those who want to learn more about how to develop this type of movement.
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Al Ridenhour
CEO, Creator Warrior Flow™
Al Ridenhour is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the US Marine Corps with 28-years of service active and reserve with multiple combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also served as a Law Enforcement consultant to the NJ State Police Special Operations Section, NJ Transit Police Operations Section, The NJ Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, the FBI Philadelphia Bomb Section, and subject matter expert to the US Department of Homeland Security's, Explosives Division. With nearly 40-years of Combative Arts experience, he is recognized as a self-defense expert worldwide and is highly sought out for seminars, workshops, lectures, and special individualized training. He is the author of "Warrior Flow Mind" (2019), Co-Author of "Attack Proof: The Ultimate Guided in Personal Protection (Human Kinetics, 2010) and the Co-Author of "How to Fight for Your Life" (June 2010).
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