Indigenous Ability

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A High n Tight Ride Submission Option by Mark Hatmaker

Thoreau, The Ojibwe & Frontier JKD by Mark Hatmaker

[First, Mr. Thoreau, on resolve and every act a work of art or of defacement.] “ Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the God he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them .”—Thoreau · Every act, every choice is but another strike of the chisel on the marble of our Lives. · No hammering—nothing is revealed. · Unaesthetic hammering, a substandard work is revealed. · Be it our bodies, our characters, our interactions with all—we are the Artists. · May we all have the Eyes and Determination of the Old Masters! ...

The Ancient Greek Warrior & The Mescalero Warrior, Part 2 by Mark Hatmaker

THE MESCALERO MOUNTAIN TEACHING “Climb the Mountain. If it is rocky, climb the Mountain. If it is hard, climb the Mountain. If it wakes fright, climb the Mountain. The Mountain is the Way.” Indigenous Tribes of the Americas are full of such youthful “hardship” training. Practices designed specifically to build physical and mental fortitude, dare I say, forge a Warrior Spirit. We find this echoed perfectly in practices 300 centuries ago in Ancient Greece. THE HERCULES ROAD “ Prodicus, who, besides his discoveries in grammar, is the author of a popular and edifying fable which has served in many schoolrooms for many centuries. It tells how Heracles once came to some cross roads, one road open, broad, and smooth and leading a little downhill, the other narrow and uphill and rough: and on the first you gradually became a worse and worse man, on the second a better one.”— Gilbert Murray, The Five Stages of Greek Religion [1925] To Forge Yourself into a Greek Warr...

The Ancient Greek Warrior & The Apache, Part 1 by Mark Hatmaker

“ A Western Apache warrior named Palmer Valor who came of age in the mid-19 th century recalled that his mother had encouraged him to swim in icy streams and endure other hardships when he was a boy so that he would be ready to take on any opponent .”- The Way of the Warrior Indigenous Tribes of the Americas are full of such youthful “hardship” training. Practices designed specifically to build physical and mental fortitude, dare I say, forge a Warrior Spirit. We find this echoed perfectly in practices 300 centuries ago in Ancient Greece. “ As to their bodies, we train them as follows. When they are no longer soft and weak, we strip them, and begin habituating them to the weather, making them used to the seasons, so as not to be distressed by the heat or given to the cold. Then we rub them with olive oil and supple them that they may be more elastic. After that, having invented many forms of athletics and appointed teachers for each, we teach one, for instance, boxing...