Shifting Attention

Being aware of yourself, your mind, and your body provide you and me, karate-ka, the practice that develops our awareness so we can recognize and change how our minds work.

Attention and shifting that attention are really a huge fundament mental practice a karate-ka or any martial system should use to train the mind to "shift" it from one stimuli to another.

Lets say someone attacks you. Your attention goes to the attack and may cause you to say, "What the ... that  hurt ... ," and then your mind is stuck paying attention to the first strike while the attacker is adding strike upon strike and punch upon punch overwhelming your mind so it never catches up.

Shifting attention to me is an ability that must be developed with practice over time. Then if you are attacked and training was adequate then your mind unconsciously, you hope, pulls "acts" out and off you go with some adequate response. Others call this the "loop." A loop like I describe earlier that keeps "looping" on that same stimuli locking your mind up.

This is just another way of explaining the OODA loop from Marc MacYoung's self defense site. Now, here is the question, how do you train to not get stuck in the loop. Training has to be realistic enough that when your mind reaches that loop it bypasses it instinctively so your body acts and puts the loop back on your attacker.

Mindfulness and Mindful Awareness through meditation has the ability coupled with proper and realistic training to reprogram your brain to do what you need in such a volatile scenario. The book "Fully Present" by Dr. Smalley and Ms. Winston explains how this all works. It is a matter of your practicing the meditative mindfulness and awareness process then taking that into your karate, martial system, training so it is applied to that model.

There is no proof it will work in the martial arts but it does have proof it works generally for our emotions, etc. If it works, changes the brain, allows for change in your everyday life then it can, I firmly believe, apply in training and practice. You can learn to shift your attention, conscious and unconscious, so the brain/mind go to appropriate responses, i.e. shift the minds attention away from the attack and into a counter the shift the loop to them.

This is my theory anyway ... oh, on another note the mind tends to fill in the gaps, fill in details that are missing, but what it fills those gaps with may not be totally relevant to the situation so practice must be such that those relevant issues are connected for proper responses. The only way to achieve this is through knowledge and application of knowledge in training and practice.