When I was in my early 20’s I got my first place and moved out of my parents home.   The independence was great, no more being told to pick up dirty socks off the floor or being berated for being too loud coming in after a few drinks.  It didn’t take too long for me to realise that liberation came at a price and whilst not being told to do the dishes was exhilarating  the downside was that if I didn’t do the dishes no one else did either.  Very quickly my lovely new bachelor pad resembled a cesspit and became a rather unpleasant place to live.  Another realisation was that the longer I left between cleaning sessions the more the rubbish built up making the task so huge it appeared impossible.  Things became so bad that I eventually sold the place and got married!

Although most of us appreciate that keeping our homes clean and clutter free is an essential part of making them pleasant places to be very few of us pay the same consideration to our own body.  Just like with a home without regularly maintenance and house keeping our body will quickly become a very unpleasant place to be and the longer left between spring cleans the more crap will accumulate.  It is alarming the amount of people I meet who do not like to live in their own skin and scary the number who actually hate it – and as the world spins quicker the number of those dissatisfied with the own internal environment is increasing at an epidemic rate.

In the outside world we appreciate that if rubbish and filth are allowed to accumulate disease will follow, but the only time most of us even pay the slightest attention to the world inside ourselves is once disease has taken hold.  Only once our body becomes uninhabitable do we give any thought to taking care of it – up until this point it’s ‘party time’ 24/7!

Disease (‘dis-ease’) does not target the strong; it doesn’t look for a tough fight.  Like any predator it targets the weak and vulnerable looking for an environment it can grab an easy foothold in before attacking.  So in order to prepare ourselves for the fight we need to give our body a fighting chance by ensuring that it has a strong foundation from which to defend itself.  But like with my old flat, once the filth has piled up beginning the cleaning process starts to look like mission impossible… which is why the task needs to be broken down and tackled one room at a time.

With my clients, some of whom have multiple serious conditions, I help them break down the task of ‘cleaning house’ in order of importance to make things managable and bearable.  Quite often the first room that needs cleaning is their mind – breaking down the habits, addressing the patterns they’re not happy with and looking at ways to systematically work through their issues.  All too often people fall into habitual routines that unless broken make it impossible to achieve long lasting healing.  A common one I see is people will say something like “My body is aching and feeling like death warmed up…. So I’m going to wake it up with a heavy session down the gym!” which to me is like saying, “My house is a pigsty after that party last night… so I’m going to have another session tonight to forget about it!”  And all that results from this mega session down the gym is a total crash in a couple of days time as the body reaches the point when it has to shut down everything else down so it can tidy up - que the colds, flu, joint pain, bad backs, depression, etc, etc that then move in for the kill once the body is busy trying to sort out the mess!

When the body is a clean and tidy having a party is fine and actually enjoyable, but I see so many people who ‘party’ just to forget that how unpleasant a place their body is to be.   I think it really is a shame when someone doesn’t enjoy living in their own skin and see the martial arts as being a wonderful tool to ‘clean house’ - but when abused they are also a great way of increase the rubbish we load our body with.  Look at your training and make sure it is making your body a pleasant place to be… once it is the parties get even better!

The human body is the most advanced machine ever created and housed inside it is the most powerful supercomputer in existence - the human brain.   This super computer is capable of sending and receiving messages to and from the farthest corners of the body at speeds in excess of 180mph and has over 100 billion neurons (brain cells) just waiting to fire up to compute and guide our body through all the functions it needs to carry out.  Every aspect of our existence including our martial arts, is the end result of a computation made by the ‘human super computer’.

Unlike man-made computers, the human brain is ‘self-aware’ allowing it to reprogram itself in response to things it learns and experiences.  Self-awareness is the holy grail of computing and it is a process that martial artists have continually refined for hundreds of years creating a more efficient software program to run the body.  Understanding this ‘reprogramming’ process is truly what makes a great martial arts instructor and is also the key to becoming a great student.

Programming the human mind is an interesting task.  Unlike a computer you can’t just input a few instructions and expect a result – unfortunately there is no ‘Matrix’ style ‘I know Kung Fu’ program we can upload into the brain.  The human mind learns through direct experience – it will be put into a situation, process the information, respond appropriately and will then remember the outcome of that response.   Our mind learns by ‘observing’ the things that it experiences.  Take for example learning to throw a front kick our first attempt may cause us to wobble off balance and our brain will then remember this and will slightly adjust our posture, weight distribution and other factors to attempt to rectify this issue for our next attempt.  It really is exactly the same process your instructor takes you through correction and allows the mind to learn from past experiences and base future actions on those memories.

Over time, learning through experience allows us to refine the commands the mind issues to the body making our actions smoother and more efficient, it stores these refined commands for the latter use.  This means that in order to improve and evolve, our body needs to experience new situations from which it can gather the data it requires to keep its programming fresh and up to date.  If it isn’t introduced to new situations regularly it is forced to continue to use ‘old’ programming over and over again and the inherent danger here is that we become stuck in a rut and our mind merely runs the same outdated commands over and over again.  It is here that we become aware of the ‘loops’ that can occur in the programming which cause the body to repeat actions and patterns that can actually be harmful to it.  Knowing how to break free of the ‘loops’ becomes an essential skill necessary for progress in our martial studies and to resolve any trauma we may experience.

‘Loops’ in the programming can occur through trauma and habit and these cause the mind stop observing and reflecting on events and to switch to autopilot.  A common example of this that I see regularly is how people react after an injury.  When a part of the body is injured the body will take measures to protect it – if you hurt your shoulder your body will armour up and tighten the muscles around the shoulder to restrict any movement that may damage it further.  This is a ‘reflective learning’ process in action.  Alarm signals were sent to the brain informing it of an injury to the shoulder, it reflects on this and responds by locking down to prevent further damage.  Obviously this ‘lock down’ reaction is important because if something is injured we want to rest it and allow it to recover.  The danger is that the shoulder will now be fixed and not able to move.  Without movement the brain will not experience anything to keep its program up to date so it will ‘remember’ that when the shoulder moves it hurts.  The only way to take an injured area out of ‘lock down’ mode is through the mindful application of ‘reflective learning’ that sometimes requires us to pay a visit to a therapist, but with intelligent and sensitive rehabilitation training, is something we can achieve.

When I’m treating someone with an injury I first find out the extent of the damage to the effected area and how ‘locked down’ it is.  I do this by slowly exploring the injury using both movement and pressure – through gently applying pressure and small movements I can gauge the severity of the damage by observing the body’s reaction to the stimulus.  This gives me the limits in which I can work without causing the mind to panic and this dictates the extent to which I can challenge my client.  My goal with any client is to change the parameters of their mind by allowing their body to experience something new.  Pushing too far will shock the mind and confirm what it already knows however, carefully raising an injured arm in very tiny increments lets it experience that there is a little scope for movement before it panics.  The quality of the experience we give the mind has a direct correlation to the wisdom it will glean from it and this is the fundamental concept behind ‘reflective learning’.

The saying ‘variety is the spice of life’ is very true but as martial artists the type of experience we put the mind through dramatically effects the ‘learning’ it will reap from it.  Shocking the mind will cause it to remember trauma and it will protect itself by restricting and inhibiting movement.  It is very easy to overload the mind causing it to violently fallback on previous programming.  To make a meaningful change in the mind and body the learning experience must be gradual and progressive.

In Japanese martial arts there is the concept of shoshin or ‘beginners mind’, this is a mindset where a student leaves behind conceptions from the past allowing them to totally immerse themselves in the present.  In order ensure that our super computer is kept up to date we must constantly supply it with fresh data, but like any computer it will crash if overloaded.  Immersing the mind in the martial arts provides it with the perfect stimulus to evolve, but like a parachute, it only works when open!

Gavin King is a physical therapist and martial arts instructor based in Essex.  He can be contacted via email on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or via http://www.shikon.com. You can keep up to date with all his articles and training via his blog on The Martial Archive at http://www.themartialarchive.com/gavinking.

In my shiatsu training I was told that one of the most powerful components of our treatments was the ability to bring our clients back to the ‘here and now’.  Having been a devotee of Zen and other eastern ways of thinking for the majority of my life the concept wasn’t alien to me, but it’s importance wasn’t truly understood really until I started delving into bodywork and my taiji studies.

I was on a course with the world renown shiatsu practitioner and teacher Saul Goodman who described the phenomenon of being ‘displaced in time’ by explaining that most of us have our energies shackled in the past or projected out into the future – both of which depletes us by drawing our resources away from the present moment.  Now it’s very easy to dismiss the idea as a ‘cute’ philosophical musing but through my treatments and teaching I have found the awareness of where our attention is focussed to have immense practical significance and when misplaced it can be one of the root causes of many of the modern illnesses of today such as depression, anxiety and stress.

We often use the expression “stop living in the past” but it is usually a lot easier said than done.  Certain personality types have a natural tendency to dwell on the things of the past – the traumas, the disappointments and even the successes.  The person locked into trauma and disappointment from the past is fairly easy to spot and the implications of this condition simple to understand, but what about the person of past success?  The image that always comes into my mind when thinking this sort of person is the old rock star who in their twilight years are still running round like a twenty year old – just that they now have a colostomy bag and they have to pick their groupies up from the nursing home.  As outwardly happy as these people may apear you always hear about many aged celebrities constantly having cosmetic surgery, divorcing people half their age and battling addiction.  Not truly the signs of a happy life when examined closely.

Displacement in the future comes in the form of obsessively worrying about bills, lack of a love life, career development and really overly worrying about anything that ‘could’ happen in the future.  This can create stress and anxiety as we spend our time worrying about things that have yet to come.

Being displaced in time draws our attention, our focus and our energy away from things that are unfolding in front of our very eyes and greatly skews our perception of the present.  Our problem is that most of us haven’t been given the tools or education to be able to sufficiently cope with these problems and for some the they become so bad that they have to turn to external agents such as alcohol, narcotics and anti-depressants to deal with them.   Yes there is zen, Buddhism, NLP, counselling and the like but as martial artists we actually have all the tools we need and also the strategies to use them - just some of us don't employ our skills outside of training.

Sparring is great place to see the effects of being ‘displaced in time’.  You can see people immediately acting out of synch with current time.  Some people when they spar have an anxiety of being hit so they will flinch, jump around and tense up at the slightest twitch of their partner.  They are often locked in the past and projected future at the same time with the memory of being punched in the mouth pulling them one way and the fear of it happening again pulling them the other – and as we all know the more we end up trying to avoid getting hit we usually end up on the receiving end even more.  As instructors the way we coach students through this is to break the situation down, provide the means to analyse it and help build the skills to handle it.  If you just keep throwing a student in head first you'll see that rather than resolving the anxiety and stress you’ll compound and exacerbate it… and the same is true in every day life as well!

One of the magical components of the martial arts is their ability to help the practitioner understand and expand their lives – to do this we only need to take the lessons we learn in the dojo, kwoon and gym and apply them in the real world.  For me that is the true meaning of ‘reality’ martial arts.