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One of the most powerful and probably meaningful aspects of fighting as an entertainment form, but also an art, is that fighters do something that is a "peak experience" in most lives. Most of the fans in an audience have had very few purposive fights, and if they had them there were under extreme conditions. What fighters do the "normal" person will rarely do. It makes fighters kind of emotional astronauts, having to live in spaces - to perform in front of audiences - over and over in peak states. I think it can really be a struggle in how to manage going into those states, or at the very least exposing yourself to that kind of duress.

Yes. 100%, but it is also that you have to use the language - albeit full of errors and inexactness - all the time, you fumble your way through, often without any correction, but just through living use, you somehow find a way, you find correct. If it was just being IN the culture, a lot more long term westerners in Thailand would speak Thai. A large number of them do not. In fact, I don't at all, I've been here 7 years. Sylvie is almost fluent, or at least getting there pretty quickly. The difference between us is that she fumbled and bumbled through uses of it, to do real things, to interact, shape things, get things done. I didn't. Andy Thomson, the amazing coach I mentioned above, didn't really speak Thai after 25 years here. But, I totally agree that if you have the opportunity to USE the language repeatedly in the culture you get all kinds of rich clues about the uses of it. This is one of the beautiful, kind of amazing things about real Thai gyms like the one Sylvie finds herself in, there is just a tapestry of Thai "Muay Thai" culture everywhere, and that whole culture of behavior and values - how you hold your body, how you hold aggression, or exhaustion, or respect...- molds all the techniques you are trying to use. That's the super difficult thing about teaching Muay Thai in western contexts, the "culture" of Muay Thai (in the Thai sense) is missing, all the rich, tiny stuff. You can try and duplicate certain aspects. You can wai when you come in, you can adopt Thai attitudes in techniques, but it's just really an absolute shadow of a Thai gym, and kind of feel just like imitation and in some cases caricature...so, maybe that's why instead you need structure, for the absence of "culture".

I have been approached to teach a group of around 10 mentally challenged young adults. I have never taught anyone who is mentally challenged. I would really appreciate any thoughts or considerations on how to conduct the classes. I have been speaking to the person involved in setting this up and the general consensus is they need a strict but vibrant session. The only way I know of to achieve this is to conduct them like a karate class. I have a few reservations with this. These being (1) I don't want to be called Sensei even though I hold that title and rank associated with it, I just don't get the idea. Never have, never will. (2) I hate unnecessary bowing and scraping, I consider myself to be very egalitarian. (3) I hate formality. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of my karate rank, I've just never seen the point in being called a Japanese title when I'm not Japanese and my karate is not a traditional form. I much prefer being called Jeremy or Jezza. I guess it's an Aussie thing. I don't even let my Muay Thai students call me Kru. I'm not Thai, never trained in Thailand, my muay thai is Australian in intention and purpose and I have never pretended otherwise. Just a bit confused as how to approach the strictness thingy. Any help to solve my conundrum, would be most appreciated.

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It will depend largely on the group but I would advise to just be yourself and follow your own style of teaching. Keep it very basic and fun. You will have to adopt as you go. Some guys will struggle to retain information, just accept it. Teaching in karate style as in lines might help but or at least as a starting point. Keep it enjoyable and keep your sense of humour. Can’t think of much else as groups can vary so much and each will have additional issues to deal with, balance, coordination etc

What is this were the motto for our Muay, or, alternately, for our living...which is the same thing: - Per Bak This is very close to a poetic, quasi-conceptual unraveling of Sylvie's motto: "Live the question."

Detouring back to the original theme, here's a citation from a secondary essay I'm reading on Self Organized Criticality "Society as a Self-Organized Criticality" (I have the PDF if anyone is interested, message me on the forum message system) This essay takes up the thesis: What if society were organized like Bak's Sandpiles (mentioned at the top of this thread). Now, a few translations have to take place to appreciate the possible impact on this passage on Muay Thai. In particular, the author is interested in how "catastrophic" or "revolutionary" events happen in societies, for instance the outbreaks of war, or scientific paradigm shifts. But let's not be mislead. The theory really is that systems near the edge of chaos, near a tipping point, are complexly organized toward what we might call "avalanches". Avalanches, like on sandpiles upon which individual sand grains fall, are sudden shifts of coordination from many parts of the system. Whether this be an outbreak of war in a society, or a perfectly timed Mike Tyson punch full of power and accuracy, the avalanche is when disparate parts all flow and work together. In the rat brain study cited at this thread's beginning, it's how the brains of rats slowly wake up from sleep. There are small, unpredictable waking actions (tiny avalanches), and over time eventually the large system-wide avalanche, the rat wakes up. This is what I find incredibly interesting. One of the great frustrations of training, and trying to change oneself in Muay Thai, is about trying to bring all the parts of the system (your body) together in a desired way. Your muay is, perhaps like a sandpile, and training is about getting it into these criticality states, when suddenly, but perhaps not predictably, it will avalanche in concerted ways. What is very cool is that this could mean that your muay, and all your practice to hone it, is more precarious toward sudden efficaciousness than you think. In the cited passage above, any influence can set off an avalanche who's size (degree of coordination) cannot be predicted. You do not even know the state of your own muay. Key of course, is to regard, and really assemble your self into a criticality state, one prone to the right kinds of productive avalanches, the right awakenings. Easier said than done. But "error" (or really null values) sits in a very different place in these models. Error is waiting for the avalanche of coordination. Key to this coordination possibility is for the system (your self) to have a certain amount of play in it...and by play I mean both the unpredictability of outcome, but also maybe actually "play". This is one reason why too rigid, or too stable of training system will not produce the criticality that will bring diverse parts together. Consider this passage in the same essay: Heavy pattern repetitions, overt control over diverse parts or actions, may produce just too stable or shift a system. Instead you want one which has parts that interact a lot (as they do in play), capable of sudden shifts (as they do in play), with a certain unpredictable nature (success or "failure"). You want a sandpile that might, at any point, cascade. If you are training much of the time in states far from this, you are maybe spending too much time in non-criticality.

Gotta admit, most of this sounds like fairly dark and scary shit to me. Not be squeemish or anything but....shit, thinking too much about this stuff reminds me of those fucked up Tumblrs. But anyway. Actually, someone on another thread talked about Hannibal, dunno if you guys meant the old movies, the books or the tv show. But in the new series, the main guy kept saying his real fantasy wasn't killing people, but watching a teacup drop and break apart on the ground. In that moment when it smashed, he wished time would stop and reverse, and all the pieces of the teacup would gather up together and be a teacup again. That's basically what it feels like when you're losing a fight and somehow come back and win. He's stronger, better, faster, nothing's working and you feel like you're drowning and there's no way out. But then all of a sudden something works and you can't believe it. That's the teacup gathering up again.

I do wonder why I have such an aversion to this Alter-Ego thing. An immediate thought that comes to mind is a comparison to acting. I'm a good actor, I enjoy it, I like impersonating people - I do a very good Karuhat strut. But I'm being Karuhat; it still belongs to him in a way. So I'm "performing," not identifying. I can't remember what actor it was, but someone famous enough to be profiled in a magazine I would read said that s/he liked acting because it allows one to experience very different life choices, without any of the consequences of actually having chosen those things for yourself. I find that kind of bullshit, honestly. I find actors who say they "lose themselves in the role" to be full of shit, too. You're either taking yourself into different silhouettes or you're keeping parts of those characters in yourself; or both. But in my mind, there's no such thing as without consequence. Which I think is what the whole idea of an Alter-Ego is. I understand the notion that your fighter-persona has permissions that you, in your everyday life, don't. I don't go around trying to knee people's guts out at the supermarket. But I can't conceive of having a different set of values for in the fight and out of it. I'm all unified theory, I guess. If I need to be more merciless in the ring, then I need to be more merciless in my life. I can't hold a value in one context and not in another. There is no escaping the consequences of actions just because of context. You either live a value or you don't. And maybe because it's something that I can't quite wrap my own heart around, I am tending to assume a much larger divide than is real for those of you who do feel these alters... like, it's not so much Jekyll and Hyde as it is Big Alice and Small Alice. Big Alice can pick up the deck of cards and toss them around, Small Alice can't. I get that. But they're not separate identities to me.

You can book private classes on the Yokkao gym's website. Just pick a trainer, or a fighter, select a date and proceed to payment;) In regards to Yokkao's cleanliness, I can only say that it is not any dirtier than the average Muay Thai gym in Thailand, which means not very clean for western standards, but all in all passable. I remember reading a review of someone saying that the gym was incredibly dirty and that potentially deadly infections lurked in the dusty corners: nonsense. Imagine that at Sitsongpeenong I witnessed the little dog of one of our trainers pee (and worse) around the heavy bags, where we walked around barefooted. I never saw anyone disinfect the area. The only downside I could think of is in the fact that there is little clinching trained at Yokkao - which for me was a good thing as I hate clinching, although I must admit that it is a fundamental part of Muay Thai.

I agree with Kevin that you ought to just try both before committing to one or the other based off of a coin-toss. Hongthong is big, has two rings, has female fighters and lots of westerners. Joe and Gen are awesome, they have some other trainers working for them but I'm not sure how many now or who's there. They're fairly technical, in the sense that they drill things. It's largely a westerner focused gym. And it's outside of the city, though not far. Lanna (I assume you mean the one in the old location, under new ownership) is going to be largely Chinese, a few westerners, and some Thai kids. There are, indeed, two rings and women are only allowed in one of them. Daeng is the trainer to look for at Lanna, he's friendly and can help with any kind of technical instruction. They have some younger trainers, who are fun and playful, and as far as I've heard from their new structure, they are much more organized in their training than they used to be. They're right by the foothills of the mountains, near the university, you can walk to anything and get into the main part of the city in just a few minutes by a share-cab "song taew" truck. You don't know how is at either place until you're there. Whether you have clinching/sparring partners your size or not. If there are women there at that time or not. If you like the training at either one or not. Check them both out and trust your own judgement based on the experiences you have actually in the space.

Sylvie and I haven't been around either gym, in an active way, for a while, and never trained more than in a private session under the existing management at either. Maybe someone can hop on who has been around these gyms recently. Both seem to be supportive of female students, both have top notch head trainers (Joe Hongthong at Hongthong, Kru Daeng at Lanna), and both encourage fighting and are well connected. The right thing to do, to be honest, is to go and train at one for two or 3 days and just feel the vibe, and then go and train at the other for 2 or 3 days, and feel the same. A big part of all this, especially between two gyms that are thought to be somewhat comparable, is just the feeling of the space, the feeling you get off of the krus, how they conduct training. By our experience you can feel pretty quickly whether you want to spend a month or two in a place or not. And sometimes you can walk in a place and get a big "get me the hell out of here" inner voice. A mistake many people make is paying for gyms in in advance. I know that some gyms try to get this to happen, and there may even be gyms that require it, but it's just not a good long term strategy. You just have to go and feel your way. Even if you hear great reviews from people who are even IN the gym right now, they may be very different kinds of people than you. Nothing replaces intuition. We've sent a lot of people to both these gym, in a general sense, just because they have pretty nice reps, and support female fighters, but really it's how you feel when there. There is always the small chance that you wouldn't like either of them, for whatever reason. You could still pop over to Manop's gym, which is much smaller, or a more westernized gym. In Thailand it's almost always best to keep your options open.

Hahaha awesome. Yeah that about sums it up.

I think I see where you are going with this... (I hope you don't mind my humor! I just couldn't help it, just love the Hulk too much...)

Oh and side note on language. I had a professor that was really known for his theories on language. He believed, and could back it up with research, that to really learn a language you had to think in it. So how do you do that if you dont understand it? He realised that people living in other countries picked up the language faster than those that were at home. He deduced that it was the immersion in the culture that really got them to be so responsive. It wasnt just that you had to learn because thats all they spoke, it was that culture shapes the brain and language is tied to culture. In essence it was really the immersion to the culture that got you thinking the right way to be able to think in the language, like a prep or lol pre workout. You became primed to learn. It really made me become more receptive to idea that culture (basically ideas) is the root of everything.

This is why Ive been against it 100%. That sense of it being fake. For me because being "normal" vs my anger self (or whatever you wanna call it, hulk or something like that) felt so fake I had trouble seeing aspects that I could learn and become. Now I see it differently. I realise for me that these are things I can learn amd absorb to make my own. In doing so they become my version and 100% real. Theres this theory that everything we eat and love to eat is an acquired taste. As adults we can eat something and immediately like it, but the thought is its because we already acquired the taste as a child. As children we learned to like some things. Remember coffee the first time? Or beer? The idea then becomes that we dont really have set things in place as to who we are really and as we age and grow we collect the things we become. In that sense we can continue to become, to grow. For me to become better, I had to accept that my perspective of things being fake was limited. Now Im a different person and very much not the angry kid. I became more my "alter" than what I thought was who I was truly. And to be clear I dont mean fake it til you make it, but to really learn to walk in those shoes, to learn to become something else.

This is definitely true, but I do think people do crave structure, if only subconsciously. To be clear, I mean westerners when I say people too. I cant speak to other countries and cultures, but I do believe western culture wants it to various levels. In teaching kids, I see it. Without structure to what we do they get bored and chaotic. The trick for me is to avoid the pitfalls of structure, the routine. So like I said above, I outline loosely to have an idea of what I want to teach, I plot time loosely so I know how much I have to get ideas across, then I go and see what will happen. Im not using structure as control for the uncontrollable. Im using it just to be more efficient with the time I have. And I think thats maybe where we westerners get our "crave" from. Its super time oriented here, right? Its part if why we have that rush culture, especially in LA. So, my hour class might be plotted like this: 5 min warm up, 15 mins bag work (if I have a plan for it itll be something like work jabs add movement), 15 mins partner drill (with the lesson, usually tied to bag work lesson), 15 mins spar/clinch work. Thats just an outline though. If they are vibing on the bag, we could stay there as long as they want. Just depends on the organic components you cant plan for. I think that crave of structure is just a hope of control in the uncontrollable. We like it not because we necessarily need it so much as are conditioned to it and maybe wish for more of it in lives that can be chaotic. Hopefully that explains my thoughts better. Trying not to ramble, so I might not always explain myself fully.

Yeah please dont misunderstand, the structure is loose lol. Its there in outline only. There still has to be an organic element to the class I believe. So I plan what I want to teach then see how it goes. Structure as in direction, not criticism or limitation.

It truly means a lot to hear that others are sparked by my thoughts and my words. As you can tell my mind is ever expanding in its search for implication, and I truly believe that Muay Thai is the great arts in the world, period. And I mean any art. The plastic arts, the literary arts, all of the performed arts. There is nothing that pulls on so many strings, and has the potential to reconcile the traditional and (hyper)modern worlds as much as Muay Thai, that is, the Muay Thai of Thailand.

Oh yes that guy

I know you are responding to Kevin but I would add that as a student I’m super happy sparring with people bigger & heavier than me; My favorite person is 6’4” about 260. He’s a pro and he schools me but it’s just, for me, delightful seeing the many ways he gets ahead of me. I also trust him, not just because of skill but because I know 99% of the time he has to really cut down in his power to get any work (holding pads for him is like a metal concert, tooth-rattling; I love it).

Would love it if Kaitlin will hop on and will be watching her fight! My thoughts & intuitions are kind of a constant stream, actually. I know its a general question but I am doing a show in NYC that includes a ladies MT fight night and this will result in people asking me why I think women ought to do martial arts in general, Muay Thai in particular. These will be people hostile to the idea of violence generally. For myself, I usually adore the women in my gyms, because there is less coquetry and more directness. Twice though, I've had another woman try and throw me under the bus to be the "favorite student" with the male coach - that's fun lol. So I am just searching for thoughts and impressions. I actually hate generalizations and think the cloud of socialization is so powerful (habitus) in developing gender roles that its difficult to find what is real and what is just driven by social needs, but all, in the end are real so I am just trying to trace patterns. Thanks.

Maybe Kaitlin will hop on, I think she is fighting today or tomorrow, but is a coach and has thought a lot about this I believe. What are your thoughts or intuitions?