Awareness Training

How to get smarter, faster, and more aware.

Keen senses, situational awareness. That psychic radar that high level martial artists are supposed to have. Is it a myth? Is it qi power? Is it mysterious spirits and guardian angels?

No. It’s the product of trained attention. And I am going to share the method for training the skills. This is deep kung fu. You start with six questions that you ask yourself about everything.

# The Six Sense Gates Questions

What does it look like?

What does it feel like?

What does it smell like?

What does it taste like?

What does it sound like?

What do I know about it?

These questions are prompts to get your nervous system used to paying attention to data you might usually edit out of your experience. This is not mystical or mysterious. You are prompting yourself to pay attention to things.

In the case of Building the Ball qigong, these questions increase our ability to pay attention to an read energy. You can think of this as weightlifting for your awareness.

This is a grounded means of exploring any idea or sensation. It can help us to get a lot of details that we have been trained to ignore.

Practicing a kung fu movement? Ask yourself these questions.

Studying a new concept? Ask yourself these questions.

Reading a concept in a sacred scripture? Ask yourself these questions.

They engage your entire organism in working with whatever it is you are learning.

These concepts help you utilize your entire being in sensing and learning. They will sharpen your perceptions and enable you to develop those weird sensory abilities that people often assume are psychic.

Being psychic is a woo woo way to talk about paying attention. I have said many time that the martial arts we practice are vehicles for growing awareness.

These questions also foster flexibility of thinking. Asking yourself what does Algebra taste like? What does Plato smell like? What do I know about baking cookies?

It is not important that you create answers. Answers are just data. These questions are prompts to elicit that data from your own organism. Your body, your emotions, your mind are all sources of information. They are always sensing and taking in data at all times.

Don’t treat any of them as mysterious. Treat them as instruments that are at your disposal for interacting with reality. That is what these questions elicit.

If you can’t see? Ok. You still have five sources of data. If you can’t hear? Still five sources of data. This is the essence of realizing that you are not helpless even if you lose access to one of your sense organs.

The last one, the knowing, is super important for reducing your susceptibility to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the seductive state in which you think you know more than you do. By questioning “What do I know about it?” You create space to examine what you would gloss over and ignore in defense of your own ego.

The answers to these questions is going to be subjective. As you practice with the six sense gates, you will begin to develop self knowledge. You don’t judge your answers or non answers. You simply ask and see the data.

This is a subtle skill. It takes practice but it will pay off in an amazing number of ways, but only if you are willing to practice. Many students fail to take this seriously. Will you?

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