A majestic bird
Published: Wed, 09/09/15
On Monday morning I was working for one of my clients who has quite a few acres of land. Quite a lot of her space is woodland with a variety of trees including birch, oak, hazel and alder. There is also a large pond, maybe even a small lake, with an island in the middle. This is all situated deep in the Somerset countryside and it is a rather lovely place. My task on Monday morning was to clear the banks of the pond/lake where they had overgrown with brambles, ferns and particularly alder saplings. Not the easiest job in the world but I made it about half way around and will continue next week.
Half way through the job I left the lake for some reason, probably to get some more fuel for the petrol strimmer I was using. When I returned there was a heron standing at one end of the water and obviously looking for fish, of which there are quite a few in the pond, I often see them jumping. The big, grey bird was concentrating hard on the water and didn’t seem to see me initially. When he did notice he stretched out his wings and flew slowly away. What was extraordinary was how slowly the creature seemed to move his wings. The feathers seemed to be pushing against something much more dense than we think of air as being. Yet, with seemingly minimum effort he lifted himself into the air and flew away over the trees.
It is quite a privilege to see such a creature of course, especially in such a lovely setting. This is partly why I do the work I do, I never know where I am going to be, what I will see, what I will need to do. Moments like seeing the heron are quite a bonus.
The effortless way in which the bird flew reminded me again of the importance of just doing rather than trying. The heron wasn’t trying franticly to to escape and fly away, he just spread his huge wings in his own good time and in a moment was airborne and majestically on his way. Air resistance wasn’t something that held him back, more a means of climbing into the sky.
The purpose of practising Stav is to access our natural and effortless power of centeredness, movement and expression. The stances teach how to be genuinely centred in our own web. Repetitive training with weapons develops effortless and focussed movement. Partner training enables us to explore how we express our power and simply see what happens. The most important thing being to just do a strike and not need any particular difficulty or resistance to validate what we have done. When training CQC I work full contact in the sense that we discover what the body can really do in terms of generating power and how to protect our own body at the same time. This often means practising very short range strikes against a pad held firmly against the partners upper body. The strange thing is that the most powerful delivery always comes when the least effort has been made. The ‘striker’ has simply relaxed and just expressed the strike. As
the person holding the pad stumbles backwards a little winded the striker will say, ‘but I didn’t do anything, I just let it happen.’
I am currently training a wide range of people and I know this works whether it is a little boy of 10 or 11 or a man in his 60s.
Accessing our true power will be the theme of the CQC seminar I will be running next year in June, more details very soon. However, you don’t have to wait that long. Weekly classes in Crewkerne and Saturday courses at least once a month. http://somersetstav.co.uk/ Next Saturday morning in Salisbury I will be showing how training with the Staff contributes to this process. http://iceandfire.org.uk/train.html On the 3rd of October in Crewkerne there will be a self-defence seminar in the morning and dagger in the afternoon, the dagger training being an advanced form of CQC training.
Have a good day, I have some windows to repaint in Martock and I had better get on my way.
regards
Graham