Student Letters

Student Letters - Part IV

My name is Eric. I have been training with Master Savelli for 11 years. I would like to relate two experiences I've had recently where I've used some of the training:

About 6 months ago, I went out after work with a friend to shoot some pool. We ended up having a good time and stayed at the bar for quite a while. She decided she wanted to do some dancing and we ended up on the dance floor. It was about 1 AM so the crowd was thinned out and there weren’t a lot of people around (maybe like 15 people on a fair sized dance floor). As we were dancing, two guys stepped onto the dance floor about 30 feet away to my left. As soon as they stepped on the floor a thought process in my head said, "They’re coming for me." Sure enough, they danced their way across the floor, directly at us. I didn’t give any indication that I knew they were there, but tracked them as they moved across the floor. As the one came up behind me to my left to "accidentally" slam into me, I moved backwards, so when he hit me, he was knocked off balance for a second. The other guy tried the same thing, and I met his motion, knocking him back a little. The first one recovered his balance and then we had a little three man mosh pit for a few seconds. During this time, without really thinking about it, I directed them towards the center of the dance floor, and managed to position myself in between them and the girl I was dancing with. I wasn’t really trying to do anything special just not get pushed around and embarrassed. The slam dancing wasn’t going their way, so the one on my left went into a boxing stance and the one on my right dropped into a karate stance. Instantaneously I had a huge surge of energy. This is difficult to describe, but even though here were two people about to attack me, something inside me wouldn’t let me strike them until I knew for sure they could hurt me. At the same time, I couldn’t just stand there because I was open for attack from two directions. Not making any conscious decisions, I started to move my arms. I wasn’t using any particular technique we had ever worked on, but rather a random combination of a bunch of hand, arm and elbow techniques we had learned separately. I was moving very, very fast. The result was that I was always in a position to strike either person, but was moving in such a random pattern they couldn’t pick out any openings. My body was moving by itself and I was essentially a spectator. I saw the fight go out of the karate-stance guy almost immediately. He was dealing with something he never saw before and wanted nothing to do with it. The boxer-stance guy threw 2 hesitant punches (I think he felt he had to do something). They were both deflected by my motion and never had a chance to score. At this point they were both just looking at me, unsure what to do and I was getting very annoyed with the whole situation. I also had been standing in the same spot for maybe 5 seconds and my body didn’t want to be there any more. I stopped moving my arms, and moved through the space between them, hitting each one with a shoulder on my way through. I turned around as they started turning to face me and saw a bouncer moving into the space I had just vacated. He had been coming up behind me. He did the whole "Is there a problem here?" thing, and everyone said "No". He left, they left, and we went over to the bar. As it turned out, the girl I was with knew of the two guys from hanging out at that bar (I had only been there a few times). She told me they got their kicks from going after people. It also turned out not hurting anyone was in my best interest, since as we left, I saw that besides the two bouncers working, there was a uniformed police officer working the door.

I am currently in a sand volleyball league. Master Savelli suggested to me that I try to use my mind against the other team when I serve and in general in the game to try to make them miss the ball. This past week we were playing the team which was tied with us for first place in the league. Two of our players were out and we ended playing short players to avoid a forfeit (3 on 6 for the first two games and 4 on 6 for the last game). The first game we got pounded (scored 2 points). Midway through the second game I remembered what Master Savelli said and started to use my mind against the other team. I started to get a feeling for it and thought it was having an effect. We scored 6 points. The third game, when we switched to 4 players, I was distracted at the beginning as we tried to position ourselves. We were quickly down 6-2. We took a time-out to re-group and I started to focus on using my mind. When we started playing again, almost immediately the atmosphere was totally different. Not only did the other team start making mistakes they weren’t making earlier, but our team, and especially me, started making some great plays. Over a period of about 25 minutes (we had lost both of the previous games in 20 minutes combined), we built the score to 10-8 in our favor. During that time the other team became noticeably frustrated. We ended up losing the game, but from our teams point of view it was almost as good as a win, since we knew we were going to meet them in playoffs 6 on 6, and they knew it too. If they could barely win 6 on 4, they had some problems to look forward to. The team that played afterwards needed some substitutes and one of my teammates and I filled in for them. I continued using my mind with very good results. I served quite a few aces, and during the game I was thinking that my overall play was probably the best I had ever done. We won all three games. Afterwards, one of my team members that had not played the second match walked up to me and said, "That was the best I have ever seen you play."