Do you breathe while you're shooting?

[Justsomeguy]

Duane, think I understand your point. "If we are practicing, we should practice everything, including what we will be thinking."

The reason that can go awry is that the thinking mind has many faults. Once it gets involved in a situation, it tries to take over. Picture yourself making a high speed run down a mountain road on a motorcycle, blasting along feeling every nuance of the road and bike and instantly reacting. Beautiful! Now picture that same run with a scared passenger on back trying to help you control things by leaning and shouting instructions. The "thinking mind" is that scared passenger.

I like to shoot L-10 because of the reloads. I plan the reloads in the walk through, but I rarely remember executing them. I haven't blown a match reload all year. But, I still wreck a few in practice because I'm thinking about them.

Of course, none of this may make any sense, because I ain't normal.

This reminds me of past experiences when I was into tournament karate. Sometimes during a match, I would be "outside myself" like an observer, telling my physical self things during the match... like, "ok, he did that when you did this, so play him a while and do that again and he will be in position for you to get him..." Stuff like that. All the while the fight was going on but the body was on automatic, doing what it was trained to do but taking suggestions from my observer self.

Perhaps it will be like that in a course of fire too. Even if you walked through a course you might miss something. Someday I might be able to say to my physical self while moving through the course "Ok, here's something new just do such and such and keep moving".

It's a blending of the observer and the "observed as avatar" sort of thing if you see what I'm saying.