As hard as I try to tie up all the loose ends of this website I run across notes from a class and think: I got to put this class note in because it is so powerful and so important. As much as you hear me talk about decisions, focus, and intention, I have to tell you there is a whole lot more to this story than I have told you so far. Think about this for a minute, what good is all the decisions, focus, and intention, if you are fighting multiple attackers and you get so involved with one attacker that you lose your mind for a moment and you are hit in the head with a big 2”x4” plank? And it happened because you lost your soft focus on all the bad guys and instead you started to focus on just one guy and lost the big picture of who is where and why? It happens all the time, but not to an experienced martial artist. We all know that we have to always be aware of someone creeping up behind us with that stick to hit us with.

Some people now a days call it “keeping your head on a swivel”. But I prefer the old school way of looking at it as if you were Ninja fighting other trained warriors who were fighting with swords and shields. In that respect you would have to be on you’re “A” game whereby you have a mental picture of the playing field and you are constantly getting a peek at where all of your adversaries are located and what they are doing at just about every moment. Its important to know where they are and what their immediate relationship is to you. Although you do have to focus on the multiple attackers, you also have to focus on the ones you have not killed yet.

So here is how the eight doors of the Octagon work for you. Imagine that you walk onto a level ground situated in a forest clearing and you find yourself surrounded by an Octagon shaped room that is completely encircling you. As it turns out though, there are eight doors framed and shaped inside this space. In this way, anyone person or all the doors could open inward on you and multiple attackers could enter where you are standing and start to attack you. So you are located at first, in the middle of the attackers, but you are going to need a strategy that will allow you to fight and defeat the attackers one at a time. In the class that I will teach on this dilemma I will show you the best way to counter attack these attackers. This will be a class on fighting either a group of attackers or 2 or 3 at a time.

I will give you a hint about the class: it is one of my favorites because it is something that you need to know and once you know it, you become just that much harder to take down, and remember:  as a woman or a girl you are smarter than a man. Don’t forget that, ever.