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Guy's Blog

Guy frequently keeps this blog updated with thoughts, challenges, interviews and more!

Tag: learning

this is not from the Assalti, but it is from the lovely 1568 edition of Marozzo.
this is not from the Assalti, but it is from the lovely 1568 edition of Marozzo.

Forms have been at the heart of martial arts practice since at least as far back as the Pyrriche war dances of ancient Greece, and documented in detail as early as 1536, in Achille Marozzo’s assalti in his monumental work L’Arte dell’Armi. I learned my first form while doing karate aged about 11, and have been a huge fan of them ever since. Forms can provide a system-summary zip-file of techniques and tactics, a means to acquire the key movement aesthetic of a style, and a varied and interesting basis for all other training. (For more about forms and how to use them, see my free article on the subject here; this post is just about memorising them.)

But they can be hell to memorise. Indeed, committing a form to memory is often the primary challenge a student faces when encountering forms for the first time. The recent visit of Roberto Laura to my salle to teach a weekend seminar on traditional (i.e. living tradition) Italian knife systems brought this into focus; at least one of the styles he taught uses set forms as the starting point for teaching the Art. We covered the first form on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday I had no trouble picking up the second form in about half an hour. It lives in my head now, and can be practised at any time.

Roberto in action
Roberto in action

Learning forms is a skill in itself, and having been taught perhaps 20 of them over the last 20 years, I have a system for picking them up relatively quickly and keeping them.Watching my beginners struggle to pick up their first form, and hearing their groans of dismay when they hear that we are updating it with some major changes, I thought I’d set down here my method for rapid form memorisation.

1) I break it into chunks. In the beginning, especially if the system itself is new to me, I don’t even try to keep the whole thing in memory. Instead, I have a number of separate little forms which together make up the whole. This is much, much, easier than trying to keep the pattern of the whole thing, and is easier still if the actual techniques or actions are thoroughly familiar, which is why I teach form after applications, not before.

2) I name each chunk creatively: this bit is “fighting ten trolls while avoiding the cat vomit”. This bit is “a helicopter rescuing Hello Kitty from a volcano”. And so on. There is no need to tell anyone what your names for these steps are; just make them memorable. Many forms have specific names for their chunks; such as “fair ladies weave shuttles” in T’ai Chi Chuan, or “colpo di villano” in our Syllabus form, or “tre passi in chiuso” in the second knife form that Roberto showed me. I incorporate these in my chunk naming if possible, if not, I apply them after the form is in memory.

3) I break up my repetitions over the course of a day, and over several days. Never more than about 10 minutes for each session, and usually much less. The key skill I am working on is retrieving the form from memory, not actually practising the form itself.

4) I use any non-training time to walk through the chunks in my head. Such as when waiting for a bus. This is often accompanied by little hand or foot motions, which can make others around me a tad nervous of the scary weirdo, but as I’ve said before, nobody can reasonably expect me to be normal.

5) During form training time, I go through the form (or as much of it as I know) as a whole, then separately in chunks, then work on the trickiest bits in isolation, then put it all together again. At any one time, I am only working on one thing, one aspect of the form, such as: a particular step, or getting every application right, or the movement aesthetic, or indeed remembering the form as a whole. Of course, once the form is in memory, you don’t need to practise memorising it any more, and can focus only on execution.

6) If the form is not from an art I am currently practising, I review it once a month or so; if it is still fluent, I run it a few times and move on; if not, then I work it back up from memory, and go over it again at least a couple of times in the following week.

I have certainly forgotten more forms than most of my students will ever learn because if I definitively quit an art, I drop the forms from my practice altogether. In three months they are moth-eaten; in six months they are gone. So be warned that once you have a form in memory, you use it or lose it. This is why I am planning on writing the Advanced longsword book (follow-up to my current The Medieval Longsword) using our Syllabus form as its base. Having it in writing and on video can easily refresh the memory, even if circumstances have conspired to prevent you from even thinking the form through every now and then.

One of the most irritating things an instructor can do is come along and correct a detail of technique when I’m working on memorising the form. It’s inevitable that there will be some slippage in execution when my focus is on the overall pattern. Once the form is down in memory, or I’m working on technical execution, then yes, such interruptions are necessary. This is why I tend to leave students who are learning a form alone until they clearly get stuck, unless they are repeating an error that matters to what they are doing; such as if they have steps out of order while working on memorising the form, or when they are getting a step wrong in one application that leaves them with the wrong foot forwards for the next one. But this is a tricky judgement call, which is why I almost always ask them what they are working on, before offering a correction.

So if you see me waving a pen around, or even a knife, and jumping about a bit, I'm probably keeping last weekend's material, and two spiffy new forms, alive in my head. No cause for alarm!

One of the most destructive forces in the world we live in is the “talent” mindset. I mean that literally. It underlies not only millions of minor miseries, but also the core of human evil.

In short, if you believe in innate talent, you believe that some people are inherently better than others. It is a short step from there to believing that some people are therefore subhuman. And we all know where that leads.

The stimulus for this blogpost was reading Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, on the recommendation of my friend Devon Boorman. In short, her work in psychology has demonstrated that belief in fixed traits leads to the “fixed mindset” which creates all sorts of problems, which are solvable by switching to a “growth mindset”, a belief that things can be learned. Go read the book. The bit that struck a chord in me, and literally woke me up to what went wrong when I was growing up, was where she wrote that, for “talented” kids, effort equals failure. And that is exactly the problem I had growing up. I could not work at anything, anything at all, because if it did not come easily, then it threatened my fundamental identity. Because only duffers have to try. So I only ever did the things that came easy, and shied away from anything that demanded actual work.

I hope the utter foolishness of this is apparent to all my readers.

I was a star pupil at school. Clever as hell and everyone knew it. I got all the way up to University entrance without ever once revising for an exam or doing a stroke of work beyond the essays or homework set by the teachers. I was a shoo-in for Cambridge, and had been told so from the beginning. My younger sister (every bit as clever as me but actually industrious with it, a year younger but in the same academic year) and I both applied. She got in. I didn’t. I was absolutely furious. I had been betrayed. I was supposed to be super-talented. But Cambridge, I imagine, could spot a dilettante when they saw one and didn’t need one more arrogant and entitled little shit clogging up their colleges. I got into all my other University choices, and chose Edinburgh (‘cos it’s the best). I then managed to get all the way through University on a combination of luck and blather, but by then, I actually had no choice: I did not know how to study.

Yup, I had no idea of what people actually did in libraries across the campus. I read a lot, and wrote essays when asked (never more than one draft), but I had no idea how to actually work through difficult problems, come up with solutions and test them against the evidence, all that sort of thing. Rhetoric, logic and grammar, yes; I could write a decent argument. But nobody had ever taught me how to work things out, how to wrestle a body of knowledge down from unattainably complex to I know this. It wasn’t thought necessary to teach me this, because I was “clever”. And I would have resisted it anyway, because it was equivalent to failure.

Please note that I don’t blame my teachers or parents for this. It was genuinely believed back in those dark ages that praising kids for their attributes was good for them. It wasn’t until Dweck and others started running actual studies that it was discovered to be so counter-productive. Remember; as late as the sixties, some doctors thought smoking was good for you. In years to come, people will say with similar disbelief “they used to praise attributes not effort!!! How dumb must they have been!” (and yes, they will attribute the mistake to an inherent trait: that is how deep this cancer of the mind runs).

One advantage of all this not-studying was that it left me with lots of time for training martial arts; I was doing T’ai Chi, fencing, karate and kobudo in my first year, and through fencing got into looking at historical fencing sources. But even then, my interpretations of historical sources were all about making it fit with what I already knew (parry quarte with a longsword, anyone?) and not a true interpretation of the source.

So how did I escape from this quagmire?

Swordsmanship.

In the year 2000, thanks to some crazy-ass training shit that I am still not ready to write about, I came to realise that the truth of the art was more important to me than my own identity as a “talented” person. Suddenly, being wrong was not such a problem. My inflated ego got out of the way enough that it didn’t feel like I was risking my very self to admit “I don’t know this” and “this is hard”, and I gradually learned how to study. How to break problems down, how to enjoy a challenge, how to embrace failure as a necessary step on the way towards mastering my field. Now when someone hits me in the face with a sword despite my best efforts to stop them, I am elated by the learning opportunity. Really. The result was a massive increase in the speed of my improvement.

I could dwell on the decades of wasted opportunities, created by my stuckness in the quicksand of the talent mindset. But that would lead to bitterness, not growth. Instead, I relish the feeling of my feet being free to run, to trip and sprawl, and to get up again.

As a teacher, then, I have no interest at all in the apparent level of talent in my beginners. None. I am not looking for someone who will win tournaments for me in a year or two: I am looking for students who will grow in their study of the art, from whatever their starting point. In some respects, those who have most trouble learning in the beginning are the most rewarding to teach, because their development is that much easier to see. I sometimes catch myself giving fixed-mindset-inducing praise, and stab myself in the eye to make it stop (that may be a slight exaggeration). I try instead to praise effort over attainment, and whenever students find the things I give them to do difficult, I tell them that I would not waste their time on something easy. The message: Easy is a waste of your valuable time. Effort is what matters.

This is also why I dislike most sports and other physical pursuits. They tend to require a particular body shape to get to the top, such as in ballet. Got stumpy legs and heavy bones? You will never be a top-level ballerina. Sorry. It makes me furious that someone with short legs will never be picked for the solo, because of the aesthetic of the art. Fuck that for a load of fixed-mindset arsery. Likewise, combat sports with their weight requirements, and so on. In these fields, some fixed attributes (like height in basketball, weight in judo, and so on) actually matter. This is so utterly stupid and anti-growth it makes me boil, and in my eyes makes these pursuits fundamentally less worthy.

Swordsmanship is perfect in this regard. There is no ideal body type. Whatever yours is, you can fight on equal terms, so long as you take your relative sizes into account. Sure, tall people can reach further: but their arms break easier. Wrestling with people who are bigger and stronger is really hard (and therefore a great learning environment). But if you can gouge out their eyes, as Fiore would have us do, then the strength difference is less critical. Think little folk can’t take giants apart? I give you the Gurkhas.

It is true that “natural” talent in certain fields appears to exist. In some sports, there are people who do astoundingly well for a short while, with little effort. But actually, if we were to plot performance over time between the plodder (someone with no actual handicaps, just an apparent lack of talent but who is willing to work hard) and the natural, the graphs look like this:

talentvworkgraph

Depending on the activity, and the degree to which genetics play a part, the point at which the lines cross can be at the beginners course or world championship levels. But cross they will. Early performance is simply no predictor of long-term achievement in any worthwhile field. This has been demonstrated over and over, in books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Matthew Sayed’s Bounce, and Anders Ericsson’s work studying violinists (which spawned the much misunderstood 10,000 hour rule. As this article explains, 10,000 hours of practice is not sufficient, unless it is mindful practice. Plus you also need luck; no career-ending accidents, for example).

That by itself should be enough to get people to drop this talent nonsense, but it goes deeper than that. For some reason probably related to sabre-toothed tigers and an evolutionary quirk in human cognition, we prefer to believe in inherent traits over learned skills. Think of the utter nonsense of inherited power, which is based on the idea that the inherent trait of being descended from the current ruler makes you the best candidate for being the next one. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m a monarchist through and through: there is just no fun in the republican way; but there is no good reason for monarchy to be hereditary.)

So why do people continue to believe in talent? For two fundamental reasons:

1) We tend to praise attributes over effort, and attribute results to innate factors, rather than processes. It’s the outcome over process problem all over again. So kids grow up believing that some people are just naturally gifted. Which is partly true, but wholly inaccurate, and wildly counter-productive.

2) Attributing success to talent gives us an excuse to fail. He did well because he’s a natural; therefore my failure is not my fault. I am just not naturally good at it.

Make no mistake about it, this is toxic thinking.

Praising talent makes less glamorous kids feel like failures before they even try. And it makes the stars associate effort with failure. It is disastrous for both groups. One gives up, and the other cannot work systematically to improve. I know this because it happened to me.

As a parent, I have had many, many, moments of heart-swelling pride in my kids, and a very few moments where I felt I was a good-enough parent. One such moment came while watching a really good ballerina on TV with my younger daughter, who was then four years old. She loves ballet, and was in awe of this ballerina. And she said in tones of wonder:

“She must have practiced really a lot!”

Let me tell you a story about how the Internet is supposed to work. It’s also about collaborating on research, and finding truth.

A short while ago, a student of mine, Kliment Yanev, came up with an excellent theory on the botanical identity of the poisonous dust plant that Fiore calls the titimallo. It was a good theory, and made sense, so I posted it on my blog. So far so good.

Then, on the Book of Face, in the comments under my “go read my blog post about poisonous plants” update, Ilkka Hartikainen pointed out that in this translation of Il Fior di Battaglia, the translators Eleanora Litta and Matt Easton identify the plant as being of the genus Euphorbia.

You’ll note that this is offered with lots of fascinating details, but without any supporting evidence for the actual identification of the plant, so I didn’t do anything about it.

Then, Alexander Petty, one of my Facebook friends, posts this:

While your student’s run-in is no doubt intriguing, we can in fact go back to period manuscripts for reference to and a description of the plant itself. Folio 101 of the Egerton 747, a Latin herbal of Italian origin produced at the beginning of the 14th century, clearly displays “Titimallus.”

titmallus01

Zoom in on the picture posted and you’ll be able to see both the descriptive paragraph on the right(“Titimallus” beginning with the blue “T”), as well as the actual plant labeled as such on the bottom left. I will list a modern transcription at the bottom should you wish to exercise your Latin. Indeed, I have not bothered to look, but I am almost certain that the Sloane 4016, an Italian herbal much closer to Fiore’s work both in region (Lombardy) and time (c. 1440), would contain the same plant as well.  [He goes on to add links to the relevant sources. You can find them all on the FB thread.]

And this:

From there on out, the herb is recorded well enough to our present history. Take for instance this “Tithymalus” from the late 1700's (First word to appear in the description, bottom-left): the illustration basically matches that of the above 14th century page, bottom-left, also titled “Titimallus.” I've super-imposed the two for easy viewing.

titimallus

And finally this:

Then of course, to the present day, this picture matching both of the afore-mentioned illustrations. This particular species is native to North America, but still belongs to the genus Euphorbia, particular species of which Fiore was most likely referring to.

Euphorbia

So, it turns out that a) my first post was wrong; b) Ilkka, Eleanora and Matt were right; c) there is a clear and unambiguous trail of documentary evidence indicating the identity of the titimallo. This is very exciting to us Fiore boffins, not that we would ever go about casting blinding powder out of trick pollaxes, no, not ever, really.

Perhaps more importantly, it also creates a perfect example of how the academic process is supposed to work: you have a theory, you publish it, others respond to it; if there is no contrary evidence presented, do nothing; if there is clear evidence that your theory is wrong, you abandon it for the better theory. And at every stage, you give full credit.

At the same time as this flurry of erudition unprecedented in the annals of Facebook, Kliment (who has no FB account (and never will, don't even mention it) and so couldn't see the thread) had checked with a medieval linguistics friend, who said “uhm, I don't see a way to go from ‘dittamo' to ‘titimalo'” and added “titimalo (sometimes ‘titìmalo', ‘titimàglio', or ‘totomàglio'), derived from Latin tithymallus or tithymalon, ultimately from Greek, is the name of a different plant in modern Italian, one of a few species in genus Euphorbia, apparently known in English as “spurge:s” At which point Kliment emailed me triumphantly that “we were wrong”!

On a slight tangent, Piermarco Terminiello (finder and translator of Giganti's lost 1608 book) added: “The good old “caustic blinding powder in the pollaxe” trick is also mentioned in Paride Del Pozzo’s judicial treatise, so it’s not just a flight of fancy by Fiore.” On a further slight tangent, the FB thread continued with a fascinating (to me at least, and perhaps to you too) discussion by Ilkka and Alexander on the etymology of the word titimallo

Let me point out, in case it isn’t obvious, that if Kliment hadn’t sent me his theory, right now I would still not know the identity of the titimallo. Being wrong is often a necessary stage on the way to being right. Sharing your theories and data are the best way to test them. And the internet makes the entire process unbelievably fast. Perhaps the most startling aspect to this whole adventure has been the fact that Facebook is actually good for something other than stoopid memes!

“The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right name” – Confucius.

In this post I will demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that every wonder of the modern age is attributable to the systematizing of knowledge, pioneered by Fiore dei Liberi. Yes, really.

I have recently returned from a very rewarding trip to Australia, teaching seminars in Sydney for the Stoccata School of Defence, and in Melbourne for the SCA and the Melbourne Swordplay Guild. On one of the rest-days, my kind and gracious host Scott Nimmo took me to the Melbourne Museum, which was a delight, as you can see.

Spiders

(Scott also took these pictures, reproduced here with permission.)
When not running away from spiders, I had my eyes wide open, and came upon this extraordinary exhibit.

The Ordering of Things

Why extraordinary, you ask? Because it is so Fiore. Really. Let me explain.

This display lays out the standard taxonomy of the Kingdom Animalia. 2,500 years ago, give or take, Aristotle divided the living world into Plants and Animals; in the 18th century Carl Linnaeus added minerals to make his famous taxonomy (hence the first question in the game 20 Questions: animal, vegetable or mineral?), and invented the genus-species double-barrelled Latin naming convention still used today. From these first steps, the modern system has developed. For those not familiar with it, or who have forgotten it from their schooldays, it goes: Life, Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. The great advantage of this system is that the classifications can be made based on the natural, visible, characteristics of the organism. (These days, scientists are moving towards a system based on DNA analysis, which is no doubt spiffy and super-accurate, but won’t make any sense to the average 8 year-old, or be any damn use to someone who has no access to a DNA sequencing lab. But I digress.)
Anyhow, this display explains the Linnaean classification system by taking a specific butterfly (the one on the left, a Cairns Birdwing, ornithoptera priamus) and placing it in its Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species, working from the most general to the most, well, specific.

  1. It starts with the Kingdom, Animalia (animals), defined as: “Animals are organisms that lack cell walls and eat other organisms.” And you can see six examples, all from different Phyla.
  2. Next up, the Phylum, Arthropoda (arthropods): Arthropods are animals with an external skeleton, a segmented body and jointed legs.
  3. Then Class, Insecta (insects): insects are arthropods with three body parts, six legs and a pair of antennae.
  4. Then Order: Lepidoptera (butterflies): butterflies and moths are insects with two pairs of wings with overlapping scales.
  5. Then Family: Papilionidae (swallowtails): swallowtails are butterflies that have a spur on their forelegs that they use to clean their antennae.
  6. Then Genus: Ornithoptera (birdwings): birdwings are a type of Swallowtail butterfly. The males have a dense row of elongate hairs on their hindwings.
  7. And finally, species (ornithoptera priamus), the Cairns Birdwing butterfly has a unique combination of colour markings.

And there’s a picture of the esteemed Linnaeus. This is the best representation of this system that I have ever seen.
So far, so very systematic, and this sort of classification is thought of as being the beginnings of a truly scientific approach. But so what?

Here’s the point. Swordsmanship instructors have been using this kind of systematic thought for centuries before the scientists got in on the act!

The earliest scientist to classify plants according to their inherent natural characteristics rather than their (human-imposed) names or uses is generally reckoned to be Andrea Cesalpino, in his 1583 publication De Plantis. (He was Italian, of course. Until, well, the rise of the British Empire, all progress in human affairs had an Italian root. Overlooking a brief century or so in the middle when the French got a look-in. I may be overstating the case slightly.) But swordsmen have been classifying the natural phenomenon of combat since long before Mr Cesalpino.
I.33, the oldest combat manual we have, from about 1320, begins with the immortal lines: “fencing is the ordering of blows” and then proceeds to show seven guards. The rest of the manual is organised according to the starting guard position of the defender. Pretty systematic.

Fiore is next, from a tad before 1410. And oh my, what a feat of systematic classification. Taking the ordering of the Getty manuscript as our base, and “the ordering of blows” as our theme, we have:

  • 20 plays of abrazare: blows made with the empty hand, or wrestling grips. Preceded by four unarmed guards and ending with two plays of the dagger against the bastoncello, introducing:
  • 76 plays of the dagger. This begins with 5 “grips”, two with the dagger and three without, then four blows of the dagger (all thrusts; straight down, forehand, backhand, and from below), then four types of other action (disarm, break arms, locks and throws), then the 76 plays, organised into the plays of nine masters, each showing a different cover, depending on circumstances. (See here for an amusing summary. Note that 2 and 7 are for use in armour only.)
  • Then defences of the dagger against the sword, in which you must distinguish between cuts and thrusts. And defending against a cut only, you must distinguish between being able to enter on the inside or the outside, which depends on what exactly happens when the attack meets the parry. Then defences of the sword against the dagger: if your point is up, strike down; if it is down, you can strike up or down.
  • Then sword against sword: the master of the sword in one hand and the 11 plays that follow, in which you must not only distinguish between cut (plays 1-7 and 10) and thrust (plays 8 and 9) but also the presence of armour (play 11), and what line is open: in the first play, you enter on the inside, in the second, you have beaten the attack wide and can strike on the outside.
  • Then there are 6 ways of holding the sword, leading us into the seven blows: which are six cuts (forehand and backhand from above, below, and across) and the thrust, which is divided into 5 types: forehand and backhand from above and below, and up the middle. Note that Fiore makes an explicit distinction in some cuts whether it is done with the true or false edge.
  • Then the twelve guards of the sword in two hands, as if they were created by the blows that you make (top tip: they are).
  • Then the 20 plays of the zogho largo, and the 23 plays of the zogho stretto; the plays are divided up according to what exactly is going on when the blades meet, just as we saw with the defence of the dagger against the cut, and indeed the plays of the sword in one hand.

(This is getting rather complicated: it would take a book to explain it all. Wait a second, I wrote one, and you can pre-order it here!)
And so the treatise goes on, with the plays of the sword in armour, with axe, spear, mounted, etc.
Sticking with the idea of classification for a moment, let’s take a look at the whole system, which as the title of the Pisani Dossi manuscript makes clear, deals with combat on foot and on horseback, with armour and without, with sword, dagger, axe or spear.
So let’s take one sword blow, and define it according to the following criteria: On foot or Mounted; in Armour or Without; the Weapon; Guard or Blow; Cut or Thrust; (if cut) True edge or False Edge; Forehand or Backhand; Descending, Rising, or Horizontal.

  1. On foot or Mounted: on foot.
  2. In armour or without: without
  3. Weapon: sword (spada)
  4. Guard or blow: blow (colpo)
  5. Cut or thrust: cut (taglio)
  6. True edge or false edge: false (falso)
  7. Forehand or backhand: backhand (roverso)
  8. Descending, rising or horizontal: horizontal (mezano)

So this blow is a false edge horizontal backhand cut: roverso mezano.
Fiore is not alone in this; all swordsmanship authors worthy of the name, from here on classify their blows properly. Perhaps the most famous example is Viggiani’s tree of blows, from Lo Schermo, 1575:

ViggianiTree

As you can see, Viggiani orders the blows similarly: by cut or thrust; if cut, with true edge or false; then by backhand and forehand; then by the line of the blow. So to find the equivalent of Fiore’s roverso mezano, we start by going up the trunk, take the left branch (taglio col filo, cuts with the edge), then the right (falso), then keep right (roverso), then first left (tondo). And finally, the botanists got in on the act some 8 years later. Welcome to the classification party!

Pedantry compels me to point out here that this classification system is not as absolute as that for living beings; a single type of blow can exist with several, even all, weapons, unlike a living species which can only be in one Class, Phylum, etc. But the purpose of Art is to order the natural world into systems so that they can be studied and taught (or as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would have it: bring order to consciousness); and to this end, I trumpet this thought loud from every rooftop in the kingdom: truly systematic thought began with the oldest Art of all: the martial. (Ancient cave-painted men? All armed with spears and bows. Don’t tell me they only hunted with them. Thus, weapons before painting: arts martial before arts decorative.)

And thus the study of swordsmanship, as a branch of philosophy, can and should be credited with the birth of science as we know it. And Fiore was the first swordsman that we know of to lay out his Art in a truly systematic way. So: we put a man on the moon? Thanks, Fiore. Heart transplants? Much obliged, maestro Fiore. Computers, aeroplanes and Internet porn? Whose your daddy? Feee fucking ORE!!

I am learning modern Italian. It's about time too I hear you cry. And rightly so.

So I have changed the name of this blog from Ragion de Spada, which is how Vadi spelled it in his 1480s manuscript, to Ragion della Spada, which is still odd usage to the modern eye, but there is only so much violence  I can do to Vadi before I'd cry. Violence with Vadi, now that doesn't make me cry at all…

I am about to go down to Australia to swing swords about, so I hope to see my Antipodean readers down there; I have a post that will go up automatically while I'm down there, but I'll probably be quiet after that until I get back.

No need to heave that sigh of relief quite so loudly.

Ciao bambini!

 

 

 

Class on Monday (in March 2014) was all about how the seniors should approach the new sword handling drill, the Farfalle di Ferro, the Butterfly of Iron. As this is a pretty important topic, especially for the chaps in the branches, we videoed the class. The footage here was preceded by the usual 10 minutes of breathing exercises and a few minutes of the Syllabus Form done solo, then (because there were difficulties with it that we fixed last week) the Syllabus Form Applications Drill. Then by way of introduction, we did the Farfalle di Ferro in its basic form.

[Update, Dec. 2021] Over the 8 years since I created the Farfalle, it has become quite popular, and many folk have lost sight of where it comes from: some even think it's directly from some historical source! Let me set the record straight: I invented it from scratch, with the help of some senior students in March 2013, as you can see from this video:

So that's the Farfalle- what's it for?

This 20 minute video is basically unedited footage of the Applications class.

The video contents are:
00.00-0.56 introduction. Making the handling drill tight and small.
00.57-2.35 basic applications of the drill: counterattack with mandritto fendente; gaining leverage control with fenestra to thrust (note groundpath in true edge, not in the flat); yielding to the parry and striking on the other side.
02.36-04.11 corrections to mistakes made in class; when not to follow the drill. General rule: “If your opponent’s point is going away from you, strike into the opening line.” Being specific about when to use the farfalle combination.
04:12-07.06: About the footwork: when winding to fenestra to thrust; and especially the footwork when striking on the other side: the meza volta. Noting Fiore’s explanation of the meza volta, groundpaths and the mechanical consequences stepping linearly instead of turning.
07.07-08.39: The same applications, applied by the attacker. Noting what happens if the parry against the fenestra thrust is a yield to the outside instead of the turn to the inside.
08.40-09.41 changing the measure; using the drill to get into close quarters. The rules: “stick your point in his face. If his sword is moving away from you, strike into the opening line. If his sword is moving towards you, put your sword in the way.”
09.42-10.52 difficulties arising from poor mechanics, especially the turn around the middle of the sword. Minimising time spent with your point moving away from the opponent.
10.53- 11.46 a basic drill to help with the turn around the middle of the blade.
11.47- 12.51: repeating the drill beginning with the roverso instead of the mandritto (i.e. start at part 2). And other variations on the basic drill.
12.52-15.19: Using part 3; the sottani blows. Variation on second drill, defender ripostes with sottano on either side. Notes re the necessary footwork to stay safe. Note re continuations if attacker parries the riposte. Note re getting away again after the riposte.
15.20-16.48: Attacker’s use of the same action, as a response to the parry. Variations depending on the defender’s actions. Use of the sottano v. the sottano.
16.49-18.02: Counter to the punta falsa as an example of turning within the turn. Making your actions smaller than your opponent’s. Note re opponent’s expectations re line of attack.
18.03-19.35: How does this work with sharps? Very nicely, thank you.

So, there you have it. Enjoy!

Beginner you are not, hmmm? image from www.freepik.com
Beginner you are not, hmmm?

Beginners are the future of any martial art. And lucky too: the best learning environment is when you are the least knowledgeable person in the room. Anyone you train with can teach you something. It is more difficult to keep learning when you are surrounded by relative beginners, and this post is about how to do it. When I moved to Finland in 2001, I was by a mile the most experienced practitioner of European swordsmanship in the country. Literally everyone I crossed longswords with knew less about them than I did. This could easily have lead to stagnation, but I managed to keep learning by:

  • Cross-training 3-4 times a week with other martial arts, one-on-one with senior instructors; basically trading classes. The potential for contaminating my interpretation was huge, but the upside was I developed a lot as a martial artist.
  • Travelling a lot to international events, paying for it by teaching classes there. I treated these trips mostly as recruitment: when I saw an instructor I thought I and my students could learn from, I hired them over to teach seminars. We average about 3 such seminars a year (in the last 9 months alone, Stefan Dieke, Paul Wagner, and Jörg Bellinghausen have all taught here).
  • Learning how to train usefully with beginners.

This post is about the last on that list. We have a beginners course starting next week, so Tuesday’s basic class focused on how the students can train effectively with the new students when they arrive. I will summarise the approach here, for students about to work with beginners, then describe the class step-by-step as a potential class plan for instructors facing this issue.

1.    Be a perfect model. The rule of beginners is this: show it to them right a thousand times, and they will eventually copy it correctly. Show it to them wrong once, and they will copy it perfectly first time. I mean no disrespect. This is just true, and I’ve never seen a beginner for whom it wasn’t. So having beginners around demands that your every action is as perfect as you can make it. No pressure then.
2.    Work at your own level. One of the things beginners have to learn eventually is the terminology of the art. So on the beginners course we do things like call out the names of the steps (accrescere, discrescere, passare, tornare, etc.) and they have to do the named step. For more experienced students in the same class this could be unimaginably tedious, but should not be: they are expected to work at their own level. So while they are all doing the same thing, some are working on remembering the terms; some working on perfecting its mechanics; and some are working through possible applications, from power generation, to avoidance, to specific plays.
3.    Use the randomiser. In pair drills, the beginner will naturally get parts of it wrong. Excellent. A genuine randomiser! The attack may be too strong, too far away, too close, in the wrong line, anything. Your job is to effortlessly and spontaneously adapt the drill to the specific conditions of the attack you get, not the one you expected. This demands 100% focus on what is happening. When it is your turn to do what they just attempted, you have to demonstrate it perfectly according to the drill, of course. Your training alternates between 100% perfect tactical choices in real time, and 100% perfect mechanics in your own time. Sounds like 100% perfect training, no?

You should also note the following:
•    The attack is never “wrong”: you get hit only if you fail to defend.
•    Your correction of the attack will be much more convincing if it comes after the attack has failed, than if you just got hit.
•    Coach by modelling, not explaining. Beginners are not stupid, they are just not-yet-skilled. They need opportunities to practise, not a lecture.
•    This kind of training demands 100% focus on the specifics of the attack that you get, not the one you expect.
•    When training with beginners, you have an opportunity to go deep, making a few actions better. But you have less chance to go wide, using a broader range of actions (because this will bewilder the already overwhelmed beginner). When paired with more experienced students, you could take the chance to go wide if it doesn’t conflict with the overall class goals.

So relish the influx of new perfection-demanding random action generators, and relish the fact that in a decade or two, they may well be vastly better at this than you are now. But they will always remember and be grateful for the help you gave them when they were starting out. You may be helping to train the next Bruce Lee, or Aldo Nadi, or even Fiore dei Liberi.

If you find this useful, please share it with your friends!

***
The Class:
We began by setting the goal of the class: to teach the students present how to train usefully with the beginners. Usefully for the beginners too, but specifically usefully for themselves. I explained briefly the three principles above, and then we applied them. This class followed the normal structure: warm-up, footwork/mechanics, dagger, longsword handling, longsword pair drills.

Warm-up
I had the students warm themselves up, structuring the 12 or so minutes according to their own current needs. For some this was the first time they had done that. This got them into the right state of mind: using familiar structures and content, but customising them to their own needs.

Footwork
We then did the basic footwork terminology drill: I called out the names of the steps and turns and they have to do the named action. Then I had them tell me what they should be working on during that drill. Some needed practice at remembering the terms; some were working on perfecting its mechanics; and some were working through the applications.We then did the stick exercise, so they had to use the steps spontaneously.

Dagger
We started as usual with the first play of the first master, and modelled what you should do if the attacker is either too stiff (execute the play perfectly: it works just fine), or too hesitant to strike (ignore the attack, until they learn to actually strike the mask).
18th1stmaster

We also covered the 18th play, what you should do if they are really really stiff.

This should be accompanied by a quick verbal correction, and you modelling the attack for them.

Longsword handling, solo drills
Here we distinguished between a beginners course class, and a general basic class to which beginners can attend. (In my School, all beginners are entitled and encouraged to attend all basic classes.) On the beginners course, you should stick exactly to the drill that has been set, so that the only thing the beginners see is the thing they are supposed to do. So do that thing very, very well. It’s an opportunity to work on the basics. The constraint will highlight things to practise. This lead to the following immortal line:
“All of your problems, in the salle and out of it, stem from imperfect basics.”
In normal class, students are at liberty to train the exact drill as set, or any more basic form, or any more advanced form, unless they are specifically instructed otherwise. I expect students to train at their own level.

Longsword pair drills
We had been working on the stretto form of first drill the previous week, so we took it up again. (For those not in my school: first drill begins with an attack that is parried; the stretto version begins with an attack that is counterattacked into. Let me point out here that it is not the counterattack that determines largo or stretto, it’s the nature of the crossing of the blades: for a fuller discussion and examples see the wiki.) This allowed me to point out that the “basic” version is actually mechanically more complex than the “more advanced” version. The reason for learning the first one first is that it is tactically more basic, and easier to keep in mind. First parry, then strike. Parrying and striking all in one go is harder for most people (not all) to grasp. So we then looked at these two drills as:
•    Parry against the attack (first drill, largo form)
•    Attack against the attack (first drill, stretto form)
•    Which begged the question: what happens when a parry is parried?
Which is what happens all the time with beginners learning this drill. They attack as they are supposed to, but as you start to parry, they instinctively change their motion to put their sword in the way of yours. This leads to the two swords bound together, usually near the points, and suddenly the defender’s continuation as set in the drill makes no sense.
Of course, this type of bind is shown in the treatise: the first master of the zogho largo.

1stMasterZL So we looked at the book, and executed his plays as a response to a poor attack. And then used the attack as a means to draw out the defender’s sword to where it could be bound, and practised the same actions but with different intent. The attacker could bind the sword and take advantage of the crossing generated, or the defender, perceiving the change in the attack in time, could take advantage of the fact that the attack was no longer coming towards them, and execute the plays. This made the point that the difference between beginner’s mistake and advanced technique is often more about why you do it, than it is about how.
We completed this study with the variation on first drill that leads to the third play of the master of zogho largo crossed at the middle of the swords, where his scholar grabs the blade and strikes.

3rdplay2ZLBecause those that know might be about to angulate around the parry, or parry the riposte, while beginners might just be a bit stiff. So the attack could go one of three ways (bind the parry, proceed as in the basic form, angulate), and the defender was expected to effortlessly execute the proper response. And to think: beginners will give you all that variation, at genuinely random intervals, without even being asked to or trained! How fantastically useful is that?
We concluded the class, of course, with first drill, basic form, no variations, every action perfect. Because you have to show it to them right a thousand times…

The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.
The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.

The real thing is the only bullshit-free scenario in martial arts. If you’re an MMA fighter, that’s the ring on fight night. If you’re a soldier, that’s being in the presence of the enemy. And if you are a swordsman, that is someone trying to take your head off with a blade. But the real thing must be prepared for, so we have drills, exercises and training. Problems only arise when we mistake one scenario (a training drill) for another (the real thing). To properly understand any drill, you must have a clear idea of exactly how it deviates from reality. I call this spotting the bullshit.

Let us take a simple example, a drill that is usually included in day one of our Fiore beginners’ course: the basic execution of Fiore’s first play of the dagger. This technique is a disarm, done against the common overhand blow.

In its basic set-up, the drill goes like this:

“Both players start left foot forwards, hands down, in a proper guard position. This is very artificial, and is intended only to create a consistent starting point for beginners.

Disarm and counter

  1. Attacker and defender both in porta di ferro, left foot forwards.
  2. Attacker passes to strike with a fendente. Aim it at the mask!
  3. Defender intercepts attacker’s wrist with his left hand and
  4. Turns it to the left, creating a leverage disarm with the dagger against the back of his wrist.
  5. Defender collects dagger and strikes”

(Quoted from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger page 51)

There is nothing wrong with this, as a starting point. But it has at least the following dollops of bullshit in it:

  1. The attacker is not trying to kill you.
  2. The weapon is not sharp.
  3. The roles are pre-set, attacker and defender.
  4. You can’t run away or call the cops.
  5. You have to wait for the attack.
  6. You are wearing protective gear, that will allow the attacker to make contact, but would not work against a real dagger (we tried this with a mask on a dummy: the mask failed against all medieval weaponry).
  7. The line of the attack is pre-selected.
  8. Your defence is pre-selected.
  9. The attacker is not allowed to counter or continue.
  10. The attack is done with little force.
  11. The attack is done slowly.

I am sure that you can think of other dollops, but 11 is enough to be going on with. So, how do we deal with this? How can we eliminate the bullshit without killing students?

To start with, number one cannot be trained outside of the real scenario. Don’t even try. It is this one element that really makes the difference between those that have done it for real and those that haven’t. (I haven’t and don’t intend to.) Regarding combat sports, you haven’t done it till you’ve been in the ring or competed in a serious tournament. Fortunately, those are much more survivable environments, so anybody who trains seriously enough can get there and do that art “for real”. This is one of the big attractions of combat sports I think: the real environment is available. I will never forget my first fencing competition. It was an eye-opener, to say the least!

So, if my drill above is so full of bullshit, why do we do it?

It does:

  1. Teach core mechanical principles, such as grounding, finding lines of weakness, etc.
  2. Teach core tactical principles, such as control the weapon before you strike; timing, and control of distance.
  3. Given the source of our art, it gives beginners a chance to reconstruct a technique from the book.

It is a perfectly good starting point. Just as a child learning to read sounding out the individual letters and creating the words is not really reading yet, we don’t say that they should just recognise the words straight away. This level of practice is a necessary step on the way to expertise.

But be aware that this drill does NOT:

  1. Teach a survival skill.
  2. Teach situational awareness.
  3. Teach decision making or judgement.
  4. Teach the ability to execute the action under pressure.

But given our list of eleven dollops of bullshit, we can map a route through training to systematically eliminate each of them in turn (except for the first). By applying the “who moves first” multiplier, for instance, we can eliminate point 5, so the “defender” is not required to wait, but can enter or move away, gaining some control. By allowing degrees of freedom for one or other student, we can eliminate 7, 8 and/or 9. By applying the rule of c’s you can increase the intensity in a systematic way, so eliminating 10 and 11.*

It is very important not to eliminate all the bullshit all at once. Especially when eliminating no. 2 by practising with sharps, you should absolutely keep all sorts of other bullshit present to avoid serious injury.

So, by carefully considering all the ways in which a set drill is not a real fight, you can design variations to the basic version to systematically clean up some of the bullshit. You will need lots of different drills, each with a different bullshit profile, to make sure that you are training in all of the attributes of the “real” technique. (For more on customising drills, see Mindful Practice).

Just for fun, and to see if you are paying attention, I have inserted one deliberate dollop of bullshit in this post: a deliberately misleading statement made for pedagogical purposes. Can you spot it?

* The “Rule of Cs” (abridged from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger p136) every drill is first worked through with the players:

  • Cooperating in creating correct choreography

This is means exactly what it says: the students are just co-operating in going through the motions of the technique.

Once that is easy, increase the difficulty by increasing intensity, or introducing a degree of freedom (e.g. is the attacker might vary the line of attack), with one player adjusting the difficulty for the other to learn at their most efficient rate- if it works all the time, ramp it up- if it fails more than twice in ten reps, ease off a bit. This is called:

  • Coaching correct actions

Finally, the players each try within reason to make the drill work for them. When coaching, the attacker would try to make sure the defender can usually counter him; when competing, you just try to make your action work. This can be dangerous if it gets out of hand, so be careful, and wear full protection just in case. In practice, the more experienced scholar should get most of the hits, without departing from the drill. This is fine, and gives a good indication of whether your training regime is working. So,

  • Compete.

 

Master you are, hmmm? image from www.freepik.com
Master you are, hmmm?
image from www.freepik.com

One interesting aspect of the recent kerfuffle regarding the USFCA certifying “historical fencing masters” is the debate about the meaning of the word “master”. It can mean simply “teacher”, or “one who has completely absorbed a system of information”, or “one who is in control of something else”. For our purposes I think perhaps “expert teacher” is the best compromise. Historically, it was primarily used as a qualification by Universities, and within the guilds. The standard guild process included usually 7 years as an apprentice, then another 7 as a journeyman, then the candidate (or his “masterpiece”) would be examined, and he would be promoted (or not). Being a “master” allowed you to set up shop independently, and take on apprentices of your own. It in no way suggested that you were a prodigy of nature, king of all you surveyed. It was a simple professional qualification. Guilds had and enforced monopolies, so the process, at an economic level, served to raise the barriers to entry, reducing competition and thus increasing profits.

One thing that to my mind has not been sufficiently addressed by anyone is the fact that the swordsmanship masters of old, whose systems we are trying to recreate, were not teachers of “historical” swordsmanship. Their stuff was state-of-the-art. They would certainly fail the academic aspect that any historical fencing masters programme must include, as they were none of them engaged in recreating the art from the sources. (I have no doubt they would ace the practical portion.) There is a fundamental distinction to be made between being able to swordfight, being able to teach swordfighting, and being able to recreate historical swordfighting systems. I for one have never had a sword fight. Nobody has ever tried to kill me with a sharp sword. I do think though that any “master” level teacher in any art should have high-level practical skills relative to his or her students and peers. Especially because when giving an individual lesson the “master” should be able to control the fencing environment to the point that only the desired actions on the part of the student will succeed. (Please refer to my earlier post on giving individual lessons for more details on that.)

Regarding the level required, let’s take my Master of Arts degree in English literature as an example. To complete the degree I was not required to have read every single English book ever written, nor was I expected to be perfectly fluent in every single style of literary criticism. But there were prerequisites to getting onto the course, and certain standards to be met at every annual examination. Within the structure of the degree, there were required courses (Shakespeare, literary theory, and others) and optional courses which included things like “Portrayal of character in 17th-century literature” and “14th century poetry of pilgrimage”. By the end of the degree I was judged, through a process of examination, on whether I was competent to read closely, and argue effectively to support the conclusions of my close reading. So in other words, I had the tools of literary criticism available to me, at a specified level of competence, in this case, “master”.

But compare my “mastery” of literary criticism, for which I have a certificate from a highly respected university (and indeed the oldest department of arts and belles lettres in the world, a fact that was impressed on us when we arrived as freshers), with a Ph.D in the subject. And compare a newly-minted Ph.D with a tenured professor. Suddenly my “mastery” doesn’t seem all that impressive.

The process of historical swordsmanship is vastly more complex than literary criticism, because it includes literary criticism but is not limited to it.* It includes physical execution of complex actions, the ability to teach, and a whole host of other skills that have nothing to do with critical reading. To my mind, someone who has mastered the discipline of “historical swordsmanship”, whether we call them “master”, “Maestro”, “maitre”, “Uber Jedi”, or even just “teacher”, should be able to take any historical swordsmanship source in a language that he or she can read, and come up with a mechanically, tactically, and academically sound and supportable interpretation of that source, develop that interpretation into a syllabus, and produce students who can fight within that system. I think that any program that offers master-level certification should require the candidate to publish a book-length analysis of a specific source, and create and publish a syllabus to develop the necessary skills (these can be combined, of course). The program should also evaluate  the students that the candidate has trained in that syllabus, and include a public examination of the proposed master’s technical skills: teaching a class, teaching individual lessons, and fencing on equal terms with his or her peers. The process must be transparent, public, easily checked. So whatever the standard required by the examining body, it is abundantly clear to anyone interested exactly what level is required, and so what the qualification actually means.

To put it another way: Can they read? Can they do? And can they teach? And then: at what level can they do all three?

Even after all that, in a stand-up fight with a master of old, or even one of his junior students, I think most modern practitioners, myself most definitely included, would be slaughtered. We are unlikely ever to approach the fighting competence of our forebears, as they were immersed in life-or-death swordsmanship in a way that just does not happen in our culture.

When my father was teaching me to drive, he told me that you really learn to drive after passing your driving test. In other words, there is no substitute for experience. I vividly remember my fencing coach at Edinburgh University, Prof Bert Bracewell, encouraging us to get lessons from his colleague, “a young master learning his trade”. This coach was a fully qualified fencing master. But as he had only qualified recently, he was now, in Prof Bracewell’s opinion, setting about “learning his trade”. From the perspective of a beginner, this coach was astonishingly skilled, and vastly experienced. From the perspective of someone who had been teaching professionally for about 30 years by this point (and actively trying to support this master’s career by sending students to him, so absolutely no disrespect implied) he was “learning his trade”.

*For non-specialists: “literary criticism” has nothing necessarily to do with criticising books the way you might criticise the morals of a politician. It simply refers to a non-naive, hence “critical”, reading of literature, digging deeper into the text than a simple superficial reading may. Every serious researcher into historical swordsmanship, whether they think of it this way or not, is engaged in a form of literary criticism.

 

We had an interesting time in the “intermediates” class this week. (Those scare quotes are to point out that after all these years, we should probably be calling it the Advanced class. So I will.) We began by establishing the goal of the class: to address the problem of freeplay devolving into tippy-tappy shit. You probably know this kind of thing: right leg leading, no passing at all, sniping out with snappy little cuts from a middle guard position. The sort of sport-fency speedy stuff that has nothing to do with the Art as Fiore represented it in his book. But here’s the thing; when fencing for points, it is far and away the best approach, which is why sport fencers do it. And in any kind of competitive fencing environment, that is what fencers will tend to do, because it works. But we are not creating sport fencers here, we are training martial artists in a specific historical system, so we had to come up with a way to make our free-fencing practice more faithful to the source.

Rather than dive right into freeplay, we only tried to create first drill, with a designated attacker and defender, in the usual set-up (one person taking on each member of the class in turn) and when a blow was landed, at whichever step of the drill, the combatants had to maintain awareness of each other, and retreat out of measure without dropping their guard.

  • In round one, the defender had to stand their ground, and the attacker had to approach from out of measure and attack with a committed mandritto fendente.
  • In round two, the defender could work from any guard.
  • In round three, the attacker could attack with any blow.

Needless to say, we almost never saw first drill in its basic form. All sorts of things went “wrong”, and most of the fighting that ensued was done in the proper measure, with proper commitment. The idea of the set drill was enough to shoe-horn the students into a better approach. There was no tippy-tappy shit at all. Maintaining focus after a blow was struck and you were safely out of measure was perhaps the hardest thing for most, so we worked on that. (I made reference to the way koryu students do their drills: bow out of measure, enter into measure, do the drill, retreat with total focus, bow again. We need more of that in class, I think. I last saw it done in Spain on my trip last year, by Marcos Sala Ivars demonstrating with the naginata.)

The drill was for both students to approach into measure simultaneously, with an agreed attacker and defender roles, do first drill without pause, and passing each other, retreat under cover until out of measure again. Change roles and repeat.

It was not good, the first few rounds. So we had a discussion on mindset, and suddenly it got a lot better.

This is a common problem in just about every advanced class I teach. The first round of anything is crap, so we have a short chat, and then it gets much much better right away. This means that students are entering the class in the wrong mind-set. Obviously, in any martial art, you only get the first opportunity to win. Because if you lose once you die. There are no practise runs, no rehearsals. State of mind is everything. Improvement should be gradual: if it leaps ahead after telling the class something they already know, then the problem is in their state of mind, not their knowledge or skill level.

If a whole class is doing something badly, it can only be my fault. I must not have trained them in the necessary skill. So we had a look at the key techniques for establishing a desired state of mind: visualisation and focus.

We started with visualisation, choosing images that generate a specific state. First injustice, to generate anger. Think of any injustice, and the state of rage begins to build. Then a rose, which calmed them down. Then the person(s) you love most in the world. Three different states of mind in as many minutes. So then, how to focus. For this we used the “awareness of breathing” meditation. Breathing is usually so boring that normally you don’t think of it at all. Requiring yourself to simply notice every breath is really hard: the mind naturally wanders. So the practise is to gently return your attention to the intended object. This works best if it is not inherently interesting, as there is more likelihood of being swiftly distracted.

We then chose images that represent the desired physical attributes of a swordsman. The class chose grounding, agility, relaxation and balance. Each student chose something that symbolised these things to them, and practised keeping that image clearly in their mind’s eye.

Then the mental attributes: the class chose calmness and relaxed focussed attention. Each student chose something that represented the desired state to them, and practised keeping that image clearly in their mind’s eye.

Then they combined these images, if applicable (there were some pretty funny mashups). The idea is to create a personal symbol that represents the ideal physical and mental virtues of the perfect swordsman, and be able to meditate upon it for a few minutes, to establish the optimum state of mind for training.

We then got up and did the same drill as before. And it went much better, of course.

To finish up, I asked them to think about this practise, and develop their own image to meditate upon, to generate the correct state of mind before class. Every class. Let’s see how things go next week!

This kind of performance-related meditation has been absolutely critical to my own development, and we really should do more of it in regular class. If you’d like to find out for yourself how it is done, I am teaching a full day seminar on it here in Helsinki on September 8th. More details here.

Every activity has its optimum state of mind. Knowing what it is, is one thing. Establishing it in yourself before the activity begins, is another. It isn't easy, but it is simple. Hold your attention on the right image for long enough that the state of mind develops. This is a skill like any other, and gets better with focussed practice.

 

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