Geoff Thompson...een docu op papier.

[tremendes]

Dit is een hoop leesvoer.
maar het is om te smullen
over een echte straatvechter...
hij heeft veel geschreven over zijn periode als uitsmijter, hoe verrot zn leven was.
Dus neem de tijd en lees het, dit is mooi spul.

Een docu op papier...


An interview with Geoff Thompson by Emma Robbins - Part 1
20/05/2010

PART 1

(Emma Robins) How and why did you become involved in the Martial Arts?

(Geoff Thompson) Like many people I was bullied as a kid, so I decided (after watching Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon) that I was going to become a fearless master of all things Martial. After thirty-seven (or so) years of diligent practice I am neither a master nor am I fearless. But I have been around a few corners and trained with some amazing people, and I have learned a thing or two about fear and physical confrontation. The Martial Arts transformed me from a young man that was frightened of pretty much everything to a very happy alchemist (and a weathered and seasoned lover of life), who no longer lives under the dominion of fear. I have learned to transmute that latent energy (fear) into gold.

(ER) You have been training, as you said, for 37 or so years. What has kept you training? Why do you continue with your own practices?

(GT) The simple answer is I still love it. I am still excited by the training and by the challenge. There is not a single day that I do not love training. And of course I am still growing, not so much in the physical game these days, although I still train physically every day, more in the internal game. Writing this article is an extension of my Martial Arts, making the films is an extension, managing my very prolific life is merely an extension of the Martial Arts. It informs everything I am. So these days it is not just what I do it has become what I am. And man I do love the people. I did a residential course recently with Peter (Consterdine) and had four days working and sharing with some of the best Martial Artists in the world. I am in a privileged position Emma; most of my best friends are world-class Martial Artists.

(ER) You did all of your Dan gradings with Enoeda Sensei, and trained with many of the KUGB greats. Would you be kind enough to share some memories and stories that you have of your training with these karateka?

(GT) Well, now we are talking. Man, I trained with some wonderful people. I can still remember the awe of Kawasoe as he (seemingly) glided through the dojo in his crisp white gi, and how karateka would travel from across the country to grade under him. I was probably about 12 years old (I still have my original licence) and training at the Longford Shotokan Club under the auspices of Mick and Rick Jackson. These two men were amazing athletes, and certainly pioneered karate in the Midlands. I actually used to walk a six mile round trip (chips on the way home) to train in what was probably the toughest karate club I have ever trained in. It was full of very large men and one or two equally scary women. To my youthful (fearful) eyes it felt a bit like walking onto the set of Monsters Inc. I loved the club, but it did terrify me. The training was relentless, the standards very high and if you didn’t block, something got broke; that was a given. It terrified me at the time. But retrospect has shown me that the grounding was perfect. I can remember that long walk as though it was yesterday, and how every step tempted me to stop and go back home. How, when I did arrive, I would peep through the high dojo doors before every session to see who was in attendance. And there were always several people who scared the breakfast out of me. Of course I realise now how important fear is in training, and that if there is no fear, if there is not difficulty and if there is not doubt and uncertainty you are sure to be at the wrong club. Those early ‘inferno sessions’ in Shotokan absolutely and unequivocally made me; they gave me a foundation that, later standing on violent Coventry nightclub doors, literally saved my life.

Mr Kawasoe was the epitome of power, but I always remember him as a very gentle and shy man. Of course when he moved it was like someone had thrown a live match into a box of fireworks. He was very dynamic. A very explosive Martial Artist. All of my early kyu grades were taken under Mr. Kawasoe. Then later, my first and second dans were taken under Enoeda Sensei. My best memories from that period are of Mick and Rick Jackson, they were so talented. I mean everyone looked up to Rick, he was just such an incredible man, but I was particularly taken by Mick, who was an amazing kicker. All I wanted to do back then was kick and Mick was (for me) the best technical kicker I have seen. I used to watch him warm up before sessions, lifting his knee almost to his head height then very slowly pushing out the most perfect kekomi. I dreamed of being able to do that. Then later of course I trained under, and was very influenced by, legends like Terry O’Neill, who became a hero of mine. He was actually responsible for publishing my first ever piece of writing, an article I penned for Fighting Arts International called Confrontation, Desensitisation (about gaining desensitisation to fear by confronting it). He actually rang me up to congratulate me on the piece and gave me great inspiration. I was just a club second dan in those days, whilst Terry et al were in the very highest echelons of Martial Arts, so I was really delighted and flattered that he rang. His phone call and subsequent support of my writing and training was what enabled me to add some heady ascent to my writing and my Martial game. And many, many years later when I was promoting my book Watch My Back I actually got a telephone call from Dennis Martin (another hero of mine) saying “Terry said, do you fancy a brew when you’re next in Liverpool?”
Tea with Terry!
It was like getting signed up for United. I was thrilled.

Let me tell you Emma I have met some of the very best folk over a cup of tea, in fact tea has become a bit of a theme for me; I first met Peter Consterdine over a tea in Huddersfield when he interviewed me for Martial Arts Illustrated and he showed me his devastating double hip punch on the services car park. I have had many teas with my JKD friend Rick Young in an Edinburgh hotel café overlooking the castle. I have tea twice a year with Australian grappling supremo John B. Will in Coventry where he tells me about his training with legends like Don Draeger. I actually had tea at my house just last week with Thai legend Master Sken. I have to tell you that you meet the best people over a pot of tea. I even found myself having tea with Chuck Norris in Las Vegas, Nevada some years ago (thinking to myself ‘how did I end up here?’). He had taken a real liking to my work on fear, the fence and posturing and invited me two years in a row to teach for his group in the US. It was a great honour, I was teaching with Benny ‘The Jet’ Urquidez and the Machado brothers (of Gracie Ju-Jitsu fame). It was amazing and quite surreal, because I was sat with Mr Norris in a Las Vegas Hotel, talking about the times that he used to spar with Bruce Lee.

(ER) You work very closely with Peter Consterdine. Can you please tell us how this friendship first started and what was it about him that made you want to work closely with him?

(GT) Peter Consterdine pretty much made me. When I met him I was a gnarled, knotted, working doorman that had some good innovative ideas on how to train for honest reality but not much idea on how to get that into a respectable teaching format. I’d written a book called Watch My Back and was trying to promote it through the Martial Arts magazines. I sent it to Bob Sykes at MAI magazine and he’d directed me to Peter, his ‘reality guy.’ I met Peter in a café where he interviewed me (tea again) and talked all things Martial. Peter was a really big name in Martial Arts, an established, high-ranking former international and I was completely un-known but we really hit it off from the very first meeting. He showed me his double hip, I showed him my line-up (the fence and pre-emptive strike) and we went from there. Peter liked the book so I was very cheeky and said ‘will you do a foreword for me?’ which he duly did. As soon as the book was released to the shops I sent him a copy and then one day, some months later and out of the blue he rang and said “I’m thinking of starting a self-defence association, do you want to join me as joint chief instructor?” And that is how the British Combat Association started. Peter became a real mentor to me, still is. He really helped me to refine and develop my art from something very rough and uncouth to what it is today. He is the kind of mentor that you dream of having, he was amazing to me. I don’t want to sound too self depreciating because I am aware of how hard I have worked and the time I have invested in training and developing myself, but I sincerely believe that if it wasn’t for Peter I’d probably still be working doors and lumping people. And man is he impressive! The first time I held the strike pad on my chest and he demonstrated his double hip I felt as though I was separated from my spine. I actually felt as though I had been knocked out of my body. I think there might still be bits of me on that services car park In Huddersfield. It was massively impressive. What I love most about him though was the fact that he had trained with everyone, he’d started with karate, but then he went heavily into Chinese forms even training in China with Yip Chun. He’s looked at wrestling, boxing, heavy weights, bouncing, body-guarding, he is one of those people that has (as they say) rode on wheel-less trains and lived with jealous women. He is extremely charismatic and erudite. When he walks into a room, you automatically know just by his presence and aura that he is someone. And that is what good solid honest sapient Martial Arts should deliver.

(ER) I understand you have written a Foreword to Dennis Martin’s book Working with Warriors. How did you get to know each other?

(GT) I was actually weaned on Den’s column in Terry’s Fighting Arts International Magazine. I think I was a brown belt or a first dan back then, training with the KUGB. Den and Terry were big heroes of mine. This was way before I ever worked a nightclub door. His was the first column I always turned to every month. It was a cup of tea and FAI (great days). Later after I’d got a bit of experience myself I wrote my first article for FAI and then later still, when I started working with Peter and we formed the BCA I got to know Den on a personal level, me and Peter used to invite him down to teach on the monthly courses we held. It was a great honour to write the foreword to a book written by (in my opinion) the best defence teacher in the world today.

(ER) How much of your Shotokan roots do you still use and develop in your system?

(GT) My training has changed massively now, I no longer do physical animal days, I have moved onto the internal jihad, the metaphysical animal day if you like. But all of my physical reality training (in fact ‘all’ of my training) has its roots in Shotokan. I had twenty amazing years in this beautiful system and was blessed to have trained with the greats like Terry O’Neil and Andy Sherry, Bob Poynton and Frank Brennan, to name but a few. My first ever grading was under Kawasoe when I was training with Rick and Mick Jackson, and all my dan grades were taken under Enoeda Sensei. It was incredibly hard training and a great foundation for me. When I later went out to study wrestling and judo and Thai and catch and many other systems, I was delighted and surprised to find that everything I learned in these Arts I could trace back to the bunkai of Shotokan kata. The only problem was it was not being taught openly on the curriculum, or if it was it was just a few repetitions of a popular bunkai – I wanted more, I wanted to master all the ranges. If they were in the kata I wanted to know what they were and to be able to perfect them. I went into judo and studied it deeply. As well as training privately with Wayne Lakin, British Judo champion, I also spent 18 months under Neil Adams at his full time International class. I was amazed at how much of the tachi waza, the shimi waza, the ashi waza and even the ne waza was, again, nesting in the kata of Shotokan. It was interesting for me because at the time I took a lot of criticism from my peers for training in different arts, many even said that I abandoned my art. I actually felt the opposite, I felt that I was being brave enough to explore my art.

(ER) You speak about how you were delighted to find that everything you were learning from the other Martial Arts, you could find in the kata. Does kata have a place in your current study and practice?

(GT) Not any more but I did enjoy it very much. People often talk about the fact that kata is unrealistic, just as they say that the patterns in Gung Fu and Judo are unrealistic, or the Ram Muay in Thai. But I don’t agree. I don’t actually think the critics know what they are looking at or talking about. Personally I never imagined that kata was meant to be the schematic for a real fight. Outside the chippy, people do not put down their haddocks and queue up to attack you one at a time in a set format. It would be naïve to believe that, even more naïve for the critics to think that experienced karateka would imagine it to be true. I think kata is much more than that. It taught me movement, co-ordination, balance, power, timing, momentum, projection, intent, distancing, Kime, breathing, visualisation, stamina, musculature, a sinewy mentality – I could go on. Kata was my grand foundation for when I later expanded into different arts, different branches of the Shotokan tree. I let got of the formal practice of kata but the benefits are rooted in every single thing I do. Many great Martial Artists find their way through kata, and I respect that.

(ER) What was your favourite kata?

(GT) Sochin probably. I liked the sheer power, the deep stances, the breathing, and even sitting here now I can still feel the satisfaction of that last kiai point. I loved it. It suited me very much. But I have to tell you here and now that I was not a great karateka. I was keen, I trained hard but it was only later, when I gave up my job and trained full time with world-class people that I took my art to the higher echelons. In the early days I was a good solid club player, that’s all. I was very powerful because I was committed and able to captain and direct my fear, but I was not very pretty to watch, the aesthetics were not splendid like Frank or Terry, my control was not the best either and my competition was pretty awful. But even with all my inadequacies, I used to scare the shit out of people with my very strong intent, especially my kiai. Later on the doors I developed this spirit to the point where I could defeat a dance floor full of potential attackers just with my voice.

(ER) You mentioned that your training has become more of a metaphysical animal day now. Can you explain what you mean by this? How has your training changed and developed over the years?

(GT) Yes, of course, but if I could first explain why and how I got to that place I think it might help. When I got to 5th dan many years ago, what they call the master grade, physically I was there and I was happy. I had taken my bones into the forge and had them tempered. But emotionally and spiritually I did not feel like a master. Actually I did not even feel like a master physically and physiologically because I was still struggling with real basics like palate control, and I was still carrying more addictions that you could shake a stick at. I was no more a master of myself than I was an astronaut. All of my training career I had been searching for self-sovereignty, and the physical animal days had taken me a long way towards it, but at that time all I had mastered was the ability to handle combat and combative fear. Outside of that I was still a neophyte. This was a hard realisation. I felt like a bit of a fraud. So I took my animal training to the next level (the internal Jihad) where my opponents were the addictions that sapped most of my power. I had always considered myself to be (what the Sufi poet Rumi called) a night-traveller, in that I went outside, into the night, in search of my fears in order to face down and overcome them. I intended to master myself. And I did do this. But now it was time for the real battle, the internal wrastle. I reversed the process. Instead of going out, I started to go in. I hunted down all my shadows; anger, greed, envy, jealousy, lust etc. and I faced them one by one until I mastered them. I unearthed my addictions, and I took a hammer to them also. I hunted all the pornography in my life (and it might be said that anything outside of homeostasis is pornography) and battered in back into moderation. This took a lot of self-honesty, because most addictions hide themselves under the warm cloak of denial and rationalisation. It is easier to say ‘I drink moderately’ than it is to say ‘I have a problem with drink.’ It is deliciously tempting to say coïtusual pornography is natural than it is to admit that - physiologically speaking – any pornography acts as a damaging caustic on the body and mind. (I know that this might seem peripheral to Martial Arts, but to me it is integral. Could you call yourself a master mechanic simply because you have learned how to put petrol in your car and drive from A to B?) Also, what you ingest (food, drink, drugs, conversation, environment etc) has a huge effect on the adrenals, and if the adrenals are constantly triggered it makes you predatory. And if you are predatory you are aggressive. And aggressive people attract aggressive people and aggressive situations. That, from my experience is fact. When I look back to the days that I was fighting in nightclubs on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, I can see that the reason I was fighting so much was not because I was a victim, or that the world was conspiring against me, rather it was because I was a beacon that attracted fighting. All I thought about, all I talked about, all I read about and watched and lived and breathed was violence. It was my raison d’être. I had weapons in every room of my house, even the smallest room. Violence was not happening in spite of me, it was happening because of me. I was creating it. Whether you read the Testament, the Guru Guran Sahb, the Upanishads, or the Divine Comedy they all tell you the same thing; what we think about emotively and consistently we will create. My life is testament to that, my experiences are my gospel and they cross reference with all the great tomes. Metaphysical self-defence then is realising this and doing something about it. Learning to understand the basics of personal creation (like mastering Kihon) and then learning to direct and mould personal creation. So instead of thinking, talking and reading about violence, I started to think, talk, read and live peaceful thoughts, creative anabolic thoughts, emotive thoughts that add to the world, not take away from it. The subject demands a book in itself really so I won’t go on, but suffice to say that what excites me most about Martial Arts, what inspires me to explore and investigate it is not becoming a good fighter, what really excites me is the challenge of learning to know myself and my massive, massive potential, and then capitalising on that potential. If it was just about the physical I’d have lost interest twenty years ago.
__________________

 

[tremendes]

Part 2...

ER) In Watch My Back you ask the question “Was it ethical to butcher an art that had been developed over hundreds of years by many Masters, just to suit my own needs?”
How would you answer this question now?

(GT) Same answer really, only I perhaps would not use the word ‘butcher’. I would perhaps use the word adapt.

(ER) The following is a quote from Watch My Back.

“Now that I understand training, I realise that if you’re not getting hit, or if there isn’t at least the danger of it, it becomes unrealistic and impractical as a form of self-defence.”

Quite often people who train in Martial Arts do not attack to hit, for fear of causing injury, and being impolite to friends. How do you break through the barrier of ‘being polite’ in a dojo?

(GT) You (yes you, the reader) have to take the initiative. If you are doing partner work, one step, three step, ippon kumite or free sparring you have to be brave and actually try as hard as you can to catch your opponent with your attack. If you don’t the training becomes a lie. It is no longer honest practice. Most people say that they don’t attack for real because they don’t want to hurt their opponent, but from my experience they don’t try and hit their opponent because they are scared that if they do, they might get one back. You have to admit that fear, own that fear and then face that fear. Otherwise you might as well be practising dance for all the good it is going to do you when it kicks off outside the chippy on a Friday night.

(ER) In the current society of ‘no win no fee’ suing junkies, do you think some instructors are afraid to teach certain elements of the Martial Arts for fear of being sued, or closed down?

(GT) That’s absolutely true, and even more so in the USA, where largely they still have not embraced, and do not teach pre-emption. But if an instructor does not have the courage to teach the truth then he should question himself; why is he an instructor in the first place? My job is to teach people empirical truths, so that they can survive a violent encounter, also to teach them the legal ramifications of their actions should they choose to use what I have taught. Understanding the law is imperative because in self-defence the law is the second enemy. Many people who legitimately defend themselves find themselves convicted and sent to prison because they did not understand the law, and did not defend their actions on their statement sheet. People are convicted for what they say, not what they do.

A bigger problem Emma is not that people are frightened to teach the truth, rather it is that they either do not know the truth or they are frightened to look at the truth, so they keep teaching people a safe-bet, handed-down version of it. One that does not challenge their comfortable paradigm. I would encourage them to look unerringly for the truth (it will set you free) and then unhesitatingly teach the truth.

(ER) You have written many motivational books as well as books on the Martial Arts. You seem to have an incredible grasp of human emotion. What peaked your interest in motivating others to think more positively, and to face their fears?

(GT) Thank you very much. It happened by accident actually. I have always been interested in motivation and self-sovereignty and personal growth, and because of this I naturally taught what I had learned to my classes. It proved, even in embryonic form, to be incredibly popular. Then I started doing courses, locally, nationally and then internationally and I realised that everyone wanted (needed) to be inspired, irrespective of race or language. It became a big part of my teaching. The books naturally flowed from the classes, I just wrote down on paper almost verbatim what I had been teaching to students and it worked, the books have been very successful. I realised while I was teaching that my gift was for communicating the joy of struggle, the power of the forge, and I loved teaching it, I found this kind of service incredibly rewarding – and I wanted to do it more. But I was aware that there is only one of me and I am limited to 24 hours in each spin of this blue planet and that bothered me. I felt that I wanted to offer more, much more. Then I got this wonderful idea. If I could write my motivation down in a book, or books, or plays, or films or articles (etc) I could clone myself, so that at any time of the day or night my message could be ringing out. So far there are about 3-400,000 versions of me (books mostly) working 24 hours a day, somewhere on planet earth. I intend with God’s grace to break into the millions within the next few years.

(ER) You are a very spiritual person, and are not the archetypal bouncer that we see in the media, or even on the doors of our locals. How do you balance the violence in your life with your spirituality?

(GT) I have no violence in my life Emma. I left that behind me ten years ago. All my training now is about art, it is all directed toward higher consciousness, a union with God. But I have to say that I needed all that violent pornography to get here. As Blake says - the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

(ER) What made you decide to stop working on the doors? Was there a specific moment when the decision was made, or did it happen gradually?

(GT) When I started to the doors I’d have worked for nothing. I loved it, absolutely, I was so hungry to learn about combat and I was surrounded every night of the week by some of the best realists around who were as eager to school me as I was to be tutored. But the job is demanding, and the violence is always prolific and the temptation of that world is profligate. It pretty much ruined my first marriage (or I should say that I pretty much ruined it). I will not lie to you, I went into the job to hunt the dragon and (I stole this from Nietzsche) I became the dragon. I became extremely violent, I became a criminal, and I would say that I probably broke nine out of the Ten Commandments, and the only reason I did not do all ten was because the people who I nearly killed miraculously woke up and I was divinely saved. I did not like the man that I saw in the bathroom mirror. It was after one particularly bad incident – a match fight on a pub car park with another karate man at one in the morning – that I finally found my senses and kicked the job into touch. This man had been goading me for a few months and I was desperately trying to talk the talk with him, but he was not a man that would listen to reason so we did what all unintelligent men do when dialogue hits an impasse (and Kissinger is no where to be seen), we took it to the cobbles. As I said he was also a karate man, a dan grade, but he was not seasoned for the pavement arena, so he did not last beyond the first three seconds. By the time the ambulance came we were all sure that he was dead. When I got home from work I thought that my life was over, I was sure that a long prison sentence stood before me and my place in the hereafter was also in jeopardy. I knelt by the bed, my wife was fast asleep, and it was as though a veil dropped and I was able to see her very clearly for the fist time. She was so beautiful. And I was losing her. I touched her skin, it felt like silk. I know that this might all sound a little poetic, but it is how it happened, it was epiphanous. A moment of clarity. Frightened that I was going to lose her and lose my children I unashamedly got down on my knees and I asked God for another chance. I promised that if He let this guy live I would turn my life around. It was – I have to tell you - a very long, dark night of the soul. The man did live, and I kept my oath, I gradually let go of the doors and took a new path.

(ER) Have you always been a spiritual person, or is this something that has developed in your character more recently?

(GT) It was always in the background, I was brought up as a Christian but – like the Martial Arts that I was first exposed to – I would find myself scrutinising the teaching and the teachers and asking myself ‘is this going to work in my life?’ Usually I was disappointed because what was taught was somehow not congruent, and certainly the teachers (priests etc.) did not seem to be living their gospel. It did not fill me with inspiration, but it did offer me a foundation for my own learning. You’d think that you might need to go to a church to find God (and many people do find Him there), actually I found God in bloody car park match fights, on beer-sticky nightclub carpets and outside late night eating establishments. I also found Him in animal day where I accidentally found higher consciousness emerging from the blood and the snot of harder contact. And the God I found was real, and what He intuited to me I could work in the direst of situations.

(ER) Professionally I am an English Teacher in a Young Offenders Institute, and I am sometimes shocked by the acts that some human beings are willing to commit. In our culture, it seems acceptable to go out at the weekend with the sole intention of getting into a fight. Would you say that in today’s culture violence could be considered an addiction?

(GT) Violence - from my experience – can become an addiction and of course it is heinous. But it does not surprise me that there is so much of it, why wouldn’t there be? It is advertised in every magazine, newspaper, film and soap. And it is always glamorised, usually inadvertently but it is glamorised none the less. Listen, I lived a violent life for ten years and it was weak and it was self-perpetuating. It solved nothing, even well intentioned violence always re-bounds on its self. What you read, watch, listen to etc. does have an effect because it manipulates the adrenals and leaves you feeling predatory. I defy anyone to watch coïtusual pornography and not want to have coïtus immediately afterwards. Violent pornography is no different. It creates a physiological release of hormones for fight or flight, and if they are not behaviourally used the body will hunt high and low for a surrogate displacement. People may deny it, but it is true.

I think if violence is going to be portrayed perhaps the filmmakers should be more responsible, show the effects of violence, show that there is no honour in it, that it is the language the ignorant and that actually it is pretty ugly.

(ER) Was that one of your goals as a filmmaker, to show violence as it is, not as people imagine it to be?

(GT) My aim has always been to show reality, the pre-fight, the in-fight and the post fight consequences. As we know violence is often romanticised on screen, it is made to look very attractive. That was never my experience of violence, I always found it ugly and frightening, I really wanted to try and capture that, and show people that there are better things we can do with out life than roll around the beer sticky carpet with some Neanderthal.

(ER) Do many people give you feedback on your films? What kind of feedback do you get?

(GT) Yes they do Emma. They can’t stop themselves. And rightly so, that is the entitlement of a free society, and we should celebrate that. Mostly the feedback is good, often gushing, sometimes personal, occasionally nasty and vitriolic. My latest film Clubbed, inspired by Watch My Back, has created a real polarity of opinion, some people love it to the very bones, others think it is violent or terrible. I try to stay objective to both views, if you allow yourself to be flattered by the good reviews, you’ll be flattened by the bad ones. Polarity is good for me, it tempers me, and it is good for the film, because no one wants to see a film that does not stir up emotion. I do love to observe though; the most vitriolic criticism (of my books, of my films, of me) is very interesting, it tells me a hell of a lot more about the critic himself than it does about me or my work. It is like a character x-ray, and it does not show much character, I have to say.

(ER) As I said, I work with Young Offenders, and the biggest challenge I face is encouraging change. Where do you feel society is failing in a culture of increased knife, gun and gang crime?

(GT) I feel slightly inadequate to answer this question because it is a global problem and great minds have been trying to solve the problem of war since time began. And kids on the street with knives, family feuds, and internal crises are all just a microcosm of what is occurring in world affairs. The world out there is representative and reflective of what is happening in the galaxy that exists inside all of us. The sages and the swamis and the seers have been telling us this for millennia, but it is taking its time to catch on with the majority of people. Partly I am not concerned, because I think that nothing out there is wrong. It is ugly and it is violent but I am not sure that it is wrong. We are simply observing a species in its evolutionary climb. We are currently standing on a rung of the consciousness ladder that still feels that violence is necessary to survival. In the evolutionary hierarchy we are probably at about yellow belt stage (but often thinking that we are fifth dans). I am sure that in a few hundred years time we will look back and be horrified at how destructive mankind was, just like we look back in wonder now at some of the atrocities that our ancestors enacted in the name of God. I have thought about this question a lot, and pondered it for years. What my experience has taught me is this; if I want to change the world the best place to start is with me. What I do has an effect on mankind. Leonardo Da Vinci said that when a bird lands in a tree the whole world changes, because everything affects everything. So I work very, very hard at removing every aspect of violence from my own orbit, from the violence I create in myself when I abuse my body (with wrong thoughts, wrong food, wrong beliefs) to the violence I create in my family when I mistreat them, deliberately or inadvertently. Everyone wants to change the world, but not many people seem in a hurry to change themselves. I personally think that you will have a more positive effect on the world if you change yourself than if you walk around London with an angry protest banner.

The people demanding ‘no violence’ are not often congruent.

It goes back to what I said earlier. The people – government, officials, teachers, priests etc – are not congruent. St. Francis of Assisi advised that we should all teach the gospel, and if we really had to, use words. So people can talk all day long, but their gospel will always, always, always be who they are and what they do. If you tell kids that violence is wrong, and then send troops out to war, or kill prisoners on death row with a lethal injection, what are you really telling them? It is a confused and ignorant message. Listen, I struggle with this stuff myself, but, as a teacher and a father I have learned this; if you want people to listen to you, stop speaking. Become what it is that you want them to be and do and they will follow. Demonstrate the sheer power of non-violence and forgiveness and altruism with your courageous and massive actions and they’ll be racing to follow suit. This is not going to happen over night. As I said we are an undeveloped species, a work in progress and our evolution is going to take time.

---------- Toegevoegd om 19:20 ---------- De post hierboven werd geplaatst om 19:15 ----------

Part 3

(ER) I read a newspaper article quite recently about a girl who was attacked by 19 youths. She stated that at least four people separate from the gang witnessed the attack and did nothing, not even rang the police. Do you think it is our responsibility to try to help in situations like this, or to protect ourselves first and foremost?

(GT) I think so, yes, we should always try and help if we can. But of course most people have no idea about how to do that, any more than they would now how to save some one from a fire or apply a suture to a victim of a car accident. The first rule they teach you in life-guarding is to first ensure your own safety. When you are safe then you can and should do everything in your power to help the person drowning. This works in water only if you are highly trained. If you are not then the chances are you will be pulled under the water and drowned too. In self-defence situations people often do not get involved because they are frozen by sheer terror. You cannot underestimate the power of fear. It triggers a natural and powerful flight or freeze response that is very, very hard to resist. It takes a strong-minded or experienced person to override that instinct and step in. And even then, if you do manage to step in, what are you going to do? If you are not trained to deal with the explosive ferocity of violent attackers you are unlikely to be effective, and you are quite likely to get badly hurt. You might think that ringing the police in such an attack would be a simple enough act, but in reality it is not. The adrenal response draws a lot of blood away from the thinking brain during fight or flight and pumps it to the major muscles, which are seen as being more useful in a physically threatening situation, so even thinking logically becomes difficult. And of course people are terrified of the consequences of any involvement in a violent situation, whether they are in the middle of the affray or on the periphery. It’s the selfish gene. It overrides morality and ethics and societal expectations and does what ever is necessary for survival. I absolutely still think that people should step up, I think that we should never stand by and watch others get hurt, but to do that we need better preparation.

(ER) You refer to “a character X-Ray” and you also mention this phrase in the Animal Day Sessions. What do you mean by this? How important is character in dealing with a violent encounter?

(GT) Character is everything in a real situation, because without it you will never be able control the often overwhelming amounts of fear that swamps your system. Training is all about developing character, like tempering a blade in a hot forge. A character X-ray is placing yourself (or your art or both) under extreme pressure to see how hardy your character really is. You might think it is titan, but until you bang the pressure on you will never really know (a sure sign of an undeveloped or weak character is someone that claims they would never lose their bottle in a real fight. It generally means that they have not felt real pressure yet). I have met many, many seasoned people who have fallen to pieces under pressure because they did not take their character into the forge. So to me, character x-ray means stepping into an animal day (or any high pressure situation) to allow you (and everyone else) to see what is inside. What weaknesses are lurking? How will you react if someone takes you to the floor? How will you cope if someone postures and swears? What if they threaten to burn your house down? The part of you that is going to have to handle a real situation is not the part of you that is sitting here reading this interview now. That is fact. The part of you that is reading these words is your conscious self, it is front of shop, the part that runs the show during homeostasis, when the body is working in the parasympathetic nervous system and doing normal things. In a fight situation the body goes out of homeostasis and into sympathetic nervous system, what we know as fight or flight. The front-of-shop self that you know and love is relegated to a back seat and another part of you, the primal self, will rush forward and take over. You’ll be on autopilot and you will go into any one of three phases; fight, flight or freeze. In this mad age of crazy neurological stressors, anyone of those three responses could be the wrong response for the situation that you are facing, a response that could get you killed because you froze when you should have attacked or attacked when you should have ran, or ran when you should have stayed and fought. Or any wrong combination of the three. In days of old when man hunted for food and dragged ladies around by the hair in the courting ritual, fight, flight or freeze was simple enough and it more often than not saved your life. These days the sound of a car backfiring is enough to trigger your adrenals. The response is out date and often dangerous. So it needs retraining, or re-educating. What I learned to do was trigger the adrenals with simulation training in order to get acquainted with the primal self and monitor its response to stressful situations and - where necessary - take back manual control and re-train it. The self that is reading this article does not concern me because he/she is not going to be there when shit and fan meet, it is the primal self that I am interested in, because that is the fellow (or girl) that needs the training. You don’t want to leave it until you face a real situation to find out, because by then it might be too late. Now is the time to do it, while you still can.

(ER) You use the phrase ‘Courage Muscles’, with regards to facing fear. Could you please elaborate and explain what you mean by this?

(GT) If you want to build skeletal muscle you do anti-gravity training, like lifting weights. The act of pushing the muscle to failure creates (what is known as) ‘the burn’. You break the muscle tissue down, and then it rebuilds bigger and stronger. Over time you increase the load on the muscle, and the muscle responds and continues to build. The same process occurs when you place increasing loads on your bones.
What I discovered was anti-gravity training for the mind.
By facing fearful situations I was able to build my mental muscle to advanced levels, so that my mind could handle increasingly fearful situations. I actually pyramided the confrontation. I drew a pyramid on a piece of paper, and on each step of the pyramid I wrote down one thing that I feared. Least fear on the bottom step, building to my greatest fear on the top step. My anti-gravity training consisted of facing down these fears (bottom to top) until I had completely overcome them. Each fear you face and successfully overcome builds your strength, enabling you to take on the next fear and the next and so on, until you are at the top of the pyramid. My original pyramid had fear of spiders on the bottom step (my least fear) and violent confrontation at the pinnacle (my greatest fear). So my journey started out (and this is not a metaphor, this is what I actually did) with me being afraid of spiders and ended up with me becoming a bouncer facing violence and potential death on a nightly basis. Once I was at the top of that pyramid, I (of course) found myself at the bottom of a brand new pyramid of fears. That’s what is exciting about this grand life, there are always new challenges, and whilst we are growing fear will always be there, you don’t lose it, you just learn to change your relationship with it. Fear is the friend of exceptional people.

(ER) Fear is the friend of exceptional people, can you explain the idea behind this phrase, and a phrase you have titled one of your books.

(GT) Fear is the enemy of happiness and progress. But only because it is so misunderstood. For those that understand fear, for those that learn to manage and channel fear it becomes a friend, but it takes an exceptional person to be able to tolerate, like, and actually love fear. So fear is the friend of exceptional people. My life has been about finding ways to become an exceptional person, and to teach others to do the same. This whole incarnation has been a practical investigation into fear and its workings, that is why I write about it so much. I learned early on that everything I wanted to achieve in life, everything, was sitting just south of my terror barrier. So if I was to be a great success I had to break through the fear-veneer. It is almost as though that invisible line of fear is like a force field erected between different realities, and if you want to experience new realities, you have to go through that force field. When Carlos Castaneda was training under the mystic Don Juan Matus, his master said to him, “Your reality is like a room in a house of one hundred rooms, if you train with me I will show you how to access the other ninety nine, in fact if you train with me I will show you how to get out of the house.” He went on to say that all the one hundred rooms (and in fact ‘outside of the house’) are all within you. But – and this is the caveat – before you can leave the room that is your current reality, you have to take on the dragon of fear.

(ER) Adrenaline plays a huge part in any confrontation and can render those unaccustomed to it useless. Do you have any drills that can mimic this adrenaline that can be done in the dojo?

(GT) Pretty much everything I do is a drill for reality. I call it ‘simulation training’. Like a pilot that climbs into a flight simulator to practice flying manoeuvres, you have to recreate, in the controlled arena (the dojo) a real situation in every detail, right down to the swearing, the spitting, the screaming, as close to no-holds-barred as you can get. In other words, simulate a real fight in the dojo, allow any range and any technique. If you allow biting, just bite and release without breaking the skin, if you allow eye gouging, just touch the eye and release without actually harming the opponent. The moment you simulate reality, the adrenals will be triggered and you will be getting real, life saving practice. You will be (as they say) in the arena. It is too easy to think that your training is real because you go for it a little bit in sparring or competition, but most dojo fighting is controlled and unrealistic. You don’t necessarily have to do this every night of the week, perhaps set up a special animal day night for the serious practitioner. When you simulate reality you’ll be surprised at the results. You will see many of your fourth and fifth and sixth dans getting beaten by yellow belts that’ve done a bit of rugger.


(ER) How do you face someone threatening to hurt your family? Personally I can think of nothing worse. Within your character, how do you differentiate between controlled aggression for the purposes of defence, and the desire to hurt someone threatening something that’s important to you? How do you deal with the anger, and even hate?

(GT) In a word, intention. If your intention is to defend yourself or a family member or an innocent person, then the act of being physical, no matter how severe would not be seen as a violent act. Violence is not in the act, it is in the intention. So if you have to defend yourself or another and you have God in your corner, in other words if your intention is honourable, then I would not class it as a violent act. But, and this is a big but, one that is hard to get your head around, if you can completely keep your consistent and emotive thoughts away from fear and violence and confrontation, you are very unlikely to bring it into your orbit. Certainly that is what my own experience has taught me. As for anger and hate, they are just energy that has taken a specific form, if you are controlled enough in the self, you can dissolve these very strong emotions back to their base parts and re-shape them back into something else. Everything is energy, science tells us this much. We use our judgement and our desire and our intention to make shapes with it, and if those shapes are things like hate and anger then they become weapons that we attack people with behaviourally. If we do not find a behavioural release and instead internalise these emotions, then they become an internal caustic that attacks the smooth internal muscles like the heart, the lungs, the intestines, the bladder and bowel, they even travel through the blood stream to the brain and kill neurotransmitters. If I have any of these catabolic emotions rising up inside of me, current or historical, I transmute them into something wonderful, like a good training session, an article, or – when you are more advanced - love. These emotions are very powerful and if we can re-distribute them we can use them to create a prolific workload. That is how I am able to get so much work done. I have all that energy inside me and I create great things with it, things that benefit me and things that hopefully will benefit mankind.

(ER) You speak of ‘intent’ and its influences on power and on situations that people could find themselves in. How do you incorporate the idea of intent into the lessons you teach? How do you explain this idea to others?

(GT) Intent is really just certainty. When a wish becomes a strong desire, and strong desire becomes full intent, full purpose, your power to manifest that intention magnifies. If your idea or your wish is just half-hearted and uncommitted nothing is likely to happen, why would it, you have to connect fully to the intent with everything you have. This is true whether we are talking about throwing a punch or climbing a mountain. If you fully commit an attack in training or in the street with no fear of consequence, it will be almost impossible for your opponent to get out of the way. I once had my house burgled, thousands of pounds worth of jewellery stolen. I was so angry that I went out and hunted down the people that stole it. The police said I would never see the jewellery again, my friends said the same and even the insurance company believed the odds of getting it back were so small that they did not even consider it worth trying. I made it my full intention to get it all back. Within a week I had found the burglar. He (actually it was a she and a he, a husband and wife team) had already sold my gear but felt my intent so strongly (I was carrying a bat, I think that helped) that he went out and brought it all back again. It was the first burglary in history that actually cost the burglar money, because everyone he had sold it to sold it back to him at a higher price than they bought it. I got it all back. That was about intent. I did the same to get my first black belt and the same to win my BAFTA. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed that our real power to succeed lay in decisive and bold action. He felt that when we had full intent it was as though the universe conspired to help us, triggering all sorts of assisting events that would otherwise have been unimagined. This has also been my experience. When I fully intend to do something, with no doubts and no hesitation, that thing is already done. If you click into intent not only will mountains move and seas part, even the constellations will get out of your way. People rarely click into full intent because they are afraid of their own power. And if they are afraid of it, then they will never engage it fully. I practice intent in everything I do.

(ER) Do you still place a lot of value on teaching verbal dissuasion techniques to those people who train with you?

(GT) Yes, I always think that you should talk a situation down if the option is there, and it usually is. I see a physical response as a very last resort, ultimately for a stalwart I would see it as a failure.
Violence in some pockets of society is a language, a very basic and course language, but a language all the same. If we want to be able to defend ourselves against these dangerous elements then of course it helps if you can speak the lingo. I learned it well on the doors of Coventry nightclubs but, to be honest I found it very ugly, so I later learned to perfect a higher discourse, which is, as you rightly suggested verbal dissuasion. In very basic physical self-defence I recommend avoidance, escape, verbal dissuasion, loop-holing, posturing and – if all else fails the pre-emptive strike. At a higher level I teach metaphysical self-defence, which involves self-defence against the self (addictions, vices, fears etc.) and defence against accidentally projected manifestation (people manifest violence into their lives with un-schooled and fearful imagination).

(ER) How important is the ability to be physically proactive and pre-emptive?

(GT) Life-and-death important! Nothing less. People die in street attacks every day. It is not a game. During my door years four of my friends were murdered. There are no whistles and bells, no referees, no orange at half time, no bows, no touch of gloves, no honour and certainly no rules. You are either first or you are last, and last in this arena might mean the cold slab. If you have to be physical the pre-emptive strike is the only consistently effective technique. From my experience blocking, parrying, trapping etc do not work effectively or consistently when the pavement is your arena. They look as though they might work, they feel as though they should work and in the dojo they are all certainly very effective, but the dojo is not the street, it never has been and it never will be. You only have to look at human conflict (civil, national and global) over the centuries to see that war always demands artifice and it always demands pre-emption. The street might be a war in microcosm, but it is no less war-like. The pre-emptive strike really is just common sense, and the moment you face an angry man who wants to flatten the world with your head you will know, no-one will need to draw you diagrams, you will just instinctively know. What we are generally sold in Martial Arts as effective self-defence is at best foolhardy and naïve and at worst a lie. And the reason I am being so blunt about it is because that lie will get you killed if you don’t question it.

(ER) In today’s age, many attacks occur in packs. How would you control this kind of situation? How do you focus your zanshin on a target that keeps switching?

(GT) You don’t. On a base physical level you use artifice and pre-emption to attack first, and then you hit everything that moves as hard as you can. On a psychological level you make yourself so good at your art that that it can be read from a hundred yards by any aggressor, thus taking you out of the victim pool. People innately know when they are faced by a warrior, that is why they tend to choose the young, the old, the infirm and those that are detached from the herd as their victims. On a spiritual level I’d be thinking ‘I am going to kill all these enemies by making them friends.’ And on a metaphysical level, man I would not even allow myself to mentate on such a question, and that way I would not draw it into my orbit.

(ER) What made you develop the idea of ‘the fence’? How important is the subtlety?

(GT) Good question (the subtlety bit). The Fence is an organically grown defence system. I placed my bones into a very violent environment to temper myself, and the fence developed as a by-product. If I was only going to teach you one physical technique that might save your life it would be the fence. It is so powerful that most people (inexperienced people usually) can’t even see it. They think it is a supplementary technique that they can add to their bulging technique portfolio. The power (as you rightly intuited) is in the subtlety. It is an easy technique to get wrong and a hard technique to master, mostly because people often do not see what there is to master. It looks so simple. The key is that the fence should be so subtle that the person you are facing does not even know that you are using the fence. That calls for expert execution - mastery no less. You should use the fence to control that all-important gap between you and the opponent, without allowing him to know that you are controlling the gap. The person that controls the gap controls the fight. You can also use an overt fence of course (known as the conscious fence) as part of posturing, where you actually tell the opponent that you are controlling not only the gap but him also, but that is another aspect of the fence and probably best left for another article.

(ER) You train for one punch. What kind of exercises do you use to make sure that this first punch will be effective?

(GT) I heard a lovely line once about writers; it was delivered by Sean Connery in a film called Finding Forester. His character played a literary giant called Forester who, on being asked the secret to becoming a writer answered, ‘write!’. Because that is what writers do, they write, they don’t sit in café’s talking about it, they just write. That’s how I developed my ‘single shot’. I just stood at a bag and literally threw millions of punches. I’d think nothing of doing a five-mile run and then 40 rounds on a punch bag. I’d isolate my punches, doing just lead hand jabs, just right crosses, just a left or a right hook, and I’d drill it and drill it and drill it until I was sick to death of punching. Then I’d jump back on the bag again the next day and start all over again. My intention was to take my ‘one punch kill’ to the PHD level, then professor level, and then beyond that. Man I was so hungry though - and I think to train maniacally like I always did you need to want it like a fat kid wants a chocolate bar. Musashi said that to get a technique you needed to do 10,000 repetitions, and to own it you needed to do 100,000. When you start hitting numbers like that let me tell you that you find something. A certain feel, a certain sense of…something that actually cannot be articulated but you will know it when you see it because it is so distinct. You cannot find it in a book or an article or an interview. It comes only from taking yourself beyond yourself. You will certainly not find it (as Dante said) from a cushion or from your bed (the cushion or bed in this case representing any system that offers comfort as staple). I have come to think of this ‘feel’ as a happy accident. I don’t really know how specifically to find it, but I do know the methods of becoming accident-prone. And diligent, one might say excessive training is one of them.

(ER) Training for that one punch, one decisive blow - in budo - is known as ikken hisatsu and the philosophy is identical. Would you consider yourself a budo-ka in this way?

(GT) Absolutely. That is what my life is. I am often faltering, certainly not a master and find myself slipping from the path all the time, but I do definitely live a warriors life. I cannot think of a better way of living.

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Part 4

ER) Do you think that tradition has a place in the modern dojo? Bowing, kneeling to open and close a class, Japanese terminology?

(GT) I’d say that we would be pretty lost without it. I love the etiquette, it is a big part of the discipline, but I do believe it should have congruence, it is not good kneeling and bowing and showing respect in the dojo if you do not carry it over into the outside world. I’ve lost count of the amount of Martial Artists I see who do the traditional thing in the dojo, but outside they have no morals, no ethics, no respect and for themselves or for others. It has got to mean something or why bother.

(ER) For those karate-ka who want to retain the traditional element of their karate study, how would you suggest they introduce a more-reality based approach?

(GT) Set a day a week or month for those that seriously want to develop, to place themselves and their art under pressure. Free spar and allow every range, so if a player throws a sloppy kick and it gets caught the fight will go to the floor. Put gloves on and make the fight knockout or submission. Once a month invite a coach from a different art (judo, boxing, wrestling, Thai etc) to come and train your senior guys and girls. Encourage your dan grades to leave the trunk of the tree to explore the branches. I would tell senior players to get a dan grade in judo, or to qualify as a boxing coach. My senior players were qualified and expert in Greco, freestyle wrestling, Sombo, Thai boxing, western boxing, Ju-Jitsu. Every week I would have someone visiting to teach a private course for them and me. You can’t be a jealous husband about your students; you need to encourage growth by inspiring exploration. And if your club does not allow you to do this, or actively encourages you against it you have to ask yourself, is this a Martial Art or is this a cult?
And listen, regarding this advice, don’t take my word for any of it. Try the ideas out for yourself. Place your art under great scrutiny, place massive pressure on it. It’s like taking a vessel out to sea, you must make sure that it is sea worthy first, that it is water tight. Don’t take my word, or your trainers word or the word of your master in Japan, the bottom line is you need to know for yourself, because if you are in a real situation and it doesn’t work, you might die, a family member might die. In Milton’s Paradise Lost he uses the word sapience, meaning in context to taste. It is not enough to be told, or to read or to watch, you must know, and the only way to know is to taste.
In the dojo an error might mean a split lip. In the street it could mean a toe tag and a slot at the local cemetery. And the great thing about pressure training is that it will develop a sinewy mentality that will enhance every aspect of your life. What I love about his kind of illuminatingly honest training is that once you have undergone it, once you have negotiated your way through that forging process you will neither want to get involved in a real fight in the street or need to get involved in a real fight in the street. Once you master the physical you will spill over into a much deeper level of knowing. As Don Draeger said, you will be so good at your art that if you stand in a room full of people those people will be better protected just because you are there.
The physical is real, it is important and at the end of the day everything you learn later will come through the physical, but (metaphorically) it is just the base camp at the base of Everest.

(ER) You mention developing a sinewy mentality. Would you say emotional strength is as important as physical strength in a pressured situation?

(GT) The physical without the emotional is just ornament. It is pretty, it looks nice but it is of little use. I have witnessed many, many high level Martial Artists fall apart like a cheep suit in the face of an aggressive adversary. It was not because the art was not good, it was simply because the art and emotion were not put through the forging process. All arts and all people metamorphose when you place them under pressure.

(ER) You also mentioned the cultist element of the Martial Arts. I am personally very interested in the role of the ‘sensei’ and the dangerous amount of power that we as students give them. Where do you feel the role of sensei begins and ends? How can we prevent this ‘demigod’ worship whilst retaining the discipline and hierarchy?

(GT) By bringing the same scrutiny and the same diligence in choosing (or sticking with) a sensei that you would bring to anything in your life. I see the most intelligent people in the Martial Arts become gullible fools before (what is often pedalled as) tradition. Put the same people in a business situation, or even before a salesman flogging a car or a computer and they will be as sharp as tacks, but before tradition and the sensei and the scrutiny becomes blind dangerous belief. You see people suffer abuse and violence and bullying and dogma in the dojo without raising an eye-lid and it is worrying. This is an objective observation. I know that I might sound cynical or evangelical, but really I am not, this is just what I see and what I avoid at all costs.
A good sensei should (as the old saying goes) give his student roots and wings. I see the role as a guide rather than a teacher. What can you teach anyone anyway? Form and technique and history, but we cannot teach people to live a good and brave life. We can inspire them to live a good and brave life if we are the embodiment of what we teach. And we can be a catalyst to that worthy aim, but what we learn in this life that is of value is what we do. We are what we do, not what we know or are taught. Knowing without doing is impudent.

(ER) Impact training to many karateka is not a common practice and when it is, it’s very often only done so from a traditional stance with traditional techniques. How important is it do you think to experience impactive training e.g while on the ground on your back – a position you are more likely to face outside the chippy?

(GT) It is important to be able to hit/fight from every and any position. That is fact. The street is no respecter of system or grade. It deals reality in spades, and you either fit into it or you get a lift to the A&E or worst. It will place you in positions/situations that you could never imagine, so it is important to train for that. In the gym you are allowed mistakes, so that makes it a good place to learn. Outside one mistake could see you killed. Four of my friends were murdered during my years as a doorman. If you want to be prepared for real situations, you need (as the sumo say) to cry in training, then you will be able to laugh in the arena. For me this means brutish self-honesty and ‘flight simulation.’ The self-honesty is about taking a character and an art inventory. Imagine that you were (metaphorically) taking yourself/your art under the ocean. Are you watertight? And be honest, because if you lie to yourself, it might not just be you that drowns. Most systems, most characters are nowhere near even close to being watertight because they just do not train for it. Flight simulation is about simulating a real affray in your dojo, to test your art/character to see if your self-evaluation is correct. If it’s not, then the same kind of pressure training can help prepare you.

(ER) Karate, like boxing, teaches that the punch comes from the ground up through the legs. When for example laying on the back, how should you use the body to create energy?

(GT) If you place yourself in these positions and practice, you might be surprised at what you discover. I developed a method called ‘restrictive training’. Through this I was able to summon instant power from any position and any range, even the most restrictive. Whether I was in a car or a phone booth, a toilet cubicle or a farmer’s field I was able to draw an explosion of power from (seemingly) nothing. I encouraged my students (and myself) to punch from seated positions (floor, chair etc) kneeling positions, off their back, on their belly, back against the wall – anywhere that massively restricted movement and so encouraged the chi channeling. From these positions you are unable to employ hip twist or use momentum to garner power. So it forces you to find something else. And you do. Very quickly. Because of restriction of movement and space you develop massive relaxation through necessity, because when you have no range to work with, tension and stiffness completely impede power. We also started to employ joints (the more the better) in the technique, so that (for instance) if I was in a phone booth or a toilet cubicle or a packed dance floor I could summon tremendous power and explosion without even moving my feet. And then there was intent, which is one of the first things that starts to grow when space is at a premium. You realise very quickly that intent of power is power. Then there is that certain something that only restriction training can develop, an indefinable energy, an explosion at the end of the technique that cannot be brought or bartered for. The Chinese call it Chi, the Japanese Qui – it has as many names as there are cultures. Personally I don’t want to place a name to it or throw a shroud of mystique around it. It works so well that my students have to start pulling their punches because the power they are generating is too much (too soon) for their bones (they start picking up injuries etc) and too much for the bones of their opponents. Not only does it force people to find some other source of power than the one that they normally employ, it also acts as an accelerator, and people become big hitters much faster than normal. It would be no exaggeration to say that I get people punching twice as hard within in one session using this method. And if the concept of power through restriction over-flows (as it should) into your world outside the dojo, you will find yourself drawing massive power from life restrictions; money, relationships, health, environment etc. Within every restricted life situation is a hidden well of potential power.

(ER) What other types of positions do you suggest people experience impactive training?

(GT) Any and every situation that you think you might be in when attacked. Sitting in a restaurant, on a toilet, in the driver’s seat fighting someone in the front passenger seat. I once watched my best student lose to a lower ranking fighter because I made him fight wearing a tight anorak, carrying two bags of shopping. He ended up getting choked out with the neck cord on his own jacket. To be honest though, the situations are less important than the spirit, because if you develop indomitable spirit through honest forge training you will be equally deadly whether you are naked in a shower or wearing full combat gear on the door.


(ER) Brown Paper Bag is a film made with incredible honesty. Are all your screenplays autobiographical to some degree?

(GT) Thank you. I love that film, I love the powerful acting and the wonderful direction. It is based on my brother Ray who died from alcoholism. He was a wonderful man and I love him very much. I wanted to write something that tackled denial and that re-humanised alcoholics. They are people, someone’s son, someone’s daughter, someone’s mum or dad. Everything I write usually starts with an experience that I have had that has moved me, then I allow it to flower and shape itself for an audience. Romans 12:20 is a half hour film that I wrote about being coïtusually abused when I was 12 years old. It was directed by two gifted brothers, Paul and Ludwig Shammasian and it is an incredibly emotive film. Similarly Clubbed, my first feature for the cinema (out in January 09) was inspired by my autobiographical book Watch My Back, as was the short film I made with Ray Winstone, Bouncer and the play I did for the theatre called Doorman.

(ER) Do you find writing such personal scripts taxing emotionally or is it therapeutic for you to face and deal with issues like the coïtusual abuse?

(GT) Therapeutic certainly, and with the more difficult scripts like Brown Paper Bag and Romans 12:20, both cathartic and extremely painful. Any kind of creative manifestation is like giving birth, it is extremely taxing, but ultimately life affirming. I actually love writing, so that helps, and of course I have developed my will through years of training, so I am able to endure, even when every sinew is begging for relief.

(ER) How did you feel winning a BAFTA for Brown Paper Bag?

(GT) It was an amazing night. Amazing. And I was blessed because my wife was with me so we celebrated together. I had always planned to win a BAFTA, but I didn’t realise it would happen so soon into my film writing career. I feel very blessed. When I am teaching or doing a book signing I often do (what has come to be known as) my BAFTA talk. I bring the statue along, let people feel it so that it becomes very real for them (it is very heavy), then I pass around the note pads on which I wrote my original book Watch My Back. I explain that I wrote Watch My Back whilst sitting on the toilet seat in a factory that hired me to sweep floors. My story started in an oily factory toilet and ended up on the world stage at BAFTA. I then ask them to draw a comparison with their own life; where are they now and where would they dearly like to be? Because if I can achieve my dream from such an inauspicious beginning – I left school with no qualifications - then why can’t they?


(ER) You speak a lot about creative energy, and the sheer volume of work on your website alone suggests that you have a lot of creative energy to burn. Is writing how you channel your energy?

(GT) Yes, writing is my way of channelling all the energy that I used to misappropriate on nightclub doors in Coventry. And I am quite happy to use anything and everything I have as a base material. All my youthful angst about being coïtusually abused, bullied or rejected in childhood romances, every slur or insult or attack - I am quite happy to draw from that vast reservoir. Similarly I also draw massive energy from all the great things that happened to me; my parents, friends, successes, love – it is all there in the memory banks looking for a little reincarnation. You can recycle it all. That is why when people tell me that they had a terrible upbringing and were abused I say “Congratulations, that’s amazing, you can really do something with that.” I have made fortunes from recycling angst. It has also been great therapy for me. The problem is that people choose to use the past as a reason to keep themselves rooted in fruitless lives. I am not saying that it is easy to recycle the past, but it is a choice, and whoever said that life was easy? It is not, but it can be very profitable.

(ER) Dead or Alive is a massively successful book. What would you say made it so successful?

(GT) Honesty. In a word. I read many books on self-defence and they were full of thumb-locks and shoulder throws, things that the majority would not be able to pull off. I wanted to write a book that would really prepare people, give them a fighting chance. I see self-defence as much more about avoidance that a physical encounter. To the greater majority, even (perhaps especially) trained people, being involved in a physical confrontation is like being caught in a burning building. I wanted to teach people to avoid the fire, escape the fire and – if all else failed fight the fire. What I did not want to do was try and teach them to be firemen, because that takes a lifetime of dedicated study and I know that most people are not prepared to do that. They want self-defence delivered to them in a neat package tied with a bow, and that for me in not a tenable proposition. So I filled the book with all the things that I thought were vital, like attack rituals, interviews with attackers and victims, sections on pre-emption, fear and the law etc. I think that when people read an honest account it speaks to them, that is why I think Dead or Alive is so popular.

(ER) Can I please say a huge thank you for this opportunity to speak with you. It truly has been insightful and fascinating, and may I wish you every success for the future!

GT. Thank you Emma, it has been a real pleasure and I appreciate the opportunity to plant a few seeds.

 

[RoniMoon1989]

Thx bro. Het is een hele hap maar ik vind het best wel leuk om eens actief te lezen ipv filmpjes te kijken.

 

[Calyptus]

en door het "I found God" deeltje ga ik dit zweverig gedoe overslaan.

 

[tremendes]

Thx bro. Het is een hele hap maar ik vind het best wel leuk om eens actief te lezen ipv filmpjes te kijken.

Vond ik dus ook...

---------- Toegevoegd om 20:30 ---------- De post hierboven werd geplaatst om 20:27 ----------

en door het "I found God" deeltje ga ik dit zweverig gedoe overslaan.

God can not please you all....

 

[tremendes]

Mooi stukkie film over deze kerel, ook erg de moeite waard.

Ik ben nog wat verhalen tegengekomen van hem, maar ik laat het maar even zo anders wordt het overdone en leest niemand het meer.

En dat is zonde want tis echt goed.

Mocht er interesse in de andere stukken zijn, laat maar even weten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esWoIgeoNh0