Relaxation

Through some life experience and a great deal of humbling training with a few great swordsmen over time, it has become apparent that the need for a calm and relaxed body and attitude as absolute as one progresses deeper into the truth of duel-type combat. This is a mysterious element of higher fighting directly connected to one’s own grasp of the void and is difficult to explain in common terms. Essentially speaking, it is the ability to face your opponent in a state of uncommitted readiness. You must be ready to react, but with a mind clear of If and Then. If your mind is cluttered with thoughts about what the opponent does or does not do, you will distract yourself. In swordplay especially, I have seen many times when preemptive flinching gave away enough intent for the opponent to adjust his attack and score. This goes for fencing as well as Kendo.

Musashi Miyamoto expressed this several different ways in his Book of Five Rings, even going as far as to describe proper posture and shoulder position in detail. Perhaps I will find time to post some excerpts of his work for the reader’s reference, but for now let it suffice for me to say that the body of a swordsman should not change its way from regular life to combat and vice-versa. To remain upright, to be strong in the lower leg and back, and relaxed in the chest and shoulders – this is the bearing common of individuals who try to maintain proper posture in daily life. The feeling of the fighting stance is essentially the same, since it lends itself to rapid movement in any direction and generally sustains good balance when at rest. To be without intent is important for two reasons; the most obvious reason is that your intent can be read by your opponent if he is clever or if the intent is deep enough to be revealed by the myriad subtleties of your body, face, or movements. The other reason (the big and hidden reason) is Newton’s Law. Your body has the property of inertia just the same as everything in the material universe, therefore, if your body moves, it is committed to that movement until you exert effort to change said movement. This includes tiny movements of nervous muscles within your body – muscles that will tighten and pull in order to prepare you to pursue your intended attack or defense. Experience tells us that this is not good for speed, since the body has to work against itself in the event that something unexpected occurs. To be relaxed is to be neutral, and to be neutral is to be equally ready for anything. I believe that this must be examined thoroughly before it can be understood. I often find it difficult to put into practice when in the heat of practice, but it must be mastered if one intends to progress.

The higher aspect of this same concept is the relaxation of the mind. This is necessary for a person to effectively neutralize attack and defense bias within the body, but it can only be refined once the body comes into subjection and is forced to relax despite the urgency of conflict. The brain controls the body – this is medically proven fact. But it is not always so with the mind; the mind can be occupied with thousands of things while the body goes about its business and the two might have little reason to communicate during mundane daily routines. So we develop the habit of acting in a disharmonious way which causes us to become distracted in situations in which focus is required. To have a calm body when the mind is not calm is possible, but only with effort. Training reduces this effort by unifying both the body and the mind. Once again, the clarity achieved by relaxation is most easily attainable during the absence of intent, since powerful intent stimulates the imagination and clouds one’s view of reality. To focus upon a single detail in battle is like suffering from tunnel-vision. If the opponent realizes that you are preoccupied with some strategy, he can attack and overpower you with speed or surprise. In this case, your only hope of survival would be an error on his part or the off-chance that your strategy involved the attack he decided to execute at the time.

The best metaphor for the calm mind is the relaxed eye. When you relax the focus of your eye, you may notice that everything seems to loose focus, but at the same time you become more aware of things that are visible in your peripheral vision. You can see the movements of a wider range of things, even though you lose the detail you once saw in the finite object in front of you. This is the same of the mind in a neutral state. While one sacrifices the detailed thoughts of intent, one gains a wider view of the situation and the ability to react more swiftly as a result. As I mentioned before, this is a necessary skill, but only comes with great practice.