Occult Martial Arts Ideas
The dojo or gym is a sacred space of mental, physical and spiritual growth. You are strengthening your mind and body to create a discipline that makes the struggles in the rest of your life easier. Maintaining the relationship with your spirits also means maintaining the spirit-self, your spiritual integrity; your oaths hold less water if you lack the spiritual ethos.
Spiritual integrity is the synthesis of mundane and spiritual; the extent to which your values hold up under discomfort. I believe walking the path that brings you closer to like-minded and virtuous beings helps overall with manifestation and bringing abundance, good friends and lovers, justice and general peace of mind. To walk this path using our spirits and our martial discipline, one must make explicit practices that combine emotional and mindfulness training, and perception.
Combine martial arts with an applied spiritual practice, meditation, for example. For example, in your meditation you have to breathe deeply, or clear your mind. This is easy in a dark room surrounded by candles. Can you keep this up while training? How about while getting punched in the face?
Interactive meditation, and performance as offering. Pick and maintain one single, uninterrupted quality through the entire training. Keep a smile through the entire class. This can be impressive to those trickster spirits.
Other qualities can be manifested as ideals in the gym, such as excellent defense, harmonized blending, quieting the mind for subtle and spiritual perception, always listening, soft and relaxed stance, etc - even focusing on a technique, or principle integral to a given spirit.
Use the opportunity to recognize when you've lost focus. You use a martial art to disrupt and distract another person's flow. But you'll know pretty quickly when someone else gets you to lose your flow, too. Quickly regaining a trance state or focus when there are distractions, emotional pain or chaos is particularly useful during evocations and divination.
Charisma as a ward - often I find that my wards are less effective when I am still stressed and insecure and doubting them: the most important protection you can be doing is from within. Experienced martial artists have sort of a swag to them. When they walk into a room, people instinctively treat them with a reverance; they can sense a competence there, and a capacity for danger. It is the cultivation of focus in the proximity to danger: the better you can walk the line between life and death, the better your confidence and autonomy, the better your manifestation.
Escaping the comfort zone - years of comfortable training is nothing compared to training on the edge of a knife. The fastest route to tapping into a primordial trance state can be achieved through martial discipline - that state where you are empty-minded, a mere vessel for the force of your spirits to flow through, animal intensity delivering, 100% over-heightened focus and perception required to manifest your goal - in some cases causing injury or preventing personal injury. This witch-like demon intensity comes to the surface pretty quickly after a nice staticky blow to the head.
Focus - undisciplined attention span is like that of an iPad kid. We can't receive the messages from our spirits or learn quickly. We can't control our focus - absorbed by some meaningless angel number or detail, misreading signs into the clouds about your ex, while the truth and patterns of your life goes unnoticed. Martial arts help us direct our attention and command it, as if our focus is a spirit itself, waiting to be spent - a little bit of focus sustained for a long period of time for a class, or intense focus at will for things like a conflict or sparring.
Letting go of the goal. There is a problem in manifestation where if you want something bad enough, you can kind of fuck it up by obsessing over it, and doubting, and worrying, and going back and letting your conscious ego worry about it and sabotage the outcome. A method for something like manifesting a job, or winning a fight: resolve as if you're already doomed. The outcome is already set. Then move yourself with the freedom of not caring about the outcome; without hesitation, doubt and fear.
Adopting that attitude of anticipation and trust helps your relationship with your spirits. Lesser witchcraft is like fighting. You really don't need to know exacfly what you're doing to achieve your end goal, or conversely cause serious damage. With good spirits certain things might take priority. In a fight you might focus too much on striking someone in the head, forgetting to protect yourself and your organs on your body. You might want to curse your abusive ex into the next dimension, but your spirit might focus on keeping you safe, creating obstacles between you and him, removing him from you physically rather than causing pain. It can be easy to react strongly and get angry at a well meaning spirit for not obeying you exactly - stay calm and practice perception.
As above, so below - as inside the gym, so outside. Ultimately your practice will benefit from critical self-awareness of yourself, your mental responses to stress and danger; people drawn to witchcraft come from fucked up circumstances. Technique relieves and transforms that stress. By understanding emotional stress and learning how to transform it so it does not take a toll on you and becomes productive is the essence of practice, as well as the path you walk in the rest of your life.
Transforming the fate of a situation is done subtly at first, manifesting smaller and smaller things until large outcomes are finally achieved. At some point you'll also realize that large problems have very very subtle moments of inception that slowly grow uncontrollable. Controlling yourself and your negative response patterns changes the outcome of shitty situations - what happens when you change your body language around a belligerent boss, hang up on an abusive phone call, stop engaging with the zero sum artificial realities other people present us with. Basically just applying techniques you learn in martial arts adjacent.
Remember that you are also a spirit: complex and multifaceted. your presence instills a certain essence onto others, you might bring a joy or positivity, make others push themselves more, you might agitate or intimidate others the same way. You have a direct and indirect impact that you own and you can change. With any other spirit, person, or being there are no trivial interactions or communications. Own and invoke your energy and control the glamour you put off; and notice how that affects your immediate environment.
Cultivating the intuitive self - the conscious mind is responsible for analyzing things logically, but is very slow and can miss things. In the back of your mind where you learn muscle memory, technique and different kinds of intelligence is when you can bypass that part of thinking; the unconscious is responsible for breakthroughs, reflexes, physical changes. The best way to improve is by embracing each encounter without even trying to control the outcome; you're not trying to win, the problem is not a puzzle to be forced or solved, your companion is arriving at the same moment of creation as you are. allow your body to do what it does without interference. This is true for sparring, spirit work, whatever the fuck. Celebrate and have gratitude for manifestation, but don't take credit! Analyze each result, set new goals, and enter each time new. Switch between learning when to apply analysis and when to move intuitively.
We all must learn and evolve whether we choose to or not. Martial arts and occultism have direct equivalence and a lot of overlap. You grow with intention, deliberation, mindfulness, critical self-examination, determination and commitment to a goal, innovation, trust, and compassion to yourself and your relationships. by truly letting go of your defenses, you become truly indestructible.
