I am conscious that although I have been practising Stav for nigh on 20 years now and attempting to teach it for a lot of that time I don't tell enough people about it and why I do it. Some of you on this group will have heard me say on numerous occasions that I intend to write a book, make more DVDs and place articles but somehow it doesn't seem to happen, and to be fair to myself I am pretty busy earning a living. So I am going to try emailing every weekday for the next month. Just a short item on some aspect of Stav, 500 to 600 words. If you are on facebook and receiving these as a member of the Ice and Fire Stav group then you can opt out by removing yourself from the group. If you are receiving them directly then just let me know if you want to be removed from the list. Of course if you want to forward them to anyone then feel free.

Okay, so first reason I do Stav? Actually this is rather difficult to identify one thing and this difficultly is what has stopped me writing for rather a long time. I suppose the key for me is that Stav provides a manageable daily practice in the stances. If I needed a particular space and environment and special clothes and equipment and a minimum of an hour to do a full routine I would have major problems maintaining any kind of regular practice. I travel a lot for work and sometimes put in very long hours, I often don't have access to equipment or even the opportunity to change into training clothes. But so long as I can get some space, preferably out of doors but not necessarily, I can do the stances in 4 to 5 minutes for each side. And I can honestly claim that I fail to do the stances about once a year, every other day I will have done them. Maybe that makes me some kind of obsessive fanatic but I want Stav to be part of my life and if something is valuable you have to be willing to fight for it and hang onto it.

The thing about Stav is that once you have learned the basics then it becomes embodied in you, so wherever you are you have it to work with, that could include being stranded on a desert island or held in a high security prison cell, it can't be taken away from you. That is not to say that when I have time and space and equipment available I don't like to do a full training session with galdre stances and weapon training and I do so as often as I can. But if I am away from home and only have a few minutes I can still do the basic stances and I don't lose the practice. It also means that I have a few minutes of being centred in myself and rediscovering who I am. When you are living and working in environments which are transient and often unfamiliar then it is easy to become disorientated and ungrounded, doing the stances will ground you and remind you that wherever you are you are always centred in your own web. Not that you can actually ever be anywhere else, but we easily forget.

Tomorrow I will write about how and why I benefit from doing the stances in other ways.

Regards,

Graham

www.iceandfire.org.uk