Training – From the desk of Adam Thomas

Don’t force the unenforceable

I am a big fan of Kung Fu movies.

One of the major relationships in kung fu movies is the connection between student and teacher. My favorite part of that relationship is the training montage.

The training montage is where the young and rambunctious student learns all the cool moves you see the master do in the beginning. After a few minutes, the student becomes a fighting machine.

There is always one part of the montage that bothered me. The movie shows the student in “perfect meditation.” Nothing bothers him. After running a few miles, every vice that got to him before his training is now ineffective.

He somehow mastered his urges. He has turned into a robot. A high-flying Kung Fu robot.

The reason it didn’t sit well with me is that when I try to fight my urges, I never become a high-flying kung-fu robot. I don’t even become a low flying kung-fu robot.

I just lose.

After a few days of me resisting, the urge comes back and does so with a vengeance.

You can’t destroy energy. That is the first law of thermodynamics. By resisting the urge, you are loading the urge into a slingshot to hit you square in the face.

What can you do? Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Before then, if you never watched Drunken Master, do yourself a favor, and catch it where you can.

Habit and Training

Trying to reach zen, from all that I have read, is an arduous process. It requires tireless practice, supreme dedication, and drive.

My latest read – Zen in the Art of Archery left an impression. The subject of the book, the author, is tirelessly working on finding zen in archery, and generally has to throw everything he knew about mastery away to unlock something greater.

While reading, it made me think of two things that are outlined in the book.

1) The main purpose of training is to get back to your own intuition.

This seems to be counter intuitive, but the goal is to get back to yourself. You ultimately have the secrets that work for you. No one else can engage you for your best work.Ultimately the goal of any practice is to reduce latency between you and the action so far that even the tool you use is an extension of your brain.

Ex. The legend of the blind swordsman, where a person, even with no sight, can feel the danger and knowing his faults, mitigate his weakness and concentrate on his strengths.

2) Ritual is important.

One of the things that the master stresses to the author is that you cannot cheat process. The author does once after years of failure(his version of failure was not hitting the target) and is almost expelled. The masters point is that he was thinking of the wrong thing. Mastering the ritual, the habit, will make the target inconsequential.

The ritual, the keys to unlock the best work, gets you where you need to be.

Ex. In the book, the master is blindfolded and hits a target in the dark twice, in the center, splitting the first arrow. His ritual and habits connected him with his weapon and art, and he felt his target. His consciousness led him where he needed to go.