Thread: Bowstring Power
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Old 02-18-2012, 03:47 AM   #10
Lee Salzman
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 406
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Re: Bowstring Power

Quote:
Jason Casteel wrote: View Post
I always enjoy reading how other people take this stuff and relate it in a way that works for them, very nice. I like what Lee added, because if left as is it might give the impression of one big build up into one big release, which is not how I've understood it. Releasing the bowstring simply results in a buildup in another direction. The bow and string should never go slack. Of course that's also a higher level and one I'm not sure you can get too without first feeling and grasping the buildup and release in a more singular manner. Being able to do that and still manage all of the other things that happen in contact with another person is such an interesting study, true budo indeed.
Funny thing is compression to me was never explained as that, only extension, and compression we were supposed to get by implication, what happens when extension is unwittingly reversed by an overwhelming force. But yet it seems so integral to its opposite that they are inseparable and to separate them out as somewhat antithetical.

As for being able to do all that and still manage it in contact with another person... it's so hard just to organize anything like this in yourself when people try of talking about affecting other people with it so soon in their training so glibly it makes me wonder if I just must be somehow physically retarded. Why do these other people find all the hard stuff so easy?

I mean, hell, the other day, just to have someone standing over me saying, here, your shoulder blade is not driving into your spine, and showing me a million ways to try and get my body to do it, and three hours later of this, I am still not doing it, and then three days later of repeating the same stuff on my own, and then going back and trying with help again, and still not doing it, and then several days later, after finding some ways to activating something in what feels like my face, despite it manifesting in my shoulder blade, I am somehow barely doing it now... I wasn't smiling intently enough, you see, and that was causing a problem in my shoulder blade, makes sense, right?

And after countless numbers of similar ego-beatings, it feels like my body is as much a raging sea of disorder that will never be tamed, always a little wave of mediocrity popping up from the depths of the ocean. And then people wax philosophical about three-legged stools and four legged animals and back gates, and I can only just go: WHAT? Budo sucks, I tell you.
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