Your most effective weapon
Published: Wed, 03/28/18
There is a chap called Frank Docherty who teaches English Martial Arts and is very active on social media, particularly Facebook and Youtube. He is also pretty outspoken in his opinions on martial arts and HEMA in particular. He has in the past been rather dismissive about Stav on HEMA groups on Facebook. A week or so ago Frank announced that he was looking for instructors who were willing to be interviewed on his podcast. So, I let him know I would be, he agreed, we had a very pleasant chat on Sunday afternoon and this is what he posted:
‘Myself and Graham Butcher had a great interview on Sunday for the English martial arts podcast show, and I found out a lot about how he approaches his martial arts. Stav is a very thoughtful way of the warrior.’
Fair enough, I also asked him why he had developed his previous view of Stav and he said that he had misunderstood what it was all about, particularly the Japanese influence, but now he had changed his mind. I will let you know when the podcast is available to listen to in case you are interested.
Knowing Frank’s previous position on Stav when I saw his request for interviews I wasn’t sure how he would react. It could have been a negative response, or I might have been walking into a very difficult discussion. But what did I have to lose? It would be a bit sad if I have been doing Stav for over 25 years and could not handle a misunderstanding and a bit of negativity.
One of the questions that came up in the interview was. ‘Why Stav?’ A good question, and one I get asked quite often. I could never give a complete answer but part of it would be that Stav teaches you to see the world as it actually is and think about what you can see. Martial arts is one of the tools or routes we use to help students of Stav learn to see and think. This means that you are not trained to just react to what happens to you, or worse, respond to what you thought happened or is about to happen. It is essential to be genuinely aware of what is happening and make your own assessment of how to respond, if indeed a response is appropriate at all. One way to defeat someone is to get them to overreact to something trivial and then leave them to deal with the problems their response has caused. An example would be if a gangster could persuade one of his rivals to kill another one, then tip off the police who did it. The
first gangster now has one rival dead, another serving a long prison sentence and the police are grateful for his cooperation.
This means that your most powerful weapon is your ability to think. However, thinking is simply an activity which can be done well or badly. You can think yourself into all sorts of dire situations and we have all done it from time to time. Or, you can cultivate sophisticated and critical thinking which enables you to see what is going on, or when things are not clear, be honest that you do not know what is going on. When we act in ignorance or, worse still, according to our own projections of what is so, things tend to go seriously wrong.
A starting point for developing sophisticated thinking through Stav is being aware of the five principles. If there is a possibility of conflict then you can ask yourself what principle your potential antagonist is acting out of? Then decide which principle you are best off working with? The Trel principle may suggest you have no real status in a situation and therefore you might as well just keep out of it. This is frequently the most useful principle to adopt. Be very careful which fights you get involved in. On the other hand, you do need to get good at hearing and seeing what other people are actually communicating. Learn to listen and hear and still take full responsibility for your responses, never just react, either do nothing or be completely clear about your intention if you do act.
Of course sophisticated thinking gives you the power to enlighten or deceive other people. The sad part is that those who have not developed sophisticated thinking are easily deceived by those who have and who are prepared to exploit the opportunity. On the other hand trying to enlighten people into a more sophisticated awareness of the world often does not go down too well unless the moment is right. Even then you may not be thanked as genuine awareness brings with it cognitive dissonance. More on that soon.
In the meantime, how do you learn Stav and learn to see the world as it is, or see the Web of Orlog as we like to put it? The intention of the foundation programme is to give you a route into Stav through establishing a practice of doing the stances, some very basic weapon training and sharing key concepts such as Orlog and the five principles. If you can make it to the day course as well on the 26th of May then so much the better, but those who have trialled the course for me since the start of the year tell me that they have benefited from studying the nine modules as a distance learning programme. You can see Shawn Sanford Beck’s comments and other details at https://iceandfire.org.uk/foundation.html
regards
Graham
PS If you want to come to the 2018 Stavcamp and have the chance to ask Ivar himself how Stav develops sophisticated thinking then the date is 15th and 16th of September. If you are not yet familiar with the basics of Stav then I will send you the nine modules to study first. Full details here http://www.stavcamp.org/