Hitting the Road

I'm headed to the University of Connecticut to deliver a paper on Daoyin.  It compares Tibetan, Orthodox Daoist, and Animal Role Specialist Opera styles of Daoyin, exploring the commonalities in view, method and fruition.

I'm then headed up to Vermont to work with Paulie Zink's youngest advanced student, Damon Honeycutt.  

Then I'm going to Montreal for fun.

And then I'm goign to be teaching for a week in Ottawa with Daniel Mroz.  

As usual if there is someone you want me to meet, beat, or have intellectual intercourse with drop me a line!  I'm much nicer and more dangerous in person than I seem on the blog.  

Here is my schedule 2014:  

• Connecticut Oct 4th
• Vermont Oct 6th
• Montreal Oct 10th
• Ottawa Oct 13th
• Back in Boulder Oct 19th

And then I'm going to Chicago to teach Daoyin and Internal Martial Arts in a graduate level Shiatsu Progarm, followed by a week in Traverse City for some workshops.

• Chicago Nov 6th
• Traverse City Nov 11th
• Back in Boulder Colorado Nov 17th

I Bought an iPad Mini

I bought an iPad Mini with a case that has handles, a tripod attachment, two lenses, and a directional microphone.  I took these four videos and then I took it back to the store so I could get more Gigabits.  The new one is on order and I should get it in a couple of days.  It is pretty fun. Getting good video is likely to be key to running a martial arts business, so I'm upping my game.  Let me know if you want me to video anything specific, you know me fighting a bunch of ninjas with nunchucks or whatever.  

If you add comments at the bottom that is great, it is also great if you put comments on the Youtube channel because that seems to spread the videos faster.  You can also subscribe to my Youtube channel, I'm trying to bust 500 subscriptions and I'm at around 450.  And of course if you share one on Tumblr or Facebook, or Google Plus or your own blog, that is probably even better.  More to come.  

Physique

My father took his motorcycle to a local mechanic with a good reputation.  The mechanic, Bill, looked at his motorcycle and said, "Your bike is dirty and grimy. If you don't care about your bike, why should I?  Take it home and clean it first, and then I'll consider working on it."  My father, the guru of hippy business, was delighted by the brilliance of Bill's novel marketing technique.  He did as he was instructed and of course Bill was happy to become his mechanic.  

What does this story tell us about martial arts?

Part of the beauty of getting into Chinese martial arts has always been that it was a counter to the dominant Western* notions of fitness. Think: sculpted muscular bodies, big smiles with lots of shiny teeth. Some of the critiques that have developed to counter Western notions of the beautiful physique have come from within Western cultures.  For instance, the notion that there are many different body types which can be healthy, strong, agile, and dynamic. This view is probably a natural out growth of the popularity of  diverse types of sports training. 

There are other types of beauty, like tall, dark and brooding, which have little to offer a conversation about physique.  That's because physique is all about what you do with what you have.  

Back in my twenties, when I got in a lot of discussions about social change, some of us radically minded dancers hit on the idea of offering to society the cultivated image of a holy body.  This was appealing partly because all I had to do in order to effect social change was simply keep doing what I was doing.  People would see my body and be consciously or unconsciously motivated to make society more humane, more body centric, more about things that mattered! (to us). 

There is a name for that view in scholarly circles, it is called romanticism, and it is a dead-end intellectually.

As I dropped the romantic ideal, my ideas about movement became far more concerned with functionality, expressivity, and the inner-workings of secret (hidden) techniques.  The types of embodiment I was cultivating tended to ignore notions of physique.  But anything one does effects physique so this was a mistake.  Examining the physique one is developing is a powerful feedback tool.  

Endemic to martial arts schools are instructions like, "Sink the shoulders, sink the elbows, relax the chest." This is a particularly bad set of instructions but there are long lists of these types of physique altering protocols.  If a logical explanation for sinking the shoulders and the elbows is offered, it is perhaps that they should be relaxed, or perhaps that they should connect to the large muscles on the back.  That's good logic, it might even have limited functionality.  But it is wrong.  What one wants functionally is maximum mobility combined with complete unity of movement.

Complete unity of movement means that if one part of the body moves all other parts move in a unified integrated way; however, there is more than one way to do this.  The results measured by the resulting physique can be a powerful mechanism for distinguishing between them.  

The instruction to "sink the chest" is a whole additional package of bad.  Again, what one wants is maximum mobility of the ribs, sternum and upper spine combined with complete unity of movement.  

The ability to see and evaluate precise refinements of practice by looking at one's physique is a master level skill.  But bad physique is pretty darn obvious.  If a person's stomach is pooching out, or their head and shoulders are hunched over, or they are walking around on legs that look like rigid sticks, there is something wrong.  If a person spends hours everyday staring at a smart-phone, it shows in their physique.  

I've walked into martial arts schools where not one person has a good physique.  It is especially shocking how many martial arts teachers get away with having crumby physiques.  Why do students bother with teachers who have bad physiques?  Well, the answer is probably complicated but I think it should stop.  

Like Bill the motorcycle mechanic, if the teacher doesn't care about her body how is she going to inspire you to care?  And speaking as a teacher now, how can a student expect me to care about their body development if they themselves don't care?

I like the idea of the Old Kungfu Shifu who says to the new prospective student who is begging to be taught, "Go home and do this exercise 1000 times a day for one month and then come back. If you come back and you haven't done it, Shifu will know, and Shifu will kill you."

____________

*Modern? Scientific? Heroic? Whatever...

Mindfulness

I teach movement and stillness.  I want my students to gain access to increasing amounts of perceptual and spatial awareness so that they also have access to the profound tools of improvisation and whole body expression.

I've been following the development of mindfulness curricula over the past ten years with rather tepid interest. Growing up Zen, I've met a lot of gentle mindless Buddhists, in a word: boring. I've also met a lot of people who practice non-reactiveness which creates an illusion of calm. That seems fine at first glance, but a facade of calm based on not-reacting is not very robust. When the calm breaks under spontaneous pressures it tends to either become wimpy and impotent, or extremely aggressive.  The bumper-sticker version: Beware of nice people.

But what if the limited goal of mindfulness training is the creation of available awareness as a conditioned habit?  Now that is a much more interesting goal.

To get at the questions of, what is available awareness? and how does one condition it? We first have to deal with the twin stress responses:  Distraction and disassociation.

Distraction and disassociation are opposite sides of the same coin. Distraction in an educational environment is often called difficulty focusing (meiyou jingshen, in Mandarin). But more generally it is the mind's tendency to be sucked into one input after another.  Think of it as lots of little focuses. Distraction is clearly not available awareness.

Disassociation on the other hand is highly valued in most educational environments. Disassociation is a powerful focusing tool. Disassociation is the ability to put one's mind to a task and disregard all other needs, interests, or inputs. People with strong tendencies for disassociation can learn languages without visiting a country where that language is spoken, can learn to play a musical instrument with minimal guidance, they can read and assimilate vast swaths of knowledge. We as a society may value it, but it isn't available awareness. It might better be called mind training (samatha in Sanskrit) or skillful trance.

I'm not confident that I have a convincing definition of available awareness.  It is sort of like enlightenment, I know it when I see it.  More importantly, I notice when it isn't there in other people.  It is the fashion these days to talk about how cool it is to think outside the box, but frankly I'm delighted when I meet someone who can think inside the box.  That ability is rare enough.  

The most powerful teaching tool I know of is called taking responsibility. Giving someone responsibility and supporting them in making decisions and taking actions might be a good strategy for conditioning the habit of creating available awareness.

I would think that anyone trying to teach mindfulness would want to create a list of all the intermediate steps one might utilize in attempting to create a nourishing environment for getting others to take responsibility.  I would like to see that list.

This may or may not be funny, but people with available awareness tend to love criticism.  "What the #@$% is wrong with you SCOTT?"  "Wow, yeah? cool. WHAT THE #@$% IS WRONG WITH ME???"  

Perhaps available awareness is knowing that one has blind-spots and wanting other people to point them out.  Perhaps available awareness is simply a recognition of the human tendency to firmly assign the causes of failures (and successes) or obstacles (and opportunities) to discrete actions.  There is obvious utilitarian value in making these firm assignments of causation, but the unconscious habit creates blind-spots.

There may be some relationship between available awareness and what is called in the commercial world multi-area competence, being good a many things. 

There are almost certainly a wide array of sensory-motor and perception-action stimuli that help establish available awareness. And perhaps even more key, a person needs enough time and an appropriate environment to process those experiences. People need rest, safety, alone time, nutrition, to be listened to, group bonding, and most profoundly: opportunities to fail and enjoy it.  Without all of those things humans tend to be highly reactive, or over-reactive.  Stressed out people may be distracted, or they may be focussed, but they are unlikely to have available awareness.  

People often find comfort and safety in established hierarchies, we are social animals after all.  Architecture can help with this.  Knowing one's place, having a role and fulfilling that role, may be an important first step to establishing available awareness.   

Available awareness is the potential to respond to multiple inputs with full access to one's emotions, intellect, and physicality. It sometimes manifests as comfort with ambiguity, and a dynamic relationships to chaotic forces or complex influences.

I'm all for including meditation tools in schools, businesses, government, hospitals, any institutions which might benefit. I do worry a bit that we might be applying a band-aid to a gaping wound, but a serious meditation practice can produce real insight.  Yet I think it is important to keep in mind that the ultimate fruition is not to make people less reactive, nor it to make them better at focusing. It is to give them the option of creating available awareness. Without it we will have a hard time ever having political discussions of any consequence, developing any real freedom in movement traditions, or experiencing intimacy.

Trying to teach movement, experience intimacy, or have a political discussion of any consequence, without having first fostered or discovered some available awareness is like trying to start a fire by hoping lightning will strike at one's feet.  

"How long has it been since normal seemed normal?"  

-Laozi

Curriculum Vitae 2014

In case my readers want to check out my entire work history and education, my Curriculum Vitae 2014 is now available for download here on my website and also for viewing at academia.edu.

It is a brave new world (again). 

On Boxing: Joyce Carol Oats

I just finished reading On Boxing , by Joyce Carol Oats.  It is a fun read.  She normally writes fiction, but this is a tribute to her life long love of boxing.  Her love of boxing is in a sense a tribute to her bond with her father, who initiated her into its beauty.  

The book jumps right into philosophy and has great stuff like this:

The old boxing adage--a truism surely untrue-- that you cannot be knocked out if you see the blow coming, and if you will yourself not to be knocked out, has its subtler, more daunting significance: nothing that happens to the boxer in the ring, including death--"his" death--is not of his own will or failure of will.  The suggestion is of a world-model in which we are humanly responsible not only for our own acts but for those performed against us.

And here, after pointing out how often boxing fights were illegal in times passed, and thus happened in-between states, in outlaw territory, or on islands with performers and spectators both risking arrest:

And boxers have frequently displayed themselves, inside the ring and out, as characters in the literary sense of the word.  Extravagant fictions without a structure to contain them.

She has much to say about notions of "primitive" and the intensity of emotions:

Those whose aggression is masked, or oblique or unsuccessful, will always condemn it in others.

After putting both feet forward into philosophy she wanders around into the lives of boxers, and major events in boxing history.  Some of the essays in this book are informative, in depth reportage, but they are also languid, timeless; as a reader one gets the sense that she deeply savors hanging out in the world of boxing.  

I couldn't help thinking of Elaine Scary's comment in On Beauty and Being Just  that one of the errors about beauty she made in her youth was thinking that boxing was not beautiful.  I wonder if Joyce Carol Oats helped change her mind?  

On Boxing includes a number of enticing and complex book reviews (more books added to my reading list) and she is not at all shy about discussing racism and, in the final essay, fascism.  Check it out.