Love this book, and all books like it. I recognized every name-drop Williams did. Every work cited in the text, I had already read, which is probably Love this book, and all books like it. I recognized every name-drop Williams did. Every work cited in the text, I had already read, which is probably why Goodreads kicked me toward this one next.
It's another one of those sitting is killing you books, great for confirming pre-established biases but with the caveat of taking it a few steps further. I've been recommending martial arts to my trauma patients for years. It might seem like common sense, but I was following a hunch, between the success of somatics in trauma treatment and the benefits you see in ADHD kids who buckle down into a well-structured martial arts program, both as an outlet for their excess energy and as a means of familiarizing themselves with consistency. Williams finally matched me with the studies and theorists that agree, kickboxing is the next best thing for a recovering PTSD patient, right after dancing.
Dancing is the best thing you can do for your mental health. There's probably some deep evolutionary or Jungian reason for that, but it doesn't matter. What matters is if you have PTSD, it's time to go to Zumba. Full stop. You're not gonna beat dancing in terms of empirically demonstrable positive mental (and, to a lesser extent, physical) health outcomes and you have to stop trying. But martial arts is a close second, and provides the benefit of empowerment in situations of conflict that you just don't get from dancing. Unless it's capoeira.
This strikes me as intuitive, because in most cases, what makes trauma so traumatic is the powerlessness you feel. If you know that you're capable of putting a potential assailant in a rear naked choke and killing them, it doesn't matter if you never have to prove that in real life. The carry-over into self-confidence and autonomy is going to be sufficient to drive your overall traumatic resiliency up a few notches.
The downside to this spectacular book, the New Testament addendum to Katy Bowman's initial gospel? Now I am moving at all times, and in stupid ways. Like an octopus rocked off stimulants. I'm bouncing off the walls. The wife says, "Can you stop shadowboxing everywhere in the house? It's making me nervous." Ableism, and flagrant. She maintains my spazzing out disease has gotten "much, much worse" since I stopped drinking coffee, and Caroline Williams has given me carte blanche to cartwheel around the yard right in front of God and Everybody.
Frig off dude. I'm moving my DNA.
As punchy a note as that would've been to end on, I've got to talk about the stretching. It turns out, stretching as hard as you can is NOT the best way to do it. You're supposed to half-ass the stretching, make it "gentle". That leads to greater relaxation and faster improvements in flexibility. Sort of like how you're not supposed to max out every time you lift, or you won't get stronger. Sort of like how zone 2 cardio is better for weight loss, recovery, energy recruitment, fat burning, and mitochondrial function than tempo runs or HIIT! Turns out, throwing 110% energy into everything you do DOESN'T help and in fact makes things worse.
Absolutely livid with this development, but it's nice to be informed....more
If you can look past the fact that this gaijin preacher consultant has no business writing about samurai or archery, let alone a meandering parable abIf you can look past the fact that this gaijin preacher consultant has no business writing about samurai or archery, let alone a meandering parable about samurai archery, it's pretty good.
Think of it as the Karate Kid, if that helps. A weeb named John or Joe or Josh goes to Japan to become a samurai archer. He is accepted to the samurai encampment, which is stuck in some kind of anachronistic time warp, and made to chop wood and carry water every day.
He resents this. He wants to be the best right now. He demands the opportunity to Biggie Size it. He is sure he can do extra work and get there sooner.
His archery sensei says nah. His archery sensei says, live your life normal, take time to rest, practice every day. Slow and steady. Tiny steps make up the journey. The usual. Then he tells a bunch of weird little vignettes about sports figures and Steve Jobs and other things that an archery sensei really has no business speaking on.
And our boy Joe/John/Jimmy, well, you know he's enlightened. Gradually he becomes a samurai archer once he embraces impermanence, slows down, and accepts Jesus. He goes back to America to see his paralyzed brother (still not sure what story relevance the paralyzed brother intro had) for the first time in 15 years and, presumably, start his career in American samurai archery.
A grain of salt won't do it. Apply the salt around the entire rim of the book Forest for the trees, all right? The advice is sound and inspirational enough, and it's not real Jesusy until right at the end. You do the work. Chop water, carry wood, don't get mad about it. ...more
They offer up some context in the introduction, where it's established that this warrior caste eventually ran Turns out, the samurai are a death cult.
They offer up some context in the introduction, where it's established that this warrior caste eventually ran out of wars and had to find some way to justify the existence of highly honed soldiers as feudal upper crust when nobody was killing each other anymore. They doubled down on philosophy and governance. Sort of like switching from Domination to Culture victory in Civ 6 when you run out of home-continent enemies to conquer.
And how do we garner these culture bombs? Ritual suicide for the CEO of your neighborhood. No higher honor. ...more
Entry level Zen, empty the cup, finger to the moon, etc. punctuated with references to working in Hollywood and Hong Kong so you knNot about striking.
Entry level Zen, empty the cup, finger to the moon, etc. punctuated with references to working in Hollywood and Hong Kong so you know it's Bruce Lee....more
A good book with a solid message. A little trite by this point in the game, but certainly one of the most authentic ways it's been presented. John LovA good book with a solid message. A little trite by this point in the game, but certainly one of the most authentic ways it's been presented. John Lovell is a vet who loves Jesus and wants you to take responsibility for your life. Society sucks but America rocks, women are terrifying and mysterious and must be protected at all costs, the government will eventually enslave you so dig a hole in your yard and fill it with canned beans and guns.
Objectively, all these things are true, and this is valuable advice. You've heard similar screeds from slightly center-right darlings (now conflated with open fascism) like Jordy P and the shrilly outraged Benjamin "Button" Shapiro. The difference between this book and their ethos is that John doesn't seem to be an asshole.
He's big into Jesus, he's big into benevolent sexism without overt chauvinism, he's big into being a prosocial member of the community, a competent father, and a man capable of killing other men with his bare hands. He suggests it's okay to be dangerous. You're supposed to be dangerous. You're supposed to rein in that danger. The combination of potential lethality and deliberately practiced discipline is the point of the whole Darwinian exercise of life, at least on this side of the y-chromosome.
I liked his differentiation between the three types of dangerous people, too. You might have heard it as the wolf-sheep-sheepdog trichotomy, that's a popular one. If you saw Team America World Police during your developmental years, I'm sure the dicks/pussies/assholes analogy is permanently seared into your frontal cortex.
Lovell's spin on this is the first type of dangerous people are villains. Dangerous because they like to be, irrelevant who's caught in the crossfire. No higher purpose. No involvement with Big Baby Jesus.
The second type are wimps, and they are worse. They let cowardice make their decisions, or avoid making decisions at all. Which, as we well know, is the same as making bad decisions, only without the honor of agency. They've so totally bought their own woe-is-me pity party that the delusion is at the wheel of their life, and they wind up doing things that, deep down, they know to be wrong because they've manufactured a plausible rationalization to cover up the fact they're ascaaaaared to act in any other way. Wimps are complicit bystanders to villains at best and opportunistic predators at worst, cowering behind their performative weakness like a shield. "Like pedophiles", says John.
And that leaves the third class, the warrior, or ideally the warrior-poet. Capable of violence, controlled enough to not do violence all the time.
To recap within Team America parameters, assholes/pussies/dicks.
The important distinction for Lovell is strategic application of warrior and of poet. You must be fearsome to your enemies and nice to your wife. If your kids are afraid of you instead of trying to hang out with you, you calibrated wrong and you are failing. There will be a time when you will be an emotional little bitch-boy. That's part of being human, and more to the point, it's part of masculinity. The soulless stoics and seething wrecks drive everyone else away. You can be the perfect murder robot in certain situations, when it's necessary, like at war, or in an active shooter scenario, or if the Redcoats demand lodging in your colonial homestead. When you are looking deeply into your wife's eyes, or playing Calvinball with the kids, or even petting a dog, it's not only okay to connect emotionally but it's necessary.
That's the main take-home of this book. John Lovell is talking to people confused by the frequently contradictory messages that Mean Ol' Society sends to men and boys. He parses the static for them and repackages it into a tidy little Michael Pollan soundbite: Be strong. Be kind. Go get baptized.
Takuan Soho zensplains swordfighting to a master swordsman. It comes off as encouragement to really double down on your ADHD.
The take-home is, the minTakuan Soho zensplains swordfighting to a master swordsman. It comes off as encouragement to really double down on your ADHD.
The take-home is, the mind that stops presents an interval for a fella to get lost in, and in that loss, he will get chopped in half by a more fluid-thinking samurai. Takuan's key is that the grind never stops, wherein the grind is the stream-of-consciousness flow of uncritical perception and unpremeditated action within the mind. If you don't think about the sword, you don't get lost in the sword. If you don't think about your stance, what your hand is doing, what your enemy is doing, you don't get lost in any of those things.
He keeps relating the mind to a cat. If the cat is free to wander, it will wander around and do cat things, effectively. The jury's out on what effective cat things are, but it probably involves 'killing vermin', and that is useful. If you put a leash on a cat, the cat won't serve its purpose. If the cat is well-trained, you can let it off the leash and know it'll be out there doing what you need it to do, killing vermin, while not doing disobedient cat actions, like "killing a baby sparrow" which was of great concern to Takuan for some reason, or shitting in your bed.
So is the mind. You let it wander from one thing to the next without trying to redirect it or stop it, and it will do exactly what it needs to do at the best time to do it. It's only if you try to micromanage it, force your attention here and there, think about thinking about thinking about thinking about, that the cat gets oppositional and defiant.
What happens will happen, and for our delusions of grandeur, we happen in the same way. Where can the dust alight, amirite fellas?
He tells the story of a Zen priest named Mugaku who got captured during a disturbance in China, and the soldier has him at swordpoint, ready to cut our man clean in half. Mugaku responds to this, in typical Zen priest fashion, by quoting obtuse poetry: "With the speed of a flash of lightning / cut through the spring breeze", prompting the soldier to immediately throw down his sword and flee. Undoubtedly to be caught, court-martialed, and chopped up as a deserter within a few days.
So what did Mugaku mean by this? Iunno man. Zen moment. But Takuan suggests it was another meditation on the ways in which we separate ourselves from our environment and the universe, as if such a thing were possible. The soldier is nothing, the sword is nothing, Mugaku is nothing, so the soldier cutting Mugaku in half, the speed with which his smug li'l life force will be snuffed, is as meaningless as swinging a sword into the wind.
Void sending void back to the void. Love me some Zen. And when the soldier who was so intimidated by Mugaku's perfectly timed "we're all like, one, man" is caught and filleted for going AWOL, his ropes of intestines hitting the dirt carried the same significance as the first or last droplets of a summer shower.
This, I'm told by dead clerics and Mandalorians alike, is the way. ...more
Saying "the least obnoxious biohacker" is like saying "the best-smelling dog turd". Let's get that out of the way.
A lot of factory standard from the uSaying "the least obnoxious biohacker" is like saying "the best-smelling dog turd". Let's get that out of the way.
A lot of factory standard from the unga bunga bullshit genre (my personal favorite), about reconnecting with nature, wearing flat shoes, eating enough animal fat, and doing mindfulness. This time, the mindfulness came in the form of martial arts, which is always good.
Pedram cusses too damn much! Nothing wrong with the occasional fuckword for added zest, for a little zing, but there's a delicate balance to maintain and it's painfully apparent when you can't recognize that. Was a time swear words made you edgy and relatable. Now, especially with the battery of cringe books like "Unfuck Your Mind" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck", it feels like a marketing gimmick.
Much of the book did, unfortunately. It was very self-help, but the thunderbolt never came, and he never tried to sell me anything. He suggested I buy some exotic herbs, but I won't be doing that.
He briefly talks about the connect between mindfulness practice and epigenetic expression of healthier genes, which is true through the filter of stress reduction, but a connection I never made directly.
He talks about how TV skews our perception with a worldview "that is inaccurate and dark, which drives us to feel unsafe, unloved, alone, and unattractive", which confirms my bias.
He says, "there's just as much space between the electrons of our cells (to scale) as there is between the stars in the sky", which sounds incredibly wrong. I'm not an astrophysicist or a biologist, but cells come in different sizes and electrons are subatomic particles. The electrons need to be atoms, the atoms need to be molecules, then the molecules need to be cells. We skipped a whole bunch of orders of organization, here, Doctor.
He talks about phasing out or at least limiting caffeine, and he's probably right. I got off coffee and I'm sleeping great, and sleeping great makes everything else in your life great. Bastard.
He talks about how work is better remote, which is an enormous relief. I'm coming off that piece of crap book The Future Is Analog where that loser David Sax was insistent that the only way to engage with reality is to be forced to during a misery inducing commute so "knowledge workers" can "garner more creativity" or whatever. I was incensed. Our boy Pedram comes at it entirely from the other side. Allow me to paraphrase:
"Hey, motherfuckers! Who the fuck wants to work? Nobody! Work fucking sucks, am I fucking right, dicklickers? PISS! It's better to work from fuckin' home so you can-- ASS!!!!-- spend more time with your family, friends, loved ones, and pets while simultaneously minimizing your environmental impact and being happier and more cocksuckin' productive."
Thanks Pedram. Yes, I'm inclined to agree, remote work has been a big step toward reducing pollution, although we all know it's polishing banisters on the Titanic until the energy and manufacturing industries get it together or come to a screeching, Fallout 3 style halt. It's also much better for mental health and work life balance, contrary to what bootlicking cowards like Sax (who has been working remote since 2000) will tell you, so long as you have a life. If your only contact with the outside world is commuting to work, then yes, of course that will seem more beneficial. But why is that the only contact with the outside world you have?
Pedram, in his middle-school-boy-in-the-cafeteria vernacular, encourages us to be more than our jobs and use technology to our advantage, as a means of minimizing our exposure to and getting the hell away from technology so we can walk the dog and do kung fu in the woods or whatever. And I think that's beautiful.
He also name-dropped Mark Hyman, who is one of my favorite Instagram kook doctors purveying unga bunga bullshit. Dude's name is 'Hyman'. Are you kidding me
Overall, Urban Monk is a pretty good book if you can come at it with a grain of salt and separate the good science (and good pseudoscience) and solid, Tedpilled, join-me-in-the-shrub-my-brethren advice from its self-aggrandizing and somewhat fratty advisor....more
I liked it a lot, but only because this is also my deal. I've been maintaining a travel blog for six years, and every post is exactly what Goodison diI liked it a lot, but only because this is also my deal. I've been maintaining a travel blog for six years, and every post is exactly what Goodison did here: anonyomized, occasionally hyperbolic memoir interspersed with meandering philosophy about bouncing around from place to place and the lessons extracted from the adventures.
The book was kind of about muay thai, but it was really just about the author in Thailand, leaving his old life and forging a new one, even if one he knew to be temporary. It was a quick, enjoyable read. Goodison's a natural storyteller and keeps it simple and engaging even when he goes purple or waxes philosophical which, if you ask me, is the mark of a real philosopher.
And it's the fighter ethos jock mentality he's pushing, of course, so that's always a win. No pain no gain, when the going gets weird the weird turn pro, stand on your own two feet and protect the weak, that kinda stuff. Sometimes trite isn't a bad thing. Sometimes it just means well-worn and dependable. If it ain't broke, right?
He also did well characterizing the type of people you meet in hostels. I knew them. I might not have met these exact ones, but I've met their respective archetypes; and like, if he changed the names to protect the innocent? Maybe I have met these exact ones. In any event, I'm positive he took creative liberties to make the American streamer more likable, and even then, kinda failed.
Definitely worth the read if you like travelogues or care about muay thai at all....more
Joe Hyams is military correspondent karate master journalist, from the good old days when journalists weren't simpering, callow human cockroaches. He'Joe Hyams is military correspondent karate master journalist, from the good old days when journalists weren't simpering, callow human cockroaches. He's here to tell you that he hung out with Bruce Lee a lot.
It sounds like bragging. It's probably bragging. Despite the obvious bragging, he communicates a workable understanding of both Zen and systemized methods of punching people, as well as their intersection.
It's primarily a philosophy book, and maybe a little bit self-help. Don't let that discourage you. If you like zen, martial arts, Bruce Lee, or people who repeatedly name-drop Bruce Lee, you're gonna love this. ...more
Astoundingly, tremendously bad. Self-congratulatory in a way that just keeps the skin crawling, this perpetual victim never grew out of his high schooAstoundingly, tremendously bad. Self-congratulatory in a way that just keeps the skin crawling, this perpetual victim never grew out of his high school Bukowski phase. At 40. He talks about all of his drinking and addled self-abuse as though they are virtues -- ah, no junkie I, but rather a disaffected intellectual -- aggrandizing his cowardice as though it were an admirable trait up until he gets tricked into attending an MMA class.
He gets his shit rocked, of course, but desensitized as he is by the arrested development that led to his adolescent lifestyle, Peter Pan decides to stay in MMA and turn every sparring session into an elaborate psychodrama where he comes at his opponent as if it were an actual fight, and when they scale up their response (as every living combat sport participant does) he convinces himself it is due to antisemitism.
He also says 'soul' and 'decency' every other sentence, to talk about how decent he is, and how deep his soul. Over and over again. And how he fears the murderous instinct that may lie deep in his soul, under all the drunken cowardice, which, lest we forget, is only a function of his incredible decency.
That's as many words as I'm typing about this piece of shit book. I can't go purple enough to describe how bad it is. If you don't believe me, you can read it, but please don't pay for it. We can't reinforce this kind of behavior....more
A German professor of philosophy gets a job teaching Kant in Japan back in the 1920s, and decides, while he's there, to look into this Zen business, sA German professor of philosophy gets a job teaching Kant in Japan back in the 1920s, and decides, while he's there, to look into this Zen business, see what all the hubbub is about. He asks a bunch of natives "How do I get into this Zen thing?" and they all look around, embarrassed, and assure him that he wouldn't like it because he's foreign.
Now, you've gotta understand, this is before the Beatniks. You couldn't just smoke mids and Kerouac off in the back of train then claim you'd achieved Nirvana. There was a system, and whenever our professor asked anyone about it, they assured him it was a system of systemlessness, or something equally incomprehensible to his precise prewar German academic mind.
Undeterred, Doc Herrigel keeps demanding Japanese natives teach him to Zen. Eventually somebody cracks and tells him, "You're not gonna get it. Your only hope is getting involved in one of the traditional Zen arts, and learning Zen by osmosis." He looks at swordsmanship, martial arts, flower arrangement, and archery, then decides on archery because he was pretty good with a rifle back in the Motherland. It's probably the same, right?
It is not the same.
He joins up with a Daishadokyo master and begins his agonizing six-year journey toward being kind of good with a bow. Daishadokyo is to Kyūdō, or traditional Japanese archery, as the Spanish Inquisition is to the US Census: they're both going through the same motions, but one is religious and far more motivated.
From there it follows the formula of every Zen chronicle or kung fu movie montage: The master tells him to do the thing, then stands by and watches as he ballses it up repeatedly and painfully. The master says nothing. The student asks whining questions in an effort to hurry to "the goal" and the master smiles serenely and tells him to keep doing the thing.
Eventually, Herrigel modifies his grip ("I found a better way to do it!") and surprises his master with a few competent shots. The master is insulted by Herrigel's attempt to cheat him, and tells him to never darken his door again. Herrigel prostrates himself and begs forgiveness, the master magnanimously grants same, then tells him, "now do the thing".
For these six years, Herrigel is grappling nonstop with what Zen might potentially be, and how far he feels from getting it. He loses faith. He has doubts. He thinks about quitting a bunch, but he idolizes the master too much to go through with it. Eventually, when he's going through the motions, the master's like "That's it! Nailed it!"
Herrigel releases a mighty "HOOTY HOO!" of triumph, at which point the master recoils in revulsion.
"You can't be excited about succeeding," he said. "That's not Zen. You're getting your gross ego-grease all over the archery."
Herrigel is like "A thousand pardons, senpai."
Master is like, "Now do the thing."
Eventually, Herrigel manages to get automatic enough in his archery that he gets an inkling of Zen, and the arrow shoots itself. His life is changed. We did it, fellas.
Good book. Good Zen story. I ugly-laughed at the little swordmaster koan at the end, paraphrased as follows:
Young man seeks out swordmaster in his hermitage, says, "teach me to the be the next hokage". Swordmaster says, "Sure", and makes him do all of his chores. The kid is the swordmaster's butler for like a year, making rice, sweeping the dirt floor, washing his stank-ass socks, before he hits his limit and demands the swordmaster teach him swordmastery, damnit! That's what I'm here for!
Swordmaster says, "Sure". Everything is the same, though now the swordmaster will unexpectedly hit the kid with a stick as he does the chores. These beatings continue for another year or so, until one day, the swordmaster is facing the fire, working on frying up some eggs. The kid recognizes this as his chance. He grabs the whuppin' stick, sneaks up on his sensei, and KIYAAAAA brings it down on the back of his head!
Swordmaster blocks effortlessly with the pan full of eggs.
The kid is like "oh shit. I thought this was just weird old man sadism, but you were for real this whole time." And thus, he gets a little nugget of Zen....more
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