Training Notes #5
Bulgarian ghosts, the right word for slaughter, sword-meditation, and discovering what's already there.
January’s training ended up looking a bit different than what I had been preparing for in December and my self-interrogation facilitated by the Winter Arc Strength Ritual revealed some pretty paradigm shifting discoveries, I’m happy to say.
But first, Happy (end of) January and start of 2026, and welcome (back) to Strength Magick, where I aim to to stoke the fire of liberated bad-assery in the ritual and temple of your body.
How you been?! I invite you to take a few moments to drop into your exhale, then breathe in softly through your nose, and again out through your mouth. Press your tongue to the roof of your mouth while you gently inhale through your nose. Stay with your exhale a little longer than usual. Get tall through your spine. Repeat as needed.
Heyyy, isn’t that nice?
What’s New:
I’ve been facilitating and teaching The Winter Arc Strength Ritual, my online support container for weaving together ritual and movement practice, which concludes this weekend. I will be announcing some new opportunities to learn from/with me that I look forward to sharing. The Winter Arc has been an incredibly potent vehicle for growing my own movement practice, and has also helped me stretch into teaching strategies and methods I am grateful to get to practice. A huge thanks to everyone who has participated.
I’m steadily ploughing along at working on the Strength Magick book. Honestly I have no idea what the timeline of this project looks like, but in the spring I will interrogate that a little more. For now I can say that it is flowing out of me pretty reliably and I am certainly aiming for a complete first draft as soon as reasonably possible. Your contributions here are greatly supportive of that work, so thank you to my paid subscribers, and if you want to contribute to the book’s progress, upgrading to paid is a great way to do that.
I’m in post-production on my feature film, and there are interesting things happening there. I’ll say more in a future post. It’s a potent work I’m deeply proud of and I look forward to sharing more.
Before I jump into the Training Notes part of this piece, I want to take a deliberate moment to orient myself, and this exploration, around the giant flaming necrotic elephant in the room of any of my fellow readers residing in the U.S.A.
I have been hearing a hearty chorus of “this is a weird time to do [fill in the blank with mundane normal human thing],” as if human history of the last 3,000 years hasn’t been absolutely hog wild, but I get why.
Many are trying to name and reconcile the tension between witnessing things like the state-sanctioned slaughter of their fellow human beings and the large-scale reveal that many people near/at the highest levers of martial, cultural and economic power are absolute monsters and the implications of that, with the incongruous quiet of their personal day to day lives.
Few words feel adequate to capture the disgust and grief that comes from directly engaging with these realities. That’s where poetry comes in for me, honestly. I have to metabolize the horror into something, or it will take root in my bones and chew away at me. I encourage you to consciously engage with whatever is happening on your end with as much thoroughness and attention as is appropriate for you.
We cannot let our attention be constantly beset by fear (and the rage-bait discourse that is oft stoked in the wake of disturbing events) and must always take steps to ground it and steward it (and all its reality-shaping power). I’m wading a little bit further out here, but you might be taking steps to divest yourself from Imperial/Dominator/industrial consumer thinking and cultural conditioning, if you haven’t already been doing that, while supporting and protecting who you can, and using whatever power you do have to make your pocket of reality as beautiful and free as possible.
No small thing, that! So I am sympathetic to the overwhelm and paralysis one may find themselves in, but only to a point. Do your best to care for yourselves and your community. You have more power than you think, and/but it is individual and communal work to come into a coherent relationship to that power, lest we perpetuate the very systems of harm that we are trying to reject.
I have been actively engaged in what I have called “de-programming” myself, and reconditioning myself through a weaving of animistic, magical, anti-colonial, Nature-oriented relational praxis since at least 2018. Not the longest time, but I reference that to simply offer that I understand intimately that this work is ongoing, complex and unique, but I believe it can, and should be done.
Let the old world go, and don’t go down with it. Seed something better.
Okay, ready to talk about lifting frickin’ weights?! Lol here we go…
BULGARIAN GHOSTS
In December, I found myself on a wave of enthusiasm for the clean and jerk and snatch — the Olympic weightlifting lifts. I watched a documentary about the Bulgarian Olympic weightlifting team under the famous coach, Ivan Abadjiev. From the late 1960s to early 1980s, the Bulgarians basically dominated the sport under his coaching and unique, brutal and high demand approach to training. And after watching this film, for about three weeks, it was all I cared to do in the gym; snatch, squat; or, clean and jerk, front squat.
I accessed a level of presence and focus demand that I had not in a while, and it did something for the way I mentally approached my training sessions. It asked that I truly drop anything that was unessential to the practice of the movements and execute them to the greatest level of capacity I had in that moment. It was a great way to finish the year, and I wondered where it was taking me.
And then the holidays happened, and then just as abruptly, I didn’t care anymore. I mean, I still enjoy the lifts, and training them; but it was almost like I had accidentally tapped into a radio channel playing through my body’s prism of movement, the signal of some ancient telos that was temporarily visiting and invigorating me, just to seemingly reorient me and get me to pay attention. That’s a reflection I make retroactively of course; the effect remains.
This sort of idea-possession isn’t unusual for me though; it’s how inspiration (another word for spirits, ideas, information, and other disincarnate, abstract energies/beings/substances) often moves through me and energizes me. I’ll allow it to permeate my awareness, incite me to action, and then depart, and whatever remains will sprout roots for future use and growth. I was moved by the Bulgarians; their work ethic, and the sort of tragic commitment of their intensity. When excelling at a particularly physically extractive sport is your best bet at being resourced and making a living, the luxurious choices that I get to make around training and how I move and stimulate my body seem pretty damn cushy.
For these guys, it must have felt like “win to survive.” I don’t know the details of their lives beyond this one documentary I watched, but there was a heaviness and noble acceptance and resolve that stirred me (an observation I can maybe only romanticize because of my far removed vantage point and poetic disposition, hah).
The Bulgarian ghosts came and went, and then I picked up a sword.
STUDY THE BLADE
I bought my partner Jackie and I practice longswords as a holiday gift. I have a bit of formal training from the world of stage combat, and a childlike glee that is utterly inflamed when I practice swordplay of any kind. Glee, and also a full body attentiveness, similar to how weightlifting moved me, but with the added layer of the awareness of my partner’s weapon while we drill.
Even though we are relative beginners and go slowly and work simple combinations, having someone swing an object at me of any meaningful heft puts me right into OH SHIT Mode and demands a level of attention and self-control I find incredibly stimulating, satisfying, and rewarding.
I can’t phone in sword practice or drop my attention for a second.
We are training averaging once a week, sometimes we make time for two sessions. It’s a welcome discipline that allows me to harness certain types of attention I really enjoy, and experience my body system in a new way.
It’s not “fitness” though, and my fitness training has also gone on a bit of an adventure.
LEARNING TO BREATHE
I reduced my overall training volume dramatically and spent time interrogating breath and “basic” positions. Ie, my body has changed a lot over the years, and it has been calling for a freshly established clarity about how I am loading everything and stressing my tissues.
Time spent with peers like fellow trainer Anthony Wong and Rolfing technique specialist Miriam Barlow, helped me access sensations and perception of breath and subtle skeletal positioning that is changing how I move and load tissues. After some explorations with Miriam of weight displacement through foot and pelvic complex, and some adjustments and breath awareness facilitated by Anthony, I was suddenly accessing sensations and levels of activation in certain tissues I hadn’t felt/been cognizant of in a long time, or ever, in some cases.
Why does this matter? Well, this quest was prompted in part by the fact that my respiration process has been excessively burdened by chronic neck and upper body tightness for a long time. This is in part due to my skull structure (high palate, overbite, narrow jaw; a concert of developmental issues afflicting many), which limited the size of my airway development. I developed muscular compensation patterns to help pull in more air. Over time though, this has produced more and more tension, and less effective breathing, and fun effects like tension headaches and stress spurred from chronic shallow breathing.
As I write that, I drop back into my breath, and softly exhale as long as I can without force, then allow my nose to receive a fresh supply of that sweet, sweet O. I am relearning how to breathe. My meditation and stillness time is not simply about “clearing my mind” so much as it is truly allowing space for just undistracted breathing. This has been incredibly potent for my well-being, let alone training.
On top of my structural issues, I also have practiced a strength sport hobby for a decade-plus that placed incredible demand on all of my structures and systems. Fortunately, I suspect that a lot of my training strategies for this sport have helped me in the big picture because they’ve kept my body incredibly efficient at oxygen use, if a little tight and stressed out. The downside has been the chronic tension in my neck, traps, shoulders and pecs that has likely exacerbated certain aspects of the respiratory challenge.
I’ve temporarily opted out of heavy front rack positions, heavy grip work, and have been biasing a lot of tissue-stimulatory work with tempos, moderate volume, and being hyper specific with positioning to drive tissue recruitment. This has focused on my legs more than anything else, and I’m slowly building back to some more upper body work.
Neurons that fire together, wire together, literally, and I want to give my body every available practice to breathe and move and exert in a way that facilitates long-term healthy respiration, not chronic tension and its attendant issues.
I’m still exploring and piecing together what that looks like for me, but I’m grateful to be in such a deep conversation with my body.
As I’ve told my Winter Arc students many times, you have what you need to progress right in front of you, and you are already in a conversation with your body. Are you paying attention and learning to speak its subtle language of sensation, movement, pain and pleasure? What are you learning and what changes are you driving?
My training this week was the first integration practice of these new positions, and the positional/postural shifts have been revelatory. My new deadlift stance feels ridiculously powerful, my overhead front rack and dip drive have done a 180, and I’m managing my breath and heart-rate better during higher intensity workouts. It’s starting to feel like training in a new body, and as someone who has long-sought to make the most of every workout and support my physiology in the pursuit of its greatest capacity, this is something like cleaning your basement and discovering a lockbox with a million bucks in it. What I needed has just been waiting for me, within me.
The last and most notable aspect of this, is the psycho-somatic aspect of this discovery of weight displacement. My “old” or default posture was one where I was literally leaning slightly backwards. Poetically speaking, this could be seen as a sort of physical expression of self-protection through withdrawal. I heavily biased my posterior (backside) tissues/structures. Not a terrible thing, but it had consequences and affected how my physiology developed.
I wonder, when did that start? When did I start pulling back and withdrawing? The answer is too early.
It’s taken a long time to literally build the capacity to let my body open up the way it is now, physically and spiritually. It is not an accident that I am experiencing this shift now – I have been aiming for this expansion for a long time, although I didn’t realize it would manifest so literally in my body. But it’s right on time. I don’t look back and think I was “moving wrong.” I was moving the way I had to, for who I was and what I was experiencing.
Changes like this cannot be forced, they can only be prepared for, and discovered
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By the way, if you’re in Brooklyn tomorrow Saturday 1/31, I am the featured artist at the wonderful variety art open mic Voices Unleashed. Come join me in some Bardic behavior and stoke your fire.
Stay wild, stay free,
Claymore
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If you’re interested in working with me 1:1 to deepen your relationship to movement, magic and self-expression, you are welcome to email me at caraclaymore @ gmail dot com or peruse here.
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