As a young teenager he had a deep impact on my life that would continue throughout my
CMA path...
Thought some might find his writings interesting in trying to understand what someone had asked, I found his site.....
When we trained back in the day, Mike was very adamant about "realness and functionality" The style lama hope gar, was geared only for one thing and one thing only "fighting" I remember one day someone came into the gym asking if he would learn about mediation.
Mike, looked at him and smiled. He said " If you want to learn about mediation, go to a temple or church, here we only teach fighting"
.As long as this voice goes un-heard, the un-seen hand of one’s defenses will continue to shape one’s decisions, appearing for all the world as “fate.”
One of the most powerful sections in Focusing Emptiness is the chapter about firebase Erskine. This is the story about a remote artillery support base during the Vietnam war. But it didn't take up much room in my book until late one evening, quite by accident, I stumbled across a website devoted to the survivors of those who died there.
Erskine2
It was especially the postings of the children of those who died that hit me the hardest. Those postings called to me to try harder, to write something better, to write something more. But Focusing Emptiness wasn’t a book about Vietnam. It was about trauma, and awareness, and how our defenses can fool us into making poor decisions. And then something occurred to me, something about a theory I knew of concerning the children of trauma; that they these children might be more vulnerable to traumatic situations later in life, that they might be more prone to bouts of PTSD.
But if anything, it seemed to me that my childhood had erected unseen walls that helped to block out the harsh realities of life. Indeed, I may have been less vulnerable. And I was never haunted by the ghosts of Erskine the way others were. But I did not escape entirely.
http://focusingemptiness.com/index.php/blog
It wasn’t until I began writing about Erskine that I became aware of just how far my defenses had gone to protect me. I faintly remember Top Johnston, for instance, the Sergeant with me there at first, calling me over to the artillery pit where the whole fiasco on that hill began.
Making my way through the blackened rubble the fires had left, I was soon standing at the pit’s edge, looking down through the smoldering streams of smoke rising up into the humid jungle air. But then…that’s all….that’s where my memory ends.
I have no recollection of what I saw. I know what was down there because I remember the Top describing it. It was the burned and fragmented bodies of those who were engulfed by the fire and explosions that had taken the entire hill before we arrived. But I don’t remember seeing any of it. It was simply gone.
Interesting enough the title of his blog, http://focusingemptiness.com/index.php/blog my own blog journeytoemptiness
A central theme in my own taiji work....
