Martial Arts: The Mind / Body Link

In order to stop your opponent in a fight you have to affect them. The best way to achieve this is to attack their mind. By finding ways to break the opponent’s mind, their body ceases to have a driver. The aim of this book is to investigate mind weakening strategies to build advantage.

There are six main ways of attacking the mind:

1. affect their senses
2. internalise their thought process
3. affect their emotions
4. deny them time
5. deny them the ability to measure you
6. activate the primitive defence response

When faced with violence, your mindset focuses on attack and defence. By adding weapons into the attack, the win seems even further away. In desperation you return to your natural response, stopping your thoughts of exiting and focus solely on physical strategies. The mind/body link has been broken, allowing the group to take you to ground, the worst outcome. Your re-activated primitive responses now limits your mind and body coordination to a focus of grabbing one person and ignore the attacking group.

Your martial art is designed to keep you safe in very unsafe situations. Take a well-functioning group attack where they collectively believe they are more powerful than you are, but break this belief and the group dynamics will crash in front of you long enough for you to escape. If you think you can rely on technical stuff in battle, then you are going to be disappointed.

Who hasn’t had an instructor tell them that you have to ‘get the job done’, but what does that even mean when you know you are missing skills? In some ways it is a statement that sends people off on the wrong track, by training even harder, only to find the solution is to give up. The answer is simple: dismantle the opponent’s intentions towards you, just like a magician creating inattention to complete the trick.