The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means… ― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings   People are always asking me about this. They want to understand what is it, where it comes from, but most importantly, how to get it. I’m going to cover this from a more mental aspect at first in Part I, and then build on it from there because without getting your mind right you really can’t get there from here. The first time I ever even heard of such a…

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War   Of all the principles in Guided Chaos probably none is more amorphous than the fifth principle of Adaptivity. This principle covers so many aspects of the art and crosses so many boundaries I really don’t know where to begin. What I’m going…

“All I know is I know nothing.” –Socrates   While generally when discussing the principles of Guided Chaos we refer to the over-arching principle or super principle as “Body Unity,” for this installment I’ll refer to it as “Unity” because I’m going to cover a few more things that are not normally discussed. In this installment of my observations on the art of Guided Chaos, I’m going to need for you as I’ve asked in the past to suspend disbelief, not your common sense just disbelief.  I’m going to need for you to put aside whatever it is you think…

Now that I’ve discussed Anticipation and the importance of Timing I’m going to discuss the importance of Looseness–but not from the perspective of re-teaching it, but to discuss some of what I believe are some of the misconceptions about it. This is going to be tough because in my view there are a number of things regarding looseness that seem to contradict each other. I personally don’t believe they are contradictions, rather I believe the confusion lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of how our bodies can carry out multiple movements simultaneously.   On Being Supple   As I’ve written in…

“There is a timing to it…” –Grandmaster John C. Perkins   Piggy-backing off of the last offering where I discussed Anticipation I’m going to jump right into this. When it comes to fighting, in all things there is a timing to it. We see it all of the time in sports but it is just as important when fighting for your life. There should be no ambiguity about this. Now when we are talking about “Timing,” like anticipation what we are really talking about is the concept of “Fighting in the Future.” It is concepts like this that in my…

In this installment of Lessons from My Masters, I’m going to discuss another aspect of the art that I think people misunderstand, and that is the ability to Anticipate. Once again these are just my observations so since you were kind enough to click on the link and read all of the others posts to get to this point I thought I’d share my insights on this because I believe it is also one of the main reasons people get stuck in advancing their ability. But before I get into all of that I need to discuss something related to…