Spirit as a Basic Principle.

[HanshiClayton]

A strong spirit is actually a component of the larger principle of external focus It helps keep you aimed at the enemy.

When teaching beginners, particularly younger students and shy students, I often notice a strange thing. They step in to punch my chest in ippon kumite, and their lead foot ends up pointing in some strange direction. It should be pointing straight toward me but instead the foot gets turned to the left or right, often very awkwardly.

If I hold out the traditional pebble in the palm of my hand and ask the same student to step forwards and snatch the pebble from my hand... the foot lands in the correct position, toes pointing toward me.
I think the foot position is an indicator of how uneasy the student is about trying to hit me. If he has a weak spirit, you can see it in his feet. Strengthening spirit for a committed attack is one of the topics for this forum.

I am also interested in a second topic. We are taught in traditional karate to eschew all show of emotion when we fight, because emotion clouds the mind and slows you down. It also gives signals to a skilled opponent. I think this policy focuses too narrowly on competition and one-on-one matches, contradicting the bodyguard's need to fight multiple opponents at once.

My first sensei taught us to project emotion into the mind of the opponent... not to cloud your own mind with it but to cloud the enemy’s mind with it. He could literally knock you out of natural stance with a look, which he followed up immediately with an oi-zuki you could not dodge in time to avoid being hit.

And kiai plays a role here, not just in focus and abdomen contraction. I once led a group of people into a dojo to observe a kata practice. The class was working Bassai Dai with a lot of spirit, and my guests stood in the rear of the room watching. They had not heard a kiai before, but at mid-kata the twenty students turned toward the back of the room and kiai’d. The guests staggered backwards about three feet before recovering their poise. That’s a weapon, the spirit weapon, and we need to know more about it.