Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

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.

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.

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.

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 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...)

My real analogy, the one I always turn to, is the learning of language. Do we really crave structure in learning a language? I kind of think not. I guess I can only speak for my own experience, but structure when learning a language always feels like something getting in the way. Just a bunch of stuff to be memorized, tested on and then filed away. When learning a language you immediate, more or less, want to know how to use it. Right away. How do I say "cat"? How do I swear? And, as everyone knows, the most direct path to fluency is immersion. Which means using it, using it, using (for a very long time wrong). Muay Thai, at its real level, is like a language. Which is why it's pretty much taught like a language in Thailand. You learn a couple of words, and then you just start using them. Then you learn some more, and you use them. You are not taught structurally. Now, I understand that teaching a class of 30 people, of differing levels, in an unstructured way is not easy. And indeed for many it might be impossible. But it does happen in Thailand, only it's not a class. I think the real reason why something like Muay Thai is taught in a structured way, so much, is because of the demands on teaching itself, which is not easy. Not really because people crave structure. I was always struck by watching Andy Thomson teach beginners (a westerner who taught in Thailand for 2 decades). He would start them out with. Stand naturally. Now take one step forward. There, that's your stance. And he would proceed like that, and in 30 minutes - I swear - you were "doing" Muay Thai. Like...pretty damn good Muay Thai, considering. He put them on the bike immediately, and he was like: pedal. I don't think this kind of training or teaching style is easy. It takes a certain perspective. But one of the coolest things about Muay Thai is just how simple it is, at the bottom of it all.

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.

My spinoff thoughts on this!

This post grows out of a really excellent thread started by James Poidog on training fighter aggression, especially for those uncomfortable with aggression themselves (that thread is linked at the bottom here). I started answering James and then just realized that this probably deserves a thread of it's own. This was the beginning of my answer: I hope she hops on here to discuss, but I'm just giving my view. I've seen female fighters go this way. Roxy Richardson advocated for it in some blog posts, Michelle Waterson talks this way. For Sylvie the creation of an alter never was super effective. She wasn't at peace with the values in that alter, and Muay Thai is so much of her soul I think it all was a little jarring, and in a way "not believable" to her, so it didn't quite stick. You definitely see this in male fighters too. The whole "persona" which works well with marketing, etc. But what Sylvie seems to have discovered for herself is the mantra: "The way you do one thing is the way you do all things." which means that if you want to fight differently, you have to bring those values and habits into your life, the way you do other things. An interesting example for instance is that as a Muay Khao fighter you need to constantly be taking up space. More and more space. Sylvie's physically small, often shy or reclusive person. She has been moving out of the way of people for a very long time, sometimes just out of the reality of what happens on sidewalks. So...when you are moving through supermarket aisles, who is the one who moves out of the way first? You don't have to be an asshole about it, but always one person makes the gesture to move first. Who is that person? If you really want to naturally be a certain way in the ring. for instance somehow who takes up space, yes, you can make up the "Space Eating Monster" alter who just gobbles space, or...you can become someone who increasingly takes up space more often, in all things, in all ways. What I find really interesting about this is that the reason why people are drawn to certain personas, or let's say certain fighting styles, like literally drawn like a moth, is that they speak to something deep inside, something that they might not be reconciled with. Training toward something in technique, or in style, or even persona, in the gym, is a way of working toward that expression, that thing. Alters are way of approaching that, but it seems much cooler, much more rich and transformative to literally take that thing, that desire onto yourself, and start to shape your life with it. I think that's much closer to the arc that fighters are spiritually aiming for in the first place. There is also always a suspicion for me that when people put on alters that those masks can break, if you push on them hard enough, that the fighter, or even the person in life, doesn't really, really, really believe that that is who they are. And that there can be a kind of fragility to that path. Yes, you can put on masks to grow into them, to give permissions, that's a tool, but what is is stronger, like a slowly growing oak tree, to really become what you dream. The original thread conversation spin off:

hahahaha. Sure. This is the better article: Ars Technica Rat brains provide even more evidence our brains operate near tipping point

Hmmm. If you are responding to my thought experiment it really shouldn't involve pushing people around anywhere. The whole idea is to develop a sense of domination, which is really just control over your environment, submissive people are also trying to control their environment as well, they do it hrough submission. In my example this is done without aggression, which means you aren't pushing against anything. A good example I can take from my bartender years. I used to bar tend during some shifts in NY in a very small service bar (making drinks for waiters) where customers would come and kind of corner me, and talk to me. Ha, I'm not the talkative bartender type at all. One night I just decided to see if I could move the person in front of me who was jabbering away - it really was only maybe 4 feet across, the little bar space, I tried to move them to the left and to the right. I would talk to them and look off center, slightly to their left to move them slowly across the bartop, and then slightly to the right, and like a cat with a laser they would move to be in front of my gaze. I felt trapped, it was my degree of freedom. I wasn't really pushing them. I'm not sure that classifies as aggression. Maybe? But, I think it's something far below aggression. It's just the natural desire to control the environment, and there are many ways to do it. Not just aggressively. When a fighter like Samart is just drifting backwards, teep juggling his opponent over and over, looking bored, leading them quietly around the ring like a dog on a leash, is this aggression? There are moments of aggression in his style to be sure, but the domination he exhibits is the same as me looking to the right, and to the left. I think the confusion is the idea that as a fighter you need to tap into some fundamental, probably repressed aggression, and then stay in this aggro state for long stretches, in order to fight. No, not really. Not in Thai style at least. You have to learn how to control the space, control your opponent, and control yourself. Yes, you can use aggression. Yes, you can tap into repressed energies, as a tool, but it isn't fundamentally that. I think there is a lot of misleading about aggression in fighting, it necessity, etc. Is there fighting with absolutely ZERO aggression, probably not. But if you watch some of Somrak's fights you seem almost none. Dieselnoi when asked about Somrak said: He's a tall person who refuses to fight you!!! And basically implied, he's a nightmare for that reason. This stuff goes way, way back for Thailand. The oldest recorded fight between a farang and a Thai is from the 18th century when a French Man challenged a royal champion. The Thai champion just retreated (and probably teeped and whatnot) the French boxer became totally enraged. It was so humiliating that the Frenchman's brother then apparently hopped into the ring to simultaneously attack the Thai. I wonder who was dominating whom?

I'm not entirely sure how you mean. Do you mean differently than the two articles cited do? Like, just in terms of error production? Or, do you mean more generally, how these articles paint a picture of the brain as a tipping point complex system?

What is at stake here is pretty much the mechanistic world view which we have inherited from the industrial age. Models of the world call our attention to certain features, and suppress our attention to other features, and let's just grant that there is no one "all features" model of the world. A great deal of what we do in the west in terms of Martial Art or combat training comes out of our gearworks mentality. We largely see the world in terms of interconnected cogs or forces that behave in practical ways. And if something predictable fails to occur we lift up the hood and check for where the connection is broken. We do this with ourselves as well, often trying to fix or replace "broken" parts, like our beliefs (that may be holding us back), or habits. We imagine that if the parts line up the machine of the world will work as it should be. And you can see this kind of mechanistic thinking in fight training. Especially in Dutch Kickboxing (taking its cue from Karate's katas, fused with boxing combo thinking), we practice set patterns that are imagined to work like a mechanism unfolding. In fact people partner up and exchange set patterns in simulated "sparring" just to make sure the well-oiled machine of responses is properly geared. You jab, I slip. You cross, I lowkick. Etc. One reason why this patterned teaching proliferates is that it fits in well with our mechanistic world, another reason is that just like in the world of commerce, making widgets (discrete units), and selling and moving them quickly, is a very keen business model for the production of knowledge. You can just stamp them out and put them in a relative assembly line. I'm not saying that all patterned instruction is like this, but we should understand that there is a certain cultural, commercial and paradigm-based balast to all of this practice,. What the complexity systems theory does to this mechanistic world view is change up our expectations, and revise our concept of "error" (or non-response, null value). Error is not necessarily a feedback of a broken part. It may simply be a criticality building system under development.

One of the most difficult things when trying to train pretty much anything is that the human organism, in fact all organisms operate with a profound sense of homeostasis. When the system finds its equilibrium it sets its internal thermostat to stay there. The human body regulates its temperature to fall within a certain zone, ideal for its chemical interactions. The alcoholic (just to pick something) stays within the circularity of habits that maintain a symbiotic relationship to the substance alcohol. Each is a system composed of a network or networks that circles back on itself, stabilizing the relations. One may be at the bio-chemical level, the other may involve friends, conversations, work habits, advertisement consumption, diet and many other things (also perhaps reduce-able to bio-chemical chains). How does one change a homeostatically driven system? The first thing to appreciate is that if you have any "bad habits" they are likely part of a homeostatic system. They are part of a sameness, a stability. They aren't just "bad", they are "good" in a set of relations. If you keep dropping your hands in sparring or on the pads, this isn't just an error. It's also something that your body is reading as right or helpful in maintaining itself. If you don't figure out how to replace the "good" that is being done with another, more operative good, it's very hard to convince the system to make the change. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. An example from Sylvie is that we've figured out that she lowers her hands at times in her movement. In particular we were thinking about how she starbursts them when kicking, for instance, instead of being more in guard. They aren't just dropping out of laziness. In fact they are forming part of a balancing mechanism, probably brought on by leanbacks in her kick, when her head moves off of the centerline. Her hands are part of a system of stability. IF you want to stop lowering your hands then you probably need to stop leaning back. You have to teach the whole system a different kind of balance. You can keep yelling at yourself to keep your hands up, but what you are telling the system is: "Don't save yourself." It isn't going to happen. There is a reason they are down. There are probably several reasons, in fact. A single thing like lowering the hands can play a role in several stabilizing systems, physically, mentally, emotionally, etc. But the point is: look to the system. Look to what stability is being accomplished. This is a long way of saying, if you are trying to change one thing you probably need to change the whole thing. Sometimes you can change the whole thing by really pushing hard on the one thing. For instance, you can tie your hands in place, and make it so you can never drop them, and the whole system of balance would be forced to learn another way. That's a brute force approach. It's usually better to globally try and shape the whole system, that way all the connective tissue between parts gets touched. This is one of the reasons play in training is a powerful tool, it pulls more and more into the system, and guides it all to evolve without critical judgment. So, onto the Critical Brain. Some ruminations on the possible nature of the brain and how that might help us see mental (and physical) training under new models. With new models come new expectations and methods. The best article to read on this is the recent Ars Technica Rat brains provide even more evidence our brains operate near tipping point but the quotations in this article are from the Quanta article Brains May Teeter Near Their Tipping Point, Quanta Magazine. Both are summarizing the consequences of a new paper presented on how brains may be structured around criticality. In taking up the idea of training away and through criticality we can see homeostasis in a new way. This theory of the brain suggests that it fluctuates just below criticality, which is in very crude terms like a sandpile. How the Brain is Like a Sandpile The stability of the sandpile system comes from it's inherent instability. What is interesting is how they are very broadly analogizing sandpile avalanches to biological processes, and brain activity like cascading neurons firing to some effect. For instance, waking up. How is it that a sleeping brain moves to becoming awake? What is the process? What is it like? This theory suggests that it's very much like a sandpile. It gets dripped on by grains and slowly moves toward its big avalanche, the cascade of neurons that in unison moves it into a waking state. You can read the articles and see how this may only be a rough analogy, but it's helpful. It's talking about how the organism moves between stabilizing and destabilizing states, and positions itself between. How the Brain is Like an Atomic Bomb The above positions the human brain between thresholds of Noise and dumbness, ever balancing itself in a Goldilocks zone which allows a helpful rate of cascading. I present it here just for digestion. I'm going to veer off on my own tangent. It's my intuition - and I did not read this hypothesis in the literature, and I have no particular reason to think it true - that the way that a cascading, avalanche prone brain dampens its sensitivity (super criticality) is likely that the overall critical system is nested. Which is to say that when a rice grain falls on subsystem x, this grain is released by another, more localized sandpile, if you will. You have hour glasses linked to hour glasses. And at times they cascade all together. At times, in fact many times, the cascade is well below the threshold of consciousness or action. Nested criticality is a very interesting model of development. If we are perusing a physical change, say perhaps snapping back on the jab, or maybe more interestingly developing a quality, let's say being light on your feet, it may be productive to think of this element as a nested subsystem of criticality. Which is to say, we are building sandpiles. Many times we are working on something and it just seems like nothing is happening at all. We are just wasting our time. And, we very well may be. On the other hand, we may be also dropping rice grains with the aim creating a sand pile, which will then critically balance itself with cascades of the desired effect. What is kind of interesting about this is that we tend to look at states in very idealized ways. A good fighter is always calm. A good fighter is always on balance. This fighting style is quick and accurate. But in nested criticality there is no absolute quality. This particular sandpile tends to avalanche, to cascade with this effect, over time. At any one particular moment, a single fall of a rice grain, the system might express that quality, or it may not. If it does not, it isn't failing. It's only a tendency of that subsystem, a tendency to cascade. When we watch someone like Mike Tyson we are struck with significant essentialism. He is just so powerful. He is powerful in all things he does. But it isn't really that way. Many shots aren't powerful. Many shots miss or are miss timed. But then that huge shot lands, accurate, fast, explosive. That's a sandpile avalanching. Lots of grains fell in that fight in which there were only tiny avalanches, and lots fell when there was nothing. Instead of imagining that those were misfires, or failed, perhaps we imagine them as a system near criticality. His training, the state he had developed, was one when power tended to manifest itself. The whole fighter would cascade with a certain effect. The same thing with maybe someone like Samart who is so slick, so on balance. The illusion he creates, often by virtue of great moments in fights when everything avalanches, is that he is ALWAYS this way. He isn't, he's off balance all time, he mistimes things, but he catches himself, the system is tending toward slickness, towards timing. The reason why this is important, or productive, is that it's a way into seeing into the nature of "error" or even unresponsiveness. The failure of a system to produce the desired effect is quickly read in very critical terms. It is broken. It needs fixing. The first thing is to understand that the system, any system, is already not broken. It is operating under a homeostasis already. If the theory of the criticality of the brain is anywhere close to being true, at minimum any particular state a person is in, any habit they have, is part of a pretty delicate and miraculous balancing act of hovering near a tipping point of maximum efficacy. As we try and train that system to have different qualities, we are just moving its tipping points. We do that by addressing nested subsystems and their criticality. The other aspect of criticality and error is that just because the sandpile isn't cascading with the desired effect doesn't mean that it is broken. It just may be that not enough grains of sand have fallen for it to reach criticality. It's just a fairly insensitive pile as yet. Yeah, you flinch still in sparring. Not enough grains have tumbled down. Your eyes and other senses haven't seen enough yet. Yes, you can train bad habits, create sandpiles that cascade in an undesired way, but if you understand that you are building sandpiles in the first place, the role of error or unresponsiveness can be seen in a different way. You are not trying to create a perfect response, as in mechanical views of the world where you push a button, and gears turn, and then the gumball drops out. The same way every time. That is the model we often think of in training. Instead, you are creating sandpiles which tend toward certain effects, certain qualities. And, once you have a pretty good sandpile you are fine tuning its sensitivity to inputs, making it more and more prone towards sensitivity and flow. But, there is no "perfect" state of the sandpile. Even the most revered fighters existed in states where if a single grain fell, nothing would happen. Its only if when enough grains fall, beauty happens.

Maybe there's a way in like this. Most of aggression = domination comes from imposing pain, or the idea of that. But, there are so many other things. I'm not going to let you breathe (when you want to), going about taking away someone's breathing pattern. I'm not going to let you stand where you want to, moving them off their spot when you see them settle. I'm not going to let you rhythm when you want to, or on your tempo. Just three. 1. look for breathing. 2. look for standing in a spot 3. look for rhythm Many people don't ever really LOOK for those things, they aren't trained to do so. But, if you get them to start to see it, then it can become a target, even a fun target. And then they can feel how it is domination. If you made a mental exercise. Walk into a room with people you are familiar with (work, the gym, school), and have a conversation with someone you know. But decide in advance to move them physically, while you are talking. Come with me, put your hand on their back, as we talk. Stop here, while we talk. Move them back, gently, while we talk. You use the customary space of talking to move the person, position them. This is fighting. If anyone did this exercise they would immediately understand domination without any aggression. Purposely interrupt someone every time they start talking in a conversation. You can do it rudely, or aggressively. This is counterstriking. This is breaking rhythm. It doesn't have to be aggressive, in fact it could be fun to see just how gently you can do it. Sylvie in the few times she's taught would show how if you stand too close to someone when you are talking to them, they will move back. You can use this to steer someone, without them really realizing it. It's just using energy and proximity. Aggression is like the crudest tool in the box. I know you know all this, but just some random thoughts.

A big variant is how Muay Thai teaches/trains domination, not aggression. You can use aggression to dominate, but only to a certain degree. You don't (often) get a "killer" mentality for this reason. It's all about controlling the other person, imposing yourself. This is really a different world than a lot of western thinking. But it's worth pointing out.