Ice & Fire Stav Blog

If you read my postings regularly you may remember that I have mentioned our resident Pea Hen a couple of times. She is still around and I always find it interesting to closely observe a creature and learn about their behaviour. I am particularly struck by the Pea Hen’s approach to personal security.

Pea Fowl are overgrown (and in the case of the males, overdecorated) Pheasants. Which means they are going to be good to eat and have little in the way of weapons for self protection. So if they are going to survive they need good personal security strategies. Our Pea Hen protects herself in the following ways. Firstly she is always on the alert when on the ground and moving around. Even when she is comfortablly perched she is fully aware of what is going on around her and it seems to be impossible to sneak up on her with out her noticing. This is a very good example of what Geoff Thompson calls being in Code yellow when out and about (a state of constant awareness of suroundings) and moving to Code orange when a potential threat is detected.

Secondly, when she does need to sleep, in fact as soon as it goes dark this bird gets herself high up into a tree and roosts well about the level that a fox or other predator could reach. Thirdly she keeps herself at a safe distance when interacting with people so that she can’t be lulled into a false sense of security and grabbed or other wise attacked. She is very tame and seems to enjoy being around human beings. She comes to the back door once or twice a day for a piece of bread. Each time I try to get her to take a piece from my hand but each time she holds back until I have put it on the floor and kept my distance. Street robberies often begin with the assailant getting close by asking the time, asking for a light or directions. Human beings fall for such tricks, a pea fowl wouldn’t.

So three excelent lessons. Be fully aware of your suroundings. When you must rest find somewhere genuinely safe and don’t be lured into danger. I don’t think the Pea Hen is taking on students at present so the next best thing might be to come to the Summer camp where you have a choice of Survival or Self-defence training before having three days training with Ivar Hafskjold.

I received this message this morning from Darren who has been a Stav student and friend for many years now. He was training in Salisbury last Saturday and this is what he said:

“Thanks for a great day on Saturday – the aching arms and shoulders have just about gone  Really enjoyed it, looking forward to April!”

I really appreciate the feedback and in many ways it tells you all you need to know about my Stav teaching. Firstly I try my best to make sure everyone does have a great day when they train with me. We will cover a lot of interesting stuff, the company will be good and you will go away with a lot to work on and think about.

Secondly, you will have to work and I expect as much effort out of each person as they are capable of. You will probably know afterwards that you stretched yourself and expanded your normal limits. If you want to discover capabilities you didn’t know you had then come and learn, if you are committed to remaining safely in your comfort zone then don’t bother.

Thirdly, learning Stav is an ongoing process and each time you train I will be encouraging you to develop further. Next opportunity in the USA is at the end of March or a week later in the UK in West London, I have just updated my calendar and we have a date for Oxford now too on the 19th of May.

So if you are deliberating whether or not to come on a Stav course you now know what to expect, you will enjoy it, you will suffer some strain (but how else can you grow?) and you will want to go further. So, thanks Darren, I couldn’t have put it better myself!

Three problems with the teaching of Martial arts. First, there is too much to learn. Secondly, rarely is anything perfected and the greatest source of failure is boredom. This creates something of a paradox. Martial arts tend to get complicated with lots of moves and skills to learn and maybe even practice. However for anything like competence, let alone perfection of technique, to be achieved one or two simple things need to be practised relentlessly with great determination. But such practice is boring and most students crave variety to maintain interest. Yet the same students know, even if they don’t want to admit it to themselves, that they are not actually competent in anything they have learned, so will actually get bored and disappointed and will probably give up.

We had a course today in Salisbury where we worked through the five principles drills and explored the fence, pre-emption and posturing in the context of the Trel principle. A sense of, ‘yes, I could make this work!’ seemed to be developing. I also set those attending a similar challenge to the one Geoff Thompson set me, take one technique, practice a lot of times every day and at the next course we will see how much more effective it is. There is another benefit, if you can commit yourself to practising one thing intensively it will fundamentally change your view of yourself as someone with no concentration or sticking power. It is actually very simple to practice one punch or strike one hundred times a day (I am doing seven hundred punches a day for my challenge, but one hundred is still a good start for most people). The greatest sources of failure are boredom, distraction and excuses. I know it certainly has been mine. So it might seem that a martial arts instructor is preparing you to deal with vicious thugs in the street but by the far more important battle is the one to take control of the self. And that is the battle most easily lost.

Only four people came today, I was honoured to train with them but I guess I must have bored and disappointed too many others. If you are thinking about attending training but not sure you can be bothered to make the effort then consider whether you are happy where you are, or if you want to move forward in your life. Training and practice will move you forward, but you have to make the effort. USA course on the 24^th to 26^th March and in West London, UK on the 31^st. I will be there ready to teach as best I can, will you be there to learn?

On Sunday I attended the first of the six seminars which make up Geoff Thompson’s master class series. It meant getting to Coventry despite the snow, and everyone expected did make it. But it would be a bit strange to sign up for a course which is largely about overcoming your fears and then wimping out because of a few inches of snow.

There was quite a lot of practice on close range punching using focus pads. I discovered that I have a fairly good right but my left couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. We were set a challenge practising one technique 100,000 times over the duration of the course (last session on the 8^th of July) which means about 680 repetitions a day. So I have started working on my left punch and I am on target so far. Geoff wanted us to experience what a punch to the jaw should feel like so he demonstrated. My training partner said that Geoff’s fist was practically touching my jaw when he lightly tapped me. It was like being hit by a bus and I felt my brain bounce inside my skull. I have no doubt that a full power punch would drop someone unconscious. I have read Geoff’s various accounts of winning fights in his book Watch My Back and couldn’t help being a little sceptical at the time, I am not now though.

It is a basic problem of teaching martial arts that students are shown a technique and told to practice it and five minutes later they will be chatting with each other and saying; done that, what’s next? Then they wonder why they are not really any good at anything they are supposed to have learned. If they expect something learned in that way to be of any use in a self-defence situation then they will get a very rude awakening. I am not saying I wasn’t aware of this before Sunday but the master class has made me very much aware of the importance of getting very good at a relatively few things. Which is why Ivar is always emphasising the importance of 1000 cuts a day in his own practice.

So in my teaching this year I will put renewed emphasis on identifying what will work best for each student and then coaching them to perfect it. Knowledge is essential but it is also meaningless without application and hard work. I got a reminder of that on Sunday and I am glad to pass it on to you.  See the Ice and Fire Stav page for next training opportunity.

Some people reading this may have heard me use the following example before. Although I saw Grand Torino quite recently I have used another Cinematic example when teaching the Konge principle over many years. If you are familiar with the late seventies film Mad Max, Mel Gibson’s first notable role when he was still based down under. Then you may remember the opening sequence where a stolen car is racing along a desert highway and the cops seem powerless to stop it. Inter-cut with scenes of police ineptitude are shots of a leather clad arm lovingly polishing the bonnet of a powerful car. In the back ground we can hear the vehicle’s radio giving ongoing reports of the chase in progress. Once the fugitive has evaded several attempts to stop him we see the car polisher climb into his vehicle, fire up the engine and take to the highway. It is of course Max played by Mel himself.

As the fugitive races along the straight desert road Max drives straight for him at full speed and at the very last second the fugitive panics and attempts to evade the oncoming car. In doing so he rolls and wreck his stolen car and kills himself in the process. It is all very dramatic and I don’t recommend the film unreservedly. It is very violent and in places frankly rather nasty, but if you have a strong stomach it is an exiting movie.

The reason I am describing this particular scene is that it can be seen as a powerful example of the Konge mind set. It shows a willingness to face down any threat or danger since the consequences will either be victory or death and either way the goal will have been achieved. If the fugitive had not veered off at the last moment then Max would still have achieved his aim, albeit at the cost of his life. It would have made for a rather short film too since the rest of the story is concerned with the aftermath of the fugitive’s death and the revenge that his gang take.

Of course the Konge mindset doesn’t only apply to violent situations. Anything we are afraid of and seems risky can be a challenge to us. But if there is a good enough reason and a great enough potential benefit then we should think about meeting the situation head on and to hell with the consequences.

Of course as anyone who has done actual practical Stav training knows that we explore the principles with dynamic training exercises. There are plenty of opportunities to learn and practice these over the next few months so give them a try.

I am finding it increasingly difficult to express what the five principles are about. Not sure why since I have been working with them for nearly 20 years and I hope I have grasped some idea of what they are about by now. Perhaps I would rather be teaching them through practical exercises rather than in on line messages. That is what I will be doing on the 28^th in Bristol and at the various day courses I will be teaching up until the Summer Camp.

The other evening Venetia and I watched a DVD of a recent Clint Eastwood film called Grand Torino. The title actually refers to a 1972 Ford muscle car which is the pride and joy of the main character played by Clint himself. The film itself charts a man’s progress from lonely and bitter isolation through deeper and deeper involvement with his community through his relationship with his Hmong neighbours. If Clint Eastwood knew Stav and had decided to make a film which charted the five principles from Trel to Konge then he couldn’t have done any better than this film. As far as I know Mr Eastwood doesn’t know anything about Stav per se but the five principles are universal truths, rather like gravity or the 20/80 principle. The issue is whether or not you understand these principles, rather than the way you came to know them. I happened to learn the five principles through Stav but it wasn’t Stav that made them a fact of life any more than gravity didn’t existing before Issac Newton observed the legendary apple.

There is a stage in the film where the main character realises that direct and violent action isn’t going to help the situation he finds himself in. So he steps back and takes a broad overview. This enables him to see a way of resolving the situation which will require a major sacrifice from himself but will also bring real healing to the community. For me it was a rather beautiful example of the Jarl principle in action.

Watch the film for yourself and see if you agree with me. Or better still come to the summer camp this year where I intend to screen the film over the evenings of the camp and we can discuss what it shows. I will have to make the necessary power available for a projector but I am sure we can overcome that problem.

Why is violence so popular? I don’t just mean as entertainment though of course representations of violent acts do crop up a great deal in all kinds of media. I mean real violence in the real world. For most of us in the West violence is not a daily occurrence and for this we should be very grateful. However in many parts of the world the daily threat is much greater and the American and many European governments are to a degree responsible for this. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya have either been bombed or even occupied by western forces over the past couple of decades. Iran is now being threatened in a similar way. I am not arguing the rights and wrongs of any particular action here, just using it to show that violence is not uncommon in our world.

It may seem that the Herse is the principle most directly concerned with violence. At least that is the way it might appear since the military and law enforcement can be seen as Herse occupations. Sometimes it is said that the Herse is the warrior principle. That isn’t necessarily wrong but the true warrior must know all five principles to be complete. It might be better to see the Herse as concerned with justice and order and that means being willing to engage with all human activity, including the possibility of violence. The reality is that each principle solves one problem and sows the seeds of excess which the next principle has to engage with. So if the Trel problem is being not fully involved in the world then the Karl principle is about collective action to create, produce and trade. This is good in that it creates a much more powerful force for creation and production than the individual could manage on their own. But if the collective becomes tribal and seeks to protect its advantages against the individuality of its members and seeks to maintain a competitive advantage against other groups by violence you have the basis for some form of tribal warfare.

The Herse principle seeks to create a situation where there is justice and fairness regardless of which group you belong to. Thus people are protected and their rights supported by virtue of their being within society. Concepts such as trial by jury and the right to free speech and free association are meant to take a community from the tribal and into the social. It is an imperfect process and, as we are seeing, each principle in isolation creates as many problems as it solves. A Herse society taken to its logical conclusion will use enforce laws and regulations regardless of their efficacy or sense until all respect for the forces of law and order is lost. There may be fear but no respect and, as the authorities in Syria are finding, this makes for a very unhappy situation.

I hope readers are getting something from my efforts to explain the five principles in short emails. There is an intellectual dimension to these concepts but there is no substitute for direct experience of how they can be made to work. Stav Martial Arts practice is one way of getting that experience and I am providing opportunities to get that training starting next week in Bristol. Or see my full programme up to July here.

The Old Norse Rune Rhyme for Fe says that: “Money causes strife amongst kinsmen, the wolf grows up in the woods.” I could spend hours unpacking that one but sufficient to say that the idea of the EU was to create one big happy family of European nations, and what do they argue about? If you haven’t been asleep or on another planet for the past couple of years you will know it is money, who borrowed how much and how they are going to pay it back.

My two pennyworth (can’t get away from money metaphors can you?) is that we have forgotten that money is just a tool for making things happen. A widely accepted token of exchange makes all kind of business and trading a lot easier than if you had to use direct barter. Money is a piece of daily equipment which is very effective and powerful in making exchanges possible, it can also be traded as a commodity. But it has no use apart from as a means of exchange, you can’t eat with it or build with it or do much else. Coins can make nice ornaments and jewellery and apparently in Zimbabwe there are notices in public toilets asking people not to use the currency notes as toilet paper because they are worth less than actual toilet paper. But you get the idea.

The Karl level in Stav is about making real things happen and providing for actual needs. This means that we understand the use of money for effective trading and doing business. But we know that money is useless unless it is used as part of a process of production and fair trade.

Yes, money lending for interest is one of the biggest businesses on the planet. But for most of history it was called Usury and considered to be a crime. Many people living under the consequences of government and personal debt may come to think that it still is.

The Karl level is about creating and protecting what is useful and valuable in a real sense. The martial training on this level focuses on preventing entry and defending space. It will be one of the lessons in my seminar on the Five principles on the 28^th in Bristol and I will make the five principles the focus of my teaching between now and the Summer Camp.

If you believe the media and the messages that we are constantly bombarded with then the world we live in is a troubled place. Apart from natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons, which probably no one is directly to blame for or stupid accidents such as the recent wreck of an Italian cruise liner which seem to have been basic human error, most of the problems seem to be due to war or finance.

Of course mass conflicts and monetary problems are the results of human decisions and actions. But somehow there always seems to be scope for blaming others. It can be argued that the Euro is basically a good idea and it is the fault of the Greeks and others for taking advantage of the creditworthiness belonging brought them. (Not my personal view I would like to add.) Once a war gets started it can always be justified by something the enemy said or did. When it is over the victors write the history books vindicating themselves anyway. It seems to be the job of a politician to blame someone else for all problems while promising painless solutions in return for votes. A lot of would be leaders do seem to be like suitors maxing out their credit cards in the hope of impressing a member of the opposite sex into bed. (or maybe the same sex depending upon your inclination). Individual bankruptcy is bad enough but when a government behaves this way the results can be very serious, ask the Greeks, Portuguese or Irish amongst a few.

The only solution is personal responsibility and self-reliance. The five principles of Stav are about creating that sense of personal responsibility. The Trel principle is sometimes described as the dependent slave level. But we all have responsibility for ourselves, our health and well-being, our personal finances and doing the best we can in any task we find to do. We have all had the experience of the very low level employee who still goes out of their way to give the best service they can. They may not be richly rewarded for it and their colleagues may not respect them for it. But it makes a difference to all concerned. Nothing matters more than people being prepared to say: ‘This is my responsibility and I will do the best I can.’

On the 28^th in Bristol I am teaching a seminar on the five principles of Stav and how they apply in a self-defence context. This includes a video of the drills we will work with which will enable us to explore these themes of self-reliance and personal responsibility which apply to all aspects of life. I will also be sharing the same material on the USA seminar in March as well.

Last week, at a Christmas party, I found myself in conversation with someone who had had a great interest in Yoga and, so used to have a good practice in the discipline. But now he didn’t have time to do Yoga at all because of the pressures of getting a new business off the ground. I have lost count of the number of times I have had similar conversations with people over the years. Not always about Yoga, but Karate, Tai Chi, or just regular keep fit, but the problem is the same; ‘I used to do an hour a day of xyz and it was so good for me but then I got busy and I don’t have time any more.’

This of course to some extent is an excuse, maybe they could get up an hour earlier or watch less TV. But to be fair it isn’t just time. You may also need the right space, or being able to put on the right clothes or just finding the energy after a long day at work which has drained you. I know that there is the argument that the right activity restores your energy and this may be true, but it can also be very hard to get to that point and still have time to eat and sleep enough.

The problem is that a lot of practices seem to demand too much commitment. A teacher conducting a two hour class twice a week is going to want to create the impression that every detail and movement is essential to getting the most from the discipline they are teaching. They may be right in an ideal world but a lot of the time ours is a lot less than ideal. So if we are going to keep a practice going we have to be a bit creative.

In order to manage a busy life we need to use the 80/20 principle which tells us that 80% of the benefits of anything come from 20% of the input. If you are not familiar with the idea then check out Richard Koch’s book The 80/20 Principle. When applied to disciplines such as Yoga or Stav this principle teaches that 80% of the benefit of your practice comes from 20% of the practice that you could do but don’t have the time for. 20% of an hour is 12 minutes. I don’t know much about Yoga but if you are too busy for that hour session then here is a suggestion. Identify a key 12 minutes of Asanas (Yoga Postures) which you can do every day and see how you get on with just those.

Stav makes this easy because the core discipline is the stances. This sequence takes less than 10 minutes to do and can be done anywhere in normal clothes. Yes there are lots of other kinds of Stav training you can do and it all has its value, but keep up the stances and you will get a large proportion of the benefit you would get from doing it all.

When I teach a Stav course, even if you learn from Ivar on the Stav Summer camp we will teach you all kinds of cool stuff. But we always emphasise that it is the stances that matter, so learn those, make them part of your daily routine and the benefits of Stav can be yours too.