Give me Freedom

If you had to choose a philosophy that would best assist the mind and body to act as one, when fighting multiple opponents, then I would recommend that you choose Freedom.

Freedom has many facets to it. There is the freedom from both physical and mental resistance, freedom from distractions, freedom from fear and anxiety; the list goes on. As you explore the idea you will see a connection to some of the philosophy in the arts that has been around a long time.

Freedom from distractions is one way of describing the survival response, that is, fight or flight (ignore freeze). This response does not waste time on thinking; it only utilises time to get us to safety. When the body is under extreme threat, it is capable of shutting out irrelevant information from your senses, as well as any extraneous thoughts, or even most of the memory of the action we actually took. You see examples of this when people escape from extreme danger by the narrowest of margins. They don’t know how they did what they did to survive; their memory of the event is full of blank moments, what I refer to as darkness.

Freedom from distraction is a useful thing in a group attack situation. If you were to judge and assess a situation, it would require time which you cannot afford to waste. When time is limited, as in a group attack, the real world moves away from your imagination of the strategies and techniques you can attempt, faster than you can find solutions or even act upon them.

When you stand before a group of attackers and you see all those bodies between you and safety, your mind naturally tends to thoughts of anxiety. Congratulations, you have been successfully distracted by the group – their physical presence and imagined potential threat has resulted in a mental grab on you. The answer to break out of this spell is to move, to accelerate at the nearest attacker and force a reduction in the information being gathered by your senses so that you experience blank moments. The process of accelerating towards the centre of an opponent’s attack is the Energy Worlds solution for trying to pressure our imaginations to stop, to find darkness and release from distractions.

Freedom from resistance is an important goal when dealing with multiple attackers. You don’t have time to get caught up fighting the resistances of your opponents. Spend a moment too long on one attacker and it gives the rest of the group a much better chance of bringing you down. Stalling is the classic response when you want control of others; it is a sign that you have decided to fight your opponent’s resistance with resistance of your own. This means you have decided to stop progressing towards safety and take control of the situation and even take some time to reconsider your options. When your progression stops, your freedom is lost and you have given attackers time to measure your actions and the opportunity to collectively act to drag you to ground. Your best chance for safety is to free yourself from any imposing resistances.

If it is obvious that attaching yourself to resistance in a group attack is a dangerous option, then why do so many people still get caught up doing it? Examining our social thoughts and conditioned fears may provide an answer. Consider then your need to bolster your ego, to win, to dominate, hurt, or subdue others, or the need to physically or mentally attach yourself to others. Freedom from these desires will help to free you from being trapped by your mental resistances.

The problem with freedom, as a concept is that it tends to runs counter to many social aspirations of winning and showing the world that you are somebody. It is why many people struggle with the idea that you don’t have to defeat the group. The power of having a total focus on freedom is that you don’t care about the group, what they may do to you, what you think you need to do to them, what the people watching the encounter may think, etc. All those thoughts that get you nowhere can be discarded and instead you can concentrate on those things that will make a difference such as acceleration and exits.

I have a theory that doing a martial art actually gives you a heightened anxiety towards violence. Learning a martial art reinforces the idea that you might be attacked. This leads to the situation where you become more anxious about the possibility of being attacked than you would be otherwise.

If people lack the ability to get the job done, then their fear of the bully or random attacker means their anxiety levels are even greater. Struggling in battle with fellow students or getting dominated by senior students within the club / school they train at only makes it worse. Usually their fear is based around someone who is bigger than they are. They have to consider a couple of times every week whether they are able to handle different sorts of threats. Dealing with these “what if” situations, on a regular basis, on how they could be attacked, only maintains and reinforces the anxiety in their minds.

If they quit the arts then it’s likely they would gradually let go their fear as they would realise that it's not easy to get into a battle if you don't want to. It is relatively easy to de-escalate most situations or avoid them in first place. You would then find something else in life to worry about. To a large extent we create the threats and associated fears that we live with. When this happens the arts are not a comfort but a source of anxiety, or perhaps it is just another example of pain and pleasure being different sides of the same coin.

The philosophy of freedom provides release from these fears and anxieties and allows you to enjoy your art more fully. A focus on freedom means that you are usually going to get the best outcome in terms of preventing injury. You act to maintain your freedom from any threat so you don't have to worry about how you would have to approach different self defence scenarios; it enables you to cut down on the required thinking time when it matters most. It is pointless to worry about the possible outcomes of an imaginary situation and its associated fears and concerns; it just becomes more baggage to carry around. Freedom means you cannot carry mental baggage; you have to let that baggage go at some point, which requires you to be comfortable within your own skin. This means you have to know yourself.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor