Clive,
You wrote this "But look at the attack again. Slow it down. Then look realistically at ways to get out of the way of the impeding danger. Then realise how easy this is and how stupid you have been."
I can't say this is wrong but I know it rarely works for me. I find that this practice of analyzing after the fact encourages me to attempt to analyze during the attack. Any type of analysis takes way to much time during an encounter. Furthermore when we analyize we are attempting to find the 'right' answer or at least avoid the wrong answer. Often this leads to the freeze response you mentioned. So much going through our heads and so little time. What to do, what to do, what to WHAM!!! It's all over.
My suggestion is don't try to analyze. Don't try to solve the problem. SIMPLY MOVE. Sometimes it will be good. Sometimes it will be bad. So what.
Imho, it is better to move badly than not to move at all. This is the important part coming up now. Each time we move badly we are experiencing our BEST learning opportunity. It seems to me that Systema is an intuitive based learning system and if we are constantly attempting to analyze situations to solve the problem and arrive at the correct answer we are NOT learning intuitively.
Actually we are retarding our ability to learn intuitively. A large part of learning intuitively is learning what does not work and we learn that by doing things wrong or poorly. Over time we intuitively learn not to move a certain way because bad things happen but we have to do them wrong first to achieve the learning. Eventually the amount of times we move poorly decreases and the amount of times well increases.
This type of learning requires the student to be mature enough to realize first when the results are poor. Some folks seem to think everything they do is perfect no matter how crappy. If we aren't honest enough to admit when we have done poorly or done well then we aren't going to be able to learn. Secondly, the student needs to learn to enjoy the mistakes and understand their value in the learning process. This takes a level of confidence and maturity, which I think Systema fosters.
I will be so bold as to make the following statement. Any student of Systema that goes through an entire class without making any mistakes or mis-Q's has probably had one of the most worthless classes of his life and he has no one to blame but himself. During that perfect class this perfect student did not challenge himself with new and creative responses. He stayed in his realm of safety and didn't really learn anything new. Shame, shame, shame.
Of course the counter to intuitive learning is that some folks are just block heads and can't learn under any system. (Insert appropriate smile face here)
mark
:shrug: :shrug:
