WATCH THIS VIDEO CAREFULLY: Repeated viewings of GM Perkins’ movement while flowing with students yields tremendous insights into how to react properly; words cannot fully convey this but you will begin to feel in your own body what is effective GC movement.
• To learn how to be or to fight in the NOW, you have to teach/train properly.
• Even if you train or fight with anger, you’re still not in the NOW.
• To train to react before the spit hits the fan, you must eliminate “wrote” training.
• Even if you view your reactions through the psychology of past experiences, that is still different than training your nervous system in the NOW so it can fight in the NOW.
• The subtle sensitivity training of GC brings you to the NOW such that you can anticipate/foreshadow the enemy’s movement.
• If you have an idea in your head of what you should be learning or what you think GC is, you will short circuit your development.
• The ego may think it is experiencing reality and the NOW, but that very process takes you out of the now.
• Most verbal teaching/explanation will take you out of the NOW, unless you are a gifted or properly trained teacher.
• A GC teacher has to feel and move in a way that shows the student how to experience for themselves the NOW – not the way you think they have to move (or even worse, how they think they should move), but how they are actually moving.
• The more sensitive you are as a teacher, the better you can teach GC.
• Some GC instructors may over-verbalize or attempt to teach by breaking down movements into concrete segments. This is a mistake.
• You’re not training so you can “Kill everybody/anybody” – you’re training so nobody can kill you and you can fight as efficiently as possible.
• You’re not training so you can beat anybody, you’re training to transcend yourself. This will get you where you want to go faster, so you can move in such a way that when the chips are down, subtle “crazy” moves will save your life.
• GC training gets you really efficient without memorization of “geometric” moves and techniques.
• When you do slow Contact Flow, each touch “Gives you 17 million pieces of information that you can’t even articulate.” Which is why proper flow practice is more valuable than endless verbal explanation.
• If you train slowly properly, the faster you go, the more they walk into your strikes. You can’t make “logical choices” at high speed anyway.
• Via your ability to “listen” with no mind or judgment and extreme sensitivity, their movement literally tells you what to do.
• As a teacher, it is your responsibility to create movement opportunities that they can discover for themselves. Verbalizing “solutions” for isolated situations cripples this.
• One thing to note while watching John is that he is always spontaneously and creatively forming weapons. Everyone else less so -- or not at all. This just underscores the importance of solo drills like Anywhere Striking, Washing the Body/Polishing the Sphere, and experimentation in Contact Flow (Washing/Polishing explained/demoed in Companion Part 2 and demoed in Combat Conditioning videos).
• John shows how flowing simultaneously with 3 students is easier if he treats then as one, multi-armed entity. This allows him to use the energy of one against the others.
• As with all these videos, words cannot do justice, you have to WATCH CAREFULLY the choices John makes in his movements while responding to his student’s movements as well as the movements he DOESN’T DO. After a while you can feel in your own body some of what John is feeling and begin to recognize visually what he’s doing. By combining this with your own solo and partner training and referencing John’s videos you can make huge leaps in your abilities.
