The Art and Practice of Freedom

When I reflect on my fights I have a tendency to get a little bit fluffy in my descriptions of my experience. I am going to describe what I experienced leading up to and during my fight more directly in an attempt to break myself down. This was my second professional MMA fight. When a fight is booked weeks in advance there is always a warm rush of excitement to carry you through your daily training. Each camp has a very specific theme that will normally settle in mid-way through. The best word I could use to describe this passing camp’s theme would be “receptivity” and/or “freedom”.

I have started to become more accepting of what it is that I am as a fighter and what it is that I am slowly letting go of. The process of freedom for me is interesting because before I started it I had to have an understanding that I am not actually free at all. This was a large pill for me to swallow especially because I have always desired to be special in any way that I could, however; in that insane pursuit, I uncovered a dark truth for myself. The reality was that I had fallen victim to the opposite of what I wanted to be: just like everybody else. The slow and painful realization of this was also a wonderful shifting of goals from wanting to be different from the external information to wanting to be free from the external information.

For this fight camp, I started to play with different states of mind in my training. I repeated my mantra before my training session but it felt contrived, it has a time and a place of use but it brought to much harshness to my sessions that I did not really need. I tried isolating myself, creating impossible boundaries between myself and my training partners and coach. I realize now that I was protecting my own vulnerability, clinging tightly to the veil so that I could hide underneath it. Because my ego was gripping my mind, my learning suffered. I knew that I needed to find a way to empty myself.

Something started to change when my curiosity developed a life of its own, it was drawn to traditional Martial Arts, specifically Martial Arts that were developed around the use of a weapon. I started becoming mildly obsessed with Vikings (the show and the true history). This wonder spoke to something inside of me, the “Berserker” within waiting to be let out, I am already well

acquainted with this part of me. I often joke that I have the serial killer gene but there is some uncomfortable truth to that claim. The more I learned about the history of war the more it made my stomach turn. I have trained the kill switch and it will never go away, a fighter needs it, awakening that side of me has always been natural for me to do. As I learned more about the brutality of human history, my curiosity started to drift towards the other side of the coin, the nurturing, the soft and the feminine side of me. I have gone my entire life without exploring half of myself. To clarify, I am not talking about the kind of femininity that has a requirement to be more agreeable or wear more dresses and pink bows. It’s not even the kind of radical femininity that requires a certain armpit hair length or a shaved head….no, it is not in the act of filling due to lack but in the maintenance of remaining empty. The true feminine does not awake via an external effort, it awakens through a relinquishing of it. How does the relinquishing of something give me more power? Because when I find emptiness I have made space for information to run through me.

As I have gotten older and I have become more influenced by the external interferences the further I drown into a narrative and the less my spirit has been able to express itself but, training my spirit in action has started to throw those interferences in reverse. I have always said that the fact that people fight on canvas is no mistake, fighting is an art and art has always been an expression of freedom. To me, freedom is defined by the act of stepping out of your own way to allow for the universe to speak through you. It is the transition between being the paintbrush to becoming the art itself.