A fighting mind

Fighting is a difficult thing to talk about in martial arts. It's in the name so there is an inevitability to it, but I don't believe it's the best mindset to start your training from.

For me, the best thing about martial arts isn't so much that you learn to fight, but that the study lends itself to immediate feedback. You learn the feel and sound of the pad when you hit it hard. You laugh at the surprise of a throw. Sometimes you tear up when you have a breakthrough. You are having an experience that is your own, and as we do a thing for its own sake, lessons of all kinds often unfold.

The problem comes when we try to extrapolate value outside of our experience. I'm told that this technique, will work in that way, out there, and immediately I'm training in a theoretical, no longer present or able to respond in time.

That's why it is so important to see martial arts as a process. I take the lessons of the dojo and I apply them to my life. I apply them to something I can get real feedback on. What we do inside the dojo should be replicated outside the dojo. This keeps our training relevant. If we train solely for an eventuality that most often will never happen we lose the ability to get real world feedback back into our practice.

Training is about developing a process that you can count on. We know it's functional because we are doing IT in our lives and it has made a difference.