Letters
It's your life
I have a job to go near training these days I hate it, I'm bored I just want to get out the room. Recently I spent 2 hours with what I think might be a friend of Steve's, an American master of the Chinese martial arts., but had to leave because of his ego, he did not want to be touched etc (sorry Steve that does not apply to you ). Anyway I am 54 and I feel like the guts have gone out of me. Please may I ask Steve is there anything I could do to make my spirit stronger? I feel sort of timid these days. (J.C.)
I think the problem with going into systems is that teachers either by their own devices, bump themselves up to an artificially inflated status, or their followers do it for them. Or you do, as a way to set your marker high. You want to see the best in the guy. I don't know why the masters do that; my feeling is that they're trying to match up to the legends of the past, which probably got to be legends the very same way. And their followers do that simply to be able to say at a cocktail party, 'I'm training with the greatest master in the world.'
I've had exactly the same feeling, 'I want to walk out.' I've trained with and observed lots of guys, and I always gave them the best shot at giving me what I wanted, and some, like the guy you're talking about (who I personally know from Japan but haven't seen in many, many years) really did think they were the cat's whiskers. Particularly those who claimed a pedigree, and I often felt like I was a mongrel in their presence. When I saw Yamaguchi Gogen I really did believe everything I'd heard about him, as I did Oyama. But I soon found out that the guys weren't even super-normal, let alone superhuman. Who the fuck is?
And I suppose I was not only angry with them for deceiving me, but more angry with myself for deluding myself. I used that anger to train. I used that anger to push myself forward, and to improve my personal abilities. When I got kicked out of the Kyokushin Kai for fighting as I thought fighting should be, I was pissed off. When I went to Japan and trained for eight hours a day seven days a week, I was pissed off because there weren't any samurai there. When I went to Okinawa and saw at Yagi Meitoku's dojo guys training to a tape recorder with Yagi's voice on it, I got pissed off. When I came back to England and George Chew paid me £15 a week when he promised £200, I got pissed off. And when he sacked me and nobody else wanted me, I got even more pissed off. And when I shouldn't have been pissed off anymore, when I actually had a job at Earlham Street in 1971, I got pissed off with teaching plonkers karate. And finally, when I went to Japan in 1973 to take my fifth dan and was treated like a piece of shit by Yamaguchi Goshi, I got pissed off again!!!!! I've been pissed off for most of my life! (But that's how I got where I am. And by the way, in case it isn't obvious to a hedgehog, I don't take myself seriously. I'm laughing all the time I'm dictating this to Trish. I'm not serious about who I am, I'm just serious about what I do—which makes me the opposite of most of the masters I've met. And I guess that's why I upset a lot of people. As Sgt. Major. Paddy Mullen used to shout at me, 'Morris, you look like a pockin gypsy going fishing. Get a pockin haircut!' I couldn't give a fuck about what anybody thinks of me.)
But I still kept an open mind towards anybody or anything that I thought might add something to my knowledge or ability, including studying many systems from around the world and coming in contact with hundreds of martial artists from all over the place. And that process continued until 1993, when I went to China and observed and interviewed the masters of Fuzhou as part of my research into the connection between the Fujien fighting systems and those of Okinawa. I was impressed with what they had to say, and I was impressed with their performance, but it was nothing new. And when I defeated the head coach of the Fuzhou Wu Shu Association who was seven years my junior, that was the end of my journey. It was time to get on to more personal things.
At that time, I was 50. Now I tell you this story about my visit to Fujien because one year earlier, I was psychologically and physiologically a fucking wreck. I've always been one of those guys who attacks the system in anticipation that it's going to fight back, and I become stronger because of it. Well, in 1992, my system attacked me. My blood chemistry was completely up the creek. I dramatically lost weight, my motivation to train wasn't even an issue because I couldn't even climb up the stairs. I went up one side of Harley Street and came back down the other, being passed from one expert to the other (who each in their turn, rather like in the martial arts, was determined to claim that my problem fell into their area of specialization) until finally when sitting in bed in the London Clinic just about to go down for a liver biopsy, I decided that was e-fucking-nough. Got out of bed, got a taxi, and went home.
I started a program, coincidentally, of pa kua walking the circle, starting with one minute at a time and working up to an hour or so. By the way, this isn't a plug for pa kua, it's just that it was the only way I could walk in a room and get some distance out of it. I then moved on in a straight line, outside, and gradually started to pick up the pace until I was marching six miles a day with the dogs across the fields, whatever the weather, like a fucking maniac.
I went to Fuzhou whilst I was still recovering. I was down to ten and a half stone, but nobody knew why but me. I was going to solve the problem. This is my philosophy about everything. I've got a personal goal, and nobody but me is going to make that happen. I've always looked for help if I could find it, but I wasn't going to rely on that help. And I wasn't going to make excuses for myself.
I've had other low periods in my life. One was in the 1970s when I seriously injured my knee and was told that I'd never walk without a cane and that I should probably take up rowing, but I got myself an indoor cycle, strapped my bad leg to the pedal, and cycled with my good leg turning my bad leg on a low resistance. In 6-8 months, the leg was better.
And I'd gotten that idea some years before in 1971 when I'd had a hand broken in three places and the 'professional' set it wrong, so I effectively ended up with a deformed hand--not a pleasant sight or a happy experience. At that time, I'd been training in Bill Stevens' Stratford Gymnasium with Pete Levy, a British power lifter . On the deadlifts, he strapped my bad hand to the bar so I could perform the lift, and my hand got stronger. It's still deformed, but I've managed to get by with it (hahaha) for over thirty years.
Anger is the thing that's driven me. And it's these destructive urges inside of me that are motivating me, and I've got lots of references I can draw on from my life experiences. The real trick is giving this energy some direction. That's what your frontal lobes are for. You gotta aim the bullet. But FIRST you've got to have a bullet to aim. So being pissed off with someboy (like with this guy you walked out on) provides you with the ammunition. You've just got to learn to point it at someone, something, or in some direction. But the sure thing is, you can't go along, like many many martial artists do, suppressing this primal drive and not expressing it within their training.
With a lot of martial arts, it's anal-retentive. It's Serotonin Man. Order, discipline, routine. Trish told me about reading on somebody's blog the other day where a guy was going on about finding the perfect Tokaido gi, what size it was, and how he got blood on it when he wore it and how he got the blood out (even the wash setting!). I mean, what the fuck's going on here?
You need to push yourself out of the parameters of your comfort zone. If the guy in the session trains at fucking 5 mph, what are you going to get with that? The overload I'm talking about is both mental and physical. You've got to overload the system. You've got to take that chance that it will fight back on your behalf. It will overcompensate for you and make you stronger, and provide you with the next level by which you can overload it even more. How the hell do you think at 61 that I can still outgun guys half my age? I've got a principle. I've got a way of doing things which agrees with how, psychologically and physiologically, we've evolved to survive. I'm not contradicting it. I'm using it.
Don't bother setting positive goals. Get angry first. Don't think your positive goal is going to provide you with the energy. The energy is always going to come from your primal drives. You've got to get in fucking touch with them, not suppress them. And that's probably the problem. The more technical the discourse on things martial, it all becomes too cortical. You've got to be working from your hindbrain driving forward through your forebrain to give it direction, just like when you're riding a horse. The power's coming from the back; the direction with your reins and legs, comes from the front. And you can cue the brain to do that. You can trick it. You don't have to go out looking for a fight. You've got enough references in there stored away.
You've got to get angry. It's in there. You've got to do something to get it out. And this is my experience: people who don't express their anger outwardly, will tend to point the bullet back at themselves. And that can really put you in a lot of trouble. You realize that that's going to happen, you realize that's where you are, and you say: that's it. I'm fucking coming out of it. This isn't where I want to be.
I know how to piss people off. And I do that intentionally because I want to piss them off for real, provoke them either into a fight, or into their best performance. I make them want to fucking kill me. Then that's the time to say, "Whoa. Go over there. Now punch the bag." I've done that with a lot of guys. That's me. I close the windows in summer and open them up in winter. That makes a lot of people quit, but the ones who stick it out and dig deep, they really get something out of it.
You've got to learn to do that for yourself. That's my secret. It's not that it's a secret, it's just that that's me. I put myself under tremendous personal pressure. I'm so driven, and that's there in everybody but society destroys it. Our parents, institutions, all of society suppresses it or teaches you to repress it. The martial arts for me is a journey of rediscovery as to who I really am. What I am as a species.
What I'm talking about isn't just physical. Even if you're an intellectual, the principle is the same. You've got to take risks. You've got to jump, and commit yourself. Explore new possibilities. Get out of the fucking trench. It ain't going anywhere. Believe me!
People tend to think that I'm a fucking psycho. Probably from their personal experiences of me, eyeball to eyeball, or through my writings, when I suggest that that emergency state of mind by which you best deal with situational problems, is partially psychotic, non-neurotic and extrovert. The thing to remember here, is PARTIALLY. You only turn it on when you really need it. How the hell else are you going to have a punishing workout? You can't be passive.
I don't walk down the street mugging old ladies or getting in fights with the dustbin man. It's not that kind of thing. But for me, you really do realize that you're a fucking loaded gun, and you can't draw it on every fucking plonker.
I went into the martial arts as a way of giving a positive direction to my violent nature. But within the martial arts I only found guys who didn't have the violence to direct in the first place, and were only pretending that they could be violent if they wanted to. In the process of trying to define and refine that animal nature, I've learned to use it. I can control it and direct it, whether it's doing research fourteen hours a day, or training eight hours a day. It's a powerful beam of light. You can shine it where you like, and illuminate whatever you want to shine it on. And that energy will get you wherever you want to go.
That's what you've got to get a handle on. Even if you feel cornered in life, you don't have to feel like a victim. You say 'fuck it' and you fight your way out of there.
It's your life. Don't let anybody else piss around with it, and most of all don't piss around with it yourself.
Steve Morris
