Mobile Minds

It’s neat to read a book by a martial artist who lives and works right here in Portland, Oregon.  Less neat is the large quantity of typos, spelling errors and grammar mistakes in the book.  It’s enough to be distracting.  It’s enough so that the copy I borrowed from the library had most of them circled (and corrected).

Getting past the apparent lack of editor, the book is a great read.  Morgan manages to keep the book widely applicable to any practitioner of the arts, regardless of style. (He’s a Hapkido practitioner) He does this by talking about qualities and ideas every martial artist needs to work on (no matter where they are in their training): angling, awareness, breath control, moving from the center, blending, being mentally flexible, etc.  If you’ve trained for a while this is a great book that you’ll find full of familiar ideas delivered in a different voice.  Hopefully there will be at least one piece in there where you’ll finally exclaim “oh, that’s what my teacher was trying to say”.  Sometimes it just takes hearing it from someone else to finally “get it”.

If you’re like some people I’ve trained with who get visibly angry when people mention the word Chi, don’t worry, it’s a fairly small part of the book.  If however, you dig the idea of Chi, the good news is that Morgan ties all his themes together at the end with (you guessed it) Chi.