Martial Arts
I think martial arts is probably one of the oldest practices we’ve been doing as human beings to confront chaos and put it into order, as well as to learn the strength in restraint and how that’s just as important. You simultaneously possess the capacity to exercise strength and cause damage, but you’ve accumulated the wisdom of when to do this and when not to do this.
I also think, like many religious scriptures, spiritual philosophies, theologies and other such practices, it orientates around the axioms of living, of caring, responsibility, aiming upward at the highest value of responsibility and truth that you can find and doing your best to work towards that. Picking courage over fear, seeking perfection of your character even though there’s no such thing as perfection in that respect, learning to have faith and endeavour in the face of adversity, respecting others despite how hard that can be in the short term, especially if you’re wronged somehow, and refraining from violent behaviour.
Of course martial arts has changed enormously from when I was younger in terms of my perception of it. When I was younger I’d watch the Bruce Lee movies, Kickboxer, all the Rocky movies, things like Rambo, and you conjure up in your imagination that it’s all about fighting. As I got older I learned that the physical aspect, the fighting aspect, is one portion of it all, but the development of your mind and your spirit are just as important. They go hand in hand, almost like the three legs on a stool. Without one, the balance is thrown off and the stool collapses.
Just as when you carry out a lot of physical work, like I do with forging and farriery, your hands become calloused. You do a lot of running or martial arts and your feet become calloused. Life is a continuous fight for territory. Like in the jungles, you have to fight for what you want or what you don’t want takes over. We see this in nature all the time with plants and different animals and how they fight for their territory.
Our bodies adapt to difficulty and I think the mind adopts the same principle. If you don’t undertake voluntary suffering and you constantly live in a world of comfort and ease, you don’t develop the capacity to deal with the turbulent and rough waters that you can find yourself in when life gets rough.
A real example from my own training where something failed, the first memory that actually comes to mind isn’t me. I can remember it with a local karate instructor in my early days. We had just been introduced to pressure-point fighting, pressure-point systems and the broader understanding of kata applications, and this was, for lack of a better term, revolutionary to me at the time.
Rick Clark was my primary instructor, but because he was in America I subsequently trained at another club in the interim, just to keep progressing my learning, learning the different katas and forms. I remember this instructor being confronted by somebody one day in the dojo in a controlled way with, “What would you do if I did this?” It was a particular type of grab.
The instructor said, “I would do this,” and used a pressure-point application that Rick had taught us at a recent seminar. But I had just spent about three weeks on tour with Rick, teaching seminars every day, sometimes twice a day. In the interim between when this instructor had learned the technique from Rick and this moment, I had practised it at however many seminars we had done and on many different people. I had that particular technique refined pretty well and I knew by how this instructor was doing it that he wasn’t doing it correctly. It didn’t work.
I could see him get a little bit flustered and then kind of gloss over it with the all-too-often heard sentence in the martial arts world: “I don’t want to hurt you, but in real life I would do this,” or, “I would do that and then it would work because I’d be using force.”
I knew in that moment what it was doing. It was masking over, I don’t want to say the failure of the instructor, but the lack of experience he had in this particular domain. Instead of being willing to admit that and go back to the basics and brush up on where there were gaps in the technique, he never did that.
I realised in that moment that I never wanted to be that sort of instructor. I don’t mean that as a personal knock on that person, but it reminds me of an expression Rick said to me. He said there are two types of instructors in the world. There are the ones who stand on the shoulders of their good students to make themselves look good, and then there are those who want to put their students up on their shoulders and make them look as good as they can be, because that’s the job of an instructor. That really hit home with me when I think about that experience.
One of the things I’ve learned about fear is that everybody is afraid, and anybody who claims not to have fear, in my opinion that’s the first person you can point at as being disingenuous. An interesting thing I learned from psychology is that fear isn’t something that necessarily disappears, but repeated exposure to fear increases your capacity to deal with that fear.
For example, if somebody has a fear of spiders, arachnophobia, you might start off talking about spiders and working through some of that. Then maybe you bring in a magazine with pictures of spiders. Eventually one day you might have a spider in the same room, in a container at a distance far away. Slowly, over the course of time and exposure, your capacity to handle that fear grows larger than the fear itself.
I don’t think anybody, or at least the majority of people by nature, enjoys physical confrontation or the fear of getting hit and hurt. But martial arts teaches you how to cope with this. You can get punched in the face and it’s not the end of the world. You can carry on through it. That’s a great principle for dealing with life in general.
When you’re sparring and fighting you get put under an enormous amount of pressure, and in that pressure you have to choose how you respond. Again, it can become a natural instinct to respond out of anger. I call it going into Hulk mode. But you find out quickly that this has a short lifespan because when you get angry and lose control, a good, cool, calm and collected fighter can exploit that immediately.
Not only that, especially if you’re an untrained fighter, you’ve got maybe thirty seconds of being fully aggressive in the gas tank and then suddenly you’re out of fuel. It’s a short-term strategy.
That’s the same with other aspects of life. In high-stakes and high-pressure situations you have to be able to have control of your emotions. It doesn’t mean that you don’t feel things, but you do have to be able to control them. That’s a lesson worth having and applying to all domains of your life, and martial arts certainly is a great teacher of that.
I do think becoming more capable has the inadvertent effect of making you less aggressive because through truly knowing your capacity for something you automatically develop self-confidence. Now, I also wouldn’t think it’s precisely correct or 100% accurate to say you become less aggressive, because there is a type of switch you have to flick when you go into a competition, for example.
But it’s a controlled aggression, and I don’t even know if aggression is the correct word.
For example, I certainly wouldn’t be in the same state of mind as when I’m completely calm and tranquil, lying down in the water looking up at the stars and floating really calmly in the river. If that state is calm, peace and tranquillity, then I’m certainly in something that resembles the opposite state of mind when I’m in a sparring match or tournament. But it’s sharpness, it’s focus, it’s determination, it’s discipline and it’s the will to win. So I’m not sure aggression is the precise word, but it’s the best I can answer that part.
I already covered the idea of restraint, but having strength is a form of freedom. People think freedom is the ability to do everything. Freedom is also exercising the ability and willingness to not do something, and that is just as important.
That plays back into my earlier point about strength. You have the capacity to do something to people, especially as a trained martial artist, and 99% of the time you will choose to walk away and not do it because morally and ethically, in my opinion, when given a choice you are compelled to choose to do the right thing. And doing the right thing is almost always to walk away. Obviously with the exception of an immediate threat to life, preservation of life and other such emergencies, but they are few and far between.
The reason I’ve stayed with martial arts for decades despite knowing how to fight is because fighting is only one aspect. The mental and spiritual aspects are lessons of life that are never done. They’re never complete. It’s a forever ongoing journey.
It echoes the old expression that the day you think you know everything is the day you stop learning, and that’s the day you quickly get left behind and become useless and obsolete. Self-development is endless.
The reason martial arts, forging and farriery are connected in my head is because the underlying principle that governs all of them is that the results speak for themselves. In my opinion it’s a predisposition of human nature to try and remember things or present things in the best light possible, with a bias to omitting your own defects and failures.
If you show up to shoe a horse and you’re in a bad mood, that horse is going to pick up on your energy. I’m not saying there aren’t awkward horses out there and I’m not professing that it’s always the farrier’s fault. However, more often than farriers would like to admit, the horse is following, and I use this expression very loosely and not as a literal application, one of Newton’s laws of physics: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
If you show up in a bad mood, the horse is going to pick up on that. You can try and blame everything else, but you know deep down it’s you and you have to take a recess, reapproach the situation and re-engage in a better way.
The same with making a horseshoe. If you don’t hold your hammer flat while you’re forging and you hammer a mark into the metal that shouldn’t be there, no matter what you do for the rest of it, all you’re doing is covering over the mistake. You can’t deny that it was there to begin with.
That same principle is in martial arts. You can teach some fancy application for a self-defence move, and especially in the traditional martial arts I always use the analogy: do you think this would work against an elite trained Muay Thai fighter, boxer or kickboxer?
If you’re leaning in the direction that the answer is no, then the answer is probably no. These different disciplines that I practise force you to confront reality for what it is, not the way you wish it to be.
The importance of deliberately putting yourself through difficult training is so that you’re prepared for when hardship comes along. Yes, there might be plenty of involuntary hardship anyway, but you don’t necessarily go through it on a regular basis.
It’s sort of like going into cold water. If you do it every day, it doesn’t bother you when it’s winter and you’re doing it. If you take that pause or break, which for example I’ve had, because I haven’t always been able to go into cold water and some of the rivers where I’ve lived have been really warm in the summer, then suddenly when you’re back in cold water you’re not as conditioned to deal with it as you were when you had been doing it every day.
So just like exercising your body physically to stay fit, I believe you have to do a little bit every day for your mind so that it too is conditioned and prepared, just like the physical training on the body.
I guess I’ve touched on most of this already, but to summarise, I think martial arts gives a person the physical strength and courage to face the chaos of the world. I think that is one of the oldest underlying questions that we wrestle with throughout our civilisation. Just like religion or any other theological or philosophical subject, martial arts is one tool that we can use to answer that question.
I think learning how to fight teaches you to control your inner monster, and that can turn a dangerous person into a disciplined and noble person who can be good and useful for themselves and for others.
