But today’s story was different. There she was standing there as always, not yet changed, having put her stuff down a few feet from the bed where I’m always doing digital stuff. She’s telling me about how she was sparring one of the Thai boys at the camp, 30 minutes straight (no rounds), and how frustrated she had become at the tension she could just feel building in her body. She realized then, and was recounting now, how she was standing in front of him in just a different body lean, a different stance, than the one she has in front of the bag, or in front of Pi Nu in padwork. Why was she not standing the way she already knows how to stand?

What this story comes down to is a certain kind of cumulative effect or realization, that has been coming for a very long time, and likely will still be arriving for years. It maybe began with the month long instruction of Karuhat as found in the Intensive and the same we filmed with Chatchai in the same month, which will be published in the Intensive as well. Karuhat, one of the slickest fighters everywhere, began quietly showing her how to “read”. Not how to do particular techniques, or even how to fight a certain way, but how to see. But not see by looking. It’s very hard to see without looking. Karuhat began teaching her this. And as Sylvie’s an excellent student, she tried really hard to learn it. And she did learn it, in all sorts of ways. But the best and sweetest part had not filtered down, into the deepest part…yet.

So she’s telling me this story, and about how she was just sitting with Pi Nu and maybe some others, after training. She recently had a realization about these times, after training, which she blogged about here:

This is a kind of Wolf’s-Light time, when the magic happens. People expect technique to be transmitted during training, when you are really gutting it out. But in Thailand it often will happen in this twilight time, after training. In any case, she said she got up and started feeling…feeling, not doing…her shadow boxing very slowly in front of them. She was saying that she had gotten herself into this funk in how oddly she had been standing in front of her sparring partner, full of tension. She hadn’t been standing right, and had even taken that into padwork afterwards. What’s up with that. So right there she just started working slowly though the movements of her everyday shadowboxing, but trying to feel it, nothing more. Slow. Feeling.

I’m going to tell you something. I’ve watched a hell of a lot of Sylvie’s shadowboxing. In fact, I’ve seen a hell of a lot of shadow boxing from others too. I’ve never seen movements like the movements she was doing in front of me, demonstrating her story to me. Never. To show that she really knew what she was talking about, she would shift between how she usually shadow boxed, pretty regular, nicely composed, technically correct movements, and then shadow boxing in way of feeling. I’m still kind of blown away by it. Never seen anything like it.

The proximate trigger to this possibility probably came from our Mental Training Muay Thai Reading Group we are doing, discussing the classic The Inner Game of Tennis. On Patreon you can catch up on our past discussions here:

Mental Training Reading Group – The Introduction (+Vipassana)

Chapters `1 & 2 – Mental Training (1 hr 17 min)

Chapters 3 & 4 – Mental Training (58 min)

Chapters 5 & 6 – Mental Training (1 hr 24 min)

Or, you can add to the mix on the Open Facebook Group: MTMT Reading Group. In any case the Inner Game‘s “quiet your inner coach (Self 1) and let your body (Self 2) just FEEL techniques” approach, and applying those principles is what lead to this breakthrough moment, this sudden awakening of the body. Also, Sylvie’s journey into Vipassana Meditation, which is all about non-judgemental awareness and observation, also primed the ground for this new edifice, this unusual temple of movements. It’s been a few years of teaching, experience and experimentation that lead to this thing. In a certain sense Sylvie has just said that it’s only that it was the right time to realize it. The student was ready. I write all of this not to praise her, as my goodness, she is incredibly praiseworthy and a hero in all she does, but to just shine a little light forward, a crack of light from the door, into the dark hallway of your own path, the direction to head toward. The thing about these kinds of realizations is that they cannot be rushed, they cannot be forced. You can feel where they are going, but if you hit the gas the realization will vanish, or become constricted. You just keep feeling, let things come and go.

We were driving in the car today to pick up Sylvie’s parents who are visiting us – we do not get to see them very often. I was asking her about her realization, but she really didn’t have much to say about it, which is probably the way it should be. It belongs to her, it’s in her body, not where words are. I’ve often thought about Muay Thai technique, and the beautiful Muay Thai of the legends that we are archiving, and that Sylvie trains with. It’s truly incredible stuff. Sometimes techniques appear that you’ve never seen before, or even a shin angle, or a limb arc. It’s easy to get caught up in all that is visible in a mechanical sense. But, I’ve often thought about how it would be if for instance you were trying to learn to rap like Biggie or Snoop (rap is not really the issue here, it works for Thrash Metal or Baroque Fugues). And how if you spent all your hours memorizing the exact words of their raps, and even thinking hard about HOW they rapped. But…you never sunk down into their flow. I mentioned to Sylvie in the car, with urban, somewhat dirty Pattaya sliding past us, the bright sunlight of late Thai morning beaming through the windshield, you could rap like Biggie using complete nonsense words. You could hum your way through Biggie or Tupac or Snoop, scat your way. You don’t need the words. You need the flow. This is the precious thing found in the legends we film, and the priceless thing that Sylvie has felt first hand.

Want to know what flow is, watch Yodkhunpon “The Elbow Hunter” feel his shadow:

Biggie’s flow:

What I got to see in those few moments of her story, standing a few feet from the bed, her workout clothes still damp from endless repetitions, was Sylvie’s Flow. What Muay Thai feels like to her, her muay, fed by the Ganges of a 100 sacred rivers. What the late and recently passed great Andy Thomson said, Everyone has their own Muay Thai. This is the crazy thing. You don’t get your own muay by pounding it out and creating it. You get it by imitating others, by humming along to their music, their flow, moving your body through the feel of what the movements mean. This is why there is so much intense variety of Muay Thai in Thailand, techniques upon techniques, styles upon styles – and why there is so little variety of the same in the west. Even in a single Thai gym you will find incredible diversity, its an ecosystem of diversity. It’s not a matter of talent. Or even quality of instruction. It’s a matter of feeling. I can’t even tell if that hoop dancer above is any “good” (???), moving to Biggie. But I can tell exactly what he is doing. He is feeling and expressing himself. If you were going to rap like Biggie, or throw elbows like Yodkhunpon, you have to start and end with the music of their flow. The body has to transmit that thing.

We don’t realize it as humans, but we are like radio towers. We constantly are receiving signals of bodily affects of others, states of being, emotional waves and tides, reading what others are feeling and even thinking. This is the only reason why we can accurately predict what others will do, drivers on the road, a shop keeper in a conversation, a wife or a stranger. We are constantly receiving and virtually absorbing, modeling, patterning the affective states of others. And we are then broadcasting our own states to others, very often rippling states forward through the infinite prism of social being. Somehow though, when learning a fighting art very often we put aside this very deep and powerful apparatus of what being a human is (the affective transmitter), and can try to turn ourselves into biomachanical mechanisms, wherein every part has to move a certain way. The oldest and deepest in ourselves is not like that. The artist – even the martial artist – is the one that takes their project into themselves, into the sea of their affective states, and learns to feel the seeds of movements and thoughts.

The Theory of Two Musics

A big mistake is thinking about fighting as “doing damage”. It’s one reason lots of westerners misunderstand Thai style scoring. Some think that you can just add up Health Points like in a video game, when in fact it is much more as if two musics are being played against each other, and the fighting artist is ever using pain and the threat of pain (including social pain, shame) to get the other fighter on their beat, trapped in their music. The aesthetics of fight judgement are the aesthetics of “which fighter’s music played stronger, louder, more clear, more subtly, more satisfyingly”. This is the reason why it is so important to feel your own music, especially in training. When you can feel your own beat, your own rhythm and cadence, your own flow, you are much more likely to be able to keep it when up against another, or return to it after being knocked off beat. This may sound like some pretty arcane stuff, but the truth is that the fighter who can keep his/her music undisturbed has the greatest chance of doing real world damage in the real sense. This is the reason why Samart was so beloved by Thailand, and many feel that he was the greatest who fought. His music was so quiet, so subtle, but was nearly impossible to disturb. And he was able to disturb the flow of almost everyone he fought. If you look at his technique he often will stand with his feet very close together – something some consider to be a major technical flaw in others – but he has incredible feel for himself. He stands that way because it is natural for him. His brother Kongtoranee, himself a legendary fighter, grown up in the same famed Sityodtong gym, has a completely different stance. Here is a little of Samart with Sylvie from the Library. You can watch all of it here.

you can watch the whole 81 minutes in the Muay Thai Library here

The first and last priority is getting on beat. And that means getting on your beat. You can’t maintain your music under adversity if you can’t feel your music. And the more you feel your music, your flow, the better you will get at feeling the flow of others, especially that of your opponent standing opposite you…and interrupting it.

This brings me back to that moment, those ineffable moments, when Sylvie is showing me what shadowboxing looks like when she just feels what she is doing, and doesn’t “do” Muay Thai. There was intense expressive poetry in it, like all those years and years of trying and doing and thinking and aching, and banging through 200 fights, and crying when it wasn’t good, or it felt like it wasn’t good, all of that was registered and etched in on the soul. Not just all the beautiful moments, or the successes, but all of it. Every tumble, every failure and frustration, it all wove itself into a gentle tapestry of movement, what it means to feel Muay Thai…for her. What it was, nobody on this earth can “do”. A transmission from very deep space. The martial artist as artist.

If you want to support Sylvie and the insane thing she is doing, you can do so here.

If you’d like to watch the 30+ hours of Karuhat’s Intensive training of Sylvie, to get her to where she is, you can subscribe to that here – Yodkhunpon is also part of that Intensive.

More on this Topic

You can watch Sylvie’s vlog on Continuity, which she filmed during her Karuhat Intensive training and is related, here:

You can watch the most recent hour with Karuhat which in many ways represents the culmination of the Karuhat Intensive, where she has gotten to thus far, filmed only a week or so ago, here, in the Library:

Karuhat Sor. Supawan – Serpentine Knees & Flow (62 min)

Resources 

Kindle Edition The Inner Game of Tennis

Free PDF of The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation

Kindle Edition The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation 

My Vipassana Retreat Experience – with vlogs

Here is a free course locator for people around the world, if you want to take a multiple day retreat in Vipassana Meditation.

I think a lot of fighters can have intermediate success because of the combination approach. They learn fixed combinations that they can just commit themselves to. This is a form of forced continuity. After the combo, there’s the break. Combination fighters grow and learn to extend their combinations, longer and longer, to stay in forced continuity, and then to get out of range. But combinations are something very different than the Reading Continuity that Karuhat is asking for. Sylvie, as I’ve mentioned before, has been both cursed and blessed by the fact that she just can’t throw a combination. She will not commit herself to forced, memorized continuity. This has left her looking behind the curve in terms of using things that easily work in intermediate fighting, but it has also forced her to develop a control style at distances other fighters might not – and lead to her Muay Khao clinch style. In training with Karuhat we uncovered though just how much Continuity – a reading continuity – was missing. The requirement to stop and comment on oneself imposed itself at every turn. The habits of self-criticism made her very knowledgeable about technique, but much less capable of expressing the breadth of it under pressure. The ask, from Karuhat, was to let go and just surrender to the movement itself. To let the movement forward – once the principles were understood – correct the error that just happened, to let the movement itself build on the success that just fell out. To let the next note played as the redemption or the meaning of the note that was just played. To be continuously composing.

The esoteric part of this though is this: If we conceive of the body as more or less continuous with what I’ll call The Great Chain of Being, that is, that the knowledge of the body – the way it perceives and organizes space, the way it rhythms itself, is ever exploring and finding balance, the way it even signals and symbolizes dominance, or guards itself, all of that of its greater instincts and reactions, its animal self – is in continuity of the world around itself. But the Mind…is the Edit, the unique way that the Mind cuts the flow of Being – Sartre called it the Nothingness of Consciousness – somehow painfully diseased when it stands above the body? I say diseased in the component sense dis-eased, ill- or not- at ease. There can be no doubt that much that is magnificent and great has been created by the incisions of Consciousness, cutting into the rhythm of Being, the way that the Mind can hollow out a moment and insert a comment as if it is writing notes on software, or like post-it notes on a refrigerator. But one of the things that we love about fighting, and making and art of and sport of it, is that it is Primordial. It returns us to other truths, truths that may have been lost and that we are in need of. In the exploration of a fighter’s style, reaching toward the fluidity of expression, and having the beautiful spectrum put before me, Karuhat and Sylvie-reaching-for-Karuhat, It struck me just how much Sylvie’s mind interrupts. It interrupts everything. There is a habit of insertion, that may very well be a condition of the Western mind, something I definitely share in. Perhaps even a pathological condition. The world is full of edits and editorials for many of us. And for many who come to Thailand in order to learn technique they become frustrated that Thais (at gyms not overly tailored to western fight tourism) do not seem to be wiling to break things down and explain things to them. This is because “technique” is not the product of edits for most Thai fighters. It is much closer to what many will just call Nature. Technique is learned by lots of watching, and even more doing. Angles, positions, conditions are not cut out from the flow of movement very often. You can see this most in Thai clinch training. There is just continuity, and the adjustment that comes out of that. I sense that the depth of this continuity in Thai fighting is already diluted from the Golden Age fighters, and fighting becomes more phrased and compartmented, less like an on-running dialogue. I may be wrong about that but when you watch a Golden Age fight you can see that it is just different, there is something you can’t quite put your finger on. The Golden Age of Muay Thai reminds me of the basketball of the 1970s and 1980s (having grown up as a basketball fan, of that generation) when players moved differently in space. Gervin, The Doctor, Kareem or Frazier. It’s like they were suspended in air, or had a tempo that escaped time. These were born in the playgrounds of their time, just as the 1980s and 1990s in Thailand the Thai village and Bangkok gyms produced fighters of equal limpidity. What we’ve learned from this intensive with Karuhat is that it is not just a difference in style. It’s not just you do it this way, I do it another way. The style is an expression of a kind of comprehension which probably flowed out the informal but very real pedagogy. It’s a way of seeing and dictating space and time. And for Karuhat this comes through the keyhole of Continuity.

above, the simple grace of a teep counter-parry

via GIPHY – The George “The Iceman” Gervin 

It is perhaps more than coincidence that Karuhat does not like to hold pads. It makes no sense to him. You already know some of the language, let’s have a conversation. Let me guide you into some of the better ways to say something. He does hold his body in positions that could be very much like a padholder would, exposing himself to where a strike would land, and one could hold a pad there as many expert Thai padmen do, but he wants Sylvie to read the shape, to see the turn of the body, where the weight is. I think part of it is also is that dropping the pads lets him move the experience away from the “strike and then stop” mentality. Or the idea that the strike or score is the point. It’s about reading without edits, and I think the art of this drills all the way down into the very structure of our thought and our experience of ourselves as persons. One of the biggest aesthetic enjoyments of the Art of fighting is that for the audience member the fighter weaves the beauty of movements while in physical states that would paralyze an average, inexperienced person in fear. The fighter is sculpting themselves out of the clay of Fear. The agitated state of duress, and the discovered calm and continuity that grows in the elevated state, is the Art. Ultimately, that is what makes it meaningful. To act as another might not. It’s why fighters at the top of their game can feel otherworldly. They skate on ice that we mere mortals could not even stand on. I believe that in these 30 sessions Karuhat showed Sylvie the hidden secret to just what that is, to ever push yourself back down in the stream, to not take your head out, to stay submerged in continuity. What is really remarkable about this is that this rather immense metaphysical conclusion comes out of what may be the most pragmatic fighting martial art tradition and practice on the planet. The things that survive and largely thrive in the Muay Thai of Thailand have been born out of 100,000s of thousands of actual full-rules fights, for decades and decades. I do believe that some of the knowledge of the Golden Age has been lost, but that is largely due to a change in learning path, that’s why this intensive with Karuhat is probably of extraordinary historical value.

It’s pretty amazing that this lesson, which occurred over 30 training days and 40 hours, has been preserved and recorded for others. The path is there if anyone wants to study it and walk it.

For more on this you can watch our long discussion on Continuity:

Watch a Karuhat highlight video, if you are unfamiliar with him.

I’ve written about differences in western and Thai conceptions of motion and learning.

You can learn from watching Muay Thai’s legends by supporting the Muay Thai Library documentary project.

It strikes me that there are 4 components to the art of making tea.

1. Selecting the water you use.
2. Selecting the tea you will brew.
3. The process of brewing or steeping.
4. The service of the tea.

You could have the most delicate and perfected brewing techniques, have the most exquisite blend of tea to steep, and the most extraordinary tea set (and service customs), but if you begin with dirty water the tea you make will be limited, distorted and most probably unpalatable. In a true sense, we have to understand that tea itself is a kind of “dirty” water. It is water we have chosen to put impurities into, impurities of a kind. When learning to fight, to see, the water we come to the process with is as important, or more important than the tea we put in, or how we brew it or serve. It if we have a good water source we can then change all the other factors, find better and better methods or teas or cups.

So here is Sylvie training with legends. Karuhat in particular (the tea) is a ratified leaf of incredible subtlety. Few fighters ever had his sense of style. And the method of brewing – essentially 90 minutes of instructive sparring sessions – is a long steep brewing method. The cup it will be presented in, we do not know, but the water. The true, almost unbearable challenge is the water. What water is to be brought to the tea each and every day. Not to get too esoteric, How clouded will the water be?

If you were just pushing through pads and banging on bags it seems that the water might not be as important. It’s just plain old Lipton. But then again, it is probably best to have the best water (mind) at any point in the process. In this case, where Sylvie is literally trying to re-write her perceptual apparatus, the water is imperative. What I’ve seen is that the process is so arduous, learning to see differently so taxing, it brings with it all the pollutants of the mind that fill our lives. Our deepest “water”, the water of our well, is what ends up being brewed with. And when things grow most difficult we somehow feel that dumping more and more of that water in the cup is the answer. The largest challenge is quieting the water, still-ing the water we bring, so the tea has the greatest chance to express itself.

You can watch the steeping of the tea, and the struggle of the water in real time.

I don’t have the time to exhaustively detail these, but I will be adding to the article as more games reveal themselves over the month. I’m hoping that they will help those watching the videos, and also that they will creatively trigger thoughts for fighters and practitioners at all levels. Perhaps the most foundational principle of all these games is learning how to see or read the Open Side. The Open Side is the direction the belly button faces in your opponent’s natural stance. If your opponent is an Orthodox fighter the open side will be to your left when facing her/him. But, the Open Side will change throughout the fight, if only for a moment. If you finish a round kick, your Open Side has changed. If you bring your rear foot far enough forward to check, your Open Side has changed. If you walk forward for a step, or you miss with a teep, your Open Side has changed. Thais track and see the Open Side wherever it is, and strikes landed to that side score higher (unconsciously in the aesthetic) than they do on the Closed Side. A significant part of these games is in tracking the Open Side, and because these Games are organized here for Southpaws much is about bringing the power side into it’s natural attack to the Open Side that sits opposite it when facing Orthodox fighters. As a Lefty much of your style concerns itself with this. You have to defend your Open Side against your opponent’s natural power, and deliver your power to their Open Side.

Karuhat switches a lot against Sylvie in these sessions. He’s a natural switching fighter, but I think he’s also training her brain to track the Open Side, which on him will move back and forth. All these games are transposable to Orthodox fighters, all that is required is quick lead leg switch steps, or walking into favorable stances, but for the sake of clarity we’re just talking about Opposite Stance match ups.

Game 1

Most of these games are most effective with the opponent on the ropes, but they can be played anywhere in the ring I supposed. The reason why Karuhat chooses the ropes is that they limit the opponent’s degrees of freedom. With her/his back to the ropes there are only three fundamental directions to move: left, right or forward (I won’t talk about the lean back over the ropes which is also available, something you’ll see Karuhat use against Sylvie very frequently). The Side to Side Game makes use of the core Southpaw advantage of having power opposite the Open Side. It is used to funnel the opponent into your power. It’s as simple as using your lead side weapons and cut-offs to give your opponent only one avenue of escape, then anticipating this and punishing it primarily with a high scoring mid-kick. It’s has lots of subtlety too because you may start off harrying your opponent to your right (away from your power) so you can properly begin the funneling in your own due time. If your opponent is square to you, you may force them to your right just so you can start the Game with a cut-off or outside kick. One of the advantages of the eventual forcing of your opponent to your left is that you can easily back-foot them for second, depriving them of the rear leg check on your rear kick. The timing of this back-footing can create easy kicking opportunities, and it is one of the things that comes with reading.

Game 2

When you aren’t pushing your opponent along the ropes, side to side, you will often find yourself fairly square with them. It may happen in the corner, or just mid-rope, but this Game is a big part of what Karuhat does. Here everything is eyes. He is looking for the forward weight shift that signals a kick or a cross (power against your Open Side). This is one of the reasons behind his own personal attack style that frequently involves a false “tell”. He will often lead with his chest rising a little, or with a head dip, to trigger the eyes of his opponent. What he does with this tell is that he’ll either force the opponent to check defensively (limiting their movement options), and produce his attack a beat slower than anticipated, or he’ll hide attacks by removing the tell. He’s always playing with forward weight signals. But, when watching his opponent he is very clued into seeing the forward weight shift. This is a core part of the “reading” he is teaching Sylvie. When you are able to counter ON the shift it can feel that you are inside your opponent’s thoughts, beating them on the strike. This is something you see Saenchai do all the time to western opponents. He’s watching the weight shift of often fairly stiff opponents. The primary counter on the weight shift is a kick to the Open Side. This is high scoring in Thailand and can be a power shot. The Game of Weigh Shift watching can devolve into an assortments of fakes and counter fakes between two fighters. If this results in forcing a check in your opponent you can move to Game 3, Attacking a Posted Fighter.

Aside from just trying to jump the gun on the weight shift with a rear kick or knee, once your opponent is coming forward Karuhat likes a few counters. If she/he reaches you with hand pressures he likes to softly parry down and pivot out to kick. The lead leg can also be cut or sweep-tapped. In the Karuhat Intensive video series though you’ll see him repeatedly on the ropes lean exaggeratedly forward and hold the beat, so Sylvie can start picking up on this as a trigger.

Game 3

A second Game within a more squared off situation is attacking the posted fighter. When a fighter is on the ropes and raises their leg to check a kick they are posted. Their degrees of freedom are highly reduced. When a fighter is back-legged (put on their back foot) they are also posted. And when a fighter turtles they are posted (though on two legs). In this game the read is on their standing leg. Most of Karuhat’s posted attacks are to the torso. Body shots and teeps punish a rear leg check against a feigned kick. He also has a version of the body cross that morphs into a head or mid-kick if the opponent is able to draw themselves backward into the ropes, onto the back foot. There is a micro game within the game that consists of simply attacking the standing leg with low kicks, or hooking the Open Side (away from the standing leg), wherein you could just go back and forth. The posted fighter is harried and attacked in all 3 weak points in a kind of whack-a-mole. Standing leg, head, body, round and round.

Triggering a Game

Aside from simply reading a thorough-going opponent, Karuhat is also constantly moving between them purposely. It is not just taking what your opponent gives you, but also putting them into a Game they seem not adept at themselves. It’s the switching between Games that keeps your opponent guessing, and when you can put them there they may not entirely be sure what Game they are in at any one time. This has been one of the early frustrations for Sylvie in this kind of teaching because it’s a lot of reading. One of the keys she’s discovered when finding herself stuck in a Game she isn’t doing well in is to switch to a Game she feels confident in. It could be something as simple as kicking the standing leg, or drawing a check so she can body punch or teep. By limiting the focus you can re-calibrate, get comfortable, and then expand experimentally into a new Game.

Game 4

This was a very small Game Karuhat introduced yesterday, just to show how Games can evolve. It’s a Game that fighters like Lungsuan or Yodkhunpon played very well. It is a tracking game where you just track the Open Side, fighting close and knee that side, making use of the skip-step knee when necessary. It can evolve into a kind of Side To Side game where you set up for the power left knee, but usually it’s just a hemming game, offering lots of points and punishment. There is a knee technique that you optimally need for this, a straight knee that has a curve to it (which follows the retreating opponent), but it makes for a very nice Open Side pressure, no matter where your opponent turns on the ropes, and compliments hand combinations nicely. You can see Yodkhunpon’s version of the (slightly) curved knee (which is different than Karuhat’s which is longer) here:

Of course there is no limit to these kinds of Games. What is helpful is to see them in this chunked way, embodying deeper principles of attack, in that they eventually evolve into the full reading of your opponent. Weight transfer, delay, Open Side vulnerability, standing leg posting, much of what Karuhat is doing is working to limit the degrees of freedom that your opponent is capable of. It means that she/he becomes more predictable, more anticipated. If you come to realize that from a position they are only likely to do 2 or 3 things (instead of an imagined 8), you can become much more adept at reading which one it is going to be, and seeking out the natural hole or weakness that displayed.

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If you aren’t following the Karuhat Intensive sessions yet on vimeo I urge you to because there is nothing like it in the history of documenting a personal Golden Age fighting style, we’re watching the blueprinting of an entire and unique fighting style right before our eyes – as cameraman I’m amazed at what I’m seeing while I’m standing there. The Games illustrated here may help you get more out of these fantastic videos. Or, if you are a patron you can find these Games in the sessions Sylvie has posted in the Muay Thai Library there.

Make no mistake, this will be the hardest thing Sylvie has ever done – and I say that about someone whose fought every 11 days for the last 6 years, something I’m not sure any fighter, male or female regardless of nationality, has done. This is going to be harder than that. And I can’t wait because Sylvie is completely up for it. She’s going to crush this, on the way to her unearthly goals. But compared to all of that this is still mind boggling. There is nothing we could do other than to dive right into it and try to bring as many of you along for the ride.

So what am I talking about, why so hard? I’m going to leave aside just the fact that she’s aiming to train with two legends of the ring – Karuhat Sor Supawan and WBC World Champion Chatchai Sasakul, one-on-one every single day, and I’m going to leave aside that in the evenings Sylvie will then be training at what I believe is the toughest gym in Thailand, Dejrat Gym, home of the Thai National team – this gym is tough not because of how hard they work, and they do, but because of the unique character of Arjan Surat who breaks you down mentally, especially if you speak Thai, only to build you up, to break you down, to build you up, etc., fashioning a harder and harder personal steel; and I’m going to leave aside that each evening when she gets home exhausted from that gym she’s going to sit down and do film review of the morning’s training with Karuhat, as she voices over for everyone what we will the be uploading and posting to Sylvie Study for patrons. I’m going to leave all that aside. What is going to be so hard is what it is that Karuhat is teaching her. It will pull at the very nerves of what Sylvie is made of, the passages at which an animal, its faculties, takes in the world.

Sylvie and I talk a lot about what exactly it is that Karuhat is teaching. He pretty much hates holding pads, and he doesn’t really work on technical dimensions. What we came to realize – and Sylvie talks about this in her vlog – is that Karuhat is teaching Sylvie how to read. Not “read” as in “look closely and observe”, but actually to look at the body as if it is composed of letters. Okay, this might seem a little out there, but bear with me. Shapes. What he teaches her though a kind of slow, constant sparring – stopping onto the break into a correction or admonishment – is to recognize the shapes and positions of an opponent, and to read what they mean. It’s like “seeing openings” but it is much more than that. That would be like calling Reading “hearing sounds”. Hopefully this is something that Sylvie can really bring out in the hours of commentary that she’s going to be doing over the next month, but he is actually teaching Sylvie literacy. Yes, you can fight quite a bit, and have pretty good success if you learn your combos and bite down and throw them over and over AND over. A lot of kickboxing fighting is like this. But the reason why Thais fight so differently than everyone else – and they do – is that they are literate readers. It’s the reason why Saenchai can face some pretty competent western fighters and just completely overwhelm them, looking like he’s in the matrix. It’s because he is in the matrix. He’s got night-vision while everyone else is feeling around, or popping out their memorized combos, looking for openings. Karuhat, one of the greatest feel fighters Thailand has produced has been teaching Sylvie how to read already in the many long form (Karuhat) sessions available on Patreon. The elements of what they are going to do are already there. But now it’s immersive. Every single day.

In fighting Reading entails: feeling the space and directing it’s stricture, seeing the shape of the body and recognizing it’s support (legs, balance), recognizing the Open Side and seeing when it changes, using rhythm to lull and delay to slip past, creating tension to make your opponent more readable. None of this falls within the realm of combinations or even techniques. Sylvie’s been kind of blessed – and cursed – as a fighter. Combinations have always been an anathema to her. She couldn’t throw one to save her life. She does not trust them. This forced her to be without one of the great cheats of fighting. When you can’t bluff your way through space with aggressive, memorized action you are forced to live on the edges of fighting in all the small things. This is one reason why she became a clinch fighter. In those small spaces she could fight for dominance. What Karuhat is doing, and it began most sincerely when he switched her to Southpaw to erase much of what was, is teaching reading, literacy. Installing new software, or an even better analogy, a new operating system. Now the problem with “reading” in this sense is that if you aren’t very far along with it it is almost useless. It’s like sounding out words letter by letter, not something that is even close to reading per se. And under stress much of what you learn is just thrown out the window because the body trusts what the body trusts, and nothing else. In order for reading to work it has to completely take hold. It has to invade your perceptual mechanisms. It has to become not only the “what” but also the “how” of seeing. That’s why it has to get into the nerves.

Why I say that this is going to be the hardest thing Sylvie’s ever done? Sylvie had a problem with violence. I’ve written about what I believe Sylvie’s doing through her voluminous fighting. I believe she’s building a new house out of a house smashed by violence. A house of techniques, culturation, rites and will. Fighting. Renown kru in Chiang Mai Andy Thomson was fond of saying: When the student is ready the teacher presents himself. It is insane that Karuhat as a teacher has presented himself to Sylvie. It’s almost out of a Kung Fu movie. He’s not a kru who actually has students. Something in him. And something in her, found each other. And he wants her to see. It will be the hardest thing in the world, as fatigue starts to build up over the repeated days, and as a student seeks to please the teacher, to let go of the old way of seeing (or not seeing). The body knows, and has stresses build the old grooves of perception tenaciously grip in like iron talons. You can not shake them free. Karuhat will patiently guide Sylvie through the perceptions of reading, he is incredible at this, but only by letting go of the old assurances of what is real (faculties of perception) and allowing oneself to see, a new, will vision take hold. Honestly, I’m honored to be a part of this. No second of it will be wasted, every moment will be earned. And it is incredible that others like you will be allowed to come along.