Real and Realistic?
What constitutes ‘real’ in the world of the martial arts? Well, there are almost as many answers to that question as there are students of the martial arts. Your perspective on the arts is likely to determined by what you hope or need to get from them. Most modern versions of martial arts have been significantly altered to conform to social norms of what is morally acceptable, physically safe and culturally valuable - fair enough, but it is as well to understand that this may well mean that what remains of the art must be workable and effective, even if that means extra effort in training and analysing.
The Munen Muso Ryu is concerned with combative reality, but unlike many of the schools operating today we don’t equate this with unfocussed and reckless pounding on one another’s bodies. We prefer instead to research and practice the most sophisticated training methods we can in order to prepare for real-life combat, where our assumption is that we will be ‘out-gunned’ by our assailants. When your attacker has superior attributes (i.e. they are generally bigger, younger and stronger, they may be armed when you are not, or they simply outnumber you) we know we have to be smarter, more aware and better trained! Intelligent training can produce effective fighting skills and still leave you able to go to work or school the next day in one piece!
Motivation and Choice
Any experienced teacher of the arts out there will know from experience that each of their students will have come to them with any of a range of objectives in mind, and these may well change over time should those students stick around. Self-defence, general fitness, body-shaping, strength development, confidence-building, making new friends and studying something more ‘exotic‘ as a hobby are all common reasons for taking a martial arts class.
Having studied the arts daily for a very long time, I’ve stayed with it because it fulfills three particular needs:
- Self-defence – I am a small, bespectacled (and probably very irritating) guy, who has an absolute loathing of bullies!
- Flexibility of perspective – to me, martial arts is the ultimate problem-solving discipline; partly because the consequences of ‘getting it wrong’ can be somewhere between merely disastrous to literally fatal.
- Intellectual stimulus – frankly, the martial arts are endlessly clever and creative; they represent an enormous range of solutions to what are very immediate dilemmas and to understand them, one is forced to bring together knowledge from many subject areas, and to teach them is to stretch one’s ability to communicate ceaselessly!
Generalising the Art into Life
I find that my interest in (or arguably obsession with) the arts means I relate lessons learned from them in all aspects of my life, whether that is my personal relationships with others or how I create and apply my skills as a corporate trainer and business analyst. Indeed that ability to pay attention to everyone and everything around me, and to analyse my environment and the interactions in it, is at the core of my learning and teaching method. I don’t make any extraordinary claims for myself: I have no great physical talent, nor am I a natural fighter, though I am pretty competent – as I should be after so many years of physical training; but I am an experienced and able teacher. My one boast would be that any of my students who train diligently and intensively for perhaps a year, should be able to visit the school of a style they have never seen before, watch a representative lesson (featuring technical training, drilling and sparring across a range of grades) and tell the average 3rd Degree Black-belt of that system more about their own style than they could explain to my student. My students are taught to analyse and infer strategy, tactics, preferred range, typical expressions of technique etc. from observation, and this lies at their core attribute of adaptability.
They also have the advantage of the example of truly talented and exceptional teachers of other arts with whom I am lucky enough to be associated. As a result, I have found that those students for whom I am not the ideal teacher, quickly develop enough knowledge and understanding (rarely the same thing!) to be equipped to prosper in any given martial speciality they may choose to follow, mostly because they can be sure that the chosen style is one that suits their needs at that time. That is a hugely satisfying thing to say – for any teacher to know that they have equipped their pupils with the tool-set needed to become independent of them is the ultimate accolade!
