Six Life Lessons from Stav - Part 1 Principles
Published: Wed, 04/15/26
I realised later that in fact arithmetic is just a matter of putting things together and counting how many you have at the end, or taking some away and counting what is left. The principle of multiplication is adding up several times and division is taking away more than once. Once I realised that this was the principle of arithmetic I could always work out an answer when I needed to. I can actually do complex multiplication and long division because I now know the principle upon which it is based.
In business a most useful principle is understanding orders of magnitude so that you don’t order thousands when you only needed hundreds or vice versa. The difference between 19 and 17 is unlikely to bankrupt your business. The difference between 190 and 19,000 easily could.
Part of what attracted me to Stav was Ivar telling me that Stav was based on principles rather than techniques. He suggested that when you understand the underlying principle of anything you can usually figure out a way of making it happen. As I considered this idea I realised that there is a principle of principles. A principle is:
1. Simple, usually three parts although each part might have corresponding aspects, esoteric and exoteric for example
2. Universal, the principle will apply in all relevant circumstances
3. Fractal, the principle will apply at any scale
Fire is a good example. Fire needs a combustible fuel, sufficient oxygen for combustion to take place, and enough heat to initiate and maintain the combustion. All fires require these three elements regardless of the kind of fuel, the source of the oxygen, or the method of ignition. The same principle applies to the burning of a tiny candle on a birthday cake or a raging forest fire. If you need to light a fire then you just need suitable fuel, sufficient ventilation, and a source of ignition. If you need to extinguish a fire you can starve it of oxygen, restrict the fuel supply, or simply cool it down until the fire goes out, usually with water. Of course there are lots of techniques for building and lighting fires, as there are for fire fighting. And yet all and any of these methods must conform to the principle of fire to be useful.
Martial arts are based on the principle of AIM, action, intention, and movement. In combat you need to be able to move from one place to another to manage your opponent the movement should put you in the right place to carry out an action, the action may also facilitate movement. The action and movement should fulfil a specific intention. In Stav we teach and use five principles of conflict management. Each principle provides a conscious and deliberate intention for resolving a conflict situation. Each principle may be fulfilled with the right combination of action and movement. If circumstances dictate that a particular combination of action and movement is simply impractical then a different principle may be selected and fulfilled with a different action or movement. In Stav we have names for each of the principles and simple rules for fulfilling each principle. I will expand on the five principles in a later post devoted to
the subject.
In Stav we also use bind runes to express essential principles and act as aide mémoires for the essential teachings. One example is the healing bind rune which combines herbalism (tein seid), physical strength (mott), and mental awareness (licht galdre), balanced with Lokk seid, megin, and myrk galdre, which I will explore in more detail in a future post in this series.
Other traditional bind runes cover the principles of crafts, and the ethical use of force, and the five principles described above can be described in a bind rune.
Another principle which I find extremely useful and applicable to Stav is the 80/20 Principle, sometimes known as ‘Pareto’s law’, which basically says that the majority of benefit and output always comes from a relatively small proportion of possible inputs. In other words 20% of resources will deliver 80% of your needs. You will wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time. 80% of your cooking will be done with 20% of the equipment in your kitchen. In any given organisation 80% of the real work will be done by 20% of the people involved. the 80/20 principle suggests that you can be very selective about what you burden yourself with mentally or physically. Make the right selection of knowledge, equipment, weapons, and company and you will always be ready for anything.
Regards Graham
PS If you wish to explore Stav in depth then please come to the camp on the first weekend of September in Lincolnshire, UK. This year Roland Zerpe, author of Stav, Runes, Martial Art, Philosophy will be with us and sharing his insights into the tradition. Full details at https://www.stavcamp.org/
Graham Butcher
21 Beaver Road
Beverley East Yorkshire HU17 0QN
UNITED KINGDOM
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