Mental Training With Me - Chapters 7 & 8 (video 69 min) (Patreon)

You can join us for the next (and last!) session live at 10:30 AM (BKK Time), on Friday November 9th, with this link:  https://zoom.us/j/565224299 

Chapters 7+8

We started out the meeting talking about some personal experiences of difference between how something “feels” and how it looks. Casey gives a very relatable example of fighting or sparring in a ay that feels good, but then watching footage later and the visual evokes feeling bad. What makes you feel bad isn’t how it feels now, it’s how you feel about the aesthetic; but the actual performance is pure feel. That’s Self II, but Self I is offering all the judgment upon viewing footage later.

“My experience over the years is that the best way to quiet the mind is not by telling it to shutup, or by arguing with it, or criticizing it for criticizing you.”

BOTH Niyi Sobo and Kara Lowentheil say this, that this approach activates your defensiveness and you end up defending your weakness. It’s the same with simply replacing a negative thought with a positive one – you will oppose the positive thought. Kara solves this by just getting to neutral first.

So, as an example of this, you’re all bent out of shape because you’re still not kicking right. So, instead of trying to go from “my kick is shit” to the exact opposite of “my kick is great,” which you don’t believe, just get to a neutral statement: “that is one way to kick.”

“To still the mind one must put it somewhere.”

Vipassana puts the mind on watching the body and consciousness. Some meditation puts your mind on the breath. You’re calming “monkey mind” by giving the monkey something to do: here, watch this; here, hold this. What can you focus on in training and fighting? Because it’s important not to focus by trying.

I’ve struggled a lot with going into fights with “trying” as the actual focal point. That’s terrible and it never goes well. Similarly, if I go in with 3 things – like, 3 skills – I want to accomplish, I will do literally everything except those three things. It’s become a bit of a joke. But that’s the problem with trying. If I say I’m going to left hook, teep and breathe, breathing is the only one that will actually happen.

We may find this idea of not trying incredibly hard to do. Yoda’s whole “do or do not, there is no try” is something we have all heard but it seems, like Yoda, totally cryptic. But every person has experienced this phenomenon where if you try to sleep, you will not fall asleep. Whereas just kind of letting your mind go soft, like relaxing your vision into a blur, you’ll be able to fall asleep. If you have ever fallen asleep, ever, you can “not try.”

What is a Muay Thai equivalent of the seams of the ball? I bring up the idea that the seams provide a focal point, but it’s not too focused, in that you can still see a whole picture. I give the example of those “magic eye” posters, that are a mess of colors but when you relax your eyes a 3D image appears. Usually dolphins or something. You have to relax the eyes to get a more generalized vision, not a focused vision. The mind needs this kind of focus. Like a relaxed, blurred focus.

My mental training book taught a lesson of concentration that was watching an object for 5 minutes. Then watching it with the TV on but not near it, then watching it with the TV next to it. Increments of concentration.

Getting to know the feeling of all your movements. This is the real purpose of shadowboxing. I am guilty of mindlessly moving around, throwing essentially the same patters over and over without paying any attention or having awareness to any of it. Chatchai is who brought my attention to feeling, feeling. Throw slow. Feel balance. Feel the full range of motion. Do ONE MOVE a hundred times.

The author suggests focusing on breathing during competition, but not intentionally controlling the breath. This is a huge difference and one that Vipassana practices a great deal. To observe without trying to control. I ask Kevin to talk about this because he wondered aloud the other night what it would be like to spar with only breathing as your focus. Only watching your breath and really nothing else He says he doesn’t really know what that would be like, but he’s going to try it in padwork first to figure it out.

 

You can catch up on our past discussions here:

Mental Training Reading Group - The Introduction (+Vipassana) 

Chapters `1 & 2 - Mental Training (1 hr 17 min) 

Chapters 3 & 4 - Mental Training (58 min) 

Chapters 5 & 6 - Mental Training (1 hr 24 min)