sad books about dogs

The mind is like China. It is a sleeping giant, but when it awakes it can shake the world.

Strength is more a product of the mind than the muscle. History provides hundreds of examples of the mind’s ability to generate phenomenal strength. Psychologists refer to it as the fight or flight syndrome, where threatening circumstances can cause the body to be charged with maximum strength, endurance and tolerance to pain.

The term Chi-meaning internal strength has long been heard in martial arts circles for adding power to your techniques, as well as, for overcoming your fears, controlling your emotions and reactions to pain, the study of your mind, your body and the intricate relationship between the two. Add to this mix visualization technique, diet and nutritional considerations and you could find the mental keys to unlock your internal strength.

Mizu No Kokoro meaning, in search of the undisturbed mind, calmness of mind is likened to undisturbed water so say generations of karate masters, and it is supposed to be the ultimate mental attitude to achieve. In any combat situation the mind must not be pre-occupied with thoughts of attack or defence or what will be the outcome of the physical encounter, no matter how serious the situation may seem.

There is no shortcut other than hard diligent training in order to acquire the state of non- preoccupation. Repetition in training drills sends signals to your nervous system and the brain. Techniques become ingrained that you should not have to think about acting you simply respond. In other words, the path to perfection is practice, practice and more practice.

Your Mind Is Its Instrument Learn Not To Be Its Slave

Okay, so what do you need to look out for when training? Yes, I know there is just so much information available out there, loads of so-called experts; it’s hard to know where to start. Of course, you don’t have to become a marathon runner unless you want to that is? However, you may wish to become versed in the techniques of NLP which you may find helpful for training your mind. So without getting too technical about it if you have not considered NLP before or even heard of it let me introduce you to the concept. We are going to touch on some of the basics for novices to NLP, visual, auditory or kinaesthetic, that you might find useful first up, is termed NLP Anchoring.

NLP Anchoring is usually defined as: “The process of associating an internal response with some external trigger (similar to classical conditioning). It’s basically a trigger that elicits a response in you. Your brain is literally an interlocking matrix of neural connections and associations, these are anchors. It’s how we give the world around us meaning. Here’s an extreme example:

Russian Dog Teasing, the Russian behavioral psychologist Pavlov became famous for his experiment with dogs. Every time he fed his dogs he would ring a bell. Feed dog- Ring bell Feed dog- Ring bell Feed dog- Ring bell. At this point he would just have to ring the bell and what do you think the dogs would do? Salivate the drooling dog proved that an association had been made in the dog brain between the stimulus of the bell ringing and the experience of eating food… so its response would be to drool.

Anchors are everywhere!

Therefore, if you hear a particular record and it makes you feel happy or sad that would be an example of a simple anchor. If you watch a comedian on a stage that has you laughing for 10 minutes, you may only have to see their face for a second, or just remember the look of their face inside your mind and you find yourself beginning to smile.

These are just some examples of non-deliberately created anchors in the auditory (sound of the record) and visual (comedians funny face). A self-created, deliberate anchor will usually be physical or in NLP terms it’s called “Kinaesthetic”

If you practise going into a stance and visualising a verbal assault whilst simultaneously generating certain feelings inside yourself then after a few practises your neurology will learn to automatically and unconsciously associate and fire off those feelings every time you do the line-up posture with no conscious effort on your part at all. This is an excellent and powerful way of overcoming the fear of confrontation and violence. This is a much more sophisticated, strategy usually used by specialists, but if you like it feel free to use it too. Remember NLP is defined as an attitude of experimentation and curiosity so if it works for you, just do it!

What kinds of feelings might you want to generate when faced with violence? Well certainly no fear! Indeed, you’d want to feel strongly motivated to deal with this threat, confident and decisive, skilful and proficient. In brief, NLP has numerous powerful tools to help with a variety of human emotions, issues and circumstances. The ideas presented here will give you a basis for starting to work within the NLP realm. What are also important are the psychological aspects to the system. The fact that it’s modeled not just on the physical but the psychological techniques gives you the edge over many other systems of fighting.

Successful self-protection

To put these principles into practice as do elite Special Forces throughout the world you need to use them in every aspect of your life so much so that they become unconscious activities like riding a bike. You will not need to even think about them. Someone who lives at this level of behavior will control every aspect of their lives so they don’t just transform their fighting ability but also their ability to get on in life. This was a short introduction to NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programing). Like China your mind is a sleeping giant.