The Three Hearts That Ride Six legs

Part I – The First Heart

Balance

Put down the pen for a moment and look around you. Look at the world. Be it man made or natural. Be it skyscraper or tree. Be it airplane or bird. Look at the way everything exists. Most things symmetrical, most things have similar designs on all sides, especially in nature. Nothing naturally exists where one side is not balanced by the other. The physical universe is so designed.

Balance is defined as a state of equilibrium and more often than not in the martial arts its sole definition is about the physical balance of the body. In most martial artists minds, the idea of balance is about angles, and directions of kinetic/potential energy.

The physical Balance

A human form is so designed to literally teeter on two thin, long, legs. The length of the legs is the sole dictator to how well balanced the wider and heavier upper body are maintained. Muscle mass in and of itself in the legs has no direct bearing on the ability for a being to remain upright. Two men of equal height and equal leg length would have the same tipping point (assuming the contact point were applied at the hips).

Kamae help to lower this balance point by spreading out the legs, thus lowering the center of gravity, and changing the tipping point to a finer angle verses it being much larger when we are standing upright. Most martial artists, wrestlers, and boxers already know this about themselves and do their best to incorporate as much as possible, a lower stance. In the real world, of course, lower stances make one slower to move and limit directional movement. A very wide and low stance limits the martial arts to only a few easily accessible directions. Over time, faster fighting methods have adopted a much more straight up stance where balance is pushed toward the opponent by allowing the upper body to bent slightly toward them, back leg pushing forward into the opponent. Almost as if the martial artist is walking into the wind.

Here in lies one of the key principles of balance: no fight is done in a vacuum. We all have to deal with the other persons potential. His balance as well as our own. We need never consider ourselves first and foremost, but as the whole cycle of the fight in one thing.

Imagine that at my joints a steel pin is placed and on those pins a steel rod is attached. This rod then connects to a steel rod and pin on my opponent. The rods have a damping ability where they can telescope in our out. I control this telescoping, my opponent does not. Therefore when he moves it moves my rods and causes my balance to be effected. If he moves in to strike me, I control my rods ability to telescope and alter their length to ensure my balance does not faultier, but some of the rods do not change length and keep him from advanced fully into my space.

Other times think of balance like holding a fire hose while you fight. It is always pushing you off in directions you have to struggle against. If his energy is the hose pushing you, you push back to maintain your balance.

The mental Balance

Balance is a central ideal in the nature of Warriorship. One does not dive into a heated battle without a strategy. Luck will only get you so far, mostly it will get you killed (or worse). Balance should come to the warrior in different manners. He should be welll grounded mentally. Able to see all sides of a situation. Trees are rooted, but they sway to the changing winds. Yet, even a tree sometimes breaks from to much wind. A warrior should be empathic, and his founding’s, those things he builds his morality on, should be things that are universally unchangeable: love, truth, life and the like.

His balance should begin long before he ever sees a single missile. This is a mental kamae on which one sinks their weight and learns the angles of their own mind. The warriors path should be filled with things that test his mental balance as well as his physical. A road untested should not be avoided, for fear is the ultimate tool of a warriors enemies on which he can unbalance even the best of us.

This doesn’t mean throw caution to the wind and race off to join the Foreign Legion. In fact, quite the opposite. The testing should come in ways that help the warrior understand his balance, not in things that completely disrupt it. Imagine if I told you to learn to fly an aircraft only I waited until we were in a flat stall, spinning out of control to hand over the controls. What good could come of such a test? And worse, who else do you take with you when you crash?

Strength is dealt out with just as much restraint as it is with swords. A balanced mind knows which and where.

The Universal Balance

In the end the warrior is looking to do one thing in particular and by way of doing that one thing uncovering others. He is looking for truth. The universe appears to us on the brink of falling over, to be spinning out of control with us, yet in reality, the closer we come to balance the less we see the universe as even being on the teeter to begin with. That underneath, in the quiet breathes we sense just how grounded and true the universe is. That it is immovable and that nothing can topple it.

Kali dancing on one leg. Saint Sebastian's bound feet. The universe never tips. It can not faultier.