Martial Arts Training - Balancing Mind and Body

A very special kind of training is critical in martial arts because martial arts is about life and death. In one split second, your life will be either spared or taken, and that outcome depends entirely upon your preparation.

The adversary you face will be stronger, faster, better trained, and more determined than you will be. Count on it. To think otherwise is fatal. He or she will also understand that body follows mind; that mind comes before body, and therefore they will train their minds, as well as their bodies, to perfection.

If you are up against an opponent who has taken the time and tremendous effort required to stabilize his or her mind, and you haven't, there is a good likelihood that your body will fail in that split second when your life hangs in the balance.

Mind has its own split second of truth, just as body has its split second of life and death, the difference being that life is temporary, whereas mind continues. This distinction has tremendous inferences regarding your psychological preparation for combat and how you will face a mortal enemy – whether you face your enemy with confidence, clarity, and courage, or whether you face him with a split second of hesitation, a split second of subconscious fear.

Since body and mind are connected, both must be developed in tangent. If one is developed over the other, then that fine balance necessary to cut through the illusions and falsity of sense impressions will not be maintained. This balance that is critical if you are to have the courage to come face to face with the reality of each situation and be able to maintain that reality each and every split second without fail. Once that fine balance is disturbed, you will either underreact or overreact, and either could prove fatal when facing an adversary that has mastered the balance of body and mind.

When training your mind, two things are critical -- focus and discernment. If focus is weak, you cannot gather your strength accurately into a point of explosive contact. And if discernment is not mastered, you will never have the extreme confidence necessary to act decisively and without hesitation.

But training the mind takes a warrior, because in the process of training the mind, you will be effectively dismantling the very things that will keep you from victory, which are your false illusions of what and who you really are. In other words, you will face your own physical, psychological, and spiritual death, and no one but you will be the executioner. You will fall into a hole so deep, so real, and so lonely that anything in the unreal world that we call existence will become as nothing.

This kind of experience is not for the weak-willed, or the ones who are merely experimenting with the martial arts; this is for the ones who will triumph regardless of the adversary, the ones who will be fearless in the face of impossible odds. The ones who are a true warrior in every sense of the word.

It is extraordinary for martial arts students to be exposed to the real methods of mind training that will insure victory, and rarer still for that student to follow the instructions to completion. Only a few, a handful will ever attain that pinnacle of perfection of body and mind that this training intimates; which is the deathless realm. Only a few will be successful because the training is rugged, not easy, and the most difficult thing that one could attempt in life. The martial arts student will be dismantling the ego; which is everything that he or she believes in and counts on, and everything that they believe to be themselves, because it is these beliefs and images that insure defeat.

The amount of time spent training in Martial arts should be split evenly between mind training and physical training. Mind training should not take a second seat to body training, or an imbalance will be the result. If the ego grows and is not controlled, defeat is certain. This is because the ego, now built up psychologically, will subconsciously be afraid of its own demise, and that subtle fear will be enough to make the difference when facing a seasoned warrior without his or her ego in the way. When you face the deathless person, you can see it in their eyes, and you had better be ready, for there will be no hesitation on their part, no illusions or images, just what has to be done in the next second, and it will be done efficiently and from an uninhibited center. In other words, a place of transcendent focus.

As previously stated, when training your mind, two things are critical -- focus and discernment. If focus is weak, you cannot gather your strength accurately into a point of explosive contact. And if discernment is not mastered, you will never have the extreme confidence necessary to act decisively and without hesitation. Both focus and discernment must be developed together.

When focusing the mind, the mind must be concentrated. Then, after the mind becomes concentrated, discernment must be developed, which means that the mind must use its concentrated qualities to penetrate the illusions of existence with discernment and wisdom until existence is abandoned and reality manifests. This is critical, because reality is the ground of the warrior, while existence, and all the falseness of existence, is the ground of the defeated.

To focus the mind, begin by sitting cross-legged on the floor. Keep your back straight and you hands lying palms up in you lap, one hand cupped within the other with the right hand on top. Then concentrate your mind. Concentrate your mind on your breathing. For whatever length of time you decide to sit, which is your own determination, resolve not to move regardless of the pain or discomfort, and determine not to move the mind off the breath regardless of what thoughts or emotions come up. You will know every in breath and every out breath from beginning to end. Your success or failure in accomplishing this will indicate the control your mind has over itself. If there is no control here, there will be no control in that split second where life or death is determined.

As you focus unerringly on every breath, the mind will become calm enough to remain on the breath without effort. Then, the body will react from this unusual peace from conflict of thought and emotion by physical reactions. You will feel your hair standing out from your body as if you have seen a ghost, and shocks will rack your body like lightning strikes. You will feel as if pure water is washing over you, and then flooding your body, and you will feel as if you are floating. Then you will feel a tremendous joy, and a uncanny focusing of the mind, followed by a feeling of equanimity where the mind no longer discriminates between anything. All things are now equal, all emotion and judging is gone. There is only the reality of ‘what is' in this very moment.

As you are training the mind in concentration, you will begin your training in discernment by investigating your physical body. You will investigate your body hair, your head hair, your nails, teeth and skin, and envision every organ. You will envision the death of your body, and see it lying dead on the ground, bloated after a few days, being eaten by insects, and then animals, until there are only bones and sinews left with a smattering of blood, and then only bones, and then a pile of bones, and then bones scattered here and there until they turn to dust and melt into the earth with nothing but the forest floor.

Then, after the mind tires of investigating the body, it will rest in concentration again, until it is ready to investigate again. Then, it will further develop discernment by investigating itself; how it (the mind) contacts the world through its sense organs, and how the sense organs are made of elements of the earth, no different from any other creature or substance, and that the body is not only part of the earth but is the earth, and eats the dead bodies of the earth, and dead plants of the earth, and will someday return to the earth.

You will investigate how these sense organs make contact with an object seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt, or thought about, and how after that initial contact there is an impulse to love it or hate it, and how during that initial feeling thoughts and emotions arise to facilitate drawing that object close if you love it, and pushing it away of you hate it. And how all of this distracts you from your focus.

You will investigate existence itself, and see if there is anything within existence that doesn't change. Whether anything within existence can provide such lasting happiness that you are afraid to lose it, and whether there is a little man or woman behind your body and mind, a self that experiences existence. Or is there only mind?

Then you will rest again by concentrating your mind. You will concentrate the mind until the mind transcends itself with a shift in consciousness where you will let go of body and mind together, all in one brief release. Then the discernment and wisdom will be automatic. Regardless of what you see in the world, there will be the reality of its impermanence, the reality of its stress, and a reality from the freedom from ego that allows you to become a true warrior.

All of this requires training, however, physical and mental training. It requires faith, determination, vision, mindfulness, effort, and wisdom. But the rewards are great; a thirst for truth and a disregard for falsity that creates boundless joy, unlimited energy, tranquility in the face of danger, equanimity when faced with adversity, a focused, concentrated mind, a heightened awareness.

And the courage of a lion.