#five tenets

Hello everyone! 😸I need your opinion on something, started coloring my Rafayel Dark Brotherhood Assassin, first I went with the iconic color scheme of the studded armor from skyrim. But then I remembered his Abysswalker skin, and changed the red parts of the armor to purple and now I dont know which one to pick, I personally like them both for different reasons. what do you guys think ?

.⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : ..⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹

The lineart for Rafayel in Skyrim-verse is done! He is going to be a skilled Assassin of The Dark Brotherhood and ofc a Vampire too, just because I can! 😝 I'm also planning on making more doodles of the boys, and other Lads NPCs put in my Skyrim lore and lil headcannons, so, him being a vampire will be logical down the line and its not just merely an aesthetic choice 🤭

...tho it mostly is, I imagine him looking this good and young forever would make him an excellent Assassin! y'know lull his victims into a false sense of security and stuff🧛🏼🩸🗡

ps: i did 2 versions of his face, I can't decide on which one I like yet

.⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : ..⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹

if you are interested, check out my page for Valko, Zayne and be on the look out for the finished version and ofc the other boys as well 🖤

One dark evening in rural England, probably about fifteen years ago, I was, as per usual in the village memorial hall (every village has them) with the familiar smell of the broad cloth stage curtains from the stage at one end, and the more immediate smell of quite a few sweaty people in doboks doing Tae Kwon Do. My teacher was a man of real spirit, he taught me what it was to be a martial artist, even if some of the technicalities of technique were perhaps a little absent. he said something that has stuck with me forever (weird how things do that sometimes eh?) he said to a small group of us: "There used to be six tenets of Tae Kwon Do, and the sixth one was humility."

Humility will always be my favourite non-tenet. It is a constant challenge and a constant friend. I feel Te Kwon Do really lost a vital aspect of itself when it left Humility out of it's core values. Humility is the missing aspect and key to true self-growth. Having the personal honesty to "Think it possible that you may be mistaken" as the 17th Century English radical and Quaker George Fox said.

Ahh, we've made it to the end. The last one, and possibly the most important.

All the tents can be described in terms of the negative: Courtesy, don't be rude, Integrity, don't be false, Perseverance, don't stop, Self-Control don't be aggressive and Indomitable Spirit, don't give up.

Indomitable spirit is about keeping faith in yourself and others even in times of great hardship. It's about always keeping hope alive. It is about refusing to bow down to oppression and injustice. it is about building the strength of character through unswerving hope to uphold the other four tenets even in the face of adversity. Indomitable Spirit is the engine, the animating force that gives life to the other tenets and brings them into the real world. It is the source from which flows true courage and empathy and compassion.

It has been a really fun exercise to go through these, re-visiting them consciously for the first time in a while and think about what they mean to me. I will be coming back to them, but thought that it would be of interest to write down what I thought back in 2023 and I can then re-visit them further down the line and see if I've changed how I think, and in what ways.

Self control is not pulling your punches, self control is not punching - is a conceited thing to say.

Self control, like perseverance has a real physical aspect to it. All of the tenets impact on the real world through informing your feelings your thoughts and your behaviours, Self Control is simply the tenet with the most physicality because yes, being able to control yourself so your movements always have an appropriate amount of power is a really important part of what self-control is and what it is to be a martial artist.

As with all these tenets though, you can, and should go deeper. If self-control is about knowing the appropriate amount of force to apply in a situation, then it is also about knowing when to not apply force. Being able to judge a situation correctly is the other part of self-control and this comes from (when appropriate) having control over yourself and your emotions so that you keep making good decisions, even when you're under pressure, or tired or upset - as examples. This is where self control becomes an internal skill. Self-control is meaningless without the ability to judge the situation correctly. This means being able to identify what options you have available, and which one is the most appropriate to use. Just like in fighting you have a range of strikes, kicks, holds, throws, locks etc that you can employ, so to, before a situation becomes a physical fight, do you have options of how to behave. This feeds into self-defense theory which is not the focus of this post.

Self control will mean that you are able to deal with difficult situations without needing to resort to violence. This will make your life easier as there are very few situations where physical violence will be met without condemnation. This doesn't mean that there are not situations where violence in the interests of self-defense is not the option that should be taken - of course there are, but like I said, this is not a post about self-defense explicitly.

So self control is about not punching and it's about pulling your punches, and using all your power, and everything in between and beyond. Self control comes with experience and through the lens of the tenet of self-control that experience becomes a form of wisdom. In fact, all the tents provide lenses through which you can turn experience into wisdom.

Perseverance is an interesting one because it can look a lot like Indomitable Spirit. Perseverance I think I would describe as keeping going.

There is a saying that a definition of madness it to do the same thing over and over again and to expect different results. I that case martial artists must all be mad because we come back time after time and do the same things again and again. It is through perseverance we overcome all obstacles. But there is little benefit to overcoming obstacles that need not be. When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Our perseverance must be tempered with the cool water of wisdom, drawn from inner knowledge.

Through training and living we come to know ourselves. We all have certain obstacles we are drawn to, or that we put in our own way. With perseverance we can overcome them, with wisdom we can learn to identify them and how we might walk around them, rather than having to climb over them. This means that we can then turn our perseverance to overcoming the obstacles that we have little or no power to avoid, because unless we achieve unity with the Dao we will have to deal with adversity and challenge.

One obstacle is boredom, whilst we are human, we will always contend with boredom and boredom is one of the greatest enemies to the development of skill. Another is of course the exhaustion of living under late-stage-capitalism but we'll get to that - later. Boredom will try and find reasons why, when you're perfectly able to carry on training, it would be much preferable to stop. This is not the same as stopping training to avoid injury or over-taxing yourself or endangering your health through over-exertion that your body cannot support. Proper support for disabled martial artists of all types is severely lacking but in the UK there is this group: http://www.dmaa.org.uk/

In short perseverance is about keeping going. We train, doing the same thing again and again and again, and we might be called mad, but we know that we are growing. Skill can only be gained through repetition and keeping the ball rolling. It needs to be pushed every day, but it can just be a nudge. 10 minutes a day is better than 1 hr and 10 minutes once a week.

We keep pushing, identifying which obstacles we can side-step, and which ones need to be faced head-on.