Journal Martial Arts Energies in Practice

[HoldAll]

Ageing Pt. 2

In 2013, capoeira master

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cycled

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to celebrate his 70th birthday and to raise awareness and funds for

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a drug addiction rehabilitation centre. I had the good fortune of catching him once at a workshop in 2009 and still treasure a photo of him and me, and I couldn't be prouder if somebody had taken a picture of me with the Pope or the Dalai Lama.

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Mestre Acordeon at age 74.

However, I don't plan on writing about all those septuagenarian martial arts titans out there to shame everybody who's slowly beginning to feel the effects of old age creeping in into exercising more and getting fit. For each of these shining examples, there are hundreds of other ageing long-time martial artists who had to quit due to serious health problems and on doctor's orders, for important private reasons, or just because they didn't enjoy practicing anymore - after all, there are more important things in life than karate and capoeira. There also videos on youtube showing pretty decrepit Okinawan karate masters performing katas agonizingly slow, and

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, 84 at that time,

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either (although it certainly looks like he had been having fun!).

At that 2009 workshop, Mestre Acordeon explained that he wasn't able to play low games close to the ground and do the

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anymore because both his knees were shot. In spite of that, he made all the other assembled contra-mestres and mestres (who had terrorised us noobs in the roda at previous year's workshop) tumble like ninepins with his ingenious takedowns. As I said in my previous post, experience can help make up for lost youthful energy because you'll be able to anticipate your opponent's/partner's moves better; however, he wouldn't have been able to keep up in a really fast game, that's for sure.

What I'd like to plead here for is finding yourself a sport that is varied and demanding when it comes to motor skills and coordination, and which is capable of really gripping and fascinating you to the point of (mild, age-adequate) obsession instead of dragging yourself to the gym a couple of times a week and half-heartedly lifting weights, or waiting for that seemingly interminable spinning class to end. Sometimes people in the mid-forties show up at the dojo, out of shape but dead set on learning karate because it's what they had been dreaming of all their lives. Sometimes it's just a midlife-crisis flash in the pan but some will stay on and carry it through to black belt. If tennis, cycling, or running are your thing, fine, but the advantage of martial arts in general is that they'll engage your entire body in a multitude of complex combinations, and the stretching portion (something that many joggers are wont to neglect!) before every class will ensure that your body will remain supple while the rest of your peers are becoming stiffer and stiffer year by year.

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Legendary French karate champion and kickboxing pioneer

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at age 66.

Being a true martial artist is like being a professional musician - you don't stop playing just because you've hit forty or fifty; you're in it for life. It will not be even hard because after some years, your martial art will have become such a big part of your self-image and identity that quitting is as good as unimaginable. As I mentioned in previous posts, it's no good to make solemn New Years resolutions and allow your intellect to badger you into purchasing a gym membership while your emotions are beginning to protest ever more loudly and will finally go on general strike by the end of January. If you're looking for discipline and rigour, karate may be for you; if you want to remember how much fun it was to horse around as a child, capoeira can be your friend.

Just a suggestion.

 

[HoldAll]

Uke

When you hear the expression 'martial arts energies', you usually think about spirited attacks that will crush everything in their path. However, you must also be able to use your martial arts energies defensively, which is why karate students are told right from the start to perform their blocks with the same force and decisiveness as punches and kicks. Effective blocking will also boost your confidence in self-defence situation when faced with a real-life aggressor. They may be less 'sexy' than punches, kicks, locks, or chokes but may be all that can save you when facing a stronger opponent, at the same time signalling that you won't be intimidated even when being in a weaker position.

Defending is something of an art. The initiative is with your opponent, not yours, which doesn't necessarily mean that you're at a disadvantage - after all, it's always easier to react than to act. What's difficult is refrain from beating a headlong retreat by taking one step back after the other in a straight line and instead sidestepping and taking evasive circular action since there'll be the dojo's walls, other pairs of karatekas sparring, the borders of the competition mat, the ropes of the ring, the fence of the octagon, or obstacles like parked cars in street fights. You can't run away indefinitely but you should to be able to defend yourself as long as necessary.

In contrast to pre-arranged partner exercises for beginners, katas often contain blocks that are performed while literally on the back foot or standing in impossible stances, e.g. with crossed legs, yet another example for situations that 'pure' self-defence systems don't take into account - in such classes, the defender is always prepared, perfectly balanced and standing firm while in real life you may be caught unawares and in unfavourable stances that make applying all those fancy techniques next to impossible. The irony is that those self-defence systems don't really teach you how to defend yourself, only how to successfully exploit an aggressor's amateurish attacks at the very first try, leaving no margin for mistakes or botched countermoves.

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This video is all about uke, i.e. receiving. At 0:43, the protagonist eats a backfist (uraken uchi) which is usually blocked by an inside-outside block (uchi uke) or by simply raising one hand protectively. In both cases, the opponent's blow won't be deflected but must be simply withstood as it lands on the outside of your forearm.

Most Japanese technical terms for karate blocks (uchi uke, soto uke, age uke, shuto uke, etc.) end in the word uke. Uke comes from the verb ukeru which means 'to receive'. Although there are also blocks directly acting on the force of offensive techniques, most work by deflecting which is less demanding on your strength but requires a really strong stance, otherwise these blocks will be ineffective and make you lose your balance to boot. You receive an attack, nullify it and render it harmless while still keeping your composure and refusing to be cowed. The attacker's idea, on the other hand, is to 'overload' your defensive system by throwing entire combinations of different techniques at you, and you really need to remain calm when absorbing such flurries of blows until you finally get a chance to extricate yourself from your opponent's furious offence, reposition and launching a counter-attack of your own.

If you're already practicing a martial art, you should always ask yourself: would my block be strong enough to deflect a really hard punch, and would I be able to follow it up with an equally effective one, and another, and another? In karate, this is often practiced as a preliminary exercise for free sparring when one partner will be exclusively the attacker and the other one exclusively the defender, and where you will be able to focus fully on each role, just like the Okinawan sensei in his demonstration of uke.

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With the exception of uechi-ryu, mainstream karate isn't very big on conditioning - Okinawan traditional styles are. Blocking can hurt, even when you're doing it correctly.

However, it would be completely wrong to classify uke as yin energy. Blocking feels just as aggressive as striking; you may be receiving but it's receiving on your terms. In capoeira, blocks are only used as a last resort; in karate, they're the primary means of defence since it's not always feasible to evade an attack and in such cases, you need to be confident and strong enough to stand your ground.

 

[HoldAll]

As ye train, so shall ye fight

There's a story about this cop who was so obsessed with gun disarming that he would practice the same move thousands of times with his partner - grab gun with both hands, twist, take away gun, hand back gun to partner, grab again gun with with both hands, twist, on and on and on, until the disarming move became second nature to him. One day he was in a 7/11 when some guy tried to rob the place and held him at gunpoint. The cop reacted without thinking, grabbed the robber's gun with both hands, twisted, took away his gun - and promptly hand the gun back to him as he had done in interminable hours of practice. Luckily for him, his partner shot the amazed robber before the guy could do any damage, or so the cautionary tale goes.

Somehow related is my pet karate peeve concerning partner practice involving throws and takedowns where karateka often are often in the habit of offering a friendly outstretched hands to their downed opponents to help them up. Imagine being actually so chivalrous in real-life situations - both the defender and the aggressors would be able to exploit such a courteous gesture in any number of painful ways. When being taken down, you should roll away as quickly as possible and only get up once you've put a safe distance between you and your attacker, else you risk being hit with soccer kicks to your ribs or head. The guy left standing, on the other hand, could be dragged down and… I'd rather be hit in the face than being caught in an armlock on the ground, it's a horrible feeling, and

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are even worse, I can tell you that from personal experience. Being so courteous and helping your partner up in such situations can be tantamount to handing the gun back to the 7/11 robber in real life.

One day a friend of a dojo buddy's brought his kickboxing group over who were curious about karate they had heard about so much. It was a long time ago, but I remember being paired with a young woman who was appalled: "What, practicing with a partner without any protective gear??" I thought "Hehe, now you can't hide behind those big gloves anymore!" I stopped being so cocksure as soon as she started punching to my midsection from a high boxing guard, which meant that they kept coming from above and not from a right angle like karate punches, so my usual blocks didn't work so well all of a sudden. When it was my turn, however, it soon became apparent that her high guard was insufficient because I stood in a low karate stance and my punches hit her just underneath her raised elbows - they would have protected her from punches coming from above but not from punches coming to her midsection at a right angle.

When fooling around before classes with my capoeira buddies sometimes, I found out that they were pretty good at defending against slaps to the side of their heads, without fail dodging or blocking them as a last resort, as they were so used to the curving trajectory of those many crescent kick used in capoeira. However, they were completely helpless as soon as I tried straight slaps to their faces - after all,

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aren't used in capoeira.

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games, on the other hand, are played at a much slower pace than in 'regular' capoeira (capoeira contemporânea), so whenever angoleros tried to join a fast capoeira contemporânea game at workshop or street rodas, they didn't fare so well, ducking much too slowly and clumsily to the point of being in real danger of getting concussed; a tai chi master will be probably knocked out by the very first wheel kick (meia lua de compasso) coming his way, being even less accustomed to such fast techniques.

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World and European point-fighting champion Alexandre Biamonti as well Yul Brynner & Horst Buchholz in "The Magnificent Seven". The need for speed in the martial arts should be obvious.

Together with the jab (kizami zuki), the backfist (uraken uchi) is probably karate's fastest technique. Both are immediately retracted after delivering a short, sharp shock. Now the Almighty Google AI tells me that "

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redirects energy by blending with an opponent's attack, using circular movements to lead their force past the practitioner and unbalance them" How the hell is that supposed to work against a lighting-fast jab or backfist? All I've ever seen from aikido classes in real life were inept slow-mo attacks easily thwarted by exploiting the aggressor's overcommitting (= leaning too far forward) when punching (which is broken out of karate beginners right from the start), getting too close (likewise), or striking blows while in comically unstable stances (ditto). Judging from all the enthusiastic propaganda put out by aikido websites, it's more about trying hard to prove the philosophical principle of non-aggression than teaching students to defend themselves properly, polemically put. However, there are videos of aikido masters on youtube who do know how to block hard, fast punches thrown by real fighters very competently, it's just that for every such master, thousands of students will have quit before getting any good; I guess the philosophical principle of aikido is considered more important here than an aikidoka's actual physical integrity.

It seems that the energies of various martial arts aren't compatible with each other or at least don't mix very well, and I don't mean just the kinetic energy 'redirected' by means of aikido techniques. It's as if different martial arts energies had a unique feel and taste that sets them apart from others in the way they defend or attack. Karate energy is aggressive and straightforward; capoeira energy is playful and sneaky - I wish I could say anything from my own personal experience about the grappling arts like judo, wrestling, or Brazilian jiu-jitsu but I'm sure that each of them has its distinct energy as well.

 

[HoldAll]

A Slo-Mo Rant

I wonder whether any discussion about martial arts energies is possible without addressing the concept of qi, i.e. without explaining it rationally in terms of modern science, without debunking it as mythical, etc. In my opinion, the widespread exaggeration of the power of qi stems from humanity's unfortunate lust for miracles, its hunger for all kinds of sensations, and for heroic sagas about brave underdogs defeating much stronger opponents (David may have vanquished mighty Goliath but let's not forget that the guy had been using a projectile weapon). Why is it that miraculous powers are ever only ascribed to martial artists and not to golfers, tennis players, or swimmers? Why are there no tales about wizened old hermits running rings around much younger players on the soccer pitch? A story about how a

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should not have made the BBC World News but then the poor guy was a tai chi master who had agreed to this uneven match of his own free will, so the public probably couldn't wait to witness some wondrous feat as per time-honoured narrative. Of course the tai chi master didn't win and was knocked out - did anybody expect a different outcome? Millions of Chinese apparently did…

In actuality, such contests do both tai chi and mixed martial arts a disservice. The tai chi master is made to look like a fool, the MMA fighter like a brutal thug, and everybody loses. However, traditional Chinese internal and external martial arts only have themselves to blame for this debacle after making bold claims such as these:

This skill can be used martially or medically as a projection skill. Basically, the person who has developed their chi to this level has obtained enough energetic strength to affect another person’s cells and bioelectric field through emitting their chi.
Sifu Dan Ferrera, "Qigong & The Power of Magnetic Fields" (free booklet)

Bagua's power, however, is more like an inflated beach ball: the practitioner's body becomes full of energy, which can be moved about at will and can be manifested to bounce an enemy a great distance away.
Liang Shou-Yu, Yang Jwing-Ming, Wu Wen-Ching - Baguazhang (Emei Baguazhang) - Chinese Internal Martial Arts, 1996

I take this to mean that practitioners able to transmit their qi outside their body to affect an opponent at a distance... Again, I'm not interested in debunking such claims and won't wait with bated breath for another mismatched contest, this time between a Baguazhang adept and yet another MMA fighter.

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I actually like this tai chi form. There are some straight-up punches, kicks and flowing blocks (nagashi ukes) in there, some moves could be also interpreted as takedowns, and certain sequences even bear a resemblance to elements of shotokan katas. However, as I said in my previous post: as you train, so you will fight. Executing such techniques perfectly but dead slowly doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to perform them at top speed and with full force as well. You can't develop any adequate timing and reflexes without practicing with a partner, and all you'll be ever able to is 'fighting' in the abstract. Practicing exclusively katas is unthinkable in karate, you have to perform (pre-arranged) partners exercises as soon as you take your very first grading exam.

It's always the same: staunch materialist sceptics will say that such things can never happen because they secretly believe that they shouldn't happen, credulous spiritual persons will say that such things do happen because they secretly believe that they should happen. Hence if it all comes down to belief anyway, facts won't matter. Accordingly, there may be in fact martial artists in China or somewhere who are able to bounce qi beach balls off their opponents, who knows? But does it really matter? It would when it was about new reliable and demonstrably effective healing methods employing qi power, not about some cheap martial arts stunts.

What I dislike about such outrageous claims is that they openly pander to vulgar sensationalism. For my part, I choose to remain on the sceptics' side and call "Bullshit!" on claims like these, not least because I value athleticism as a key ingredient to success in the martial arts and would consider such qi projection feats cheating (provided they were for real, of course).

A perverse habit NewAgers and many serious occultists share is this knee-jerk voyeurism triggered by anything supposedly 'hidden' or 'secret' - if something was genuinely hidden or secret, you wouldn't even know it existed, let alone read all about it in a book titled "The Hidden Power of X" or "The Secret Power of Y". In a way, you could label such tomes sources of spiritual pollution, in this case mocking serious martial artist who have been diligently practicing for decades but are apparently too stupid to learn how to wield the 'hidden, secret 'energies' behind effortless invincibility, no cardio or muscular strength required.

However, what upsets me the most is that all that dumb qi hype is clouding the issue for me. The martial arts energies I'm interested in are not some mythical superpowers to stun and amaze a naïve audience but rather the subtle forces and currents generated by the actual practice and application of martial arts, and I have a hunch that they'll be much more sophisticated than than any traditional notions about qi. Even now I'm expecting that these energies aren't antagonistic, with the energies of one fighter being pitted directly against those of the other until finally the more powerful forces of the stronger one win out; instead, I think that true martial arts energies are synergistic, enhancing and augmenting each other to form a new unique whole. This idea could also have implications for viewing occult energies in general because it would allow for the possibility that energies can intermingle and blend with one another instead of acting strictly separately and independently of each other. For example, I never got the feeling during dojo sparring that any martial energies were cancelling each other out, it was almost as if I was forming some kind of invisible bond with the other guy instead (ok, it was different on the competition mat). This synergistic effect is even more marked in capoeira circles where the common energies of the two players practically skyrocket as a consequence of the boost they receive from the music and the other capoeristas in the roda - when practicing capoeira moves alone, however, those energies are practically absent and can hardly be felt.

I don't know where my quest for the discovery of real martial arts energies in practice will take me yet in this Journal but it's safe to say even now that qi beach balls won't play any part in it, no way.

 

[HoldAll]

Conceptualising Occult Energies

When talking about occult energies, I think we're using the term ‚energy‘ much too liberally. It merely serves as a placeholder for ‚forces we don‘t really understand’ (as causative or transformative agents) or ‚esoteric qualities we can‘t explain’. What’s so dangerous about this word is that it obviously borrows its prestige from physics, a legitimate branch of science, even though mundane science itself is ill equipped to investigate occult energies and even considers them bogus. Historically, however, ‚energy‘ had a much broader meaning:

The word energy derives from the Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, romanised: energeia, lit. 'activity, operation', which possibly appears for the first time in the work of Aristotle in the 4th century BC. In contrast to the modern definition, energeia was a qualitative philosophical concept, broad enough to include ideas such as happiness and pleasure. (Wikipedia, “Energy”)

While we are still retaining a broader meaning of the word, for example when we say “I just don’t have the energy for a daily morning run!”, ‘energy’ is predominantly associated in our minds with electrical power IMHO. After all, our civilisation runs on electrical energy which easily controllable and infinitely exploitable, definitely not the subject of philosophical inquiry but rather utterly quotidian stuff we all take for granted, and I think this attitude inadvertently informs our way of conceiving of occult energy too, just as if it was ours to use and utilise to our hearts' content. Electricity is 'democratic' and egalitarian since it can be employed by anyone to power any device imaginable without requiring any special qualifications or prior permission, and hence you get all those occult books promising to teach you how to 'harness' or 'tap into' into any cosmic power source as effortlessly as plugging in some gadget into a wall socket until you're bloated like a tick with occult energies.

Another phenomenon subconsciously at work here is the fallacy that having a name for something seduces us into believing we’ve got a handle on it. There’s a saying: “Judging means ceasing to think” - as soon as you form an opinion about something or somebody (important/unimportant, interesting/boring, sincere/liar), you stop thinking about him, her, or it anymore, even when the issue or the person deserves more assessment and reasoning. In a similar way, the word ‘energy’ is arbitrarily bandied about in occult circles, with hardly anybody asking themselves what it really means in a given context, and as a result, the physics meaning of the word tends to be borrowed to describe and predict the behaviour of occult energies, however incongruously. I’ve mentioned this reddit post before where somebody was spoke out against hazel as a material for wands because wood was a poor conductor, which is exactly the kind of muddled thinking I’m criticising here. Magic isn’t physics, physics isn’t magic, they behave differently, they follow different laws, and I think we should never lose sight of the fact that the word ‘energy’ as used in occultism is merely a figure of speech.

The ancient Chinese built zig-zagging footbridges leading to their pictoresque lakeside tea houses because they believed that evil spirits could only move in a straight line; we may smile indulgently at this quaint superstition but ask yourself if you yourself do in fact believe that occult energies can go around corners - or do you take your cue from radiation like radio waves and insist on their linear propagation instead? Are occult energies able to penetrate any material or are they subject to certain limitations in this respect? In the Solomic grimoire tradition, an iron box is used to torture demons, and the Fae as well as other spirits are said to hate iron (that’s where you get the ancient custom of nailing horseshoes above doorways). What about lead? What about insulators like wood as in the reddit example above? Hmm… science tells us that

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(and not even a tinfoil hat will protect you from this incessant cosmic incursion). Ok, occult energies behave like neutrinos then. Oh wait, in some contexts, they are sometimes said to flow like water (qi) or waft about like air (prana in Sanskrit, lung in Tibetan) – nice, but does that mean they’re unable to penetrate solid objects which is why they’re presumably confined to those mysterious channels or meridians and btw, are they subject to gravity too? By dint of some complex mental acrobatics (chaos magic philosophy will help you there!), you should be able to accept every single one of these metaphors using real-life phenomena as equally true; additionally, you may claim that quantum physics was somehow involved, or give up altogether and lapse into the comfortably hazy world of mysticism.

When discussing occult energies, I think we should do our best to forget all we think we know about science and physics altogether. No more simplistic descriptions of the famous double-slit experiment complete with incorrect inferences, no more desperate herding of Schrödinger’s cats, no more amateurish mangling of quantum mechanics. Take for example ‘dimension’, a purely abstract concept used in physics and mathematics. I once saw an interview with S. Connolly where she was asked how that whole demonolatry business of hers worked, and she replied, “I could mention Hilbert space or 11th dimensional geometry but…”, by which she probably meant, “No idea, and nobody really knows either”. When people claim that they met beings ‘from another dimension’ in their dreams, they might just as well say ‘from a mystic realm’, which is much less amenable to pseudo-scientific explanations. The age-old principle that knowing the name of a being will give you power over it does not apply to theoretical concepts of magic, in my opinion.

Whenever scholars of religion or anthropologists paint themselves into an intellectual corner and are forced to deal with all that yucky woo-woo stuff their subjects are practicing, they will frequently use the term

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(probably because they’d feel silly if they mentioned ‘occult energies’ in their papers), irrespective of whether these supernatural forces are in fact linked to any Melanesian and Polynesian cultures or not; it has become a global technical term in the academy by now, fuzzy enough to accommodate just about everything that might embarrass these sober thinkers. I think it’s actually a good idea. Mana is sufficiently obscure a word as not to give rise to spurious associations, whereas ‘energy’ tends to fool you into thinking that you know all about occult energies because you’re a science guy at heart. No. A Tahitian tribal elder probably knew much more about mana 500 years ago than you’ll ever understand about occult energies despite your MIT physics degree. Whether you say mana or ‘occult energies’, you’re pinning a label on something that is basically ineffable; you may describe or study its expressions but that’s about the extent of it.

Unlike electricity (or many types of occult energy, for that matter), martial arts energies are NEITHER ubiquitous NOR egalitarian; they can ONLY ever arise in places where martial arts are actually practised and can ONLY be generated by martial artists, period. Whether they can be exploited for any other purpose, e.g. for powering spells, I don’t know; speaking from my own subjective experience though, it would feel somehow wrong, meaning inappropriate, but more about this in my next post.

 

[Swampdweller900]

This journal is amazing. Thank you so much for posting this. I used to practice AIkido when I lived in a place with dojos. Same Ki in the middle of the name as you've been exploring. Maybe you've already touched on Aikido elsewhere and I haven't read that far yet.

Unlike Karate or the other "pugilistic" (as one dojo used to call them) martial arts, once you spent years learning and had the right teacher, the ki elements came forward. Combat-focused martial arts make it about ki as force - ki vs ki, action vs. action, while we were supposed to be flowing around and then with and over the incoming ki. Taking someone else's energy and wrapping it up and around and over them until they fell. It works, and to see some of the really well-trained higher dan blackbelts work is amazing stuff. They're always so gentle and subtle. But, IMO the problem is that they also spend their careers practicing against other aikidoka, who give up that flow easily. While I wouldn't doubt they would be fine fighting an untrained random person, it's the 5th dan Karate blackbelt vs 5th dan Aikido black belt (where both are also not 60+ years old) where I would expect the persistent and quick direct nature of the Karate ki to eventually prevail.

 

[HoldAll]

I’m glad you like my journal! I get so few feedback, I’m grateful for any input I can get because I’m always looking for new ideas.

My main problem with aikido is that it doesn’t teach beginners to adequately defend themselves. Redirecting the force of an attack is a very advanced practice that requires good timing and years of experience and is by now means foolproof because any trained ‘pugilistic’ fighter will always retract their arms or legs after punching or kicking precisely to avoid being grabbed, so if you aren’t able to catch an opponent’s wrist at the very first attempt, what then? From what I’ve seen in beginners classes, aikido seems to rely on an agressor’s overcommitting, i.e. leaning forwards and placing their centre of gravity outside their base, which we will drill out of karate beginners right from the start - karate kihon is all about solid immovable stances - if I were to attack an aikidoka with a classic lunge punch (oi zuki), I’d step forward all braced for contact and stand firm afterwards, and there would be no ki to redirect because it would all remain contained within myself. Merely taking down an aggressors doesn't render him automatically harmless, you'll have to follow up with punches or kicks or switch to groundfighting for that

From what I’ve seen myself live (for a time we shared the same huge floorspace with martial artists from other disciplines), aikido classes weren’t very confidence-inspiring; it looked like the philosophy of non-aggression was much more important than learning to actually protect yourself - the toris’ attacks were unrealistic or even farcial, whereas in karate you simply get hit if your block is ill-timed or inefficient, there’s no overpolite ‘cooperation’ between tori and uke. Punches and kicks to the head are pulled, of course, but you can go full throttle to the midsection, and any mistake on the part of uke can have painful consequences, such as bruises on the forearms or punches to the stomach. I’ve seen youtube videos where aikido masters were in fact cable of blocking effectively but I guess it would take aikido students many years to get there. I once saw an aikido master, a 7th dan, warming up before a workshop, and I would have definitely hated to go toe to toe with him because his hara looked so tremendously strong, but otherwise… I always say there’s a martial art for everyone depending on your own mentality, and the aikido mindset is just foreign to me.

I’m still debating whether anything supernatural was or could be involved in martial arts but right now, I’m tending towards the view that good hara is a combination of a low centre of gravity, powerful abdominal muscles and a certain self-assured posture with the pelvis slightly tilted forward. Qi, on the other hand, seems to be solely a concept borrowed from Traditional Chinese Medicine that has no bearing on real fights except in folk legends and fiction, and as for the Japanese ki… I’d like to side with

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for the moment here and say that it appears to be nothing but kinetic energy straight out of Newtonian physics. However, I suspect that something is going on here that I can’t put my finger on and which hasn’t occurred to NewAger armchair martial artists yet, and trying to find out is the purpose of this journal.

 

[Swampdweller900]

I’m glad you like my journal! I get so few feedback, I’m grateful for any input I can get because I’m always looking for new ideas.

My main problem with aikido is that it doesn’t teach beginners to adequately defend themselves. Redirecting the force of an attack is a very advanced practice that requires good timing and years of experience and is by now means foolproof because any trained ‘pugilistic’ fighter will always retract their arms or legs after punching or kicking precisely to avoid being grabbed, so if you aren’t able to catch an opponent’s wrist at the very first attempt, what then? From what I’ve seen in beginners classes, aikido seems to rely on an agressor’s overcommitting, i.e. leaning forwards and placing their centre of gravity outside their base, which we will drill out of karate beginners right from the start - karate kihon is all about solid immovable stances - if I were to attack an aikidoka with a classic lunge punch (oi zuki), I’d step forward all braced for contact and stand firm afterwards, and there would be no ki to redirect because it would all remain contained within myself. Merely taking down an aggressors doesn't render him automatically harmless, you'll have to follow up with punches or kicks or switch to groundfighting for that

From what I’ve seen myself live (for a time we shared the same huge floorspace with martial artists from other disciplines), aikido classes weren’t very confidence-inspiring; it looked like the philosophy of non-aggression was much more important than learning to actually protect yourself - the toris’ attacks were unrealistic or even farcial, whereas in karate you simply get hit if your block is ill-timed or inefficient, there’s no overpolite ‘cooperation’ between tori and uke. Punches and kicks to the head are pulled, of course, but you can go full throttle to the midsection, and any mistake on the part of uke can have painful consequences, such as bruises on the forearms or punches to the stomach. I’ve seen youtube videos where aikido masters were in fact cable of blocking effectively but I guess it would take aikido students many years to get there. I once saw an aikido master, a 7th dan, warming up before a workshop, and I would have definitely hated to go toe to toe with him because his hara looked so tremendously strong, but otherwise… I always say there’s a martial art for everyone depending on your own mentality, and the aikido mindset is just foreign to me.

I’m still debating whether anything supernatural was or could be involved in martial arts but right now, I’m tending towards the view that good hara is a combination of a low centre of gravity, powerful abdominal muscles and a certain self-assured posture with the pelvis slightly tilted forward. Qi, on the other hand, seems to be solely a concept borrowed from Traditional Chinese Medicine that has no bearing on real fights except in folk legends and fiction, and as for the Japanese ki… I’d like to side with

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for the moment here and say that it appears to be nothing but kinetic energy straight out of Newtonian physics. However, I suspect that something is going on here that I can’t put my finger on and which hasn’t occurred to NewAger armchair martial artists yet, and trying to find out is the purpose of this journal.

100% agree with you on the shortcomings of Aikido. It's like until you hit 3rd Dan, you're qualified to keep a drunk guy on the street from getting a shot in and that's about it. 3rd Dan seems like the level where I don't know what they teach them, or maybe it's just 10-20 years of muscle memory, but that's when things get real. It's all amateur hour before then, and I never made it past that.

My second dojo was far more combat-oriented, and I definitely had my lip busted more than once by not reacting in time. They did not play around once you were clearly able to handle yourself on the mat, which meant being a good uke as you so correctly point out. That took some people years. To be fair to their process, it's that someone is going to put you on the ground, so step 1 is be able to take the fall without literally breaking your neck. As you mention with Karate, if you block poorly, you get hit -- so do the block right! For Aikido you might dislocate a shoulder (seen it happen), which is higher risk and maybe not higher reward. And ends up making some people better uke than nagi, so you're just a super excellent ragdoll with 2 mediocre attacks? OK...

The more philosophical third dojo I ended up at was like some fancy boys club with sticks. Some days I wouldn't even build up a sweat after an hour on the mat, which seems like not a fair trade for how crunchy my knees are and I'm basically doing standing and swari waza version of rich lady yoga.

As for Qi, I'm with you on this. Directed life force energy is a thing. Intent plays a huge role in so many of our non-physical world, it stands to reason that if someone can hone their intent in terms of their physical body as well, there's something there. Follow your gut.

 

[HoldAll]

Towards a new model of martial arts energies

I haven’t made up my mind completely yet whether martial arts energies in the occult sense do in fact exist or whether ‘energy’ in this context is just a metaphor for psychological processes but my hunch here is that the energies of two persons fighting aren’t antagonistic and don’t cancel each other out; military historians will sometimes use the expression ‘

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’ to describe the chaos of battle and the confusion warfare is wont to cause, and I think something like that happens in fights - it’s not MY energy vs. YOUR energy but rather an intermixture that has no bearing on the outcome of a given combative confrontation. On the surface of course, all fights are conflicts ending in victories, defeats, or draws, but it seems to me that it’s not so clear-cut underneath.

A brief word about the so-called ‘subtle body’: I don’t believe in it, and it will have no place in my emerging new model of martial arts energies either. In my mind, Mme. Blavatsky borrowed an ancient Eastern concept, put it through her Victorian-era fantasist wringer and used the resulting mess mainly to perpetuate the traditional Western disdain for human physicality. Martial arts, however, are about flesh, blood and bones, and while the mind may influence the outcome of fights to a certain extent, it’s the physical body that executes defensive and offensive techniques, not the astral, causal, or buddhic one, or whichever theosophical lasagna layers you happen to believe in.

You may have heard the expression ‘locked in combat’, and that’s what competitive fighting feels like: you and your opponent are somehow umbilically connected. You’re standing toe to toe with that person as if tied together with an invisible rope, and this is why I think that some sort energetic entanglement will arise during fights instead of a head-on collision of two opposing forces. Accordingly, the martial arts energies generated by two fighters may look something like this:

That’s a

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, not an artist’s impression of ground-fighting! *lol

As opposed to movie fiction and WWF wrestling, there are no good guys and no bad guys in competitive fights, and your opponent has just the same right to win as you do; whether you or him/her are the more virtuous person is irrelevant here. For the referee and the corner judges in the elimination rounds of a karate tournament, you’re just this guy with the blue fist & foot protectors and the blue belt on while the other one will wear the same outfit in red - which doesn’t symbolise anything, it’s just the regulation colour code to better tell competitors apart (it used to be white and red in karate, in judo it’s white and blue, same difference). The only person knowing your name will be the record keeper sitting at the mat-side table but for all the other mat officials, you’re just Mr. Blue No. 98, no one special. It won’t be about avenging past slights, rescuing your girlfriend, stopping a dastardly villain in his tracks or some such action movie crap, it will be about patiently advancing through the rounds and hopefully making it to the semifinals and finals.

When you look beneath the surface and study the emotions of two fighters, you won’t find anything in the way of hatred or even animosity, just combative spirit. Like or dislike doesn’t come to it, which is again why I’m proposing a synergistic rather than an antagonistic relationship here. In my opinion, martial arts energies are generated by practising, sparring, or competing, they don’t independently hover somewhere in the ether where they can be ‚harnessed‘, ‚tapped‘ or syphoned off by couch potato occultist, they aren’t even a discrete part of your energetic make-up at all - all you possess is the ability to bring them forth by means of your own physical efforts.

I don’t believe for a moment that subtle energies are capable of having

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on fighters; that’s just another wet dream of out-of-shape NewAgers, gamers, and armchair occultists. In the more sensationalist books about the internal martial arts, you can frequently see artwork showing a

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, supposedly rendering him impervious to all kinds of punches and kicks. Shaolin monks are ostensibly capable of performing all kinds of astounding feats thanks to their qi, like breaking iron bars with their foreheads or balancing on spear tips. Only… what about the grappling arts like wrestling, judo, or Brazilian jujitsu? How exactly can that mystic qi bubble help you when you’re desperately trying to fight off a choke or an arm bar?

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What I’d like to suggest in this Journal is a new model of martial arts energies where the gross and the subtle don’t belong to separate realms but instead interpenetrate each other, much like in the Calabi-Yau manifold diagram shown above, so that no clear distinction between body and mind or the energies of two competitors fighting will be possible. In my personal understanding, (external) martial arts energies are direct expressions of the raw human lifeforce and lead to a state of heightened awareness unattainable through internal martial arts like tai chi or bagua which, on a purely physiological level, stimulate different hormone glands and therefore will result in a different state of mind in practitioners. External martial arts energies are exhilarating, not soothing; they make you feel more alive (much like sexual energies!), reminding you how great it is to have a body and what a source of joy and ecstasy it can be.

I think I may be on to something here.

 

[HoldAll]

Intent & Focus

If you reached out with your outstretched arm in front of you, it could be interpreted as a flowing block (nagashi uke), a spear hand (nukite) to the face, grabbing somebody by the hair - or reaching into a cupboard for a fresh plate; no martial arts energy whatsover will be generated in the latter case. According to the model I have in mind, martial arts energy can only arise if there is a clear intent to execute a certain move as a martial arts technique. When you arrive at home with your hands full of grocery bags and close the door with your foot, its movement may be similar to a sweep or trip but again, no martial arts energy will be generated since you don’t regard the open door as a training tool - which you can, and in such a case you’re in fact practising your martial art (I sometimes amuse myself by closing open drawers with my feet but I’m not very serious about it).

There aren’t any secret techniques in the martial arts. The human body is only capable of performing so many physical movements, and there are only so many body parts that can be used defensively or offensively, but what sometimes happened in the early days of MMA was that somebody would pull a technique from relative obscurity and use it to the surprise of his opponent, e.g. foot stomps (= fumikomi, already heian sandan, the third shotokan beginner kata, later in bassai dai, etc.), or shoulder shrugs to the underside chin during tight clinches but by now, every kind of punch, kick, lock, or choke anatomically possible has been tried, tested, and discarded if not effective. Shrugging your shoulders because you don’t know or care about something is different in intent than ramming one of them into your bear-hugging opponent’s jaw.

Similarly, when you kick out in front of you as a part of an aerobics routine or a dance choreography, it won’t count as a martial arts technique; the ability to throw their legs admirably high in the air doesn’t make the famous

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martial artists, after all. The difference here is combative intent as well as focus which in martial arts means willing your feet to hit a specific spot with maximum force.

The first kick you’ll be taught as a beginner in karate is the

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to the midsection / mae geri keage chudan / (called pointera in capoeira but it’s hardly ever used there); it’s the easiest kick to learn but the most difficult to apply since it has a rather short range and can be easily caught or dodged because of its fixed trajectory. As a result, you seldom see it used in karate point-fighting nowadays but when it scores in MMA, it can have a devastating effect because the whole power of your opponent’s leg will be concentrated into a very small spot, i.e. the ball of the foot, making you feel like you’ve been hit with a blunt spear tip.

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According to old karate lore, the focus of your punch or linear kick should lie about an inch below the surface of your opponent’s skin - anything less won’t be effective, anything more would just result in a push. Of course it’s different when clomping up and down the dojo and practising without a partner; when I was a beginner, I thought I had to imagine an opponent in front of me but the mental effort proved too distracting, until an instructor told us to focus on a spot on the opposite wall instead, which was much better, also for kata practice - that’s where you get that typical faraway stare from kata experts at karate tournament.

In my opinion, focus is another indispensable prerequisite for martial arts energies to arise, not in a geometric one-inch-below-the-skin sense but within the meaning of

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(decisiveness; fighting spirit). You’re not throwing your legs in the air like you just don’t care, you’re aiming at a specific point or body area and intend to bring maximum physical power to bear on it, whether you’re defending, attacking, or attempting to throw someone. It’s nothing mysterious, everybody is accustomed to concentrate when faced with a difficult and/or important task. In his later, less accessible books, Carlos Castaneda makes a huge production of the concept of ‚intent‘ in his spiritual system but it’s very simple in martial arts - you want something to happen and do it, period. The difficulty lies in achieving it though, and willpower alone won’t always be the deciding factor; as a matter of fact, a strong will can even become an obstacle just like an inflexible mind but that’s beside the point, and I don’t want to start philosophising here.

Next up will probably be the question of how to quantify and qualify martial arts energies according to my new model. How can a maximum amount of such energies be produced by a single practitioner? Do the energies of champions have any noticeable superior qualities? What about the striking vs. the grappling arts?