Consulting Swordsman
Meditation is a crucially important practice for martial artists. It enables you to gain control over your state of mind, your level of arousal, and above all teaches you to be able to direct your attention. I have been teaching meditation in one form or another for many years, but never before over the internet. … Read more
In “Following my own advice” I described how I try to get something important done every day before checking emails, because prioritising the important over the apparently urgent is key. In that post I rather blithely referred to concentrating on ‘creating assets’, and loosely defined assets as “anything that adds value to your life. Value … Read more
I’m working on the latest instalment of The Swordsman’s Quick Guide, which will cover my foundational breathing exercises. The book is already out to my test readers who have kindly volunteered to wade through the sewage of extraneous verbiage and excessive punctuation in search of the faintest glimmer of useful text. My fellow writers will recognise that … Read more
I’m a Luddite, it’s true. I resist the march of technological progress because I think that most new technologies aren’t labour saving life enhancing devices at all. I was saying this back in the ‘80s when people were extolling the new ‘desktop publishing’ thing. “What used to take two weeks can now be done in … Read more
Medieval scribes had crap posture too! Image from: http://www.booktryst.com/2012/03/medieval-scribes-gripe-about-writing.html One of the challenges of my new lifestyle is that I don’t have class three or four times a week to keep me to a fitness regime. Before I could make the switch in my head from swordsman-writer to writer-swordsman, I had to figure out how … Read more
I have been meditating in one form or another for about 18 years. Of all the things I do to be a better human, and a better martial artist, writer and teacher, I think meditation is perhaps the most important, and the most effective in terms of time spent to results obtained. This is because … Read more
My next book, Swordfighting, is, from a creative perspective, done. It is still being edited, tweaked into better forms, and has yet to be published, but the creative work, by which I mean “writing new material”, is over. I have a bunch of started book projects on my computer, and I am wondering which of … Read more
We had an interesting time in the “intermediates” class this week. (Those scare quotes are to point out that after all these years, we should probably be calling it the Advanced class. So I will.) We began by establishing the goal of the class: to address the problem of freeplay devolving into tippy-tappy shit. You … Read more