The Necessity for Fear

It was fear. I was shaking inside. I cannot beat this guy. This is José ("Chegüi") Torres, the great WBC and WBA 1965 Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion speaking at The Moth Radio Hour about fear. Jose Torres talks about fear at The Moth

What particularly caught my attention was toward the end where he says that it is fear that allows you to anticipate when a punch is coming before the punch is launched.

Maybe the quest for the superpower to know what my opponent is going to do is a dead-end quest. Maybe the old masters who wrote stuff like, 'When my opponent moves, I move first', were eloquently describing how afraid they were.

For a guy like me who is struggling to overcome being disassociated from my body, "I think, therefore I am." to being more embodied and associated, "I feel, therefore I am.", I am discovering that I deny I fear when I'd be better served by noticing and feeling I fear. Noticing and feeling is part of the process of developing internal gongfu.

If I pull back from training or stop training and I don't know why, maybe the "why" is because I'm afraid. But if I deny I fear, and I don't feel what I'm afraid of, then I may never even get to the point that José talks about; using your fear.