Martial Arts::

Of course we couldn’t very well choose a theme of “virtues” without mentioning patience. In one of life’s great ironies, the greatest barrier to success is often impatience for it. In order to begin to understand the challenges that our lack of patience can pose for us, let’s first consider one of the mind-body disciplines we discuss a lot here at bodyplusmind, the Alexander technique.

Given t ...

Recently, we wrote an article on the elements required for successful mind-body education. One of our members, Hideoshi, added one to the list, Attention.

As a student, it is clearly not enough to simply sit back and learn techniques by rote, yet this mindless training is commonplace amongst students and teachers alike. The practice of drilling techniques is largely to blame for this, not because the repetition of techniques and skills isn’t valuable, it is immensely so, but because repetition without attention isn’t valuable, in the martial arts or in any field of study.
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Even without taking a look at the picture above, we're sure most martial artists would agree that not getting hit is either the most, or second most important thing to succeed at. While some value striking the opponent above avoiding strikes, even they would recognise that, as a strategy, this can only be taken so far.
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