Transformative Martial Arts

Internal martial arts are an interesting way to reap all kinds of benefits to your health, flexibility, strength, focus. They also present a number of challenges.

The first is to find a good teacher since you cannot really learn from books or videos even if they can be a useful aid when used with intelligence and some prior understanding.

The next big challenge is how to put enough time in. To really develop skill you need to put in hours every day, yet most people practise for just a few hours every week. Within internal martial arts there are many areas to develop. There is body alignment and coordination, forms, body conditioning, techniques, drills and meditation.

In a typical hour and a half class to try and cover all of these is likely to skim over the surface. That’s why I get very enthusiastic about teaching weekend seminars and retreats, since it gives the opportunity to get below the surface, to explore and learn more richly.

Traditionally teaching would be very slow. It was expected that students practise a few simple basic exercises for as long as it took to understand and integrate them into the body. This approach still works, however faced with the distractions of modern living it appeals to very few people.

I find the greatest benefit in terms of keeping the training interesting is to offer opportunities to deepen the understanding of specific skills and areas of training. If you spend a period of time going into one aspect of the art, it will tend to carry over into all aspects of the art.

If you work on body structure then this will become apparent in forms and techniques, if you work on meditation for a period then the mental qualities will integrate into other practises.

You can focus to an extremely fine degree and benefit from it. You can focus on the quality of the hands and fingers, the alignment of the head and neck, the quality of the breath or the regard (is that English or French? By regard I mean the way of looking). You can focus on qualities such as heaviness, smoothness, sensitivity, or extension.

All of these can unfold with a richness of valuable insight. If you immerse yourself in what you practise this unfolding develops in its power to fascinate. You can discover a whole world within the simplest movement, boredom disappears and the experience of time opens beyond the stricture of wristwatches, minutes, hours and years.

If you deepen one aspect of your training for a period of time you will find it easier to return to the quality that you found when you concentrated on it. It is as if you create a sign posted route back to the state or skill through the meandering pathways of your nervous system.

Part of the job of the teacher is to recognise which aspects of the training a student will most benefit from practising. Sometimes your whole practise can be transformed through the understanding that comes through focus on a single element.

As a student it is your responsibility to do this practise yourself and outside of class. Follow the instructions and leads of your teacher, and also explore on your own initiative. Then you can bring what you learn back to the class as questions, and in your body as skill that contributes to the evolution of everyone that you practise with.

So whether you choose to go on seminars, retreats and intensives, or just decide to take some extra time to only focus on one aspect of your training. Take a single movement, principle, or quality and develop for as long and deeply as you can. That way when you have just a couple of minutes to practise (and two minute practises will be a topic that I address soon) you can recover those qualities quickly.

Once you stand up from your computer what will you focus on first?