Special Episode - Spirit Animals of Xing Yi - Bear

In this special episode special guest martial artist Graham Barlow and Damon examine Bear as a spirit animal in reference to Xing Yi. This is the first of a series covering, at a minimum, all twelve of the spirit animals of Xing Yi, setting some of the ground work for upcoming mainstream Woven Energy episodes on Animal Spirit Dance.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, and welcome to this very special episode of the
Woven Untie Podcast. My name is Demon Smith, and because
this podcast episode is a special one and not a
mainstream numbered episode of Woven Energie, I have invited a
special co host, which is my co host from the

(00:29):
Heretics podcast, Graham Barlow. Hi, Graham, how are you doing?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
How good? How are you?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm busy but good, excellent. A few things. First of all,
apologies for how long it's taken us to get a
Woven Untie episode out. Everybody has been insanely busy, especially me,
and as mostly my fault, I do have Joe. Shout
out to Joe booked in for the next mainstream episode

(00:58):
of the Woman I Podcast, which we should be doing
very soon, but for this sort of special episode, I
just wanted to shout out to our amazing patrons. So
I know the patrons support us for both Heretics and
for Woven Energy, but I don't think we've done any
Woven Energie episodes for a very long time now, So

(01:19):
thank you ever so much guys for sticking with us.
We know how awesome you guys are, and it's absolutely
amazing that you do stick with us through the thick
and thing, the good times and the bad if you like.
So this episode, I think a lot of our patrons
are interested in marshal arts, and which is the reason
I've invited Graham to co host this gra great it's

(01:40):
not just marsh arts. We're specifically talking about the marsh
lot of Shinghy here and we're going to use on
this episode and maybe it might become the start of
a series. On this special episode, we're going to use
the animals of Shingy as a kind of introduction to
the idea of spirit animals in general in shamanism. I think,
as I've said many times, singing is the most shamanistic

(02:02):
art that I've come across. But I mean there's other
martial arts that are fairly shamanistic in their nature. And
I think it's good timing in terms of where we
got to with the You know that the Woven Energy
episodes are sequential, and we're sort of getting to the
point where I know for fact that some of our
patrons are getting on quite well into what you might

(02:24):
call intermediate spurt dance, because I've seen them do not
on video. It's absolutely amazing what people can do from
just for a podcast, So sooner or later we're going
to start touching on the subject of animal spirit dance,
especially because we've been doing a lot of the changes.
Probably we've been getting onto enough changes to start talking
about animal spurit dance, and animal spirit dance is not

(02:49):
the only place where animal spirits exist in the wonderful
broad and enormously wide scoped subject of shamanism. Another area
is in bat of arts, and there's a huge amount
of crossover between the spirit animals that you get in
a martial art like shingi and the spirit animals that

(03:09):
you would have for spirit dance to Actually, from my
point of view, they're the self same animals. They're not
different animals, They're exactly the same thing. And you know,
I think we've talked about this before. My perspective on
these things is, I guess the best way to describe
it is, I've thought about having a single hall, like

(03:29):
a practice hall, and on one side is the you know,
something like that looks like Cobra Kai saying wild animals
martial arts in here, and across the block on the
all across the other side of the building, on the
other road is this sort of hippie looking thing with
mandalas and you know, various things cords and tassels and

(03:53):
all sorts of drums and shamanic paraphernalia hanging in the window,
but the doors on streets laid. It lead into the
self same hall where we're going to be practicing practicing
spurt animal movement stuff, which is at one in the
same time Marshall and not Marshall, depending on your perspective
on it. So we're not really talking about spirit animals

(04:17):
in martial arts per se. What we're using this as
an introduction to start to think about what spurred animals
are like when it comes to animal spirit dance. And
so Shinghi is a really good place to start because
unlike most Marshalots I mean, I mean going both do
Charlie Foot, and Charlie Foot has an awesome total of
five animals, which might seem quite good, you know, but

(04:37):
actually that's nothing on Shingy, which has twelve animals. So
if we're going to talk about spurt animals, we might
as well talk about a lot of different ones. And
so in Shinghi in general, the animals aren't really and
there's an order that we teach them in isn't there.
But yes, it's more of a general areas. Some of

(04:59):
them are easier than others, so we tend to teach
those ones first, and the ones that are more difficult
we tend to teach them later. But it's not like
it's one, two, three, four or five or anything like that.
They're all equal, and just because ones advanced doesn't mean
it's quote unquote better. I mean, for instance, the bear

(05:19):
and the eagle are the there's a bit of controversy
around this, or the bar eagle single animal. If you
get good at those two, they often used together, even
if you don't consider them a single animal. There is
an animal called the bear eagle in China, even if
you don't consider them that. If you get good at
those two, really good at them, you could be an
absolutely lethal fighter without learning any of the others. Whether

(05:43):
you think there's ten more or eleven more or whatever,
you could become a very very high level martial artist.
Even though these two might be considered quote unquote basic,
they're only basic in that they're relatively easy to learn.
So I think that we might as well, I know what,
you think, we might as well just dive right into it.
With the first animal, which is the wonderful one of

(06:06):
the wonderful animals that is found, I would say that
it's realistically, it's the most prevalent animal that you find
in the spirit dance of Mongolia, and it's also an
animal that's very prevalent and I found very useful in
Mongolian wrestling as well as in Shinghi, which is the

(06:29):
bear and the bears are kind of good case in
point because we all have ideas about what we think
of different animals and different animals alike. And first of all,
there's also this thing that our spirit animals real animals.
If you're of the opinion that they're not, there's some
heavenly magical thing that can be whatever you want them

(06:52):
to be in your imagination, and they have characteristics that
are nothing to do with real life animals, then we
disagree fundamentally on what spirited animals are. Every animal has
an essence or an underlying spirit and underlying way that
it fulfills its lifestyle that, if you like, they're like

(07:15):
guiding energetic principles or portfolios of change that enable it
to be successful within the environments and context that it lives.
And what I mean by successful is staying alive and
reproducing and all that kind of stuff. Then that sort
of underlying essence of the animal is its animal spirit,

(07:35):
if you like. It's what makes it unique, it's what
makes it successful. You know, all of all the species
that ever existed, most of them have died out. So
the ones we've got now in the world today, they're
pretty good. And a couple of the they're pretty good
at what they do, and you know, environments change and
they'll evolve over time. But we're talking about animals that

(07:59):
have been through a very rigorous natural testing process, and
so you can put a lot of faith in the
things that they do, in the way that they behave.
In terms of martial arts, we're not looking at every
single aspect of these animals lives, which in terms of
spurt dance, we may well be looking at every single

(08:20):
aspect of these animals lives in terms of the fullness
or the broad scope of the animal's character, But in
terms of martial arts, we tend to be looking at
let's say, three things, three aspects, and so that's what
we're going to limit ourselves to on this series. Are
these three different aspects of each animal, and different animals

(08:44):
have to worry about these three different aspects in different proportions.
A few of them don't have to worry about one
or two of these aspects at all. But the first
aspect is hunting or predation. How does the animals set
about hunting? Because obviously for those animals that were lie
on hunting, which are quite a lot of them, these
animals are very very good at this, they wouldn't have survived,

(09:08):
you know, in competition with all the other species of
animals that have ever existed, which are larger in number
than the species we've got with us today. They've obviously
been able to hunt very very effectively. So that's one aspect.
Another one is not being hunted anti predation, it's how

(09:28):
do you defend yourself when things want to eat you?
And for all of these animals, things tend to want
to eat them, and even for the ones, the few
that are what you might call apex predators, if nothing else,
humans want to eat you or have wanted to eat
you for a very long time. So you need to

(09:49):
be able to defend yourself from predation in one way
or another, and in some cases you need to be
able to defend yourself from aggression. But that leads us
into the third category, which is known as intra specific aggression.
That if you're like bear on bear, tiger and tiger
human on human, it's usually in that case it's not

(10:11):
predation because cannibalism, true cannibalism is very very rare in
the animal world. True cannibalism is very very rare, and
it's more competition for mates, territorial behavior, establishing dominance, hierarchies
for those animals that are group based, that tend to

(10:34):
live in groups. It's about if there are a number
of choices that I'd say a female has in terms
of who they might want to raise a wild animal
family with, then the intra specific aggression can can fall
out of that because obviously there may be more than

(10:56):
one male who wants to fulfill that role and vice versa.
Possibly who you know, depend depending on the animal or
the thing. Is One of the things I found about animals,
even in Shigni, but certainly in the broader context of biology,
is that whatever you say about animals doesn't matter what
you say about them, one of those animals out there

(11:17):
in the world will prove you wrong. Whatevery point you've
made or said, one of those animals out there will
prove you wrong. And that's even within within broader groups
of animals. You know, bears, for instance, there's a lot
of different kind of bears. Even in Japan, we've got
two different broad categories of bears. We've got the Asiatic
black bearsuma, and we've got the big brown bear that's

(11:41):
sort of grizzly type of thing up in Hokkaido, or
the heguma. So just within that one nation, if you're like,
we've got two different types of bears and they're not
exactly similar to each other, though they have characteristics in common,
and we want to examine each of these groups of
characteristics for each of these animals. For some of them,
we'll skip over some of these things because they're not

(12:03):
particularly relevant. Horses, for instance, predating on grass. What their
strategy for that is to stick their head down in
the grass and eat it. The grass isn't going anywhere,
you know, so we might skip lightly over things like that.
And another thing is the selection of animals, and this
is really important for shamanism, For spurred animals and shamanism,
I've seen a lot of people in the West when

(12:25):
they do spur animals or they imagine spirit animals, they
imagine all kind of way and wonderful things, and very often,
I mean, there's cool animals. There's a category of cool animals. Obviously,
Eagles are pretty cool, or bears, you know, wolves, wolves exactly, Yeah. Wolves.
Interestingly enough, the wolf isn't one of the shingy spur animals.

(12:48):
That's quite interesting though. I have a lovely drone with
a wolf on it, so I've always used succumbed to
wolf mania.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
Maybe there's not a lot of wolves in China.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Don't know, Well, there's not a lot of anything in.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Or used to be.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, exactly exactly. I'm sure there have been wolves in
China historically. Whether they all got eaten or not, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
There must have been, but you never hear about them
in any Chinese martial art, really.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Do you. No. In Kempo there's a wolf. It's called
a kami. There's wolf strategy.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
The Japanese influence, though, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Yeah, so the Japanese wolf is actually extinct. But they
did have wolves for a very long time, and of
course historically they were very aware of aware of them,
so they did. So if look, if they had him
in Japan, they definitely had him in China. I mean,
we could look into the detail on that and come
back to it. But I believe that the spirit animal
understanding in Kempo is has come from China, but via

(13:47):
people like China and pin and stuff. So so there
must have been in China at some point in time,
or maybe it's just the province of what region it
came from this time.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Mongolia lots, so they've heard they'd have heard about wolves.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
I mean, yeah, absolutely. And also there's those super cool
guys talk about being cool. There's those super cool tribes.
And then they're not native Mongol they're they're more Central
Asian type of extraction. But there's these tribes in the
far western Mongolia where they actually go hunting wolves with
golden eagles, and they go out on their horses and

(14:25):
they've got a golden eagle not a fault, and a
golden eagle on their arm and they go and hunt wolves.
That's got to be like that. I don't really approve
of blood sports or anything, but that's got to be
one of the coolest past times there is in the universe.
Is like hunting wolves with golden eagles on horseback. So yeah,
Mongolia has a big, big wolf tradition. And actually, if

(14:47):
you look at the secret history of the Mongols, you'll
see that kingis Kan himself was descended from a wolf
in the in the mythology behind all of that. Quite interesting,
quite interesting. So sub bears, what can we say about bears?
They were good place to start, and they're a great
example of the point that I was going to make,

(15:07):
which is that human beings stand at a certain place
within nature, and some animals are closer to us, and
some animals are further away from us evolutionary speaking, and
the people, for whatever reason, the people who came up
with the shinghi or identified the Shingese bird animals obviously

(15:28):
understood this because they picked nothing that was far away
from us. I mean, there's some great animals in Chinese
martial arts, like madness. I love madness stuff, but you
wouldn't get that in shingy because of manness is an insect,
and shinghy in general, it picks what people might describe
as higher animals. It's mostly mammals and birds.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
We are more directly descended from isn't it.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Yeah, or closely related to, because the shamanistic aspect one
of the reasons for study or coming to a you know,
how we study things in shamanism, it's not by reading
the book about them, it's by it's by practicing them
and internalizing them and coming to experience the world. So
in terms of any any spit animal, and this is
no difference between shingy and and shamanism. It brought more broadly,

(16:19):
they both do exactly the same thing with these animals.
They see the world through the eyes of these cousins
of ours, of these biological cousins of ours.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, and with a spine and four limbs.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
You know, that's quite exactly similarity, exactly, And they when
we see the world through the eyes of our cousins,
we see a different world. And then we come to
see ourselves through the eyes of our cousins. This is
what the dragon's all about in shingy. The very fact
that an animal might want to imitate other animals, that's

(16:55):
quite a rare thing, but it's not unheard of. You know,
there are various snakes that take on the mac that
aren't venomous, that take on the markings of venomous snakes,
for instance, But the fact that some animal in the
world might actively want to be capable like a tiger
in fighting for instance. I very much doubt there have

(17:16):
been many tigers sat around thinking, you know, these skinny,
not very dangerous human things, I quite fancy trying their
useless ways of fighting rather than my own. I don't
think that's probably happened. You know, of course we'll human,
we'll do this, won't get into the dragon, but humans
have ways of compensating for that. But my point is

(17:37):
that the very fact that we want to do this
shows that what a shamnistic species we are. I don't
know of any animal that's done this to a great
extent than human beings, this idea of taking on the
spirit of other animals in different contexts, in dancing and
fighting or whatever.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
In the context of storytelling, I mean, human beings have
always been storytellers and imitate. You can imagine sitting around
a campfire, can't you talking about that you've seen the
buffalo or something, and then pretending to be a buffalo exactly.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
But although that does also allow us, because you know, human,
there's nobody better than them. The miasma than human beings either.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
So we can pretend that we think, yeah, the buffalo
is and act like I think it's.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
One of the reasons why bears are so dangerous to people,
because people, too many people have seen padding and Winnie
the Pow and stuff like that, you know, when they
were growing up, and they do look cute and cuddly,
especially when they're young, you know, but they are very
very dangerous predators. And I think you know, my feeling

(18:46):
is if you see a bear, you go out in
the wild and you see a bear, certainly I would
react like this. If I was walking through the forest
and there was a bear, that might be a big
concern because I know what these things can do. And
it depends what kind of mood it's in with a
bear as well. But I'd be sure that I'd be
far less worried than if I was walking through the
woods and I saw a tiger or came across the tiger.

(19:10):
I'd be far less worried. But I think wrongly, so
I think that bear will do just as much damage
to me as the tiger was if it really wants to,
you know. Of course, the difference is the bear or
the tiger in both cases, the bell the tiger might
not be hungry, in which case they're probably not gonna
be that bothered about me, although tigers can get very territorial.

(19:31):
So so yeah, it's it's but Pantington bear and all
that stuff we have. So you've got to be careful
when you study spirit animals and in shamanism in general.
I remember when I, you know, I think I've told
the story before of how I got into Shamnism when
I was young, and then when I went to university
in the eighties, I got seriously, seriously deep into trying

(19:54):
to understand Shamnism and what it was all about and
spirit animals and all that kind of stuff. And that's
when I first also started picking up Shingi. I think
I love Chingius for this very reason. It was the
main martial art that said animals all over it. I know,
we got this crazy five elements thing, or some branches
of SHINGI have this crazy five elements thing. I was

(20:15):
never particularly interested in that, and I think grim Will
verified that I'm still not to this day, but the
animals are just wonderful.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
In another heresy, that was another heresy for the sing.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Right yeah, and coming out of the eighties and into
the very early nineties, I kind of got involved in
what you might call guru culture, you know. I became
interested in secret societies. Well I'd been involved in one
or two other things, but I became more broadly interested
in them. I used to travel places to study things,

(20:51):
which I don't really do anymore, and I also got
involved with a number of Obviously, I tried to find
other people who were into shamanism, and I did find them.
I found, I mean Western people like me, people in England,
in the States. I found people who were interested in shamanism,
but they were interested in a slightly different kind of shamanism.

(21:14):
To me. A lot of them were you know, we've
talked about the imagination trap and the idea of spur
animals was there, definitely. I mean it isn't every form
of shamanism, even invented in your head shamanism, but the
ideas about testing that, the ideas about you know, I

(21:35):
have an owl who's a wise old owl, you know.
I mean there's a human conception owls are pretty wise,
but they're just as good at what they do as
a lot of other animals. They're not any owls, not
any more wise than a bear, for instance.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
They also have quite small brains apparently.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah. So the point is that these are human characterizations
that we impose upon things. And if the spur animal,
for instance, now somebody might believe that in part of
wisdom to them because ours are so wise, but really
ours are wise enough to do what they need to do.
They are silent hunters in the night. They're very very
good at it, but they don't need to be very

(22:14):
wise in human terms in order to achieve their very
impressive level of capability and hunting. And I mean being
silent like that is not inconsiderable feat. When the prey
animals are so sensitive to sound, it's quite it's quite

(22:34):
impressive what they can do, but it doesn't link to wise.
It's us, human beings that have linked owls to wisdom.
And when you're study in spirit animals, especially in a
martial context, you need to be real about them. You
need to understand what this real spirit of the animal is.
You need to take that on and translated within yourself
into human terms. That's what the very term shingy is about.

(22:58):
Shing is the underlying spirit of the hour animals, and
ye is your intention, and so you put the two together.
You take the inder line spirit of the animals, real animals,
and you use that. You put that together with your intention,
which is generated by the situation that you're in the

(23:19):
natural environment, the situation that you find yourself in, and
you put those two things together, and there you are.
You've got a martial art called shingi. And so the
name is very good, the names really good, and so
haven't said all of that. I view the idea as
I've said many times. I think testing is important in

(23:40):
martial arts, and I think it's important in shamanism. If
you've got an owl who imparts wisdom to you, awesome,
but please test and make sure that it's not just
your imagination and the owl is not just telling you
what you want to hear. You know, everything's going to
be okay, and all that kind of stuff. To me,
that's not the most useful kind of wisdom that you

(24:01):
want to get from an animal compared to, for instance,
somebody's cornered you and they're trying to stick a knife
in you or tie your head off or something. Can
the wisdom of the animal actually help you get out
of that situation without getting killed? To me, that's much
more useful kind of wisdom, you know. Or if you
find yourself in a situation where you're stranded and without

(24:23):
without recourse to modern support facilities, modern you know, supermarkets
and stuff like that, Can you support yourself in the forest?
In the woods? Can you find things to eat? Can
you make shelter? Can you find you know? Can you
can you do all the things that you need to
do to survive and prosper in the forest like a
bear can, like a bed does. Every day you're probably

(24:44):
trying to escape from the forest, whether the bed does
need to, because that's home, you know. So this is
what I mean by testable things, things that are real,
some things that can be practical. Even though they're wide ranging,
they're still sort of testable. And I think it bears
a great place to start, because like us, like humans,

(25:05):
a bear is an omnivore. And if you look at
humans in shamanistic societies, I mean, for instance, take the
sand people in Africa or the events in Siberia the
just to give two examples. These are hunter gatherer peoples
at least at certain times of the year in terms
of the events, and all the year in terms of

(25:26):
sand people the hunter gatherer peoples, and they will eat
anything that moves in anything that doesn't move, they will
they eat their very very broad diet. And given that
they that they have very high child mortality for obvious reasons,
they have no social safety net and no protections. Once

(25:48):
you get past childhood in those societies, you can expect
to live a very very long life. I mean, for instance,
more than double the lifespan of the average person who
live in an early agricultural society or even a middle
agricultural society, and maybe an agricultural society up to and
including these seventeenth thirteenth century. You can expect a longer

(26:12):
life than those guys simply because of the variety of
stuff in your diet. And obviously, by the time you
reach adulthood you're pretty lethal yourself. If you live in
one of those societies, you're probably the apex predator. And
it's no longer the lions in terms of sand people anyway,
it's you. So but it obviously it takes humans a
lot more time to learn to be as dangerous as lions,

(26:34):
but they do. They achieve it. And so bears are omnivores,
they're very opportunistic. They will hunt animals. You can see
bears taking down deer. That's the other thing. Running away
from a bear not a bright move because bears can
run as fast as a race horse, and you can't

(26:55):
even if your name is you know, Linford Christi or
what's it called the Jamaican guy who's saying bolt, you
still can't outrun a bear, not even close. So don't
do that. And they can climb, and they're very good climbers,
so going up a tree. So anyway, so this omnivorous

(27:15):
diet gives them something in common with us how we
used to be, because we're no longer like that. We
go on the supermarket now. And so this idea, when
you have an omnivorous diet, your approach to life, and
this is a big characteristic of the bear, is exploratory.
You're searching around, you're looking for things, you're trying things out.

(27:36):
This is why bears look wastebins. Right, They have no
idea what's in the westbin, but they know this might
be something interesting in there, and so they open the
top of the bin and they get in there with
their nose and their claws and they start rooting around
what's interesting in here, you know, pulling things out, I
have a look at them, all this kind of stuff.
That's how you should approach. That's how you should approach

(27:59):
if you're using the best in martial arts, that's how
you should approach grappling or wrestling. Bears are really useful
for stand what you might call stand up grappling. The
things that Bears do are very good to that. Obviously
the mills they wrestle with each other for the whole
dominance to be attractive to females. Thing. If you look
at the stuff that they're doing, which is why they're
so heavily prominent in Mongolian wrestling and the Mongolian spurred dance.

(28:21):
I mean, one of the things that I've learned from
bears that's been really useful to me because I was
never really into throwing techniques. I mean, that's why I've
always been a campo guy and not a jiu jitsu guy,
because you know, jiu jitsu and campo are very closely related.
We did a whole series on that for anyone's interest
on the Heretexs podcast is not the thw itself, but
how you set it up, how you get the person

(28:42):
into a position where they can be thrown. And that
was all the bit that I found quite quite obscure
and difficult to get until I started looking into this
thing with bears and how they wrestle with each other
and this sort of circularity that they have, their very
quat circularity in their intraspecific aggression. They twist from side

(29:05):
to side, they're shakings, they're using their chest to chest,
they're doing that all that kind of stuff the top
Judo and Mongolian wrestling practitioners do. And what they're effectively doing,
although you can't see it, is they're trying to take
the center of gravity of the opponents of the other bear.
They're trying to take that center of gravity outside of

(29:25):
the base provided by the feet of the other bed.
They're usually on two feet, just like we would be
doing this kind of stuff. They're trying to move that
center of gravity outside of the base. And how they
do that is with circularity, because obviously, if you just
stand there, it's like two sumo wrestlers. If they're not
allowed to move their feet, they'll stand there for a week.
You know, just that they're very, very strong and they're

(29:47):
really really good at maintaining their center of gravity inside
their base. But if you start circling, if you start pulling,
your bears also use their claws to pull the opponent
or the the prey sideways in a circular way. If
you start doing that, you start to see that you

(30:07):
can cause rather than the opponent, especially if you've got
like you know, like in a clinch or something like that,
you can make the opponent move their feet when you
want them to, rather than you just waiting to see
where they move their feet. You can decide once you
get used to these sort of polls, and so one
of the things we did when we started learning Mongolian

(30:28):
wrestling was just that quick pulling the opponent to one
side and to the other and just observing what their
feet are doing when you pull them. Obviously, so if
the guy is facing me and I pull him to
my right, he will is likely to step his left
foot over to his left and why temporarily widen his base.

(30:49):
And in judo Mongolian wrestling, even in tempo such throws
as Temple does have these kind of throats, you can
if you can time it so that as he takes
that step, you can either a you can elongate the
step more than he's intending to step by doing a
quick trip or something like that, or sweep his foot.
But more importantly, you can that widening base. You can

(31:11):
step into the center of the base and take control
with your physical position of his center of gravity. So
as he steps, O would say to his left, my foot,
either my right foot or my left foot steps into
the center in between the central point between the widening
the two feet that just temporarily widened because of my pole.

(31:32):
And if you can practice that simple pole over and
over and that step into the center, you start to
find yourself in a position where the throws that you know,
whatever they are, you know, sort of like Judo's or
sort of God, he's probably not famous through in the world,
or that. Let's take some Assumo flows that would work
better with that step in a more basic kind of way.
Let's take what again, screen again Assumo, you step into

(31:56):
that central point. There comes at a time when you
have control of his center of gravity, and you can
develop an innate sense. And this is exactly what bears do.
You can develop an innate sense for that just by
doing it over and over again, pulling to one side
the other. As long as it's not predictive, you know,
you don't know which side you're gonna pull him too,
or he doesn't know which side and you don't know

(32:17):
which side he's gonna pull you too. You can initiate
an attack in terms of for instance, a throw over
your hip or trip over your leg or just something
like that, or just like a twist down like you're
getting Sumo a lot finstance with sucreine age. So unfortunately
for the world, I know Sumo throws way better than

(32:38):
I know Judo throws. Thinking of the wrong terms. It's tough.
But anyway, you can find these things on YouTube. What
I'm talking about. Sumo is quite popular. You can step in.
And the point is that you actually made that opportunity.
It was you that dragged the guy to his left.
It was him that chose to step to his left
with left foot, but obviously he he did that because

(33:01):
you dragged him to his left to maintain his center
of gravity, and that temporarily made that opening for you
to take his center by moving one of your feet
into that center position. And depending on which way you
turn and stuff. And I found studying this thing that
bears do wrestling with each other. I found it improved
my ability to make throws happen greatly, even though I

(33:21):
wasn't actually working on the throws themselves. I mean, we
have a bunch of different throws in temple, and I
wasn't really working on the throws themselves. I was working
on the thing that led into the throws. And that's
like the simplest situation that raised. There's lots of permutations
on this, like he spots it, he does a shifter position,
then you you know, and so on, which is what
bears do when there when they're wrestling with each other.

(33:43):
But it's that opportunism that's really really important in the
bear spirit that's really really useful in martial arts. The
bear is not going in thinking I'm going to do
this to you. It's going in and which is why
people get a bit confused in terms of when bears
are hunting them, because as do sometimes stalk prey, including people.

(34:03):
It's quite hard to tell because when bears do the stalking,
they're still got that exploratory I'm looking in the bin
to see what interesting thing is going on in here.
It's not like a tiger standing there roaring at you
in a you know, if a tiger's standing there roaring
at you, you have a chance to live. It's when

(34:26):
it's running at you and not roaring, that's when you're need.
You need some heavy weapon of some type. And so
approaching any combat in an exploratory, even playful way. And
I think because of our Maasthma as humans, it's quite
hard to get past this idea of violence something part

(34:46):
of the Maasthma. We see violence, and it is violence.
You know on the TV where where people are just
going out deliberately the harm of the people for no
real good reason. We see that as violence. And I
guess it is in human terms. But as I've said before,
you know, with wild animals, a tiger attacking somebody is

(35:10):
I would say a water buffalo. Let's leave humans out
of it. Say a tiger attacking a water buffalo. It's
not the same thing. It's not a bunch of people
who are motivated by their political or religious beliefs and
feel so strongly and angry that they want to go
and harm some other people. The things going to the
fridge in human terms, it's just going to the fridge,

(35:30):
and it's not angry and it's not lost, it's calm.
I mean, unless it's protecting its cubs or something like that.
It's not angry. It's just it's you know, going to
the fridge. It's looking for some food. And that's done
in a very explory way. And I find that incredibly
useful in things like, for instance, a more taire like

(35:53):
and shingy chicken, all that clinch fighting stuff like that.
It's really good for dealing with things like that. It's
really good for or the circular stuff that's very rare
because they movement bears naturally move in very circular ways.
They're quite heavy, and they have they have a good base,
and so it's obviously less energetic for them to rotate

(36:14):
to a certain extent on that base. Sometimes I've described
it like a heavy barrel, a big heavy barrel hanging
from a rope from the ceiling, but it's free to
swing and rotate. It's like that, and it's more efficient
for them to rotate than it is to you know,
jump about like a monkey for instance. And so this
kind of rotation becomes very vigod And when you see

(36:34):
them striking, you know, with their claws, which they do
frightening amount of power because they don't have super sharp
claws like a tiger does, but the amount of power
behind those claws, it doesn't really matter how sharp or
not they are. You know, they're sharp enough, but the
way that they strike has that sort of circularity that

(36:54):
you get with the you know, hooks in boxing and
stuff like that. It's very very powerful circular striking, and
which is great. It's great to have this animal taught
very early in shingy practice so that we can use
hooking strikes and hooking palm strikes that are rare in
Eastation marshal lights in general. It's not just Chinese marsha
arts so rare in Eastation marsh lights in general. Ones

(37:15):
that haven't been influenced by boxing the campo as for instance,
could you look.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
At the clause as being something related to weapons.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
I think in some ways yes, In some ways no,
the clause are needed. For instance, unno, for us, animals
are just so likely to be trying to eat ants,
and so the claus are really useful for getting behind
the bark of trees and stuff like that. And they're
definitely related, but they're natural, they're part of the animal
and this and this but this is important because in

(37:45):
this case, when we come out of the dragon, part
of our shing part of our spirit, is that we're
too users. And that's what you do want in Shingy.
You know, Shingy's famous for its spear technique. It's got
every weapon under the sun just about but spear, I
think in particular, and that's where you want to get.
You want to get like the spear becomes part of you.
It's not in any way separate from the rest of

(38:07):
your body. And so you're trying to get to the
place I guess you say, as humans with dragonishing, we're
trying to get to the place with spear where bears
are already at with their claws. Makes some kind of sense, Yeah, yeah,
and when we achieve that, we become quite dangerous like
a bear. And so, but the bears, I think bears
don't have claws in the same way the tiger, I

(38:28):
mean tigers swipes you with its claws. I mean, you know,
it's like a multiple bacon slices. You know, you're you're
going to be an awful mess after one strike from
a tiger's paw. If it's trying to hurt you, they
can they can hide their claws when they're they're dealing
with their young and stuff like that, or even you

(38:49):
see some of these guys where the humans are being
hugged by tigers who brought them up and things like this.
The claws are in, not out when they're doing that.
So bears have a much more The desire in a
bear clothes is much more about their lifestyle. They do
lots of different things, and so the claws are more generalistic.
They're not for a specific purpose, which is hunting mammal prey,

(39:11):
which would be the case of a tiger, therefore getting
insects and berries and you know, you have to open
nuts and all this kind of stuff. So they're general
purpose type of clauses you would expect. But my point
is the way that they deliver power through rotation, the
same way they strike is the same way that they wrestle.
They're delivering power through rotation. And one of the things

(39:33):
that I show people a lot in when I'm teaching
martial arts, I probably should do it more is get
people to slap a pad with the like a hooking slap.
And then and then so first of all, I usually
get them to do a hook punch what people imagine
as a hook punch, and then they hit that. I
get them to hit the pad with just a natural slap,
like they're slapping somebody across the face, and they can

(39:54):
immediately see that actually they're generally, if they're not very
well trend, they're generating far more power with the slap
than they are with the punch, because they have an
idea what a hook punch should be like, and usually
that's completely not what a hook punch should be like.
So when we deliver a punch with bear, for instance,
and shingy do we practice it with a palm first,

(40:14):
and then we do it with a fist. And because
the slap across the face thing is much closer to
a good hook punch than what most people's idea of
what a hook punch is. And so what I do
is then just keep pretending you doing the slap, but
close your fist and hit with your fist. And that's
how I teach people to punch with the bear kind
of hook punches. They are very very powerful animals. And

(40:40):
if you're going to lie on bear shing if you're
gonna wear on the best spirit in your marshal endeavors.
You need to be powerful because this sort of opportunistic
but ponderous that they don't do a lot of backing
off bears. I mean, they will do if they charge
it you and you stand up tall and make a

(41:01):
lot of noise and stuff like that, especially if there's
a group of you. They're not stupid. They no humans
are dangerous. They're not really clever enough to see whether
you've got guns or not. But they're no humans are dangerous.
So if you stand up to them, I mean, you
don't charge at them, but stand up to them and
make a lot of noise, that's probably a good way
to get them to discontinue the charge that they're making

(41:22):
at you. And in that way, but that's not really
backing off, that's just giving up because they never really
intended to attack you in the first place. They just
don't like the fact that you're there. But bears are
very powerful and they can follow through. And this is
what I've always said to people with who do Kempo,
for instance, Kempo has every kind of martial arts technique
under the sun. We got all the jiu jitsu stuff,

(41:46):
we've got all the sumo stuff, we've got all the
boxing stuff, lots of sort of kickboxy typer you know,
a lot of the styles that went on to become MMA.
For instance, Shooto and shin kakoto jutsu and these things
that led to the UFC. Shooto became a martial arts promotion.
I think it was a mixed martial arts promotion. I

(42:07):
think it was four years before UFC one. And these
sort of Kempo styles in Japan that start doing the
mixed martial arts kind of thing. All of those guys
have heavy heavy boxing influence on them. From Kempo's history,
there's a guy called Saeto Toro Usuke who brought boxing
into Kempo. I think we've mentioned this on the Heltics

(42:30):
podcast in the late eighteen hundreds, whereas, for instance, famously
karate didn't really come into Kempo until the nineteen twenties,
nineteen thirties. So, you know, I think, as we've said before,
boxing's be Western boxing has being in Kempo a lot
longer than karate has been. But just like that, you know, boxers,

(42:51):
really good boxes can be very very dangerous, But if
you want to make the bear, you're because of the nature,
we don't have claws, and if you're thinking barehand, if
you want to make the bear your animal of choice,
you must be able to generate an awful lot of
power with your strikes. This is key to the other

(43:12):
things that the bear does. The long story shot, if
you can't knock somebody out, bears probably not the best
animal for you to be pursuing. That's probably the best
way to put it. You need enough power because they
don't tend to back down in their pursuit of prey

(43:33):
or when something faces them off, they tend to go
all what I would call all wrestling, go into a clinch.
And of course, the thing with a bear where when
they go into a clinch is very very different from
humans when they go into a pinch, because generally humans
aren't very good at doing damage when they're in the clinch.

(43:54):
And that's why we need the referee to separate them
in boxing, because they just stand there, there's nothing much
to do, and they are much more adaptable than we are.
They use their clothes in a wide way range of
different ways. For instance, catching fish is a famous thing
the bears do, and they literally catch them out the air.
They can they use their clothes to hold prey as

(44:16):
they're wrestling with them. They can do damage with their
closes that kind of wrestling. And as Graham said, they
can climb trees, they can swim, they can dig for
roots and all this kind of stuff, and the clauses
are used in all of these kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
They can bite as well.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Oh, can they have a bite. They've got very very
good bite strength like all things that eat large animals,
and they do bite. That's slightly different in the hunting characteristics.
They'll bite a lot in the mating competition, they're not
actually trying to they're not actually trying to kill each other,

(44:52):
which is a good thing. Otherwise bears would be even
rarer than they are in the world. And so they
do change their behavior, might do like nips nipping type
of bites in competition, but sure in in because a
bear it's a close range fighter. And this is something
that needs to be understood. Bear. The reason why we

(45:13):
put bear together with eagle in Shingia is that bears,
how much it let's not say fighter, bears pre date
very close. They tend to wrap the the prey items
it's a moose or something. They tend to get on
it with their body, and they tend to use their
as we've said, circular momentum with their weight to move

(45:35):
the thing around. They're quite happy to go down to
the ground and keep doing that. They'll move the prey
into an advantageous position using these these strong circular poles,
and they're much harder to resistance and deadly than linear poles.
You know, if you see, you know when we do
you know, you see people aren't very good at push hands,

(45:56):
doing push has and you see these two strong guys
that are pushing straight into each other really with real
big muscle power and not being able to move each
other when if one of them just did some sort
of a little circular technique, the other guy'd probably fall over,
you know, because they're so not good at that outside
of its way, but that sort of circular power delivery
is harder to deal with, both in pushing shoving, but

(46:19):
also in setting things up in this sort of grappling
situation where you want to set things up, and the
thing is you're still opportunistic about it. You're still doing
what I call the trash can approach, because you pull
the guy, you circulely twist him and again on the ground.
You can do that to move them into a more
advantageous position. For instance, for the biting. He pulled them

(46:42):
and they do something. But you need to react to
what it is they've actually done, not what you think
they're gonna do. I mean, for instance, what I was
talking about before. Instead of stepping with his left foot,
when I pull him to my right or I twist
him to my right, he might cross step behind where
there's other foot. You know, there's lots of things you
could do, or you might just shift step. We're both
feet are jump bull. You don't know what they might do.
You have to react to what they actually do. And

(47:04):
I find that trash can approach your beds. I mean,
get on YouTube and watch them. Watch how a bag
goes into a trash can. It doesn't sort of dive
in and go woo and start throwing stuff up in
the air. It's sort of olmos the top and it's
looking around, and it's using its clothes to move things
to the side and all this kind of stuff. It's
very very exploratery. And I see that same kind of

(47:26):
I see that same kind of exploratory thing, and some
of the very good guys in Graham's other martch art
these the BJJ stuff. When you see very high level
guys rolling with each other, they call it. There's an
awful lot of playfulness and exploratery stuff goes on in that.
I've with his crazy Spider Garden things like this, you know,

(47:47):
and it's almost like for the fun of it. It's
almost like experimentation, and there's all these weird and wonderful
things they can do. So they do. But it doesn't
mean that it's not effective. In fact, because it's exploratory,
it's more effective than you think it is.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, exploratory stuff is more for for your own research,
like learning, And if you see people competing, it tends
to be very different.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
The the spirit of playfulness is gone, you know.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yes. I have a couple of explanations for that. One
is that the people watching when they're competing, they don't
want to be made a fool of, and so they're
less willing. I see this in the workplace. Actually they're
less willing to explore and try new things out. But
every now and again you do see it. I mean
you see it in the UFC and you see it
and shoot on and stuff. Every now and again, somebody

(48:40):
does a bit of and it's odd, to be fair,
it's often when somebody is feeling really confident or they
feel like they've got nothing to lose and stuff, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
If the skills, if the skill levels are vastly different,
then it's a lot easier to.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Experiment exactly, isn't it exactly? But I think the general approach,
although although you you might not see it the competition
because they don't want to be made fools of. But
I think that it's really important that you do experiment
in life because you'll never be able to do certain
things unless you try them out, you know.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Yeah, that's what the training is. Your chance to play
around and fail.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Exactly, not matter exactly. And there's a bunch of stuff
I've worked out that way, you know. I started playing
around with it, not very seriously, and then gradually it
became something that I could use in a serious way,
but maybe applying it in a more minimal way. We
have a friend, Doug. Shout out to Doug who does
his tai chi in an extremely minimal way, but it

(49:35):
is tai chi. And though if somebody sees them doing
these tiny little movements that he.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Does Doug does bare Kong food, doesn't he really?

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Absolutely? Guy, yes, But but my point is that in
his application of tai Chi's movements are very small, but
they are the same movements that you practice in a
very big way. But he kind of proves that you
don't need to do in that big and exaggerateated way
to make it work. That's the point. And so I
think a lot of the stuff that people learn through this,

(50:04):
and bears as well, real bears as well. If they're
really really serious and they really need to take down
a take down a elk or something like that, they'll
be very focused. They'll be doing things in a much
more minimal way than they would be if they're playing
around in a trash can. But maybe some of the
sensitivity and the skills, because elks are not small, right,

(50:27):
we're talking about big beasties themselves, maybe some of those skills,
those exploratory skills are in use. They're just done in
a much smaller, more minimal way. That's harder to see.
And I found this with grappling in general, certainly when
I did judo and with my Mongolian wrestling, and I
do some sambo and various other things. Even done a
little bit of b jj Wcgraham. The closer range you

(50:49):
get to somebody you get in a grappling and if
you try to make this is why a lot of
grappling arts don't really have forms. I mean, judo does,
but they're not exactly popular, are they. A lot of
grappling arts don't have forms because it's impossible to make
forms when you get very close bodied the body like that.
A tiny little difference in what the opponent does makes
them sometimes makes a massive difference in what you've got

(51:10):
to do to cancel that, to counter that. And so
if you're making two man forms with body the body
grappy type of stuff, the kind of stuff that bears do,
repeating the same form twice over is almost prohibitively difficult
because these slight changes that the opponent makes means actually
based on the sensitivity of what you're feeling for what

(51:33):
they're doing, you need to make every time you do
the form, you need to do something different. So yeah,
so best don't bears don't waste energy unnecessarily, that's the
best way to do it. To explain that, and also
this productory stalking. If you're a martial artist who does

(51:53):
something like shingy have been here, and you're up against
as I used to be in the ateso, up against
guys who you what's on a semi contact karate that
we used to do in those days. We do these
competitions and there's got a point if they land a
punch on you, whether it's gonna do anything or not,
you're sort of in the competition. You're sort of put
in a position where you have to close with them

(52:16):
or the referee will get angry with the other's. Semi
contact karate is a really unpleasant spot. I liked full
contact karat and no problem with that, but semi contact
writer was just like one of the worst things ever
in terms of the attitudes and the culture around it
and all that kind of stuff. But you couldn't do
this in a semi contact karate competition because you'll get
disqualified by the referee. But that's sort of predatory stalking, quiet, exploratory, slow,

(52:42):
no kind of a hurry, stalking of the opponent, if
you're allowed to do it, can really unsettle the opponent.
You know, you're staying well out arrange if they want
to come, they're gonna come. But you're ware arrange and
you just stalk around the edge of the area. So
they used to do like a taped square on the ground.
He just stop run around the edge of the area.

(53:04):
And generally they've already if you do shinghi and stuff,
they've already found out that you're close in fighter, so
they don't particularly want to close with you. But you're
the one maintaining the long distance, not them. It puts
them in quite an unpleasant situation, just like a bear
is stocking you, because from their perspective, they tend not
to want to close with you. Said this a lot

(53:24):
of times when shingy fights other styles that sort of
stand up striking styles, you have this experience, this frustration
where they just run away from you. I remember a
lot of times where the referee would say begin or
something like that, and then I'd immediately be in with
a chain of bugs and poles and what have you,
and the guy would just run out of the area,

(53:45):
and then the referee would have to stop it and
bring it back to the center. There's like these two
tip lines on the center in the center of the area,
and he'd bring it and they say begin, and then
the same thing would happen again and again and again
and again, and I'm thinking, well, this guy keeps running away,
Sure it's not me that it's fault. And then in
the end it would be me that would get disqualified
for being overly aggressive. So the this predatory stalking thing

(54:08):
is a good antidote to that. If the if the
referee is all warned you that you're being too aggressive,
you just immediately switch into that long range predatory stalking
around the very outside of the area quite slowly and
just letting the guy who wants to run away from
you decide when he wants to come to you. If

(54:28):
you do it too much, so you then get disqualified.
But not being an active participant, you know. But it's
just it's just looking out for these kind of things
and looking for opportunities, and of course the opportunities generally
with guys not used to that kind of attacking that
stuff that for instance, you getting Charlie Fought. Yeah. One
of the things I loved about Charlie Fott. It's the first,
the first time I've ever learned a martial arts form

(54:50):
where the first move is to attack without any kind
of defense. That's a I've never seen that before in
any traditional martial arts form. No, you just hit the
guy and knock him out before he does anything. Yeah,
that's a that's a that's a nice move, that one.
You know what I'm talking about the you know the

(55:10):
overhand the start of section three of the landform. Yeah, yeah,
that that sort of overhand talk to the jar where
the person's actually done nothing at all to you, nothing
physical anyway, quite interesting. Charlie Foot will get on at
Charlie Food at some point in time, actually will need
to if we do all of the animals, because Charlie

(55:31):
Foot does have an animal that isn't in other styles,
which is the leopard, which is very very interesting. So
another thing in terms of bears attitudes, they tend to
they tend to be fine if you don't provoke them.
They're usually minding their own business, doing their own thing.
And I find this to be a very helpful thing
in life. You don't you're not going out to look

(55:53):
for trouble. You're just getting on with your own whatever
you're doing. And if somebody does anything to you, then
then you know they might regret it, but you're not
exactly going you know, you guys better watch it kind
of thing is doing what you're doing, you know, and
it's a very calm thing, and dealing with aggression, dealing

(56:13):
with some sort of threat of violence. Being calm quite
useful for not having the fight. You can sort of
see people who are very very well trained in martial arts.
People tend not to pick on them. I mean body
type of people tend not to pick on them because
they're relaxed in a situation where most people would be tense.
And you can sort of pick that up from body language.

(56:35):
And again this is a very bad type of thing.
One of my teachers in China, probably the best eat
master that I ever met. He people used to say,
look dangerous, and there I remember the crowds and Beijing
used to part in front of him, might be trotting
along behind him, part in front of him. He looks
so dangerous and he was doing nothing. He looked dangerous
because his face was completely blank. There wasn't the slightest

(56:58):
hint of emotion or anything, no expression, not a negative expression,
not a positive expression, just nothing there, and people just
get out of his way. Quite interesting, shoulders down all
that anything, but not fake, but just genuinely not concerned
and he didn't need to be concerned either, And so
other things were bears that you've got the sort of
marking behavior where they scent trees and this is all

(57:20):
the intra specific stuff they make, growls and rows and stuff.
This tends not to be with prey animals. This tends
to be with other bears. And these are signals that
are like asserting dominance, challenging rivals, all that kind of stuff.
They often engage in sort of what you might call

(57:41):
physical contraslations with other bears. They engage in this sort
of combat which involves biting, clawing, and wrestling, which are
pretty much the things that they do, but in these
physical confrontations they've been They play like that as young bears,
and they get more serious about it is they get older.
They do have a sort of hierarchy, but you know,

(58:02):
they're not huge numbers of bears in a we don't
sort of talk about herds of bears sweeping across the planes,
do we. But they do use these sort of encounters
to establish a sort of dominance. The older, stronger males
establish a sort of dominance in a way of heading
off further trouble. And this is something you can think

(58:22):
about in human terms, in terms of you know, gangs
and stuff like that. Somebody is usually the leader of
the gang, and a lot of the people, certainly in
the movies, you'll see the leader of the gang frequently
does bad things to other gang members in order to
keep them in their place. At least that's what they
think they're doing. I'm not sure it's the most effective
way to run a gang. I think inspiring people with

(58:45):
a great positive vision of the future and you know,
making them feel good about themselves and not good about
the mission is a better way to do it. But
it is. It is sort of heading off for the
aggression so that the senior male doesn't actually have to
fight full out one of the younger males. They'll just
every now and again they'll they'll do a bit of
an encounter or a combat lightweight compact with another male,

(59:09):
the younger male, in order that the male, the younger male,
will respect their dominance within the group and head off
any need to fight. And it's the benefit of the
younger male and the older male that there isn't actually
a full on they're trying to kill each other. But
obviously this peaks during the mating seasons because the pressure

(59:30):
to mate with the females is much higher. At that
point in time. There's only fourth bears. There's only a
certain time that you can do this kind of thing,
you know, a hibernation and all that kind of stuff,
and the baby's being born at the right time and
all this kind of thing baby bears, so that there's
the testosterone levels and stuff in the band's blood going
up and down through the year. Human beings a bit

(59:52):
better for that, and that we're more you know, that
we're more evenly paced throughout the year, and they you know,
these sort of display behaviors at that time, you know,
become more prominent. And if you see videos of bears
on YouTube doing these sort of standing displays, standing tall
and posturing and going and growling or roaring and you know,

(01:00:16):
looking big and dangerous, it's probably the mating season when
that video was when that video was shot, because obviously,
if they were hunting you, you wouldn't be seeing that
at all. You'd be seeing they going and you're much
more likely to see the dustbin thing than that if
they're actually hunting you, and yeah they are. They also
use sort of sudden lunges every Now this is when

(01:00:38):
again you think this is the one on one for
bear wrestling characteristics. You've got the they're on the back
legs that up, and that's just because you want your
center of gravity and position where you can twist the
opponent's center of gravity around you. It's better to be
up and down for that, which I mean you can
see that in BJJ versus Judo. When BJJ guys get

(01:01:01):
JUDO guys on the ground, usually it's slaughter, and when
Judo guys get bjj's standing up, it's usually slaughter. You
can see that that different things suit different environments, different places,
and this is the same with bears. This sort of
rearing up is good for that kind of stand up
grappty type of thing that they do. These sort of

(01:01:22):
semi circular pause wipes that are used with rotation I've
already mentioned, but that's also how we punch with bear
in shingi. It's exactly the same way generating force. It's
elbow heavy and it's heavily locked into the rotation of
the body. Biting they will bite, and where they bite
is also quite useful in human terms, because these are

(01:01:43):
the places that are accessible to us in a very
serious confrontation, very very serious. I stress. They will usually
bite around the face of the neck on the shoulders,
which is easily accessible and in human terms, this is
also a head butting territory, that kind of stuff. And
these sudden lunges when once you've upset the opponent's position,
you can use a sudden lunge or sudden movement of

(01:02:06):
forward movement with your weight to sort of disorient them temporarily.
And people think that about you know, I'll get them
down on the ground and all this kind of a
sudden lunge, and usually it doesn't work because they are
just their base. But while that's split second, while they
were adjusting the base, that's usually the time when you
get the chance to knock them out. So you're switching
from one way to another, circular grappling, into the circular

(01:02:30):
striking and back again, depending on the situation, and you
use the grappling not necessarily to do some amazing throw,
which you might be able to do, but more likely
to temporarily distract them so that they run onto the
palm strike or the punch or one of these knockout punches.
And again you're in control of which way they're turning.
If they're turning to their if they're turning to their right,

(01:02:52):
typically the head will also go to their right slightly.
And that's the point. That exact instant is their heads
turning to their right. That's the point when you hit
it left for the hook. That's how you get the knockout.
It's not just about power, it's about timing. That's the
best time to hit anybody in terms of a knockout
strike is head's moving right, so you hit it left,

(01:03:12):
or heads moving left so you hit it right. That
the brain doesn't exactly keep up with the head when
you do that, this sudden reversal direction, the brain keeps
going the other way. And that's that's one of the
secrets to a knockout and why the people don't really
need as much power as they think they do to
knock somebody out. What they really need is good timing.

(01:03:33):
And another thing that bears are quite good at is
this sort of application of endurance, which is also good
in human terms. The issue is that this idea of
endurance tests of endurance Floyd Mayweather but believe he does
these long practice bouts where he has boxing partners who

(01:03:55):
goes into the ring with you know, and he boxes continuously,
and when one gets that, one jumps out and another
one jumps straight in, so he doesn't have to stop boxing.
And there's this long endurance thing. And then when he
comes in a normal boxing match and he has a
limited time on around, he's got tons of endurance. A
really really good way, good way to practice. And another

(01:04:16):
thing in terms of martial arts, which always gets overlooked
when you see this stuff discussed on discussion groups and
things like that, is this idea of non lethal intense
in bads wrestling with each other. They're never intending to
kill each other a very very rally. They're just trying
to establish dominance and they're trying to to a certain extent.
They're still play fighting. They've been play fighting since they

(01:04:37):
we're young, and they're play fighting in a more serious
kind of way. And that is what martial arts practice is.
You go to your martial arts dojo, you practice martial arts.
Ninety nine point nine percent of your career in martial
arts will be play fighting. What I mean it's play
fighting is you might even be in competitions where people
are trying to hurt you, but it's still play fighting

(01:04:59):
because nobody's allowed to use a weapon. Nobody's trying to
genuinely kill you, because if they were, and they were
using bad type of tactics, the last thing they would
do is allow themselves to be put in an equal
situation with you. They were attack you while you were asleep,
they attack you while your backs turned. They'll attack you
when you're, you know, doing something that distracts you from

(01:05:22):
defending yourself if they really wanted to hurt you, and
they'd be using some sort of weapon, because we are
human beings. So so that idea of this kind of
non lethal intent in these bouts, even when they're very serious,
even when the other mates bears are perfectly capable of
killing each other. But there's plenty of bears on the planet.

(01:05:43):
They don't go out to do it. And that's a
really good attitude for your martial arts career in general,
because you're not really in martial arts. You're not really
I mean, you might be think that you're training for
some life threatening situation, but really the fun of it
is not in that. The fun of it in doing
it and practicing and exploring and and so I like

(01:06:05):
the idea of the bear in the bin, rather than
the bear beling into you and pulling the pieces them
from them, which is perfectly capable of doing. Yeah, the
bear in the bin is I use that attitude an
awful lot when I'm doing you know, don't matter what
it is, push hands or five elments fighting or whatever
it is that I'm doing. Zumo. The bear in the

(01:06:26):
binners are really really good, good metaphor for what bears
are really like, rummaging through a bin. I do like it.
I do like it. Anyway, I was thinking of doing
bear and eagle on this one, but we have been
going for a considerable amount of time on just bear.
So shall we draw a line on that? Do you

(01:06:49):
have any final thoughts? Mate?

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
Nothing? Apart from it. Just bears a really cool I
like them.

Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
They are super cool, super cool. So let's let's next
time one of these that we do. Let's go on
to the best partner in crime, the eagle and talk
about why they are partners in crime and what that
word means.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Let's do that, all right?

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
Awesome, Thanks for listening, guys. Hi