Let's talk Technique

This post is meant for both beginners and advanced students,

So let's talk "technique". What is a "technique" in the martial arts? From my study of them, the underlying unity in the self-defense arts is that you are being attacked, consequently you have to, and should react to the attack. You react out of the will for self-preservation, or fear.

 There are various kind of attacks that are empty handed, attacks involving weapons, psychic attacks and spirit attacks, which are the hardest to neutralize. So a complete self-defense art has to take into account all of that (plus the weather and terrain) and yet not become paranoid to the boot. Why not? After all you are being attacked? Because a well thought out defense is calm, stable, and even relaxed. In many cases emotionless, only the technique is working. Therefore, we can say that a technique is a kind of response that you have been working on during your training.

So, for example if you are a Tai Chi player, you are working on staying relaxed and neutralizing, "not being there" so to speak. If you are a Daito Ryu Jujutsu practitioner, you will meet them with an atemi, or seize the moment and destroy your opponent's spirit. In Aikido you will mostly likely harmonize with your opponent or several, and cause some damage or inflict pain from there. Karate believes in blocking and returning the energy, although that is a cruder level. Ninpo has all of the above embedded in its taijutsu.

So as you can see the approaches are many, or several in this case, but the underlying structure of a technique is not so different. I summarize it as such: 1st you perceive an attack. If you have caught it from afar, nothing should stop you from reacting by moving your body out of the way, or putting in a nice offensive punch kick or just putting your hand out, i.e. "reacting according to circumstances".

If they are close by, and the attack has already begun in the shorter range, you should probably be moving yourself out of the way, or perhaps joining yourself with their attack, thus sticking and following, or harmonizing with their center of gravity, or perhaps a movement of their hand, which is an outgrowth of that....

There are MANY things one can do, so you have to be open minded, and not get stuck on one learned response that your school or your teacher prefers. There are many schools and many teachers but the greatest is living inside each and every one of us, the Mahaguru, or the Greatest Teacher as they say in Sanskrit IS the Atman, our own soul residing within ourselves. Surprised? Well, you are in for a few more surprises, because so far I have only been talking about physiological response to an attack, not emotional or spiritual, which are of course embedded in the physiological - without our spirit we are nothing, empty space.

What I am saying here is that one should really spend a lot of time on practice, and that practice has to revolve not around how to have a more powerful punch, or kick, or how to devilishly crush your opponents joints or cause them unspeakable harm, it should revolve around how to just BE IN A NON-CONFRONTATIONAL SITUATION, that we call LIFE.

In life, all of the situations are already present in a nutshell, but we tend to disregard the simple yet profound lessons that life gives us, because the majority of martial approaches out there tend to concentrate on teaching how to fight, in other words on how to EXIST AND SURVIVE WITHIN THE CONFLICT. What I am talking about here, is not how to exist when the conflict has already begun, but about how to exist without the conflict. It may sound contradictory at this point, as we are talking about martial arts techniques here, aren't we?

We do, but in order to truthfully discuss the techniques we have to start from afar. Look at your lifestyle. What do you do throughout the day? What do you think about? What kind of person are you? How do you treat people? Do you practice often, or just once a week at your class or school? All of these and many other more profound questions should be asked by an aspiring adept of martial ways, and should become a part of her daily meditation, and from then the real studying begins! I firmly believe that you cannot have a good technique without being a thoroughly intelligent individual. That opinion comes from my own research of those considered "good". Read books, and choose your heroes wisely. Don't stop at what you have already think you've achieved. A real teacher wouldn't pet you on the head so easily, but she is not going to try to break your spirit either by being overly harsh and even abusive.

By the time you start educating yourself in that way, you will see that combined with the physical practice of repeating your routines, katas, forms, your intellectual preparation will immensely deepen your practice, and you will start coming in touch with your Spirit....

To be Continued