One way to understand the job of a Guided Chaos teacher:
It is the teacher’s job to create situations that empower the student’s subconscious to better feel and apply the principles (balance, looseness, body unity, sensitivity).
We must remember that it is primarily the subconscious that must be taught, and the subconscious learns from experience only. So the student’s subconscious must experience the principles in action in order to learn to trust and utilize them.
I can explain and demonstrate Guided Chaos to you until we’re both blue in the face, and you might understand it on a conscious, logical level. But that will be largely meaningless as far as your ability to DO it, as the ability to do it springs primarily from the subconscious, which does not care what anyone says.
How can a teacher create subconsciously educational situations?
One way is via hands-on manipulation, i.e. contact flow and its variations. Here the teacher must utilize empathy and intuition to feel the student’s internal obstacles and break them down or get around them. Then the subconscious may be educated via the experiences the teacher facilitates for the student via hands-on manipulation of the student’s body and mind.
Another way is via exercises, both solo and with partners.
Over the last 50+ years, John has studied, experimented, and refined the exercises of Guided Chaos to best facilitate understanding of the principles by the student’s subconscious. Many of the exercises are deceptively simple, yet the details of them are very important and purposeful.
The “core” Guided Chaos exercises in particular (e.g. balance walks, polishing/washing, box step, free anywhere striking, RHEM, gang attack drills) were designed to help the subconscious come to grips with the principles without creating bad habits or training scars.
Between contact flow and its variations, the core exercises and their variations, and other important training elements such as tendon strength exercises and slam bag training, and training with apparatus and weapons . . . there’s a lot to cover and refine over time!
This makes it very important for instructors to remain focused and largely refrain from making up new exercises and drills for their students. It can be tempting, at times, to isolate certain movements or ideas into a repetitive drill, or come up with a new exercise based on the instructor’s own relatively limited understanding of Guided Chaos and combative reality.
The problems with this, however, are two-fold: 1) the “new” drill takes time away from practicing established exercises, and 2) the “new” drill may have negative effects or shortcomings that the instructor is blind to, such as setting up certain expectations or habits in the student’s subconscious.
It is true that repeating a certain movement or concept a few times can help a student understand it, and isolating and practicing a certain idea for a few minutes can have benefits. To expand such practices into new drills or exercises that are repeated over multiple sessions without vetting by John, however, is problematic for the two reasons cited above.
In Guided Chaos, we are blessed with a rich variety of training methods and exercises that have been proven over decades to enhance subconscious realization of the principles and foster improvement in students without deleterious effects. There’s typically not enough time in an ongoing training schedule to do justice to all of them. The best we can do is respond to the needs of our students with the appropriate proven training methodologies, and in doing so, deepen our own understanding of what they teach.
"We can all work in this direction. There are some things that have been developed from a few of our students and masters...I definitely agree that deep understanding of my decades-long development of our basics should be well understood and shared with myself along with the Senior Masters before certain habits occur that slow the internal flow.
REMEMBER: CHOREOGRAPHY KILLED THE CAT.
► Grandmaster John Perkins
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