My name is Steven Barnes.
Once upon a time, I was a pot-bellied, four-eyed nerd, crippled with fear and loneliness; dreaming of being the kind of hero he saw on the silver screen. That dream sent me on a forty-year journey into the martial arts, eventually claiming three black belts. I was kung-fu columnist of Black Belt magazine for three years, and have been around the fitness, and self-improvement industry, most of my life, actually creating a copyrighted technique called “Lifewriting”
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TACFIT Warrior
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I’ve taught to thousands of people. Back in 2002, I started hearing rumors about a guy named Scott Sonnon, whose teaching and quality of motion were unlike anything else. I’d written over a dozen science fiction novels at the time, several featuring advanced martial artists described as moving like “water over rocks” or other hyperbolisitic images…
But as exquisite as his movement was, what really impressed me were his theories, especially something called the “Flow State Performance Spiral”
As an award-winning science fiction writer, I had the freedom to imagine what sports psychology might be like in a hundred years. Or what it might have been like, three thousand years ago in the mountain retreats of Vedic India. And what might have been the same about those two techniques, ancient and modern.
Unlike a formal researcher, I had the freedom of reading hundreds of books, studying with dozens of teachers, read thousands of articles on physical culture and psychological power…and simply dreaming of what might be.
With my notoriety as a novelist, I’d been able to gain access to world-class performance scientists, as well as scholars who had personally translated ancient texts, or those who had studied traditions thought long dead…who sometimes had been sworn to secrecy, but were allowed to ignore those vows if they thought they had found a worthy student.
To my very great fortune (and surprise!) I was considered worthy. Through all of this, I developed theories about how it all might tie together, theories mirrored uncannily in Scott Sonnon’s Flow State Performance Spiral.
The FSPS suggested a way to quantify the quality called “mastery” in the martial arts. Remember the myth we all swallowed about how learning to kick butt was somehow connected to inner peace, enlightenment, all of that? Kwai Chi Caine spewing aphorisms, Master Po, Yoda and so forth?
Well, for most of us, none of this was remotely close to the truth. Because the pieces of the puzzle were simply scattered too far, fragmented between too many different cultures. But the 20th Century was a time of knitting these different pieces back together again, and our Soviet friends were some of the first to glimpse the full possibilities. And American Scott Sonnon was one of the very first to learn their secrets, and translate them so that Westerners could finally gain the benefits of thousands of years of Eastern body-mind experimentation.
After thirty years of studying hard and soft styles, yoga, meditation, hypnosis, gurus… shamanic paths and more stuff than I’d ever admit in a family email (hey, you never know what the kids will read… let’s just say I traveled some winding roads…), the last major piece of the puzzle fell into place. A clear, English translation that said that the secret to the body-mind interaction was within our grasp.
And also, the reason why this truth had been so elusive, so unteachable, for so long. The secret was this: you can’t put the “secret” into words, any more than you can describe a salad fully enough to nourish the reader. You have to eat it to “get” it. And that elusive body-mind connection? The masters could dance all around it with language, but ultimately you either step into the arena, or you don’t. It cannot be “taught”…but it is possible to create a context in which it can be learned!
The trick is that “Mastery” isn’t a noun, it’s a verb. It isn’t some place off in the future, it is contained in your behaviors on a day-to-day level. Masters laugh at the idea of being masters–they know that there is just a path, stretching between birth and death. A path walked one conscious step at a time.
We cannot walk the path for you. But we can show you precisely where it is, and place your feet firmly upon it. The door will be opened, beginning in just EIGHT days.
TACFIT Warrior. The past has spoken. The future is here.
P.S. Check THIS out: http://www.tacfitwarrior.com/blog/?page_id=564