Power found between two trees

[Edit: Started writing this January last year]

There is a pair of old trees in Antwerp. Walking from one to the other I get stronger, faster, happier.

I've been trying to figure out how I can be a better teacher.

In college, we had this really helpful and organised teacher, he was tremendously dedicated to his craft; wonderful command of engineering mathematics. His notes and lectures laid it all out with superb clarity; matter-of-fact. But when it came down to exam and study time - it was all like grasping water; the stuff was hard to reproduce and apply. He made me feel it was easy; "All you have to do, folks, is..." But it needed more work. He made us feel safe and secure with his notes and lectures. Complacent.

Unintentionally unsuccessful.

In secondary school, we had a mathematics teacher, who was on the other end of the spectrum; she offered little to any sense of security in her classes, to the point that I was the only one out of 12 that did not find a tutor for extra support. Strangely, the end result was that the class did spectacularly as a whole; Bs and As all round. In a Machiavellian way, she created a circumstance where her students could excel.

Unintentionally successful.

Risk Compensation - a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected. Not enough perceived risk and we'll stagnate, too much and we'll flounder.

Where's that middle ground? Spoonfeeding; cast adrift..

During his workshop two years ago at Elite Athletes,  Tom Weksler talked about his approach to teaching floor-work and acrobatics; he wanted us to get a feel for moving around down there, for us to get a grasp the motor principles at play. He was resigned to the fact that he had to teach us a pattern of moves because he had found it the best way to learn lessons. But he invited us to figure out what the movement and pattern illustrated.

I had my first session with my kung fu student this evening, since the Fighting Monkey Intensive in Athens.

Fascinating, rich, thought-consuming and frustrating. It reminded me of the Buddhist adage:

"When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him."

Jozef and Linda spent 5 days showing us a full spectrum of concepts: stillness, rhythm, collaboration, situational movement instead of rote movement. Challenging us to find our own insights from the situations.

So for the coming 2 months I will not give him technical or detail corrections, instead I am going to suggest a quality that a movement or set or exercise cultivates and let him judge and question for himself if he can solve it.

The Form of Father, central in the Fighting Monkey practice, as Jozef pointed out is a set of exercises, a lot of them similar to what they do on soccer pitches every weekend, nothing holy. But the story of the father form is rich. This is 8000 thousand years old, something precious, healing, comprehensive and powerful; it will heal you and more.

My experiences and what I have heard from others that work in embodiment (Mark Walsh, Francis Bryers, Anouk Brack, Paul Linden) is that the body is very porous/sympathetic to the intention/purpose:

If I believe something, the body will do its best to support and cultivate that perception. It's why pharmaceutical companies bend themselves over backwards with double blind studies, to ensure that the patient has no inkling if it is the real pill or the sugar pill they are taking.

At the end of the session, I pointed at two grand stately trees several paces apart. I told him walking between these two trees would make him more powerful. He just has to figure out how that could be true.

Hand Day

People joke about skipping leg day.  But most of us skip "hand day" far more frequently.
The article link got me thinking and probably repeating myself, and definitely repeating others.
Little summary
- Inverse correlation to all risk mortality (5kg drop in the grip test linked to 17% increase in mortality risk)
- decreasing grip strength in elderly linked to cognitive decline
-nearly 20 percent decrease in grip strength [...] in one generation.

The irregular objects we have to manipulate in life aren't as forgiving as a bar and we're not preparing for it.
Ever since Fighting Monkey in Athens last year, I've been spending more time with my hands. And this was further reinforced by Rafe Kelly in the summer (Evolve, Move, Play).
Using clay, playing with the wooden ball, more time on the Chinese pole, more aware of it during partner carries in the circus training, isometric grips and compressions while i walk around or sit.
It is something I intellectually appreciated, but I am only now physically realising how complex the hand is.  All the different joints and structures in the hand mean there are a nigh infinite number of situations to develop strength on dexterity; A pole expert will have a different hand to a climber to a hand-balancer to labourer to a parkour athlete to a judo-ka to a kungfu practitioner, every time slightly different response to requirements.
One of the reasons the bar is so popular is because it's the easiest grip we do and means we can lift more weight or do more reps because we've removed the hand as a weak point. We avoid learning how to selectively apply force in the palm, fingers and wrist; am I pinching, poking, grabbing, enveloping, holding, "sticking", smashing, etc.
The consequence is that the hand doesn't develop a proportionate capacity to the rest of the body; an ability to deadlift x3 bodyweight is less relevant when we are trying to carry furniture on our own.

http://m.nautil.us/issue/45/power/raising-the-american-weakling

Elephant features

My student and I have these fantastic conversations as we travel to and from work.

In the main, we muse and ponder philosophy, kung-fu, meditation/awareness and embodiment; and the practicalities thereof in so far as they fit and don't fit in modern daily life.

At the certainty, or at least at the risk, of hubris, they remind me of classical philosophical dialogues or parables... or maybe a web-comc (I'm looking at you, dinosaur comics):

1. We're always taking the same path,  (heading towards the rising sun or the setting sun) & arrangement (side-by- side in the car)
2. Sometimes the above topics are explicitly discussed (“What do you think the relevance of practicing forms is to learning from our reactions at work?”)
3. While other times we happen upon them like an errant euro in the corner of a jacket pocket (“You know, what you just described there reminds me of an outcome from practicing this meditation,…)

More than any other practice/habit I have these days, the dialogues have shaped how I've behaved and trained in the last year... at least as far as my various cognitive biases allow me to assess. They're a touchstone to the qualities I want, moments to reflect on whether I'm moving towards or away from them, discussed with a like-intended (not necessarily like-minded) companion.*

Particularly in 2016, there was a wonderful shift in dynamic; the dialogues, they became much more "dialogue-y"; His own practice and learning were taking root; I couldn't just tell him "like it is" and have him nod sycophantically without digesting it.**

In our dialogue from last week, he was telling me about how he was reframing certain experiences by approaching them  with enthusiasm; converting nervous energy or contraction that arises from "having to do something" into something with clearer direction and momentum; he'd encapsulated a certain way of being in a word that he could take out to help him when necessary. It was great stuff, reminded me of Wendy Palmer's Leadership Embodiment Fundamentals.

I did have one reservation about it though.

Something that I've struggled more than once, when employing a cue to incite a change, is that their ability lead me down the garden path, away from what I wanted. I suggested he try and dig in, develop an introspective snapshot of the state he wants; The introspective snapshot - I described it like being able to paint a landscape, every detail, not just "the trees are green and the sky is blue."***

I remember one time, I was working with a client that wanted to feel more confident. I offered the image of a rockstar. It certainly had the desired effect on me - the image of a charismatic star on stage, radiating, larger than life, etc. But for him...It went terribly, he focused on the status change, that people would be beneath him, "fuck 'em”, developed a sneering attitude and became slightly aggressive. Different strokes for different folks.

The cues, what we've judged to be key features/phenomena of a system - itself a defined and limited piece of the universe - are simply a shorthand for something that people have written, spoken and dreamed about millennia- physical, mechnical, spiritual, biological, physiological, social, sexual, abstract - something that has roots going back to the dawn of life.

But for simplicity's sake I'll reduce it down to a phrase or image. Perfect.

Much like fabled the elephant, if I only know an elephant from grabbing his trunk, my cue for the experience won’t be useful for you if you’re on the other end cupping his testicles.

Our models and stories have their limits.

The danger in a cue, an arbitrary defining feature is not knowing its limits; If you find something that works for you see how far you can lean on it before it breaks; find out how others look at it.

Expect that your knowledge and tricks will one day fail you.

As the goatherd told me in the Sahara ten years:

The world is too big for your philosophy

*******

*He gets dragonball Z and Supernatural references°

**He told me once: after work, he really wanted to sit in silence, that even the sound of the radio got on his nerves. I,  apparently, told him he should leave the radio on and work with that discomfort.  He did this for weeks, essentially self-inflicting what the Geneva convention forbids.. a time later, he told me that he couldn't handle it anymore and had since switched off the radio. I balked at what he had been doing to himself; and told him that sounded like a horrible, masochistic idea; I had no recollection of advising it.

***Full disclosure, I didn’t say that at the time, but while I was writing this post, it came to me and I thought it was worth embellishing.

-------

°...and I suppose a common language in training and observation helps too.