LDShouler wrote:Just to say, I really like your stuff Rob and find it an inspiration for work that I do with my classes...but I find it hard to understand the relevance of this type of activity to self-defence; it could lead to all sorts of delusions in the mind of those experiencing it if not explained correctly, and to be honest (I learned hypnotism whilst at uni) it seems more in the domain of Derren Brown.
Thanks glad you are finding the material useful!
I'll try and explain from my perspective. Derren Brown - yes, in a way. Actually there was a guy training with me who studied DB et al in depth, he actually makes a living in that field now. He told me he once used an exact DB method to talk his way out of a potential bust up. Just this summer I was teaching in Italy. One day we did a session on body language which I topped off by doing some "mind reading", guessing correctly 4 random numbers that a person thought of. I had 60 people convinced I had some "magic power" until I showed them how it was done (a simple trick). The interesting thing was how many said they were disappointed that it was just a trick.
Anyway, if we put that work under the heading of "psychological" then it is a big part of our training. I'll try and be brief, but, to me the System is the study of all our systems - nervous, muscle, skeletal, etc etc including our emotional/psych system. This is the important one as you can have the coolest moves in the world but if, under pressure, your "bottle goes" you freeze or fold.
So a lot of our work is on the psyche. We ran a workshop last week on conflict management (see video thread) and over half the session was spent on fear control, managing emotional response and so on. We work this in some depth, though I only ever put part of it up on YT.
To bring it back round, then, many drills are on this kind of work, often using the physical to access the emotional. Perhaps this stems from the background of the teachers, like I said before this is "operational" rather than "traditional". It has many uses, there's people using the breathwork with PTSD veterans, for example, or others taking some of the principles for their own training.
How the work is explained and presented in training is, of course, very important and this is something often missing from video clips. In fact, one of my own clips was put up for ridicule a while back and the guy cropped the explanation from the beginning, so you can't win sometimes. If everyone is aware of the drill parameters and purpose there should be no problems. And I go back to my first post about this being very "individual" work, it should be exploratory and educational, then tied into functional work, otherwise yes, there is a risk of it becoming "sideshow".
cheers