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This week, I learned about Place Bonding, Positive Disintegration, and some Ashi Waza (and they hurt).  Place Bonding
We read an article this week about Place Bonding by Hammitt, Backlund, and Bixler. Everything below is from their article but I didn’t cite it appropriately. The idea they write about is rather intuitive and the reason they wrote it was actually an empirical study seeing whether you could identify place bonding statistically through fishermen at a specific river (you can and they did). But the idea is more interesting to me. Imagine a special place to you, a place that has meaning and a place you continue to go back to or think about if you haven’t been there in a while (Viento y Agua, Morro Bay on the central coast of California, and the southern California art museums are where I’m place bonded to). So, I wrote an outline of the article and I figure it’s easier to just list bullet points as I have here to explain Place Bonding:
Positive Disintegration I’m reading this wild and crazy book right now that could be classified as a self-help book. One of the theories to psychological development that they present is Positive Disintegration – the idea that negative and challenging stimuli are not only opportunities for growth but the only meaningful way for an individual to develop. Similar to place bonding (and all these ideas) this makes sense intuitively but developing a framework around the idea turns it into a tool that can be used to do critical work. In this case the tool is used to do the work of psychotherapy and the gift that it brings is a vocabulary and an affirmation that viewing psychological tension is positive. In fact, it says that if you don’t go through the chaos and anxiety of the challenge you will remain in that same state of what is called Primary Integration. I’ve learned in my classes that we are creatures of habit, seeking out the things that make us safe, remind us of the normal and acceptable, and -while we seek novelty- we want that novelty to be in an appropriate paradigm. The Theory of Positive Disintegration, developed by Kasimierz Dabrowski, says that our personalities must be created (as opposed to given to us), we must have appropriate response to stimuli, anxiety and depression precipitate disintegration, our initial personality must disintegrate, development of personal values and emotional reactions is necessary for developing your personality, emotional reactions guide the person toward personality development, it is critical that the person make existential choices based on what they feel are more in line with their autonomously developed values, and (like an autodidact) autopsychotherapy is necessary. This is huge! Think about how affirming this is if you’ve ever dealt with the darkness of existential challenges. The term disintegration is an interesting one for this usage. When I think of disintegrating I think of falling apart and dissipating. And, in actuality, that is what is happening but it’s not the person that is disintegrating; instead, the prior personality (the behaviors, the emotional strategies that worked for ‘lower’ personality, the personality that was ‘given’ to you) disintegrates. Dabrowski says that most people don’t get out of primary integration because it’s too challenging – we just don’t want to push ourselves out of what’s comfortable. Lastly, for this blog anyway, Dabrowski says that 3 things contribute to a person’s Positive Disintegration: overexcitability (increased neuronal sensitivities), specific abilities and talents, and a strong drive toward autonomous growth. Holy shit! This makes so much sense for so may things. I’m thinking of how this explains Victor Frankl’s and Elie Wiesel’s explanation of how some people could survive the horrors of the holocaust and how others couldn’t. I’m also thinking about the folklore of the mentally disturbed artist: the person that creates new and magnificent ways of seeing the world can only do so because of their highly sensitive personality. The other thing I’m thinking about is how you just meet those people who have more ‘grit’ (this is Angela Duckworth’s term and I highly recommend looking this up too). They are driven by Dabrowski’s third factor of the drive toward individual growth and autonomy. I love this theory. Ashi Waza and a neck crank The last couple weeks in Judo we’ve been learning sweeps. I blew my shoulder out so I’ve been focusing on rolling more but the sweeps are powerful. Specifically, we’ve been learning Kouchi Gari and Ouchi Gari (the small inner reap and the big inner reap) and I got to watch my first legit Judo sparring (they call it Randori) on Friday. It was great watching a bunch of black belts going full throttle like angry water buffaloes. Check out this awesome website: http://judoinfo.com/foot-techniques-ashi-waza/ Instead of working throws, I just rolled with someone super close to my size (a rarity). We ran tried to kill each other for a couple rounds and I mostly lost but I lost better than I had before. On one of my last moves before the final buzzer, I was trying to get a choke that I couldn’t get. So, I took what I learned from Oregon Elite Training and transitioned to a sick neck crank that got me the tap. In life I struggle with spontaneity and adaptation and the same is true in fighting. This neck crank was the exception and I suppose that’s called learning.
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