The World of Fighting Monkey (part 2)
Engaging with your work demands a certain degree of ownership. There must be a benefit to the challenge presented, beyond just a hard-to-apply confidence. A task can serve as a test of will, a test of adaptability, and/or a test of inquiry. It can also present itself as a raveled frustration. The creation of situations that require mental fortitude serve the psychological branch of Fighting Monkey research.
Defining failure can be as arbitrary as defining success when the goal is not to finish. Success suggests how far you’ve come, and failure illustrates how far you still have to go. They gray in-between, unsure of what to look for but fixated on what you find, is a place of utmost immersion. To build self-trust, one only needs to be compelled enough to try:
As individuals, we have our own unique set of breaking points. When we deem we are done with a drill differs when we are a part of a partnership or group. We compare and don’t want to disappoint. We will go well beyond the place we would have given up alone. The community pushes just by being present. It supports the efforts of the collective.
Apart from a seminar, however, many struggle to find other beings to play-train with. Each of the following sections can be developed with or without a partner. Mental moxie is a skill like any other. Practice and familiarity encourages improvement.
STILLNESS
As simple as it sounds, maintaining stillness for an extended period of time can be a demanding effort. Depending on the position and length, not moving can be as laborious as moving wildly. Without any action to distract, the holding becomes a meditation. When you can no longer scan your environment, your thoughts and awareness turn internal, studying and manipulating lines of tension to keep you going.
A right hand extended, left hand reaching/ pointed downward paralysis was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I had to drop my hands and reset myself four times during our twelve minute trial. Once that first crack came, others were quick to follow. The feature photo shows another statuesque option to try.
Pre-workshop I used a the idea of stillness to build resolve and comfort in the uncomfortable:
BALANCE
Much like Feldenkrais teachings, holding the head, ribs, and pelvis freely allows them to make tiny adjustments as needed. Forced ‘military’ stiffness creates unnecessary tension and stress. Excessive effort is the opposite of ease. Things made easy can last longer and enter into more challenging situations.
Starting static, try and get 50% of your weight on each leg. Front to back, get slightly more pressure on your heels than your toes/ balls of feet, 60%-40%. From here, attempt to load one leg to 90% without shifting the hips in the direction of the loaded side. Lift the heel of the lighter foot, creasing the toes and eventually kick-standing on only the tips. (I call this 95-5). Set and steady, slow step into a forward hover and continue into a dynamic warmup.
Combining tools and elements:
Incorporating some roughhousing:
COORDINATIONS
This is where it all went black. After hours of non-stop movement and interplay, Linda showed us a move in which the upper and lower halves were doing completely different things. Even when she slowed things down, I couldn’t piece it together. I could get just the feet, and I could manage to kinda get the arms, but I couldn’t perform it simultaneously.
We danced our way down the hall in lines, watching others struggle or excel. As he watched me falter, Martin asked, “What sport you play?” None anymore, I thought, but I replied, “I used to play basketball.” “This just like basketball,” he said. No, I thought. This was nothing like basketball.
As people continued to make their attempts down the lines, the back of the room got thick. We were trying to figure out who to watch and how to inch our way closer to the desired effect. It was a psychological experiment. How much frustration would it take to get us to quit? What would our method of problem solving be?
Martin loosing his mind in the best of ways:
FOOTWORK
The saving grace was when Jozef recognized we were stranded and reduced the movement down to some simplified boxing steps. Right cross, left cross, right uppercut. Left cross, right cross, left uppercut. We had to determine how to use our feet to produce the desired vector and force with our hands. Moving forward, and then moving back, we then teamed up with a partner to integrate a patty-cake kind of synchronicity, while both advancing and retreating.
The importance of footwork was a major theme throughout. Those of us who dared to participate in the workshop barefoot were left with significant blisters (I returned to my shoes a few hours in and kept them there for the duration). The skin of our feet was ill-prepared for the gauntlet we faced. Our dexterity and conditioning were only slightly better off.
We used unevenly sanded Jenga blocks to make gates for our feet to pass through. Given instructions were: 1. Slide rather than lift your feet, 2. Only have one foot pass through a gate (two upright blocks just far enough for a foot to pass through) at a time, and 3. Create as many combinations as possible.
We started off in the pentagon shape, but when we were allowed to use just two and build our own shape to interact with, the results seemed to improve personal development.
NOTABLE ADDITIONAL TAKEAWAYS
- Actions on the ground rarely translate to standing.
- Maybe moving as well as possible within the range we have is at least as important as developing a larger ROM.
- Putting your hands on the body part you want to pay attention to helps give it additional kinesthetic awareness.
- Using your hands as a counter balance removes them from a position of interaction.
- Stretching is overrated. Look to the animals. (Cats only do it for a second or two).
Above all else, Fighting Monkey is a mindset. It is about a shift in perception about who we are, what we can do, and why we try. It is the acknowledgement that there is both fact and fiction in everything, and it up to us to form a contextual truth and then to challenge it. The monkey we fight is ourselves:
“The discrepancy between the childlike enthusiasm and spontaneity we were born with, in awe with everything and everyone around us and our current sleep — that is what needs to be punched out of us to let our energy burst loose again, without restraints and customs unconsciously designed and accepted by ourselves and sold to us as real by our surroundings. That is the real Fight, the real Monkey to throw into the ring.”