The Taproot Podcast - The Psychology of the Katana: Exploring Japanese Swords, Bushido & Warrior Philosophy

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Join therapist Joel Blackstock, martial artist James Waites, and esoteric practitioner Alice Hawley as they delve into the fascinating world of Japanese swords. This episode explores the metallurgy, history, and psychological significance of the katana – from its invention by Masamune after the Mongol invasions to its deep connections with Bushido philosophy and Japanese culture. Discover how the unique forging process of folding different steels creates both strength and flexibility, mirroring the integration of the human psyche. Learn about legendary duelist Miyamoto Musashi's unconventional fighting techniques, the mental aspects of swordplay, and how swords symbolize clarity, truth, and trauma healing across cultures. Whether you're interested in martial arts, Japanese history, metallurgy, or psychological symbolism, this episode offers profound insights into how ancient wisdom continues to resonate in our modern world. Listen to "The Psychology of the Katana" and explore more thought-provoking conversations at GetTherapyBirmingham.com. #Katana #JapaneseSwords #Bushido #SamuraiPhilosophy #MartialArtsPsychology #MiyamotoMusashi #Metallurgy #SwordSymbolism #BirminghamTherapyPodcast #WarriorMindset

Hey guys, it's the Tapestry Theory of E-Collective podcast, Discover, Kill, Grow. And today we're talking about the psychology of the katana, the Japanese samurai sword. So I'm here with James Waits and with Alice Hawley. Hi, there. And we're going to go through the psychology of swords. James has some personal stories and also advanced techniques he's going to go through the psychology of swords. James has some personal stories and also advanced techniques he's going to share with us from his training. And Alice is going to go through some of the spirituality and the esoteric connections that swords share

across culture. So I'm going to just to jump into this quickly because we got a little bit of time today. I am a metallurgy nerd. Like my wife would tell you that I like knives, but I'm not like really into knives as much as like super purpose driven steels. I think you're just kind of interesting that you can have something that is like as ubiquitous as metal, but it is as different as you can make steel. So I don't like I have a couple of knives. I'm not really, I don't really collect that. I'm more interested in like different things. And so a katana is a little bit different than a Western sword. There's a lot of sort of amateur and professional

like pseudoscience out there in that space, like about what katanas can do and whether or not they're magic. But so like, if you look at something like this, then my webcam is not great. But you can kind of see the layers on the metal here and like the maker's mark on the side. And my webcam is trying to make it disappear.

So this thing was covered in rust when we stayed at this like really cheap kind of tacky bed and breakfast in like Tennessee. And they had all these like dollar general knives in the drawer. But there is one where I kept telling my wife, I think this one's actually like a VG-10 or like white paper one or something.

I think this is a high carbon steel. Because a lot of the steels that Japan uses, they're forged. And they're folded to kind of laminate the blade with different metals. We'll get into what that looks like with a katana, but they have a different they have like a different texture. Like you can almost kind of feel. I don't know if it's the crystal structure or what it is, but there's like a slickness

that's almost like fish scales to some of them. And this thing was covered in rust. Like I have it completely like sanded down now. But I asked the guy, I was like, I think this is like a really expensive knife. Like I don't want to. But it seems to be like going to waste here. Would you take like thirty dollars for it? I think this is like a really expensive knife. Like I don't want to. But it seems to be like going to waste here. Would you take like thirty dollars for it? I think this is like a three or four hundred dollar thing.

But I don't know. I could be wrong. And like he just said, four hundred dollars is too much to have for a knife. And then he like took the thirty dollars and gave it to me. So I cleaned it up when I came home and ends up that it is like, you know, about a three hundred and fifty dollar Japanese like knife that's folded. So like the thing that makes the steel different, like this is probably like you know, about a $350 Japanese like knife that's folded. So like the thing that makes the steel different, like this is probably like a steel like VG 10 or white paper one.

Like when you deal with like Western steel, like from the medieval period, a lot of it is designed to be like durable and floppy. It's something that would be like similar to like what a modern spring steel is. Whereas, and it's not like wivvily floppy, but you don't want to hit a suit of armor and then have your sword bend. Whereas with the East, they had something called Damascus steel or Wootz steel, which

you start seeing in the history, Western history when people are encountering it. And essentially, they would throw just a lot lot of grass and straw like into the Arabs would until like you started to get a ton of carbonization. And that carbonization is something that you can make the steel a whole lot harder. So when you make it hard, it's more likely to break because it is a lot more rigid, but it also can hold like a much finer edge. Like it can it can hold and so if you're dealing with a long like

Arabic sword that you're gonna swing from horseback or something that's pretty useful. Whereas if you're gonna fight a suit of armor it may not be as useful. And so that's wuts or Damascus steel. So the way that it's pretty amazing like what Japanese Smiths, because in Japan, there's like some overlap with the rest of the world. But now like we basically know about the crystal structure of metals, that there's like crystals inside of these things that you were making, and that that you can model that in 3d, you can figure out like what you can do to martensite to like add another atom to it. But obviously, they don't have anything like that. So you have people that are basically just sort of like banging hot metal and folding it until they

like discover incredibly complex things, which is kind of interesting. And so the the history, the quick history of the Japanese katana is that, you know, you've got these swords that are relatively soft, they start to take on like a little bit of a curve, but when they're Mongol invasions of Japan are happening, the king is like, the emperor is like, these things don't, and this is probably an oversimplified history, we don't have a good enough weapon, what do we do?

And that one of the master forgers invents the Katana and figures out his name's Masamune. It probably is like a lot of different techniques that come together over time, but the pop history is that one guy just invents it in his shed and takes it to the Emperor, which maybe that happens, and he says, you know, that if you put clay along the side of the sword, you're going to get a harder edge because you're cooling it at different temperatures and the sword's also gonna bend. So the bend comes from the actual crystal structure

diverging and pulling against itself, not because they just bent a metal rod and a katana. And then also he figures out a way to layer steels and fold them together so that you get the properties of both. So you can get a really rigid edge that if you made the whole sword out of that, it would shatter like glass. But when you're folding it in kind of a Z shape along the spine with softer metals,

it's going to benefit from the flexibility of those. And so these are front weighted swords like they're not like balanced like a western sword that you could really spin or something, because you're supposed to be playing. And James will probably go into more of that like with the momentum of these things they're weighted six about six inches from the hills or the suba so like a lot of these these things have more to do with the way that you play with the inertia of it than just something that's when you hear of a masterwork sword, you probably think it's like super wieldy,

super well balanced. And when you first hold a katana, like they're kind of unwieldy. Like you're like, for example, like in Budo or Eido or Kendo, one of the drawing forms, like, you know, you could be the strongest guy in the world, but that doesn't, and you could hit really hard,

but that doesn't mean that you can necessarily accelerate something faster. Muscles tend to have like a set speed that enzymes can accelerate them But when you're drawing the sword you push it against the scabbard and kind of a triangle shape away from you And you you keep about two inches of the blade inside of the scabbard or the seya So when you're pushing it out you're getting this tension built up So that when you pull the scabbard off or the seahawf, that blade is going to pop out with a ton of force. So it's like little

tensioning tricks like that are kind of what make this a different style and a different psychology of fighting than the West. So that got a little bit more on some of the blacksmiths and the history there, but I'm going to turn that over to James to kind of go from there because he's got some stories will break up the flow a little bit. Yeah. Well, I was going to say I'm a I'm a freaking nerd when it comes to all this and really just the history part. You're right, after the Mongol invasion, Masamune actually studied broken blades and was trying to figure out why are we breaking our blades against these invaders they had a lot of shields So you can imagine

At the time that Japan was on my majority horseback shooting bows and had long kind of like naginata as which are you know staff swords big staff long blade and They they it's like a sword bladed spear in it. Yeah. Naginata. Yeah. So it's just a, a thicker blade all the way through and some, some fitted that blade to actual sword hilts and use that on foot. But yeah, that was the primary, that was a part primary fighting way of the samurai,

especially when, when the Mongols invaded and they hit Tsushima and Iki Island. You know, they got shocked. The Mongols, they had bombs. So this is the first time that we saw, kind of like in Japan, saw iron bombs being thrown. They also fought people with shields and with like this crazy type of armor, heavier armor. And noticing that their arrows are bouncing off. Arrows are kind of bouncing off. The only way that they were able to kind of win some of the battles on those islands were the close quarter combat of just the rage of the samurai or not the rage of the warriors back then they even got wrote about was that a Japanese person with a sword is a scary thing after the

first invasion and that was written about them before they I think they arrived back at like 1281 again we had a typhoon help out with you know the sinking of the Mongol ships before they landed on mainland Japan. But that was a crazy thing, too. There was a lot of spirituality in that time. The Shogun and the head of, I guess, well, kind of the military-esque, not really big Shogun at that moment.

But that was the spread of Buddhism through that. And it was the way the warrior way Bushido after that. That was what Toki, Toki Mune. At the time, there was no solid thing, Japan, like solid religion or solid type of thinking way. We didn't see the samurai show up until after this moment in general. So a lot of the thinking from Buddhism and Zen and Shintoism were kind of the thing that creates the like the Bushido, like the kind of the warrior way at that time.

So it was kind of broken up. You know, we get a lot of at the Mongol invasion, there's no really kind of like set and stone warrior delivery system until after, in fact, after they redid all these things, created the katana. Masamune found a better sword. He created one. And you had the shogun at the time kind of transcend religion throughout the ranks. So he spread basically Buddhism or Zen through the warrior class. And so you have these kind of elite soldiers that come up from that. So you have the ones that are studying poetry, that are kind of meditating and finding their inner self, the warrior self, you

know, that the kind of the Bushido, their warrior way, a sense of like, kind of some kind of essence of stoicism, except that you have you have them express in a lot of ways. You see a lot of samurai expressed through art, whether it's poetry, writing, even art would block all those things. So you have a really change in Japanese society in that moment, which is the one of the craziest things about that time. Well, and one of the things when we talk about like the psychology of the katana that you're hitting on that I'd like to hear you kind of talk to specifically, if you have a second is like, there are these sort of interesting tensions in Japanese culture, because I think we view it as like, that it likes tradition or

that it likes authority or that it likes like personal work and reflection in ways where when you really sit with the culture, there's kind of like an equilibrium to it. Like, you know, Japan has an emperor, but the emperor and you have to show fealty to the emperor and you have to show all this respect and they're proud of the emperor, but the emperor really isn't that powerful. Like the shoguns actually ran the country, which continues until World War Two, where there's still debate about whether or not the emperor was even really that important or if it was the generals that were going to run the country, which they probably were. And so that idea of being both an artist and a warrior, that you had to be both,

or that somehow your art was informing the warrior culture, so many of these things were a response to limitations. The thing about the Mongol invasion that made the swords and the warfare have to change is that Japan is a pretty metal poor country. Like there's not a ton of metal resources, especially not accessible at the time. So when the Mongols came in, they basically had hardened leather armor that was just, it was boiled, it was probably chemically treated, it was woven differently, and it was like hard to cut through. And they also had iron plate, which there just wasn't enough iron for there to even be like what you would have seen in the bronze age in some places of Europe. In Japan, you know,

almost closer to the Renaissance, there just wasn't enough for there to be like infantry iron armor. And that's what was breaking the swords was that, you know, they had, they didn't have the resources of these other countries, but what they did was they had this culture that was able to contemplate itself, you know, go inward and then come up with these creations. And then the culture is like still very proud of that. So, you know, when you could you talk about like in Bushido, the way of like, you know, some of that's Taoism, too, I think, that idea that that you have energy is really what's behind everything. So that same energy that is cultivated in art

can also be cultivated in war. The energy that is held still in the body in meditation is also preparing to come outward through combat, things like that. I don't know. Because it seems like that's kind of what you're hitting on. I'd like to, you have more kind of practical experience with that than I do.

Yeah, no, you kind of learned, it's been forever since I you know, I did kindo and shinned kindo a good bit God about ten years ago And you got you learn a lot about the cuts or the kata that they get go through and they all are in some specific way tied to yourself and tied to your enemy. And it's really about the confidence in you. Your confidence, your kind of like your solid state is gonna be the thing that overcomes enemy.

If you for a second think about, and we'll get to that when we talk about Musashi, but the thought of, could I lose this? You've already lost type thinking. It's really about, you have to, you and yourself have to be confident in your sword. Your sword is extension of you and if you don't have no confidence down the line, you've already lost and that's the thing with Shinkendo, the biggest thing in that that's a that's a type of martial art that is not necessarily like

like full like full- on kendo, meaning that it's not, you're not dueling the entire time. Shinkendo is more about your footwork, about the actual martial art of stances, things like that. But the biggest thing what happens at the end of Shinkendo when you get up in rank, you do Toshimagiri, so test cutting. So you actually, you go up through the ranks where you actually

Have now access to a legit cutting sword I think they're called shinkans Like you have a Ido. It's a blunted blade for kind of test swings, but everything you're right going back to what you said Joel that the the whole thing of Visualizing the sword is not the biggest thing. It's visualizing what's past. It's kind of like hunting. Like you look at your target,

but you also look what's beyond the target. And same thing with the sword. If you think about cutting the thing in front of you, your sword is always gonna get stuck in the thing in front of you. If you thought about how your blade just transcends through the thing in front of you, you let it flow. So Tosh McGeary is crazy. I never got to, I'll be honest, I never got to full on Tosh McGeary. I was able to practice indoors and not

necessarily go practice at the Cherry Blossom Festival in Mount Brook. But if you go there, you'll actually see on the stage every year in the Jared Blossom Festival the Shinkendo people doing Tosh McGeary, which is awesome, which started in test cutting. The helm splitting cut is the big thing that you learn because it was the thing that could kind of stripe through iron helmets at the time. And so when you get so good with following, the sword is a slicing instrument and not necessarily beating you up with it. So that was the whole thing is like,

you had to make your sword slide through time and space through your opponent and that's, or whatever you're cutting and it just goes like that. But you have to think about that. You have to psych yourself up. If you think, oh my gosh gosh am I gonna cut through this? To Tommy Matt, which is what you use in Tosh McGarry You've already lost you have to think about how you're gonna go through this thing and it's a lot of just again

That's what the cuts and everything you do is you are trying to flow through it And it's all about just allowing yourself to calm if you have a terrible grip if you're too You know anxious and holding onto their sword, you're gonna feel that sword's weight in your hands a lot more. If you, for a second, you think about how I'm gonna swing this, and depending on what cut,

the more mind games that you play with yourself, the more you're gonna lose. Yeah, the idea of emptiness, of zen, of flow state. We talk about artists and intuitives and trying to help patients tell the difference between their own kind of unconscious biases and trauma and flow state of intuition on here a ton. I mean, I think there's so much rich there to mind. Before we get into like the, some of the history of the warriors, duelists, and the specific schools of the forgers in Japan, I was wondering if, Alice, if you have anything about the nature of swords or any of that. I don't know if you've ever looked at the death poem tradition. There's a really good

book that I had for a long time. I think that it's disappeared from our waiting room at some point. But there's like a book of Japanese death poetry that like Zen monks would meditate and then come up with a death poem like during the last days of their life that are hakus. They're very short and they're really pretty. I mean some of my favorites are like you know there's a guy that wrote one when he dies in a battle. You know they find it you know he says something about like you know, there's a guy that wrote one when he dies in a battle, you know, they find it, you know, he says something about like, you know, this is a field of warriors. We are icicles melting, returning to the stream, you know,

just so simple. But, and then there's another about like your whole life, you are a ship in a river, a paper doll drifting in a river that a child has dropped, but eventually the river reaches the sea. That kind of idea of energy and continuity that you find in a lot of those traditions. Alice, you do tarot.

I know there's a suite of swords. There's also probably a lot of overlap with swords and esoteric magic. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah. And everything James is saying just directly flows. I mean, you're talking about energy and how. And it is implicit, like what swords represent

and what the history of it. And especially listening to you all talk about it, swords isn't necessarily. Swords and metallurgy are not one of my special interests. But I am. It's fascinating to hear you all talk about the history and what James is talking about with, you know, how you direct energy and the sword being an extension of you. And so swords are representative of air energy in our, you know, air, water, and air when,

I mean, air, water, earth, fire, what am I talking about either? But they represent air energy. And so they always are about clarity and logic and intellect and it's sort of the left side of the brain, the part of your brain that kind of focuses and uses that precision to be able to come to, to be able to like create thoughts instead of just amorphous feelings.

It's like that sharpness of swords. That's the air energy that comes in. So yeah, they represent. And so then just in general, that's kind of what we get with swords. And then, yes, within the tarot, that's what the suit represents. And so with with tarot, it's sort of a, it's a, you put down the the cards and then you then you kind of reflect on like what they bring up for you subconsciously and they all have themes and archetypes and swords is one of the four suits masculine divine masculine energy coming in. So like the Yang energy coming in and that being like using your energy to like penetrate or externalize everything, which is what you're saying like in battle with what you have to do is sort of like, not only is it like dialing dialing in and grounding and like becoming one with the energy, but it's about turning your internal shield outwards and externalizing and putting all of your energy outwards

so that you're not, and that's what you have to do to be able to engage in a battle, is put everything out. And I'm also thinking about Athamas or Ath in like ceremonial magic or some traditions where they're, it looks like a sword, it's like a knife-like thing. You don't use it to actually cut anything or do anything like satanic or something, but it's used to direct energy in ceremonial magic.

And so it would be made of some kind of metal. It has like a double edge, which represents the polarity of the masculine and the feminine. And within ceremony, you might use it to hold, and as you're saying, an extension of yourself to point the energy out and direct it and put your intentions outwards. And they usually have like a black candle, which is all about like neutralizing energy

and grounding it. So yeah, yeah. But I think, yeah, that, and then the metal itself actually like represent is sort of divine masculine representing too. That's like the, in the evolution of the planet, like when the metals came in,

that was like when consciousness started to be, to pierce the veil with the sharpness of those, it's all like this energy representation. Well, and it is one of the first things that we do to demarcate society that went from sort of a nomadic pre-conscious or pre-collective consciousness. Yeah, no, and that's spot on.

Early iron stuff. And Buddhism has some of that too, that's used for like cleaving, piercing, or scraping, but in a metaphorical way. I mean, some of those may be based on old tools. There's like the Kodaga sword or the Purva dagger or the there's a Kartika in my office which is like an old like leather scraper but it's they're so ornate now you couldn't actually use them for that purpose they just have this ritual significance. Like you're saying you couldn't do a satanic sacrifice with any of these things they're too ornate. Like the the Buddhist fire swords have all this metal, you know fire basically around the blade To get to reinforce that this is a spiritual purpose not a metaphorical purpose

Well, and what you're just saying about like the Iron Age and stuff like that sort of I want to I want to just emphasize that It's really interesting and like Eastern traditions and when you understand like consciousness that the whole What you're talking about about the Iron Age coming in, that is literally why, it was like the air energy coming into the evolution of consciousness and that's why those metal ages started happening and we're moving through these different yugas, which are like eras of time. And so that's like metals and swords and stuff

are representative of this resurgence of the divine masculine energy coming in and creating more thought forms and societies and systems and organizing things and things that penetrate energy outwards. Which is partly why when I think we become nostalgic for another time, either in a healthy way or in a bad way that can be kind of a fascist or mythologizing like a past we can't return to. This sword is an image that we come back to, in good and bad ways and healthy and unhealthy ways

through those movements, but not just recently. I mean, even going back to like the Crusades and things, I mean, there were kind of like older calls back to these things, even when the weapons were modern. So the with Japan and the katana, like, I'd like to talk about some of the dualists, and the history of dueling, because I think that shows those tensions like really well. James has some stuff on that. And one of the things I think is interesting is like, you think of the stereotype with

these things is that, you know, the warrior meditates on the sword and thinks of himself as already dead so that if he does die, he's not afraid of it. He's just in flow state, awaking from a dream and that you're really cultivating this inward power by developing character, developing consciousness, developing knowledge, and then the sword becomes this extension of you.

We think about it in that disciplined way of that you have to train for a hundred years before you can even cut the mat or, you know, a lot of people like to say, well, you could forge a sword in four years, but it took 15 years to know how to polish one and these different kinds of things from different periods of Japan.

But a lot of these duelists were tricksters who were kind of gnarly and kind of defied tradition. Like a lot of the people who were the most successful actually broke their tradition and started to use like the walk is Oshie, the short sword. They would do a dual sword technique or they would do something that wasn't quote unquote allowed. And so like that's sort of an innovative tension, James, you want to, you want to jump in there?

Well, I was going to start off with obviously Musashi as the stereotype trickster, Ronin's creating his own path, creating his own sword style. I want to dispel the first things about it that Yoshikawa wrote the books that it internally became Musashi's novel, which books that it internally became Musashi's novel, which influenced the samurai trilogy that we get as movie form. But one, Musashi did not fight for the losing side of the big Tokugawa, and he fought for Tokugawa during those days. So he fought for the winning side. Yoshikawa writes that Musashi fought for the losing side, but that's fiction that wanted to kind of derive

the character of Musashi and defeat. But Musashi probably did not experience a lot of defeats, is what we know. That he was 16 when he would be fighting in those wars, which is crazy. Just think like he would have to go fight his dad. Yeah, I love the Musashi, the book Musashi by Yoshikawa. But it definitely took some liberties on how how Musashi came to be. What we do know is that he did follow a Buddhist monk that told him,

you've got to reborn, you got to be born again in some way. And that's when he went from, I forgot this originally, I think it's to Takezo was his like born name and then he changed to Miyamoto Mushashi. But that's what started his journey. So he is a trickster. A lot of, again, this is the kind of juxtaposition of samurai versus the Ronin, A lot of, again, this is the kind of juxtaposition of samurai versus the Ronin, which are just wandering samurai, which are that which is kind of a class that was like you either had a bad master that died, or your master didn't, you know, have anybody succeed him in such a way. And so there's always you know, that's what the Ronin type was, but you're still kind

of in essence, a samurai, you still follow this type of, this living again, we saw she did write. He was an artist. He reflected a lot. We have a lot of his thoughts on paper. But only after he was done, you know, he sort of basically duels everyone who was around and kills them or wins and then says, all right, there's no one left to fight. Everyone else is younger and they're gonna study me. So I'm gonna kind of go into a cave and write the book of the five rings.

Yeah, but he also even during his journeys, he had to figure out he wanted to find out why he's going. I mean, that was the whole point of and that's just to the book is fun. Why does he feel, you know, why does he longing for all these things? It wasn't the glory. It wasn't the battle. He just wanted to find what was gonna make him Kind of feel whole again. And so he had to incorporate a lot But you know, he's obviously a very interesting character you if you've read anything about me Sasha you've like he was crafty, very wily in that sense of making people late. He was intentionally late to a lot of his duels,

making, you know, that he was causing that inner karma. There's a trickster psychology to him. To psych people out? Okay. Yeah, like in the book of the five rings, or in the samurai trilogy that James is talking about, you know, spoilers for, you know, the 50 year old

Japanese cinema, but like he went though one of the last tools of dual and Ganesh, you're island He he shows up late with a or that he's chopped into a sword that he says he's gonna fight with Instead of his real sword to kind of be like I don't even need a sword to defeat you He shines the light from the blade in the guy's eyes. He gets behind the sun. He stands in the water. He goes late to it. He appears to be maybe hungover or just like waking up from a nap, not caring.

He does all these things to kind of enrage the opponent that you don't associate with the noble samurai meditating and then killing in a single slice. The most effective duelists really didn't do that. And when I forget the trans, I don't know the original Japanese for the style of swordsmanship that Musashi said he was doing,

but a lot of those translations are something akin to doing what works or doing whatever it takes or doing what is effective, you know, is kind of how he called his school of swordsmanship. And that a lot of that trickster innovative stuff is sort of at tension with the way that the tradition needs to live in the Japanese culture as being this timeless thing that is about nobility.

But a lot of these guys were kind of gnarly like James is pointing out. They did some psychological trickery and low forms of honor, you know. His style was called the school of the strategy of two heavens as one, which is wild. But yeah, going back to Mutashi again, he was crafty. One of his other famous duels was the final head of this one swordsman dojo is a young kid, probably 12 or 13. Musashi has already defeated I think the heads of this school once and so it's transferred down to

this kid who follows a family of swordsman in this dojo and of course the school just wants to jump Musashi and so Musashi just sits in a tree and just watches as they all gather Takes note and just like okay This is gonna be easy and all and this is one of the one of the only times in kind of his life that he Actually used one sword and one his actual bladed weapon. You see him all the time So confident and his skill that's the whole confidence he beats people up with boken or wooden bokdos that he carves or finds and sticks that he carves into a sword but this was the one time he's sitting in a tree just watching everybody gather he's knowing he's going to be

ambushed but to end the fight quickly he just jumps down sprints draws his sword and chops a little kid in half right off the bat and then just runs away, beats a couple of people up on his way out. Doesn't kill anybody else. I don't think I think he might have killed a couple of other people, but that was the quickest way to end the battle. He knew his target. He knew it wasn't, you know, he's like, he's there to only defeat one person

and not defeat 20, which and so he just runs sprints right in as like a crazy person, everybody kind of steps back and is like, what's going on here thinking that he would just line up and face, but instead he did what he had to and just ran and. Well, and there's some speculation that he was like an incredibly strong guy and that he just had a lot more upper body strength than a lot of other people.

And then also maybe he had a skin condition that isolated him or kept him like at the edges of society and not allowed into traditional, and that's a theory until he became so good at sword fighting that he was he had to be like entered into canon. I don't know if you can say anything about that because Miyamoto Sashi and Sasuke Kohiro, those are like the two duelists in Japan that are kind of famous that actually are rooted in real people that are mostly real even though we don't know everything about them. Even the people that had a root in history, like a lot of them turn into kind of myths like Zetaishi the Blind Swordsman. And then the opponent that the last opponent that Miyamoto Musashi faces, even though there's not really a lot of history to it. Like he has an odachi as a longer sword,

and he kind of becomes a character that is depicted as like extremely feminine and sometimes almost like, you know, transsexual or transgender in appearance. Do you know why that is? Like I always thought that it was just like a compensation to Miyamoto Mushashi's like masculinity, that he was like such a hyper masculine guy that they portray his final opponent as more feminine.

But I don't know if there's any historical reason for any of that, really. I don't know. Obviously, that goes back to a lot of people painting Musashi as rambunctious. I think they made up these stories of a skin condition and things like that to kind of make him seem more relatable in a sense, you know, because he was actually really good.

Again, a lot of people want to paint him as a failure at the beginning, but he probably wasn't. He probably just had, he was good martial ability, which means like his attributes in other areas probably weren't so great. I mean, how he related to other people, especially in writing was just so bizarre. And thinking that, I mean, he ends up feeling normal, but you get to this point where he, when he's not normal,

he's a really good dualist, and someone has, they have to point something out, or they're, kind of come up with a reason why he's a bad guy in some essence, right? You know, he's, he can't just be all good. a bad guy in some essence, right? You know, he's, he can't just be all good. And so yeah, you have these things that he does this because he's he isolates himself. He's trying to battle a lot of these things or figure out but it's really, I think he just really wanted to find something that made him feel great. And I'm pretty sure he, the priest Sasaki was his last, I think that was the last duel. I, he used to Odachi and it was because he was paid. Uh, I think that's rooted in him being that a feminine, he, it was probably more so, um,

flow state of water or he was more traditional dualist than Massashi maybe traditional dualist, but also kind of wealthy. I mean, he, I think he, at this time he's being paid a lot to kind of coerce Musashi into a duel. Again, he was another famous duelist that everybody believed in and had heard of. No one really saw him fight before. They just heard stories. And I think that was also that kind of mindset of like the stories coming before the person of like, yes, this is our savior. Finally, somebody is going to take down Musashi. Here's a lot of money. And so you get that impersonation of like, just think about somebody who has

been on the road as a Ronin for forever. And then someone who's getting actively paid a lot to take care of this problem. You get that kind of sense of this person's wearing a little bit more nice clothes. He's able to hang out with people, trying to figure out where Musashi is. And so I think they paint him in that light of very feminine because he wasn't out there trying to beat people up like, or trying to find the next fight like Musashi was, he was just really, he only one target and that was try to track him down and then trap him.

Um, and that's why Musashi knew that he wasn't about to be trapped. He was going to make sure that he made him pay for this. Um, but after that, I think it wasn't fun for Musashi anymore. I think that was the reason it was one of his last duels was because he had successfully, you never saw him really use his technique on anybody. Again, the wooden oar to the island after the dude's tired is a crazy story.

But he carves his own sword and just bops him over the head and crushes his skull apparently But so you get those you get the things you have to find some way to demonize somebody doubles holotail I practiced that with my daughter with her wooden katana hundred She's she's gonna go on a journey soon just start Well, we have a tea party and then a sword fight on the top of Red Mountain So whichever way society goes, you know, she's covered, you know, yeah down to an Abbey or or fall Got all the skills

But yeah, I think that's a but I do think there's a reason why we paint Well, a lot of people that paint me Sasha and so it's sort of way but also hit that The people who came after him in another because he was kind of too perfect So in a sense of he was really good at what he did and then he wrote in another because he was kind of too perfect. So in a sense of he was really good at what he did. And then he wrote great books when he was done. So he's androgynous at the end. Y'all are saying that's like how he how it culminates. And probably not historically, but artistically, if you see people

inspired by him in anime is anything they're almost kind of transgender some of the time or extremely feminine, long hair, long sword. Because that also represents like the ultimate like enlightenment is coming back to androgyny and merging the divine feminine and divine masculine. Well, it's an Eastern religion thing is coming back to that androgyny. I mean, and historical philosophy like Aristotle and stuff, but merging those two and becoming like one with one with Chi one with the universe and then being able to like direct it all so sometimes I don't think it's necessarily I don't know that the

history presents what y'all are telling me but I don't think that like return like a androgyny necessarily indicates like a weakness so much as it might be representative of enlightenment yeah I don't think it's from weakness. I mean, he's usually portrayed as a pretty powerful character sometimes as like either the main antagonist or the main protagonist of like different kind of manga and historical or based on history, you know. Yeah, I think it had a lot to do with wanting external validation versus Musashi's internal validation like Musashi is always searching for this something that's within. And Sasaki was probably the one that's

looking for that external. I'm the one who defeated me. So she that's all he wanted to do. That's all he wanted. But for it's for everybody to know that going through town saying I'm the one that's going to fight me. So she and it's just like, so I don't think remembers his name. Like that's the thing he does. He's just like, Sashi I don't think remembers his name. I like that's the thing he does.

He's just like, I don't know who you are, but they say I need to fight you kind of thing. So it's- Yeah, that was another kind of psych trick of being like, I haven't even heard your legend. You know, I don't even know who you are. You know, this guy's been paying people to talk about himself for a long time.

Yeah. What about, I mean, I'd like to do an anime episode at some point with a guest, if we find the right guest, but what do you think about the way that swords kind of, or the katana connects with like weebs, like people that kind of like mythologize it and turn it bad maybe, or just, what do you think about that?

Like generally like the cool guy that you were like kind of scared of, but wanted to pretend you could fit in with. In my experience, you know, when you're like in high school or early college, you like it's a little older that drives like a souped up Mitsubishi Eclipse, or has like Bala sharks,

or like he was the guy that knew like all the strains of weed where it was like halfway made up, or like all the cool stuff you didn't know from your suburban identity. And like he knew all the katana facts and had the book of five rings on his coffee table. I don't know if y'all had this experience with you know, that was definitely a type of dude. It was. Yeah. Well, even in yeah, 2011, there was a guy like that who actually got me into it. I jokingly, I mean, I watched anime, but you would always see like somebody slice

through something like butter and it doesn't move and then slowly slides off. I saw this guy do that in person with a watermelon and I was sold. I was like, Holy crap, he just like got into this zone. He was like, it was a party trick at this point. He's just like, let's watch Parker, you know, slice up this melon and we would just go outside his back porch and he would just like get into this zone. And the next thing

those guys are now, I wonder if it worked out for them. Oh, it worked out for this guy. This guy. Yeah. Uh, he's doing, he's, he's a millionaire in Atlanta right now. So it's crazy. Uh, so maybe that's what that focus did for him. Uh, maybe I need to get back into that can do. Good. Yeah. Let's study the study the blade study. So and do what is it? And what does it go?

Hero had that concept of like no sword. Like he would do a lot of the fights where he would say like the best way is to avoid combat. And you know, one of the guys, you know, taunts him and is like, I want to duel you with your no sword style. And he's like, yeah of the guys, you know, taunts him and is like, I want to duel you with your no sword style. And he's like, yeah, I'll do you on this island. Come with me to this island. I'll show you no sword. The guy's like, yeah, fine. And he rose him out to this remote island and the guy gets off the boat and he's like, bye. And he leaves him there for a couple days and doesn't do him. And he's like, that's

how you do a little no sword. So there's a lot of kind of like playing with like energy trickster, you know culture being you know Being capable at fighting but also being better than needing to fight I think is one of those big tensions you see in these stories and those kind of energetic traditions echo like other Esoteric practices and Alice you see any like parallels or or anything because you had to mention using like Alice, do you see any parallels or anything? Because you had mentioned using knives or swords in Western esoteric magic to separate things, cleaving things, directing energy. Not quite a wand, but it is a tool that shows up

in the traditions. Yeah, used in a similar way from a wand. But yeah, it can redirect and direct intention is what you're trying to put out there. a wand, but yeah, it can kind of redirect redirect and direct intention is like what you're what you're trying to put out there. And and I think that's, you know, when James is talking about like the strategy of, you know, you're trying to not cut something but but like fully slice through it, like you have to like get really clear on like, what is your intention and not get bogged down? Like like what do you want your life to look like?

Yeah, yeah um What about tarot symbolism the suite of swords like any of the you had mentioned air um, but are there ways that like the Are there other through lines like in that suite? Yeah, I mean it's always um Yeah, so it rep so like I was saying kind of represents logic and clarity like we're talking about. A lot of times in the sword suit, there are no bad cards in the tarot, but the swords ones can feel and that and that's just like, you need to know that if you want to learn about tarot, there aren't really any bad cards if you're doing it right.

But the 10 of 10 of swords is kind of tough suit. It sort of feels like that. And there are various cards where the swords do feel more like they're kind of, to me, representing different traumas and things like that. There might be swords depicted. The Six of Swords is a little family that's in a boat moving from rough waters to calmer waters. But they have all these swords still stacked in their boat. And so it's this kind of idea of

they're maybe leaving this war torn land, but they're taking all these weapons with them. So it's like the, so, so it's, and it's, and it's like a father, a mother, and a child. So it's not like a battle thing, but they're moving somewhere safer, but you know, no matter what you take the lessons that you learned, like the things that pierced and like cleaved your consciousness and like redirected your energy and bringing that, bringing that with you even as you're, as you're healing.

So there are different, different swords, I mean, suits of swords, like, I mean, cards within the sword suit that kind of, that's kind of how swords can kind of be played with. Anxiety comes up a lot with it because this is just things that are piercing your consciousness of trying to, you know, knowledge that you have that's trying to pierce through the veil and come into your consciousness, trying to like rise up into new awareness and new. Yeah. I always wondered if the sword,

the game of thrones chair um chair or throne forged out of swords wasn't inspired by that suite because he plays with a whole lot of that idea that they're taking the swords and making them useless by making them a throne but the throne is so inherently violent and corrupting that it could lead you back into violence and and and this sort of like slippery nature of the sword. Um, I always wondered if Martin was playing with some of those ideas or he just arrived at them independently in Game of Thrones. I think it's interesting because a lot of times

he might have done it intentionally, but then there's just sort of, this is where we get back into these things that are baked into our consciousness, these art types that we don't realize. And so as an artist or an author, you play with and bring out these, these themes that are just these, you know, universal pieces of fundamental knowledge, and you can find it everywhere, even if the author is an artist and even know what they were doing. That's because it's from truth, it's in the flow. I know James has to hop off in a minute. Did you have anything you wanted to sign off or kind of throw in at the end of there? Alice, do you need to get off right now?

Or can we run a minute or two over? Yeah, I have. Well, yeah, I can do a few more minutes. OK. James, what you got? I don't have anything to sign off on except for, well, I don't have anything to sign off on. Well, thank you.

Did you see the Abudo Academy open, like North Birmingham? You want to sign up with me? I was thinking of doing some classes. Really? the it. Look for my love. I gotta go do the real art therapy. Yeah, so through it. So alright guys. Well, next week. See ya. Yeah, I don't know. I was a lot of the stuff with like you're saying, or a friend of mine was what did like graduate school work for a minute where he was like helping foreign students get engaged. And he was like telling me that a lot of times students that are coming from like Eastern traditions of India, Japan, China, like have a hard time with this idea of like citing sources because they're like, well, that's a perniprofesy. It's everybody's. It's just the universe's whatever work. Why would I write down? You can't write down the first time that somebody came up with that. And that kind of egoic idea of like Western inventor owns the knowledge and like whatever it was like,

so at odds with that. That's what you start to, once you kind of get deep in it, it just starts to feel like you kind of recognize like, oh, this, you know, we attribute this to somebody from the 50s, but this is like 3000 year old. Somebody said it back here 3000 years ago. like 3000 year old, somebody said it back here 3000 years ago. Yeah. And that is that's that's sort of my beef with like Western science is just sort of

where we're kind of identifying all this stuff that's like literally in, you know, the Vedas and stuff you they talk about all the, you know, quantum physics and everything and we never acknowledge, you know, we discover things but never go, oh wait, okay, this is what they must have been talking about back here. Like this is what this scientist was talking about. It's just, it's just interesting who gets the credit. Like you're saying for these like universal pieces of knowledge. Yeah, I don't, I think that, you know, if you invent a cotton gin, or if you invent a new antibiotic, you probably, you know, you invent a cotton gin or if you invent a new antibiotic you probably you know

Are the first one to come up with the way that that molecule is connected together or something But when you're coming back to these things that are in softer sciences about uh energy and you know Even you know quantum physics math kind of becomes a soft softer science at these upper levels What do you um? How do you uh, you you have somebody who has ownership or invention of that? I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. I'm trying to think I had a thought back there, but can you say more about that? Well, I don't know. Just, you know, well well with perennial philosophy in general I mean because we definitely bump up against a lot of that on here I'm kind of of two minds because I usually try and say like alright, here's the spiritual tradition

Here's the anthropology tradition Here's the tradition where that gets bumped up against in psychology and then maybe myth if that's relevant or if it's separate enough from the Anthropology right to try and let people kind of feel it. Because I feel like that's the best way of just kind of saying, yeah, a lot of people have worked in these spheres. There's ways that you can make them more disciplinary, but the source of them is kind of interdisciplinary.

But when I read authors that do the same thing that I do, I don't like it. Like, I'm like, oh, I get it, I get it. I know that gets the point. So I don't know if there's like a way to kind of communicate that clearly, but I don't like it. Like I'm like, Oh, I get it. I get it. I know that gets the point, you know, so I don't know if there's like a way to kind of communicate that clearly. But I don't know. Communicate that clearly. Yeah. Well, and I think, yeah, there's a lot to, like even inventions, concrete inventions, like you're talking about, like there's so many cases where in history, it shown that multiple people right around the same time came up with the same invention or the same concept. And so it's really like, is any one person really

inventing something or is there in energetic understandings of how the world works? People are actually tapping into collective knowledge that suddenly like put collective consciousness that's put these pieces together and all of a sudden they're little individuals who, like, are happened to be the right frequency to be able to like access it and then transform it into into some kind of invention. So it's kind of always, you know, once you get into the nitty gritty, it's like, who really, like, I get into my head when I try to write, like, like, trying to figure out how to say things in a way that nobody's ever said them. And then it just, all of a sudden, it just starts looking like every single word is just a metaphor that somebody has already used. And like, every phrase is feels, feels trite. Um, feels trite. Well, and I think that holding the identity of the self, um, that is, you know, individual and then also like the collective is, is hard, you know, you kind of want those things to be in resonance, but you know, we do exist for

a minute as an individual in the world. What do we do with that? You know, that's an old question. Um, yeah. And, uh, I don't know, just kind of put a cap on, on, on swords and the psychology of katanas. Is there anything else that you kind of want to get to, or do you feel like we've hit that as much as we can?

I feel like we've hit it. Yeah, I think just with the psychology of trauma to just reinforcing that the swords can represent maybe in the tarot different traumas and how it's these things that directly impact and put us into fight or flight and then keep us there, it becomes this force that can sometimes it collapses your reality in ways that gives you these awakenings or things like that, or just profound knowledge and it's that swords coming in and piercing through your individual, all your neurons and everything, it's coming in and piercing through all of that. There's probably a good metaphor to be made like from parts based psychology, like the idea that like, we're noticing all these parts of self and our multiplicity, but that when we bring them together and don't over identify with

one, we're actually more than the sum of our parts in the same way that you're stacking, you know, like a soft metal in the middle of the spine, you know, a medium metal and then laminating in a harder metal and then reinforcing the tip to make martensite. And then this whole sword can now cut through things that glass can cut through, but it's not as rigid as glass. It's flexible enough to last through the battle. Something probably there about the folding of steel and the forging of the soul also is relevant. Yeah. That is swords that forms the ego. And so that is where we see trauma and people split,

or just any of us. I think everything, that's on a spectrum as well, how much we're dissociating, how much those swords have really, the traumas have come in and like split us into different parts. And it's about, you know, trying to, but trying to kind of like come back and re and like own that energy and come back to center even. Yeah. Well, like, uh, people you deal with that have been cut off from personal power that are sort of like under identified with their own agency or their own voice. Um, a lot of somatic practitioners talk about that showing up across the arms and in the center of the chest,

that a lot of times when you try and get them in touch with like their right to self, they feel a black hole sucking, you know, in the heart, and you want to replace that with like a warmth or light and, you know, kind of meditate on that feeling of power. But I mean that is kind of the warrior archetype. When you're holding a sword, you're holding it, you know, with your arms in front of your chest. And a lot of the people when I'm saying, okay, you're really over-identified with the magician, you're trying to understand everything as a terry, you're trying to understand everything as a system

and passively, but you need to be more comfortable with your ability, you know, because of trauma, you've been cut off from this ability to just say, this is me, I'm visible, I have a right to this conversation, I have a right to self and standing upright, you you know getting people in touch with that warrior archetype Yeah, a lot of them imagine themselves holding a sword or holding a shield Yeah, and in like Hatha yoga and Kundalini yoga and different practices

some of my favorite in Kundalini yoga tradition you put your Put your arms up like that and and then that's, and like with your fingers kind of pointing to the edge of the room. But then hold it, you hold it like that for three minutes to, you know, anywhere to like 11 minutes or something, depending on how much. But it's basically, but what's interesting is that as you're holding it, the idea is that your shoulders are really, your shoulders and your arms are really strong enough to let you do that for that amount of time. But there's this psychological thing that happens where it just starts feeling like, like, I can't do this on our shoulders, powerlessness, things like that. And so as you meditate in some of these postures,

another one is like where you, let me back up and then I'll come back to me, but where you're like up like that, and I'm holding it like this up at the top. But that's like Daren, you hold your fingers directly up and you're just completely concentrating your energy and pushing down into the earth and like directing up at the top. And so you're making your and you're just completely concentrating your energy and pushing down into the earth and like directing up at the top.

And so you're making your, you're doing the same thing with your body to be able to direct the energy, turning yourself into like that sword, sword sorta. Is the arms up, is that what you call sun salutation or is that something different? That's different in these types of, in Hatha yoga and Kundalini. I can't remember what we call it.

I can't remember what that's, it's in a bunch of kriyas, but I can't remember what it's called. Yeah, nuts. the You know, that's that's interesting I think that and that idea of kind of like power being in the center the warrior archetype You know being kind of identified with the sword that we have a right to our own kind of individual voice or power We come back to that In a lot of different somatic traditions because it is the way that you assert individual power, you know Whereas like there's a lot of kind of more mystical pathways and to understand things intuitively, but the sword is not really about as intuition

as much as being able to actualize something. Yeah. And it's about, yeah, what you're saying in swords, I guess what I didn't, the keyword here is also swords, you're about truth. And so when I'm showing you like, and you could do this, anyone could do this, but sit in lotus or sit crouching on your knees

and do the one where you're holding your arms, your fingers like this. And this is a mudra that I can't remember the name of. And then you hold your, but hold your arms up. That one, as you're doing it in certain kriyas, you're reciting Sanskrit words, satnam, which means the truth is in me. And you're just saying it over and over and over.

Satnam, satnam, satnam, satnam. I'll just do it for minutes. It's the most empowering thing, because you feel it in your diaphragm. But it's just telling your body these tones resonate with our soul. So you're doing it you're bringing your energy in and penetrating it out into the world and saying like the truth is in me I am the truth I am the truth I am the truth so it's all

about like I am I am powerful not not giving away your power not saying I'm I'm just a just a tiny drop of water and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, I am, I am truth. I am its enemy. And I think that's what swords, when we're talking about clarity and things like that, it's about what is really, really true. Well, my wife has named her Katana. I gave her a Katana for Mother's Day

and she knows German. She's of like Czech descendancy and she also is a teacher. So I was holding out for like a name like Adelweiss or teacher's glance or something, but she named it Final Lesson. So that's on our library. She's got a kind of a, it's traditional, but it has a flower kind of rosemaling painting

on the, on the sail. So I don't know, I was hoping you could do it up there, but I didn't have time to set up the computer. Well, that's good. I'm sure you've got stuff to get to. You got anything else you want to sign off on? The psychology of swords. All right.

Yeah. No, this was fun. We will see you guys next week. Thank you so much. Thanks.