American Freestyle Karate and the Power of Confrontation

Dan Anderson is one of the most accomplished American martial artists. On the website for his school, his bio reads,

“Professor Anderson is the director and chief instructor of Dan Anderson Karate and has a 7th Degree Black Belt in Karate, a 6th Degree Black Belt (Senior Master) in Filipino Modern Arnis, and an 8th Degree Black Belt in MA-80. He is a 4 time national karate champion, having won over 70 Grand Titles! He is the founder of American Freestyle Karate, a uniquely American martial art as well as the author of the best selling book, "American Freestyle Karate: A Guide To Sparring" which has been in print for 30 years. He has been honored by inclusion into the Karate Living Legends, a lifetime achievement honor, being one of the 50 most influential martial artists in the 40 year history of tournament karate. Prof. Anderson's school has been continually teaching martial arts to the residents of East County for 25 years, making it the oldest Karate school in this area.”

The book mentioned above, American Freestyle Karate: A Guide to Sparring is widely recognized as one of the seminal and most authoritative written works on the subject of karate style point sparring. It's topics span stance and posture, body movement with and without footwork, developing power, kicking, punching, and blocking, and monitoring the opponent. It contains both technical information, including step by step breakdown of techniques and combinations, and strategic and conceptual instruction which informs the practitioner in his approach to both sports combat and self defense.

One particularly valuable section discusses the concept of confrontation, so crucial to success in freestyle sparring,

The Ability to Confront

“To confront – verb transitive – Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary 2.a. “to cause to meet: bring face to face.”

Psychologically, everything in karate boils right down to the idea of confrontation, to face up to something. Sparring, approaches, technical information, everything.

A person's ability to confront things comes with familiarization and gradient stages of the ability to confront itself.

When you have trouble with any face of karate, it comes from a failure to confront that particular area. Example: a person is a strong technician and is tough but does not think when sparring. The thing to do is to have them confront thinking during sparring in gradient stages. 1) Plan out each attack and carry out the plan; 2) spot circuits (habit patterns) in your opponent's sparring, etc. Take him through each step until he is up to sparring and thinking.

The ability to confront is such a great part of everything. Anything you can do well is because you can confront it, meet it face to face, nose to nose with a big grin. Karate has always felt easy to me, but acceptance of getting hit in the head has never been easy. My ability to confront things is up on karate and down on getting hit in the head.

Things that you cannot confront easily will have to be worked through, but if you take any one particular thing and work it out in easily handled steps, pretty soon the punch in the head (or whatever) will not seem so awful to you.

This is how I break my students into sparring. Thanks to movies and television, beginners come in with preconceived notions of karate, ranging anywhere from macho brutality to the idea that the studio is a monastic retreat for pacifistic martial monks. But, they have one thing in common; they sit back and tense up when watching somebody else spar. Here it is so close to them, violence, punching faces, kicking groins, struggling. A sparring match can be a fearsome sight to a lot of beginners. So, I start them off easy with a punch, a stance, a kick, a block, until they are comfortable with it. Then slowly, easily in a line drill, they see that attack come at them and block it. Great. That attack was handled. Then after a while, they get into slow and easy, unstructured blocks and attacks with a partner, the same thing that bugged their eyes out in the first place, sparring. The only difference is that through a series of gradient steps, they reached a point where what was once foreign to them was now recognizable and comfortable. That is what the ability to confront is about. Anything you have trouble with, work on in easy steps until it becomes comfortable.

Professor Anderson's advice transcends the art of kicking and punching. Take it with you in your training, practice your least favorite techniques. Do ten more kicks when you're already tired. But apply the lesson to the other facets of your life as well.  Confront, persevere, have indomitable spirit.

Everything in karate boils right down to the idea of confrontation. Karate no shugyo wa issho.

From the Monk to the Master

The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom (不動智神妙録, fudōchishinmyōroku) was a letter written to Yagyū Munenori by the Japanese Buddhist monk Takuan Sōhō. In it, Takuan attempts to adapt Zen teachings to the art of the sword. According to the modern translator William Scott Wilson, “one could say that fudōchishinmyōroku deals not only with technique, but with how the self is related to the Self during confrontation and how an individual may become a unified whole.”

“Takuan Sōhō was a Zen monk, calligrapher, painter, poet, gardener, tea master and, perhaps, inventor of the pickle that even today retains his name. His writings were prodigious (the collected works fill six volumes), and are a source of guidance and inspiration to the Japanese people today, as they have been for three and a half centuries.”

Takuan influenced both Munenori and Musashi, and his teachings are reflected in both Book of Family Traditions and Book of Five Rings. In The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom, Takuan begins by explaining the importance of No-Mind-No-Thought. Per Wilson,

“Again, we speak with reference to your own martial art. As the beginner knows nothing about either his body posture or the positioning of his sword, neither does his mind stop anywhere within him. If a man strikes at him with the sword, he simply meets the attack without anything in mind.

As he studies various things and is taught the diverse ways of how to take a stance, the manner of grasping his sword and where to put his mind, his mind stops in many places. Now if he wants to strike at an opponent, he is extraordinarily discomforted. Later, as days pass and time piles up, in accordance with his practice, neither the postures of his body, nor the ways of grasping the sword are weighed in his mind. His mind simply becomes as it was in the beginning when he knew nothing and had yet to be taught anything at all.

In this one sees the sense of the beginning being the same as the end, as when one counts from one to ten, and the first and last numbers become adjacent.

In other things – musical pitch, for example, when one moves from the beginning lowest pitch to the final highest pitch – the lowest and highest become adjacent.

We say that the highest and the lowest come to resemble each other. Buddhism, when you reach its very depths, is like the man who knows nothing of Buddha or the Buddhist law. It has neither adornment nor anything else which would draw men's attention to it.

The ignorance and afflictions of the beginning, abiding place and the immovable wisdom that comes later becomes one. The function of the intellect disappears, and one ends in a state of No-Mind-No-Thought. If one reaches the deepest point, arms, legs, and body remember what to do, but the mind does not enter into this at all.

The Buddhist priest Bukkoku wrote:

Although it does not

mindfully keep guard,

in the small mountain fields

the scarecrow

does not stand in vain.

Everything is like this.”

Takuan believed that only by keeping the mind from stopping in any one place could the swordsman act with the spontaneity and freedom of the beginner. But he also emphasized the importance of rigorous training, saying, "If you do not train in technique, but only fill your breast with principle, your body and your hands will not function."

Train the techniques. Repetition is the mother of skill. But in your training, seek what Takuan called No-Mind-No-Thought.

"If one reaches the deepest point, arms, legs, and body remember what to do, but the mind does not enter into this at all."

The Importance of Visualization

Mental focus, concentration and visualization are some of the most important parts of your training. Most people are familiar with the saying that sports is 90% mental and 10% physical. Despite that, many people fail to spend as much time practicing in their heads as they do practicing on the floor. Yet again and again, top level athletes and performers in every field credit their success to mental preparation.

Jerry West, former Guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, had such a penchant for hitting buzzer beaters he was nicknamed ‘Mr. Clutch’. In one memorable game in which his team was trailing the Knicks with a few seconds left in an NBA Finals game, West took an inbound pass and shot from 60 feet at the buzzer. Knicks guard Walt Clyde Frazier recalls thinking: “The man’s crazy. He looks determined. He thinks it’s really going in!”. Of course, it did go in, sending the crowd reeling and the game to overtime. One time, when asked about his ability to frequently hit the big shot, West revealed the root of that confidence Frazier witnessed. West explained that he had already made those shots time after time in his mind. Jerry West, like so many other legends such as Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Phil Jackson, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky and countless others, realized the power of visualization.

What is Visualization?

Visualization is a form of guided mental imagery, where the performer imagines himself succeeding at his physical tasks. A popular visualization for athletes is the mental rehearsal of sporting events while ‘intending’ a desired outcome. Amazingly, research has revealed that visualization can actually enhance performance to nearly the same extent as physical practice. A study conducted by Dr. Blaslotto at the University Of Chicago is an intriguing example.

The goal of Dr. Blaslotto‘s study was to determine the effects of visualization on sports performance. As a performance measure for this experiment, the researchers chose the free throw percentage of a group of basketball players. First, to establish a basis for the study, the current free-throw success rate of each of the subjects was tested and recorded. Three groups were then established, and the athletes were assigned to one of the groups at random. After 30 days of testing and retesting, the results were as follows:

The third group, who neither physically practiced or visualized shooting free-throws, showed no increase in percentage.

The first group which physically shot free-throws for an hour daily, collectively improved thier free-throw shooting by 24%.

The second group, which practiced daily by visualizing shooting and making free-throws, collectively improved their free-throw shooting by a shocking 23% without having physically shot a basketball!

Another similar study was done by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation exploring the effects of visualization on muscle strength. The results of that study also astonishingly revealed increases to muscle strength through visualization, further reinforcing the fact that mental training is actually as impactful a tool in performance enhancement as physical training. In one of the most well-known studies on Creative Visualization in sports, Russian scientists compared four groups of Olympic athletes in terms of their training schedules:

Group 1 - 100% physical training;
Group 2 - 75% physical training with 25% mental training;
Group 3 - 50% physical training with 50% mental training;
Group 4 - 25% physical training with 75% mental training.

Group 4, with 75% of their time devoted to mental training, performed the best. In explaining the results the Soviet scientists involved concluded that, "mental images can act as a prelude to muscular impulses."

With each imagined repetition, a neural pathway is formed. Neural pathways in short, are clusters of neurons in the brain that work together to create a memory or a learned behavior. Dr. Blaslotto explained, “As your brain conceives of an act, it generates impulses that prompt neurons to ‘perform’ the movement being imagined by transmitting those impulses from the brain to the muscles.” This in turn creates a habit, or neural pathway in the brain, programming your body’s actions as if you physically performed the activity.

Studies show that the human mind has difficulty separating reality from imagined reality. If you’ve ever had a dream that felt “so real,” you understand. This happens because much of the brain is unable to differentiate between "real" events and "imagined" ones, and so treats them both the same in terms of chemical and physiological response. That's why when a person reads a sad story they cry, even though no actual sad events have occurred, or when they watch an action movie their temperature, heart rate, and adrenaline levels will increase, even though they are sitting perfectly still in a safe, dark movie theater.

We can use this to our advantage in our training. Visualization can help us to rehearse combative, dangerous, and challenging situations in order to prepare us for a violent encounter. It can also help us to improve our technique performance. The basketball study above showed almost the same improvement in groups that imagined practicing as in groups that actually hit the floor. If we combine both aspects of our training, we can see massive advances in our skill level.

It is also important to visualize an opponent when we perform our techniques. Any time you are practicing your kenpo in the air, imagine an opponent who you are intimidated by. See yourself hitting that opponent in the face, in the body. Put the situation into a context where you might be forced to defend yourself. You are safe in the school, but imagine you are having to do your kenpo in a dark, rain slicked alley late at night in a bad part of town. You will find that your mindset and your performance will be drastically affected by this kind of visualization.

When I am focusing on learning the proper anatomy of targets and weapons, I visualize a solid blue human body form, like this,

It helps me to visualize exactly what I am hitting, what effect it will have on my opponent, and how the surrounding anatomy will be affected.

But when I am practicing my techniques for self defense performance, I visualize a big, bad, scary looking man who intends to do terrible, terrible things to us all. It helps me to use the face of actor Danny Trejo.

You can use whatever images you like. Maybe someone from your past, maybe someone you saw on television. Maybe it helps you to see the image of something you find frightening like a monster from your childhood. The key is to select images which cause a visceral reaction for you, and then to train against that imagery and within that chosen context.

Everything that you experience takes place within your mind. Everything you perceive to be real, the things you touch, taste, see, smell, and hear, is actually just a highly detailed projected environment created by the computer in your head. It receives input from all the sensory organs and then compiles that into a hologram so real you never question it. But much of what you think you see is actually just the brain filling in holes in the information its receiving from one source with information it's receiving from another.

A particular blind spot known as the punctum caecum in medical literature is the place in the visual field that corresponds to the lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells on the optic disc of the retina where the optic nerve passes through it. Since there are no cells to detect light on the optic disc, a part of the field of vision is not perceived. The brain fills in with surrounding detail and with information from the other eye, so the blind spot is not normally perceived. Even though you know it's there, and you can “see” it, it's actually just your brain telling you what it expects to be there. We can take advantage of this. Since our reality is only happening in our minds, we can create alternate realities, practice a number of scenarios within them, and benefit from that training. The brain can't tell the difference, and neither can the body.

So train hard. And think hard. Kenpo is a mental pursuit as much as a physical one. And the student who focuses on his performance and visualizes his success will find his reality matching what his brain expects to see.

Drills -
Beginner: During every technique repetition in the air, imagine a real, aggressing opponent. See your strikes hit real, vulnerable targets.

Intermediate: Perform a technique on the body. Close your eyes, and visualize yourself performing the technique perfectly, from start to finish, ten times against a real opponent. Now open your eyes and perform the technique on the body again. Pay attention to anatomical repositioning and accurate targeting.

Advanced: Imagine an attacker at 12 o'clock. When the opponent attacks, defend the original attack and then begin a counter offensive striking combination. Continue that action to a takedown and then a finishing move. Begin again with a standing opponent.

The Passing of a Fitness Legend

by Claudia Luther, special to the LA Times
http://http//www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jack-lalanne-20110124,0,5507436,full.story

Jack LaLanne, the seemingly eternal master of health and fitness who first popularized the idea that Americans should work out and eat right to retain youthfulness and vigor, died Sunday. He was 96.

LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia at his home in Morro Bay, Calif., his agent Rick Hersh said. He had undergone heart valve surgery in December 2009.

Though LaLanne was for many years dismissed as merely a "muscle man" — a notion fueled to some extent by his amazing feats of strength — he was the spiritual father of the health movement that blossomed into a national craze of weight rooms, exercise classes and fancy sports clubs.

LaLanne opened what is commonly believed to be the nation's first health club, in Oakland in 1936. In the 1950s, he launched an early-morning televised exercise program keyed to housewives. He designed many now-familiar exercise machines, including leg extension machines and cable-pulley weights. And he proposed the then-radical idea that women, the elderly and even the disabled should work out to retain strength.

Full of exuberance and good cheer, LaLanne saw himself as a combination cheerleader, rescuer and savior. And if his enthusiasm had a religious fervor to it, well, so be it.

"Well it is. It is a religion with me," he told What Is Enlightenment, a magazine dedicated to awareness, in 1999. "It's a way of life. A religion is a way of life, isn't it?"

"Billy Graham was for the hereafter. I'm for the here and now," he told The Times when he was almost 92, employing his usual rapid-fire patter.

Another time, he explained, "The crusade is never off my mind — the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think — all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America."

When he started, he knew that most people viewed him as a charlatan. That's when he decided to do the stunts that made him famous.

"I had to get people believing in me," he said.

He performed his first feat in 1954, when he was 40 and wanted to prove he wasn't "over the hill." He swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge — underwater. (He carried two air tanks.)

Other feats in his 40s: swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf wearing handcuffs; swimming the Golden Gate Channel while towing a 2,500-pound cabin cruiser; pulling a paddleboard 30 miles from the Farallon Islands to the San Francisco shore.

At age 60, he upped the ante by swimming from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, handcuffed and shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat.

The next year, he did a similar feat underwater. And at age 70, he towed 70 boats with 70 people from the Queen's Way Bridge in Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary — while handcuffed and shackled.

Why attempt such feats?

"I care more than — you cannot believe how much I care! I want to help somebody!" LaLanne explained. "Jesus, when he was on Earth, he was out there helping people, right? Why did he perform those miracles? To call attention to his profession. Why do you think I do these incredible feats ? To call attention to my profession!"

Well into his late 80s, LaLanne continued his personal fitness routine of two hours a day — one hour of weight training and another hour exercising in the pool — beginning at 5 or 5:30 in the morning (a concession to his age; in earlier days, he started at 4 a.m.).

No one — not even Arnold Schwarzenegger — could argue that LaLanne wasn't the best. Schwarzenegger, who met LaLanne in the 1960s on Muscle Beach on the Venice Boardwalk, said LaLanne would try to see who could match him in numbers of chin-ups and push-ups.

"Nobody could," Schwarzenegger told The Times. "No one even wanted to try."

Francois Henri LaLanne (nicknamed Jack by his brother) was born Sept. 26, 1914, in San Francisco to French immigrant parents; his father worked at the telephone company and was a dance instructor and his mother, who was a maid, was a Seventh-Day Adventist, a religion that advocates "eight keys" to good health, including nutrition and exercise.

LaLanne grew up in Bakersfield, where his parents had moved to become sheep farmers, but the sheep contracted hoof-and-mouth disease, and the family moved to Oakland. LaLanne's father died of a heart attack at age 50.

LaLanne often told the story of how his mother spoiled him, giving him sweets as a reward. By the time he reached adolescence he had become a "sugarholic" with a violent temper and suicidal thoughts.

But that was only the beginning: He was failing in school, his stomach was upset, he wore glasses, he had terrible headaches, he was weak and skinny, he had pimples and boils.

"I was demented! I was psychotic! It was like a horror movie!" LaLanne said of this time of his life.

When he was 15, his distressed mother dragged him to a lecture on healthful living being given by nutritionist Paul Bragg.

"We were a little late getting there and there were no seats available so we started to leave," LaLanne told What Is Enlightenment magazine's Andrew Cohen, "and the lecturer saw us and said, 'Lady with the boy, we don't turn anybody away! Ushers, bring two seats and put them up on the stage!' "

At some point, Bragg asked the young LaLanne what he had eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and LaLanne told him: "Cakes, pies, ice cream!"

"He said, 'Jack, you are a walking garbage can,' " LaLanne said.

But Bragg offered salvation to LaLanne: He could be "born again" and be the healthful and strong person he wanted to be — if he changed his ways.

"That's what I wanted! I wanted to be an athlete, I wanted the girls to like me, and I wanted to be able to get good grades in school, and this man said I could do all that," LaLanne said.

LaLanne took Bragg's message fully to heart. And, by his own testimony and that of everyone around him, he never had cake, pie, ice cream or any sweet from that day forward, nor did he drink a single cup of coffee or tea.

He also started working out with a passion and was a star athlete for the rest of his high school years. All his maladies disappeared; he even stopped wearing glasses.

"I was a whole new human being," he said of this transformation. "I liked people, they liked me. It was like an exorcism, kicking the devil outta me!"

After graduation from high school, LaLanne started his own business selling his mother's healthful bread and cookies. He also set up a rudimentary gym and started training police officers and firefighters — "the fat and skinny ones who couldn't pass their physicals" — in exercise and weightlifting.

"When I first started out, I was considered a crackpot," he said. "The doctors used to say, 'Don't go to that Jack LaLanne, you'll get hemorrhoids, you won't get an erection, you women will look like men, you athletes will get muscle-bound' — this is what I had to go through."

In 1936, he opened his first real gym — LaLanne's Physical Culture Studio in downtown Oakland.

But business was slow. LaLanne went to a local high school and picked out the skinniest and the fattest students, offering (with their parents' permission) to "turn their lives around" the way his had been.

Word of his success spread, and business was good enough for him to open other gyms. In 1952, he went on TV, but because he could only afford time in the early mornings, he found his audience was mostly young children. So he got a dog — Happy — to appeal to the kids, who were encouraged to go wake up their mommies for a workout. The show was eventually syndicated nationwide and ran for 34 years.

LaLanne met his wife, Elaine, whom he called LaLa, in 1950 on the set of a local TV show, where she booked talent. She was initially unimpressed by the 5-foot-6 1/2-inch LaLanne — she ate a doughnut and blew cigarette smoke in his face. But she took a closer look at him when a friend agreed to go out on a date with him. They were married in 1959, and she became an integral part of his business.

LaLanne's business interests would grow to include a string of gyms across the United States, workout devices like the "Glamour Stretcher" and "JLL Stepper," vitamins, supplements and several books.

By the time LaLanne was in his late 80s, however, the business consisted mostly of juicers that he advertised on infomercials and his lectures.

LaLanne also knew when to back off. An interviewer described him as "intensely unfussy for being such a fanatic." And LaLanne once said that one of his best friends was a man who "weighs about 300 pounds, drinks a quart of booze a day and smokes like a fiend. I'll light someone's cigarette for them. This bull about changing people — you never change people! Accept 'em, accept 'em, accept 'em!"

For himself, he seemed to live by a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I philosophy that required him to be hyper-vigilant.

"With my personality," he said, "I could be a runaway, out with a different woman every night, drunk every night, eating and doing things that — well, you know, you've got it in you, we've all got it in us. But that's why you've got to take control!"

He had his pleasures — beautiful cars, singing, fine wine and a long and happy marriage that he said was passionate after many decades.

He felt proud every time he fulfilled his promise to himself to never eat between meals or eat sweets. While he was the first to agree that his liquid meals — the least repulsive breakfast was carrot juice, celery juice, some fruit, egg whites and soybean — tasted pretty awful, he didn't mind. And of his two-hour daily workouts at his home gym, which he called his "cathedral," he said: "I want to see how long I can keep this up. It's kind of a macho thing, using me as an example."

LaLanne retained a high level of energy well into what, for the rest of us, would be dotage. But his feats tapered off after his 70th birthday. Although he talked of swimming underwater to Catalina Island for his 80th birthday, his wife threatened to divorce him if he did. "Let him rest on his laurels," she said. He vowed to do the swim for his 90th birthday in 2004, but when the birthday rolled around, he told the San Jose Mercury News that he planned only to "tow my wife across the bathtub." His plans for his 100th were even tamer: "I'd like to have the biggest group I've ever had watching me and lecture to them."

LaLanne was given a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame in 2002, long after he had attained the respect he long craved. But his biggest thrill was to see that what he had been preaching and advocating for more than 50 years was being taken seriously.

"Back then I was a crackpot; today, I am an authority," he said in 1998.

Besides his wife, LaLanne is survived by Elaine's son, Dan Doyle, of Los Angeles; LaLanne's daughter by his first marriage, Yvonne, a chiropractor, of Walnut Creek; and the couple's son, Jon, of Kauai, Hawaii.

Water, Water Everywhere

I found this information on the Internet and wanted to share it. I hope it can help!


Incredible as it may seem, water is quite possibly the single most important catalyst in losing weight and keeping it off. Although most of us take it for granted, water may be the only true "magic potion" for permanent weight loss!

Water suppresses the appetite naturally and helps the body metabolize stored fat. Studies have shown that a decrease in water intake will cause fat deposits to increase, while an increase in water intake can actually reduce fat deposits.

Here's why: The kidneys can't function properly without enough water. When the kidneys don't work to capacity, some of their load is dumped onto the liver. One of the liver's primary functions is to metabolize stored fat into usable energy for the body. If the liver has to do some of the kidney's work, it can't operate at full throttle. As a result, it metabolizes less fat, more fat remains stored in the body, and weight loss stops.

Drinking enough water is the best treatment for fluid retention. When the body gets less water, it perceives this as a threat to survival and begins to hold on to every drop. Water is stored in extra cellular spaces (outside the cells). This shows up as swollen feet, legs and hands. Diuretics offer a temporary solution at best. They force out stored water along with some essential nutrients. Again, the body perceives a threat and will replace the lost water at the first opportunity. Thus, the condition quickly returns.

The best way to overcome the problem of water retention is to give the body what it needs. PLENTY OF WATER. Only then will the stored water be released.

If you have a constant problem with water retention, excess salt may be to blame. Your body will tolerate sodium only in a certain concentration. The more salt you eat, the more water your system retains to dilute it. But getting rid of un-needed salt is easy - just drink more water. As it's forced through the kidneys, it takes away excess sodium.

What's more, the overweight person needs more water than the thin one! Larger people have larger metabolic loads. Since we know that water is the key to fat metabolism, it follows that the overweight person needs more water.

Water helps maintain proper muscle tone by giving muscles their natural ability to contract and by preventing dehydration. It also helps to prevent the sagging skin that usually follows weight loss - shrinking cells are buoyed by water, which plumps the skin and leaves it clear, healthy, and resilient.

Water also helps rid the body of waste. During weight loss, the body has a lot more waste to get rid of - all the metabolized fat must be shed. Again, adequate water helps flush out the waste. It can even help relieve constipation. When the body gets too little water, it siphons what it needs from internal sources. The colon is one primary source. Result? Constipation. But, when a person gets enough water, normal bowel functions returns.

Basically, the body will not function properly without enough water and can't metabolize stored fat efficiently. Drinking water is essential to weight loss. But how much water is enough??

On the average, a person should drink eight 8-ounce glasses every day. That's about 2 quarts. However, the overweight person needs one additional glass for every 25 pounds of excess weight. The amount you drink also should be increased if you exercise briskly or if the weather is hot and dry. When the body gets the water it needs to function optimally, its fluids are perfectly balanced. Once this happens you have reached the "breakthrough point". What does this mean?

• Endocrine-gland function improves.
• Fluid retention is alleviated as stored water is lost.
• More fat is used as fuel because the liver is free to metabolize stored fat.
• Natural thirst returns.
• There is loss of hunger almost overnight.

If you stop drinking enough water, your body fluids will be thrown out of balance again, and you may experience fluid retention, unexplained weight gain and loss of thirst. To remedy the situation you have to increase your water intake again.

20 Tips For Getting Your 8 Glasses of Water Daily

Sometimes drinking our eight glasses of water a day can be a real challenge Here are 20 tips to help you accomplish that feat! It is said by many beauty experts that drinking your water is the cheapest, quickest way to look better! That should motivate us!

1. Make a bet with a co-worker to see who can drink more water in the course of a day.

2. Have a big glass of water at every transitional point of the day: when you first get up, just before leaving the house, when you sit down to work, etc.

3. Make it convenient - keep a big, plastic, insulated water bottle full on your desk and reach for it all day.

4. When you have juice (apple, grape, or orange) fill half the glass with water.

5. When you have a junk-food craving, down a glass of water immediately. You feel full quickly and avoid the calories, and it lets time pass till the craving fades.

6. Have one glass every hour on the hour while at work. When the work day is done your water quota is met.

7. Substitute a cup of hot water with a drop of honey for tea or coffee.

8. While at work, get a 20 ounce cup of ice and keep filling it up from the office water cooler. The key is drinking with a straw - you take bigger gulps and drink much more.

9. Freeze little bits of peeled lemons, limes, and oranges and use them in place of ice cubes - it's refreshing and helps get in a serving or two of fruit.

10. After each trip to the restroom, guzzle an eight-ounce glass to replenish your system.

11. Don't allow yourself a diet soda until you've had two to four glasses of water. You will find that you won't want the soda anymore or that just half a can is enough.

12. Let ounces of water double grams of fat: When eating something containing 10 grams of fat, I drink 20 ounces of water.

13. Drink two full glasses at each meal, one before and one after. Also, drink one glass before each snack so you don't eat as much.

14. Carry a small refillable water bottle at all times and drink during downtime; while waiting in a bank line, sitting on the train, etc.

15. Use a beautiful gold-rimmed glass and fill it with cold water from the tap.

16. Drink two glasses of water immediately after waking up.

17. Bring a two-liter bottle of water to work and try to drink it all before you leave work. If you don't finish, drink it in traffic on the way home - it's like a race.

18. Always keep a 24-ounce bottle of water handy while watching TV, doing laundry, making dinner, etc.

19. Add drinking two glasses of water to your daily skincare regimen. Drink, cleanse, moisturize, etc., then drink again.

20. Drink your water out of a big Pyrex measuring cup - it's a good way to keep track of how much water you are drinking.

Lessons in the Mountains

Issai Chozanshi was the pen name for Niwa Jurozaemon Tadaaki, a samurai who lived in Japan from 1659 -1741. Little is known of his life, but he left behind several insightful works on martial arts, the most well known of which is his Tengu Geijutsuron.

It is the story of a swordsman who happens upon a group of spirits in the mountains while they are discussing the Way of martial arts. He listens in on their discussion and learns about the importance of spontaneity, acting without acting, and mushin or flowing mind.

The spirits he encounters in the mountains are called Tengu. Tengu are a kind of Japanese folk spirit that were thought to live in the rocks and the trees and could take on the shapes of men and animals. They could be harbingers of good or bad luck, and would sometimes be blamed for small acts of mischief, but they could also be depicted as wise and powerful natural forces.

In Tengu Geijutsuron the spirits discuss the importance of both technique and principle, and the discussion often returns to the importance of keeping the mind free from intention. In Chapter Two the Tengu describe the benefits of these things to the martial artist,

"Swordsmanship is the technique of contention, and it is considered essential to cut through the root of confusion of life and death from the very beginning of your study. But it is difficult to do this abruptly. For this reason, you should use all the power of your mind to cut through the principle of life and death, to develop your ch'i, to test the techniques of physical confrontation, and make great efforts without any neglect throughout this time. When you have sacrificed your life for training, when you techniques are mature, when you ch'i is under control, when principle has penetrated your mind and you have no doubts, when you are no longer confused and your spirit meets no obstruction - then your thoughts will not move within you at all. And when your thoughts do no move, ch'i will follow spirit. It will move along with animation and will flow smoothly. When ch'i rides the mind, it will not stagnate, it will not be stopped, and it will control form with complete freedom and without obstruction.

Following the perception of the mind, the speed of practical application is like opening a door and the moonlight immediately shining in; or like striking something and having the immediate response of a sound. Victory and defeat are the traces of practical application. But if you don't have conceptualization form will not have aspect. Aspect is the shadow of concept, and is what manifests form. If there is no aspect to form, the opponent you are supposed to face will not exist. This is what is meant when we say that neither my opponent nor I exist. If I exist, my opponent exists. Because I do not exist, even the insignificant thought of good or evil, perversion or properness, by the man coming at me will be reflected as in a mirror. And this is not reflected from me. It is simply that he arrives and moves on. This is just like being unable to confront with your own wickedness someone who has attained virtue. It is a mystery of the Of-Itself-So. If I tried to divert it from myself, it would become a thought. And because this thought would obstruct me, my ch'i would stagnate, and practical application would not be completely free.

The person who comes and goes like a powerful spirit neither thinking about nor enacting the unfettered mysterious function - this is the swordsman who can be said to have attained enlightenment."

In the opinion of the Tengu, it is not enough to have the proper physical skills without the proper mental ones, nor vice versa. It was only with mind and body in harmony that the warrior is able to "control form with complete freedom and without obstruction."

Then, in Chapter Three the spirits discuss the "moon in the water,"

"...there are various meanings attached to this phrase according to different schools, but fundamentally 'the moon reflected in the water' is a metaphor for when you can move and respond with spontaneity and no mind. Among the poems of the Abdicated Emperor Sotoku while he was at the palace near Hirozawa Pond is the following:

                      Though there is a reflection,
                            The moon reflects itself
                       Without thought.
                             Without thought, too, the water:
                             Hirozawa Pond.

At the heart of this poem is an enlightened state of mind concerning action and response with no mind and spontaneity..."

The poem and the parable refer to a state of perfect emptiness, wherein our actions are instantaneous and without intention, and where the opponent is both present and not present in our minds.

The lessons of the Tengu are true today, over three hundred years since that day in the mountains. Practice with discipline. Internalize the lessons of the concepts and principals, perfect your execution of the physical techniques. And remember the moon in the water. It exists, without delay, or intention. It simply is.

Learn to fight like this, and you will understand what Chozanshi means by "Abiding in the midst of attack" and "Attacking in the midst of abidance."

Life Lessons from a Samurai

Kaibara Ekiken was over eighty years old when he wrote Yōjōkun. A doctor, philosopher, teacher, samurai, and scientist, Ekiken was responsible in many ways for introducing the concept of rational empiricism to feudal Japan. Much of the medicine he taught and practiced throughout the late seventeenth century is still being practiced today.

Yōjōkun was his final written work. When he was thirty-eight he married the daughter of a local samurai administrator. By all accounts Esaki Token was a match for the artistic and philosophical Ekiken. Schooled in music, calligraphy, and poetry already, she also knew enough of history and philosophy to keep him on his toes. She often accompanied him on his travels and is even suspected of having written one of his books herself, publishing it under his name to give the work a wider readership. When she passed away at the age of sixty-two, he finished his work on Yōjōkun, and passed away himself the following year.

Yōjōkun contains the collected wisdom of a man who spent more than sixty years treating the sick. Unlike other classic samurai works of the era which taught the warrior how to die with honor, Yōjōkun is a set of instructions on how to live. Kaibara Ekiken believed that living long and well was the truest way to show gratitude to our ancestors for gifting us with life, and the modern reader will instantly see the wisdom of his teachings.

The Way of Nurturing Life
Verse 27

"Different people have different vocations. They polish a vocation and add technique to their Way. For all vocations there are techniques in which you should become well versed. If you do not master the techniques, you will be unable to perform the tasks at hand. Even among the most trivial and humble accomplishments, if you do not have a command of the techniques, you will be incapable of the task. For example, making straw raincoats and papering umbrellas are extremely easy and humble vocations, but even there, if you do not study the techniques, you will be unable to do the job.

How much more so, then, for the Way of Nurturing Life in the human body of man, which is said to be one of the Three Powers, along with Heaven and Earth? In short, if you are intent on taking care of yourself and living a long life, you must learn the appropriate techniques.

The common practice for learning a technique, even for some trivial art, is to seek out a teacher without fail, receive the teacher's instructions, and learn the proper techniques. Even the extremely talented will learn nothing if they do not have access to the techniques, a teacher, and instruction.

The techniques for nurturing your health are a full-fledged Great Way, not some small art. If you do not study the techniques with resolution, you will not master the way. If you are able to study under a person who knows the techniques, do not trade that opportunity for a thousand pieces of gold.

When I look back on my youth in my hometown, there were many people who did not know the Way of Nurturing Life. They led dissipated and therefore short lives. Moreover, many of the old folks in my village, not knowing the Way, were often sick and in distress. Their health declined and they became doting old fools early on. In such cases, even if they lived to a hundred, their lives were without pleasure and full of aches and pains. A long life ill conceived is of no use. You may think that simply living long is a good thing, but longevity alone is not something for which you should be congratulated."

Seek out the Way of Nurturing Life. Learn its techniques and study them with resolution. Live a long and health life, filled with pleasure. That is how we can best show our gratitude.