Making the art your own

As you progress in your journey in the arts you experience periods where you are excited, and full of enthusiasm for the progress you perceive you are making. Then you also have the periods of depression where you are not making the progress you think you should be, where things don’t work as you believe they should after all this time. It’s the peaks and troughs of the arts that everyone seems to go through, a roller coaster of emotions generated by our vision of where we should be at, verses our perception of where we are actually at.

This is of course unless you have delusions of grandeur; these people will always be on a high until someone brings them back down to earth.

At some point however you need to get into a different groove or you will experience these highs and lows until you leave the arts. What drives you to that next level in the arts where you get a sense of having achieved what you set out to accomplish? The focus on techniques and a technical approach makes it difficult to get off the roller coaster.

Energisation has a big advantage in terms of making the art your own as it builds its own momentum. Your technical training is all aimed at preparing the body to hold together under high acceleration for skills like reduction, etc. The footwork related to Longarm is focused on reduction, flight, acceleration, measuring and timing skills. The goal is to create a larger mass effect, a more efficient way of moving through opponents, with a footwork that enables you to rapidly switch between activation and loading to achieve full energisation. This will give you a focus for your art that a technical approach can never hope to match. It will also give you results and there is a tipping point where it really starts to shine.

Freedom is the philosophy of the Energy World and a part of it is freedom from the trap that nearly all martial artists fall into with the conditioned focus on technical ability. The expectation is that your technical ability should equate to a certain practical ability and when the two are not in sync in your mind then you get in a funk. In the Energy World the problem goes away as you move towards the ability to fully energise, but in the Resistance World of training you are just going to have to put up with it until you decide to go down a different path.