Garbage in, garbage out. Putting positive thoughts in your memory bank, leads to mental richness. You didn’t hear O’Sensei talk about how life was hell and we need Aikido to fight our way through it taking no prisoners. Although, come to think of it, he probably could have made a fortune developing an internet marketing campaign around that concept looking around at some of the shit they’re selling right now in internetland. Can you imagine the ad of him in a warehouse that’s been transformed into a gym wearing board shorts with a couple muscle cars in the background wearing a muscle shirt with his arms crossed saying, “If you follow my 7 steps, you too can be a fighting machine, bro”
There are martial arts out there whose underlying philosophy draws on these garbage mental and spiritual bank balances:
Scared to do something? Well, that’s not very Aiki now, is it? Some of us try visualizing. Here’s the technique: Sit there on your couch and visualize whatever it is you’re scared of, and see yourself doing it, successfully, over and over. Do this until you’re nice and comfy and the fear goes away. Then you get up to do it and… bitch out. Why does this happen? Because the nice little visualization you had on your comfy couch was a whole lot nicer and fuzzier than the reality of the situation. The reality has teeth. The visualization didn’t. Damn.
It’s that initial fear that is the bugger. I’m of the opinion that action is the only thing to cure your fear. It took me 28 years to have the cajones to be able to do a front flip off of the diving board. I remember that moment. Nobody else thought it was that big of a deal, but I did. All throughout childhood my friends did flip after flip after flippity flip into the pool. I’d end up doing a half-assed back flop and bail out at the last second. I stopped trying for years. One day, a few years ago, I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I just got up and… Did it. Ever since then, it’s been a piece of cake. I know, it’s nothing big, but it illustrates the point. Now if I could just learn how to swim.
Scared of taking that first highfall in training? Take a deep breath, focus, take some advice from your peers, and do it. Don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s only as big of a deal as you make of it. Once you get over the initial fear, visualization can help refine and streamline whatever it is you were scared of and help you get better at it. Before that… Jump.
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I absolutely love books like this. I read it when it came out last winter and have read it several times since. It’s free from Amazon (click on the picture above) and is absolutely incredible.
In The Flinch, Julien Smith (check out his blog here) calls you out. He calls you out for flinching. Read the book to find out more about what exactly the Flinch is, but what I’ll say here is that this book forever changed the way I look at fear. Yes, I can still be a chicken shit, but hopefully less so, much thanks to The Flinch (taking the book’s advice, I have been taking cold showers for a few weeks to combat my Flinch…never comfortable).
The Flinch is so very Aikido. You’ll see. If you’re planning on testing for your next rank in Aikido or any other art, read it. If you feel like you’re plateauing at any venture right now, read it. If mediocrity and boredom are washing you away and you feel like you’ve lost control, read it. If you’re a perfect individual with no problems… Still read it. It’s a bold, colorful, to the point call to action that we all need. Weighing in at only 131 pages, you can read it in an afternoon or two and I think you’ll find it to be a refreshing boost of Aiki-powered fear bashing which we all could use.
…incredible interview by Eagle DeBotton. Miles Kessler is a good friend of my teacher, Vince Salvatore. He’s doing amazing things in Tel Aviv right now at the Integral Dojo, which he founded. You can find out more about him here. Many, many great points covered in this interview including, but not limited to:
- Unless a shift in perspective takes place, it isn’t Aikido…
- Aikido happens in relationship…
- The natural occurrence of conflict between people who, if not self-aware, results in a chain of action/reaction. We play with this relationship in training.
- Aikido is Jazz. You can’t predict it nor keep it in a box.
So glad to see him online more and more. Looking forward to much more in the near future.
There’s so much negative shit out there in internet land that, if you want to find it, you will. The news delivers stories as negative and gloomy as the status quo will take. The two forces of motivation behind all human behavior are the need to avoid pain and the desire to gain pleasure. People will do more to avoid pain than they’ll do to gain pleasure. Media experts know this.
I’m not sure if our brains were designed to take in that much negative info all at once. Maybe we were designed to be able to handle negative shit that happened in our own homes, communities, etc., but here in the information age, we know in twenty seconds when a bomb goes off half way around the world. We see it and we localize it. Fear sets in and we live our lives in an anxious, nervous, frightened trance. It’s so easy to get consumed by it.
In Aikido practice, my teacher always says to focus on principles. Principles are what’s important. With that in mind, it’s great to have a personal philosophy and moral base of principles that serves as a compass, if you will, helping with wading in the waters of information. Without it, you’ll be lost, swayed by public opinion. Until you have this, research and study may be necessary. However, if you have a solid moral, philosophical base, you can work with whatever information comes your way. You can believe it, exclude it, criticize it, or do something to try and fix it. Once this moral compass is in place, you don’t need to go looking for negative information. Trust me, plenty of it will come your way without searching for it. This doesn’t mean to close your eyes and hide from it either. It kinda boils down to just a few questions:
- Is this information fo’ real? A lot of it isn’t. A lot of it is. Check the sources. If it’s not, drop it and move on with your life. If it is real, the next question is:
- Is it worth doing something about? If you’re not going to do anything about it, drop it and move on with your life. Sitting there bitching to people about it without any plan of action will not change anything (plus, no matter how interested they act, people get sick of hearing you rant after a while). If you do determine it’s something you want to do something about, the next question is:
- What can you do? If you can do something about it… Do it. Without getting arrested. That simple. Write the email, make the phone call, start the movement, support who you want to support, discredit who you want to discredit, whatever. Do it. Get it done. Then, move on with your life.
I think the key to this post is, control the information, don’t let it control you. Live your life. Question things. Be skeptical. But don’t get consumed by negativity. Take care of yourself, your family, and your close friends and community. Make your art. See beauty. Be curious. There will always be people out there who will try to screw other people over en masse. Always. Be aware of them, make others aware of them, don’t be a victim, but don’t let them control your state of mind.
I wrote a post a while back about, what I called, the snail brain. I kind of threw the post together after the idea hit me, and I’ve been thinking of it ever since trying to clarify my thoughts on it. What I claim it is, is the phenomena where you override your lizard brain’s survival instincts when you should really be listening to it. I think us humans are unique in doing this. I love studying conflict and fear, and my research lead me to Gavin DeBecker, one of the world’s leading experts on security. This guy owns a firm that provides security to Supreme Court justices, past Presidents, many of the world’s most famous celebrities, and other high profile individuals. His firm also provides a lot of protection to the CIA. You know you’re a bad ass when your company guards the CIA. Yeah, the ones who kill and assassinate people around the world daily. He guards THEM. Predicting violent behavior and dealing with fear is what he does for a living, and he’s the best. Anyways, I was watching some of his interviews when I stumbled on the video below. Especially, check out the segment of the video around the 3:50 mark where he talks about the woman getting on the elevator:
What he describes is what I was trying to say about the snail brain. This woman got a terrible feeling about the sketchy looking guy on the elevator. In her gut, she knew that getting in the elevator with that man was probably not a great idea. But, she overrode it, and decided to get into the soundproof, steel cage with him anyways. As DeBecker states in the video, no other animal in the world would do that.
My research about DeBecker carried me to this video below. This is a first, and hopefully a last, on AikiLiving, but… brace yourself… it’s an Oprah interview with him. Yep, I couldn’t resist, because the story he tells explains this point even further:
Kelly, in the story, overrode her survival instincts several times and it lead to her being raped. Following that horrendous event, though, the one time she listened to those instincts saved her life. As much as I bash on the lizard brain, it does have a purpose. Fear could be a gift. Not anxiety, but fear. In the first video, DeBecker explains how ridiculous anxiety is and how it’s affected our culture. We’re a culture based on fear, really, and most of it is not necessary. There are times, however, when listening to your survival instincts could save your life.
Gavin DeBecker is an interesting dude, for sure. He has some books out about fear and having the awareness necessary to prevent dangerous situations from happening. He also has several interviews online that I highly recommend. Watching that whole old-school Primetime interview is worth it too.
I just reached over to my calendar and slashed off another day. It’s something I do every day so I remember what day it is, because I never do, but this time was different. Usually, it’s just a ritual I go through. Mark off the day. Woohoo! Another day done, bring on the next! No big deal. Today, it felt like I killed a part of myself when slashing that box. That little box that I so often half-mindedly mark off showed its true colors to me. It screamed at me. Usually it stays quiet as I slash, and the next box presents itself to me in all of its blank glory waiting to be slashed tomorrow. Today, though. Today I realized, at my core, that the blank box I just slashed signifies a day of my life I’ll never get back. That box is dead now, never to return. How many moments did I waste in that day which I seemingly marked off in a fraction of a second, and thinking back, seemed to fly by in reality even faster than that? Waste on indecision, on repetition, on sacrificing myself for others’ opinions, on monotony, on negativity, on anger, on emptiness, on passiveness, on fear? I must be getting older or something, I dunno. Not sure how this relates to Aiki, but I know it does. This story’s been told a million times. Time flies. How we spend it matters. Spend it well.
I’ve come to the conclusion that evil can only exist because good people have surrendered themselves from acting against it, tricking themselves into believing they’re wrong. If every reasonable person in the world didn’t care what bad people thought of them, and had the confidence to speak up and act against it, we’d be way better off.
What inspired me to write this is when my wife came home the other day from a trade show she was working at with her organization. There were a lot of kids and parents attending. She came home absolutely livid at what she witnessed there. There were a few different scenarios she told me about, but I’ll only go into detail about one in particular:
Apparently, there was a grandmother with a leash on her grandkid. GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY! NEED I SAY MORE? Deep breath… Gotta finish the story… Okay, so, she was ‘walking’ this kid and, of course, not paying attention. The kid was leaning forward with all his force trying to run up to a booth that he probably thought was intriguing, you guessed it, his grandmother let go of the leash, and the kid fell flat on his face. Not showing any concern for her kid, the grandmother showed the body language of extreme disgust for her grandkid. I mean, how dare he embarrass her by falling like that, right? To add insult to injury, the kids’ mother, who was walking behind grandma, hoddled up, picked the kid up BY THE LEASH suspending the kid in mid air, and drug the kid along, kicking and screaming. My wife felt horrible for not saying something. She did what I probably would have done too. She stood there, perplexed, not even knowing how to mentally process this gross public display of utter dysfunction.
As I grow older, I see how many problems come from horrible parenting. I will say, I’m not a parent, I’m sure it’s easier said than done, and I won’t go into it too much here. The point is, this kind of behavior is plain wrong. I don’t care who you are. My wife would have been fully justified in saying something. But then there’s the risk of causing a scene, or the parent getting hostile, or whatever. As I said, I probably would have done the same thing in the absurdity of the moment and stood there in disgust with my mouth open in disbelief while not saying anything. Why, though?!!
I am pointing out a huge flaw in good people. We need to be a little more outspoken. There are way too many good people in the world for there to be so many atrocities in it. If every good person called crappy people out on their crappiness, with full confidence and strength, I think the world would be so much better off.
I’m not saying people should have their noses where they don’t belong. I’m not saying we need to interfere with other’s lives in every way, instilling our ‘righteousness’ in them. People who do things like that usually seek out faults in others and are vocal about them from a place of incredible insecurity and hatred. In fact, do-gooders like this who nitpick and interfere in the personal lives of others should be called out on their obnoxiousness. But there’s certain things that are not to be tolerated. I don’t know how to define it in words, but I think we just know when that line has been crossed.
It’s all about conflict, isn’t it? Most reasonable people would rather live simple lives without it. I’m with them. Honestly, though, I think reasonable people need to be empowered to stand in their own strength and just say ‘no’ to certain things. Good people care way too much about what bad people think about them.
That’s where aiki comes in (yep, finally got to it). It’s HOW we handle the situation that counts. How do we do it to where it leads to the best outcome? Irrational people can be really nasty. When cornered, they have the tendency to pull out all the stops and can render your positive resistance invalid by ad hominem attacks, personal insults, witty statements, etc. That’s why we need to know how to say what we say when we school them in front of their friends. It takes clarity of purpose and absolute confidence to fight for good. It takes rational logic and knowing where and when to apply pressure. Taking personal responsibility for the world around us is a huge step in the fight against crappy people.
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So, I’ve written about the lizard brain before, along with a host of others. I’m a bit obsessed with it, actually. I love studying people, and I think it’s so interesting to see how people react to things. Anyways, the lizard brain explains a lot about the human condition. BUT (dramatic pause) there’s yet another brain we have to deal with, people. Yep, I’m not sure what to call it yet, but maybe the ‘snail brain’ would be best. Allow me to explain.
So, something disconcerting happens, we’re stressed, threatened, angry, or whatever the case may be. We have two distinctions to make here:
- Scenario A: Am I facing ‘fake’ fear (speaking in front of people, having that difficult but necessary conversation, etc.)? Or….
- Scenario B: Am I facing immediate danger (a midget coming at me with a machete, a shark, a whitetail deer, an angry bird, the IRS, etc.)?
Once we designate this, if what we’re facing is ‘fake fear’, the answer is obvious. Do what the lizard brain tells you NOT to do. Get up there and speak, have that uncomfy conversation, work on those abs, don’t hit that snooze button AGAIN, put the calzone down, whatever. Hear it out, do the opposite, and you win.
The SNAIL BRAIN comes into play during scenario B. When we’re actually threatened with immediate danger, our lizard brain is activated. We know it immediately. We’re taken over by a kind of force that makes our heart beat faster, zooms our sight into tunnel vision, and clenches our fists. We’re in survival mode, baby! HOWEVER, and here’s the kicker, the question I ask is if the lizard brain is so ‘automatic’, why do we usually lock up, slow down, and freeze rather than ‘automatically’ move into appropriate action? It’s like the lizard brain sets us into survival mode, which is good in this case, and then this snail brain (which is like the brain WITHIN the lizard brain) activates and we are relegated to the state of a helpless… well… snail. We can’t think, we can’t act, all we can do is stop and slither around.
Maybe the lizard brain isn’t so bad in this case? Maybe it’s getting a bad rap? Maybe it takes clarity of mind to not only ignore it, as in Scenario A, but to actually LISTEN TO IT and do what it says here in Scenario B? To properly align and unify with whatever energy you happen to be dealing with, appropriately, is aiki. Achieve perfect aiki. Squash the snail. Control your lizard. Be well.
I left something out of my last post which I took from the Dan Messisco seminar that I attended a couple weeks back. During the warm ups for the class, Dan had us do rolls very slowly and had us concentrate on having complete control of our bodies throughout the whole movement. Usually during falls, we let momentum take over. Only problem with that is that we’re then at the mercy of the momentum. It’s really a great practice to feel like you’re consciously controlling every fraction of movement to the point where you can change or reverse direction at any time (it’s also a great workout for your lower body and core). During the training, Dan took it even farther to perform each technique with independent movement. He went on to explain that this was a good example of grace. Grace is apparent in a great athlete or dancer where they are living under the same laws of nature as all of us, but they move through the world, from what it seems, independent of those laws. They are obviously not independent of them (this would be impossible, of course), but are actually in absolute harmony with these laws and have tested and pushed the limits of just how much control they actually have within the boundaries of them, and are not at the mercy of them. By working on complete body awareness, Aikido can be a great practice for this.
Think of it this way. Super basic. Go find a table. Rest your hand on the table and fully relax your arm and hand. Now, if someone were to come along and kick that table out from underneath your hand, you’d lose control of your hand and arm and it would fall. Now rest your hand on the table and have the awareness of that action being independent of the table. Your hand is where it is because you want it to be and if the table was kicked out, your hand and arm would remain in the same position. You can practice this when walking. At any moment of any step, you should have complete control and be able to change direction or stop completely. Of course, there is only so much ‘control’ we can have over our bodies since they do have to conform with these laws of nature (momentum, gravity, inertia, etc), but we are way too dependent of them and controlled by them. Especially with ukemi, when we’re taking falls, we get chucked around and lose control completely. We forget we’re still doing Aikido. That changes when we consciously take control of our movement even when taking fast ukemi. I noticed it made my Aikido super balanced and strong when training with this intention. It’s, of course, slow at first. But as you train in this way, I can imagine, if you get really fast at this, your Aikido would be insane. I can’t wait to start playing with this. Our dojo is very basics focused, and I think it would be very powerful to apply this concept to the basics.
We can also take this into incredibly stressful situations in our day to day lives. It’s easy to get caught up in the inertia of the conversation and get swept away by the intensity of the moment, losing ourselves completely. I experienced this recently when dealing with a difficult customer service ‘situation’ at work where my emotions were totally commanding what I was saying. It’s the same feeling as taking ukemi for someone who is just chucking you at a point that’s just way out of your comfort zone. But I stopped and brought awareness back to my body. Here I am, right here. I can move, think, talk, and act completely independent of this abnoxious asshole on the phone right now. He was controlling my mind, dog-gone it! (Yep, I think ‘dog-gone it’ was the term I used too). Now I’m in complete control. I can now take this conversation wherever I want and am not at the whim of his next reptilian brain induced vocal spasm. Yippee! Be independent. Take control. Now.
