How you can get the mental edge with dim mak pressure points training

Have you seen a martial arts movie lately? Or maybe an action blockbuster that included dim mak pressure points....or with one of those fight scenes where the good guy has taken on more than it seems possible to handle, where in the beginning he gets bloodier than the other guy, spends more time being knocked to the ground, and yet, manages at the end to get up and win?

Did you find yourself cheering for him? Did you come out of the movie, or turn off the video, and feel strong, inspired and wanting to train then and there? Did you, for the next week or so, tell everyone you met about the great movie you saw? And did you find yourself working harder in class that week? Did you find yourself invigorated and eager to delve into your dim mak theory and practice?

You may be wandering what this got to do with dim mak training. Well, it’s the other half of the training that differentiates good and great practitioners from the others…it’s the mental attitude!

You may have been inspired to take up martial arts because of the movies you saw, or you may have been inspired to study pressure points because it holds many of the elements that inspired you to martial arts in the first place.

Twenty-five years ago most martial arts were steeped in mystery, not many people in the West were learning them or knew about them. In the movies we saw the martial artist always win over the bad guys. Who wouldn’t be inspired by that?

The martial arts are becoming more popular, in fact, there’s a good chance that if you meet someone in the street, they would have had some martial arts training (good or bad) -- or someone with them would have done some classes. The certainty that you can protect yourself because of your training has diminished.

But if you are a dim mak practitioner, knowing that it is still not available on every local street corner, that gives you an edge. It increases your confidence in knowing that you can protect yourself, it makes you stand a little taller, maybe be more prepared to try and defend yourself, that’s the mental advantage.

Dim mak gives you a mental as well as physical advantage. Harnessing the mental is as important as the physical, in fact it can be the deciding factor in getting yourself safely out of a sticky, dangerous situation.

So, how do you actually gain this advantage?

Dim mak pressure points – The power of focus in the martial arts

The mental edge is as important as the physical edge you gain from practicing dim mak defence. Now let’s look at how strong a force your mental attitude can be, and how to both use dim mak to gain the most of this advantage, and vice-versa, to use this to improve your dim mak.

There’s a lot of information on our website about the techniques and the physical actions of dim mak, but dim mak is also mental. It is an Eastern martial art, steeped in the notion of ‘holistic’, mind and body, physical and mental, Yin and Yang.

When you inflict physical pain to the human body, you also inflict mental pain. In dim mak some of the pressure points you target have huge effects on the human emotions, a pressure point attack can cause anger, fear, depression and other emotional disturbances. These emotional responses can severely affect the ability to physically function.

Fear can paralyse you, stop you from acting at all, or make you act so timidly that your responses are inconsequential. Anger can make you rush, cloud your vision and your judgement, make you strike wildly and ineffectually. Depression can cause you to not even bother, see no point in the fight and give up, you cease to care.

So, a physical strike can adversely affect your mental attitude to the situation, which will in turn adversely affect your physical ability to respond.

The reverse is also true. If the negative attitude comes first, this will negatively affect your physical abilities, which will in turn affect you mental ability again.

Let’s look at an example. Someone approaches you, you can see and sense the anger. They’ll often have their chest stuck out, or they’ll have their head down, a scowl on their face and their tone will be cutting, or sarcastic. This anger is supposed to frighten you, they want you to bow to their will, their showing you that they are not afraid of you, they are trying to make you mentally feel threatened, feel uncertain, back down, they are trying to exert their power, they want to control you.

Now there are two usual instant responses to this. The first is to fight -- instead of making you feel scared, they make you angry, so you square up…as one person once said to me, you think ‘bring it on’.

The second response is the fear -- they intimidate you, you do feel scared, you want to back down, you don’t think you can win this, you think you’ll get hurt, you want to run.

I’m sure you can think of situations like this, even at home. If your friend or relative walks up to you, and you can tell they are already angry, how do you respond? If one of your children questions your authority, what feelings and emotions does this raise?

You can probably think of a few times when you have marched up to someone angry, wanting to enforce your will, trying to make them bow down. It’s part of human nature, it’s built into our very beings, it’s a form of protection, of proving who’s the fittest, yet it’s counter productive.

The key here is one of the basic premises of dim mak…to strike effectively. But to defend yourself against an opponent who is bigger, younger and stronger, you need to be able to focus and think clearly -- you need to control your emotions and focus on what it is you want…to get out of that situation safely with as little personal damage as possible.

You need to control your emotions…use your calmness and focus as a weapon against your aggressor. This is the subject of the next article.

In any sport or physical endeavour, we often focus on the physical techniques and we get distracted by getting these right, but it’s often the mental attitude that defines the great practitioners and competitors in any sport.

Back to those movies, many students are inspired to start training in the martial arts by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li and even some of the Western practitioners such as Jean Claude Van Damme or Steven Segal. And whether you appreciate their style or not, they have done a lot to further the interest in Eastern martial arts practices.

And they all have one thing in common…watch their fight scenes, study their faces, at some point in any legendary fight scene, the table turns in the favour of the good guy, look closely at the face of both fighters at this turning point. The good guy’s face becomes calm, he no longer looks defeated or scared, he’s resolved, focused and determined. He’s taken control of his emotions, and as such he now has control of the situation…and he will win.

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