Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
All the data vs. our capacity to absorb often leaves us overlooking and/or skipping over critically important skills and information to our detriment. As you can begin to imagine in the martial arts for self-protection there is a ton of stuff to learn, understand and then apply in the most difficult and stressful of times, environments and situations. Add in the daily life sensory processing you can find yourself on sensory overload, quickly.
As I began this journey I never truly understood what all this meant to learning how to defend and protect and only in the last two decades has it become clearer just how much was missing from that understanding that it began to hit me, personally, just how much you really have to focus on to achieve success in self-defense and self-defense defense. It is literally as you are already realizing astronomical and then you can begin to visualize just how much time and effort must go into your training, practice and application of skills.
It is no wonder with today’s pension toward instant gratification that many in the dojo find themselves glossing over more important lessons to get to the fun, exciting and thrilling parts of kata, kumite and competitions. It is a very strong draw for many and takes a huge discipline to bring oneself back to all the parts and not just the fun parts to get-r-done.
It can be mind bending to realize the depth and breadth of what is needed and when you add on that is has to be consistently, continuously and effectively practiced and trained literally forever to remain a viable methodology that it and in of itself leads to huge sensory overload.
Baby Steps… one must take the time and take baby steps over a long time so it will work. The old adage that one can learn certain methods to self-protect in a short time span is true and is not true all in one BECAUSE even the short effective version still needs to be supplemented by all the other stuff of the before, during and after involving self-protection in the name of self-defense and self-defense defense.
Sensory overload is coupled with an overload of the masses, i.e., larger and larger groups living and working in closer and closer proximity where the human species still has not evolved to that level in our very ‘genes’, if you will, making the sensory system work on overtime resulting often in sensory overload is a BIG problem. We were not meant to live in such large and diverse, as in beliefs and cultures and so on, groups. When you begin to cram more and more diverse folks into one place something is going to blow.
I try hard to adopt the Zen approach through the 12 essential principles of Zen:
12 Essential Principles of Zen
- Do one thing at a time. single-task, don’t multi-task.
- Do it slowly and deliberately. take your time, and move slowly.
- Do it completely. Put your mind completely on the task.
- Do less. doesn’t have an unending task list either — there are certain things he’s going to do today, and no more.
- Put space between things. Don’t schedule things close together — instead, leave room between things on your schedule.
- Develop rituals. Ritual gives something a sense of importance — if it’s important enough to have a ritual, it’s important enough to be given your entire attention, and to be done slowly and correctly.
- Designate time for certain things. certain times in the day - designated for certain activities.
- Devote time to sitting. sitting meditation (zazen) is one of the most important parts of his day.
- Smile and serve others. smiling and being kind
- Make cleaning and cooking become meditation. Put your entire mind into those tasks, concentrate, and do them slowly and completely.
- Think about what is necessary. There is little in a Zen monk’s life that isn’t necessary.
- Live simply. if something isn’t necessary, you can probably live without it.
To achieve a skilled masterful level of handling sensory overload, especially when studying the full and comprehensive martial arts in self-protection these twelve principles will work wonders and they will effect how you do things on a daily life basis as well.
Everyone will feel sensory overload in this modern iRevolution in which we live and technology is not slowing down one iota either so adopt the twelve essential principles of Zen to achieve some semblance of peace, harmony and a Zen-like life style.
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