This is a Reflection on the Conversation between Patrick Oancia and Jozef Frucek in the Transmission episode “Jozef Frucek on Fighting Monkey, Communication, and Adaptation of Biological Systems.” It would make the most sense to first watch or listen to that episode, and you can find the link to that episode in the show notes.

I’d like to point out for our listeners that Fighting Monkey is a project co-founded by Jozef Frucek together with Linda Kapetanea. But since we only had Josef on the Transmission Conversation, we will focus on him.

Fighting Monkey is an important phenomenon in the movement education landscape, and not just because of its training approach but also because of the rich narrative surrounding it.

Soon after releasing that episode in March, Jozef came to teach in Montreal, and Patrick and I attended his lecture at the dance faculty of Concordia University. After the lecture, we spoke with another attendee, a Flamenco instructor who said that he attended specifically because it’s always interesting to hear how people talk about dance and movement beyond techniques. So, this shows that the way Jozef talks about Fighting Monkey broadens the conversation about the role of movement practices in the broader context of life. So, rather than focusing on what you do in Fighting Monkey, we want to understand how Jozef chooses to talk about it. This reflection is mostly based on the content of the transmission episode with Jozef, but occasionally I also refer to the content of that lecture.

We’ll center on three keywords: Communication, Being Yourself, and the relationship between being yourself and being a teacher. This Reflection will consist of three parts:
1. Examining the thinking behind the structure of Fighting Monkey practice.
2. Reflect on why Jozef choses to frame Fighting Monkey the way he does, and
3. Exploring whether we can draw any meaningful comparisons with Baseworks.

What Jozef Means by Communication – 03:09

First of all, I’d like to highlight one important moment. Jozef talks a lot about Communication in this episode.. However, for our audience, it would be helpful to differentiate the conventional meaning of this word and how Jozef uses it. Because In most cases, when he says “communication” he means much more than just verbal interaction or even nonverbal interaction. Instead he uses this word to refer to the entire “interaction between you and the environment.“

For example, when he says that Zero forms explore the effect of your communication on your physiology, it’s not about verbal exchanges with people, but about how you live within the world. How you walk, how you move, how you eat, sleep, what you do, and how you interact with people as well.

So, with this point in mind, let’s move on.

FM Structure on the Foundation of Karl Friston’s Model – 04:05

To start, let’s review one of the key concepts that Jozef relies on conceptualizing the Fighting Monkey practice — Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle. In basic terms, this principle explains how biological systems, including humans, maintain their existence by minimizing the amount of surprise or prediction error.
While it may seem that we perceive the world around us as is, using our senses, this is actually not the case. It would be too overwhelming to constantly perceive all the incoming sensory information.

So we can think of the brain as a prediction machine. It constantly models the world around, making predictions about what will likely happen next based on past experiences and compares it with sensory inputs.
In Friston’s model, we have “Me” and the “World” that are linked in this way:

“Me” is your inner world, including your thoughts, feelings, memories, skills, and bodily states. The “World” represents everything external—your environment, social interactions, and physical challenges. You constantly predict what the World is likely gonna be, and when your sensory inputs from the “World” don’t match your internal “Model,” your brain notices the mismatch or discrepancy. This mismatch is what Friston calls “Free Energy.” It is the uncertainty or surprise experienced by the organism. And the central idea is that living organisms are constantly trying to optimize or minimize this surprise and maintain homeostasis, which is the dynamic balance of the internal environment.

How can you minimize this surprise? You can either update your Model to better reflect reality — that is learning, or you can take actions to change your environment to fit the Model. This continuous loop of perceiving, predicting, and acting is what helps you to stay aligned with your world, ensuring your survival and well-being.

I think the idea of learning here is pretty clear. But if you are wondering, how exactly can we change the world to minimize the surprise, in the language and logic of this model, we eat to minimize the surprise of hunger, and we put on clothes to minimize the surprise of being too cold. As you can imagine, in this particular case, changing your model to “I am not cold” would not be effective, but, in many cases, it is possible to use one strategy over the other. Always choosing action would be an example of rigid thinking – trying to force the world to fit your beliefs. While always choosing to refine the model will result in indecisiveness, procrastination and inaction. And Jozef talks about Fighting Monkey as a practice that helps to be more intelligent and flexible in balancing these two strategies.

You can learn more about Friston’s model it in this book. And I am also going to add links to the show notes to a couple of Friston’s open-access papers about this model as it applies to behavior, consciousness, learning and so on.

Now, let’s review how Jozef extends Friston’s model, which can be seen as the philosophical backbone of the Fighting Monkey practice.

Jozef takes the fundamental idea of perception-action loops from Friston and adds two Fighting Monkey components into it: Zero Forms and Movement Situations. And if you think that you are here right now, then Zero forms focus on understanding your state from past to present, while movement situations model the world from present to future.

This is how Jozef explains Zero Forms in the conversation

“Zero forms, are a set of physical questions where we study the effect of your communication on your physiology. So we keep your hypothesis of the world, and we test it through interoception and proprioception. We try to test, what’s the effect of your everyday life on your joints, on your organs, on your mind? How do you coordinate? What is your autobiography? What is your voice, etcetera. Which makes you understand what information is missing. Why are you aging the way you are aging?“

Zero Forms practices include Stillness, Joint Articulations, Coordinations, Improvisation and Voice Training.

But Zero forms are not all about physical practice. Using a format of “One question per One type of practice”, Jozef summarizes it like this. He says:

“Zero forms are questioning who you are.
So what is your autobiography? (Stillness)
What is the state of your viability? (Joint Articulations)
How do you coordinate? (Coordinations)
How do you move and improvise? (Improvisation)
And how do you express yourself?” (Voice Training)”

Fighting Monkey does include stillness practices in a more conventional sense, but would standing with your arms out for 60 minutes be classified as Stillness or Joint Articulations under Zero Forms? When I hear Jozef talking about Zero forms conceptually, I get a feeling that he refers to something less physical. Whichever way, The Zero Forms practices are inserted into Friston’s model between Me and Perception and are meant to facilitate a change in perception to better fit the environment.

And then, Jozef explains “Movement Situations.” like this:

“And between perception and action, we have added another element which we call movement situation, which means, simulation of life. Which is basically your capacity to model the world before you meet the world. What does that mean? It means that a basketball player does training before he goes to play a basketball match. You’re basically able to model what you would like to do in the future, And you are able to model various futures so you can create different hypotheses from which you can choose the best strategies. So what you learn in a movement situation is your capacity to model the world in a different way. So then you can have a larger repertoire to act in the dynamic world.”

Now, just from this explanation, it may sound like he is talking about skill training. However, the practices included here don’t look like typical movements you see in any sports or dance or martial arts. They are more like games and often involve a partner.

The way I understand this, is that in Movement situations Fighting Monkey introduces elements of unpredictability, such as another person or some unconventional movement task, to prepare you for the unexpected, allowing you to develop a repertoire of responses you can use in the future in real-life situations, which are unpredictable.

At the lecture, Jozef mentioned that the practices that are included in Movement situations include Scripts, Body-Body, Composition, and Sculpture.

So, this conceptual model of Fighting Monkey practices fits neatly within Friston’s model. Jozef says that this structure of practice is meant to be a life-supporting practice. And saying life-supporting, he doesn’t talk simply about health or injury prevention. Let’s look at where Jozef draws inspiration when he talks about life.

The Properties of Living Systems – 11:19

When Patrick asked Jozef how he felt about following the rules when playing basketball, Jozef responded like this:

“The basic rules that we need to obey are those rules that are common to all biological systems. And what is common to all biological systems, all living creatures, is that we try to persist. And we try to resist dissipation of energy. We try to create what Francisco Varela would call autopoiesis. We are autopoietic systems. Self-creating systems. An autopoietic system has a certain autonomy from the external environment and tries to keep its function and its structure intact for at least a certain amount of time in order to persist in a fluctuating external environment. So that’s a kind of first rule. I try to maintain my stability. I try to maintain my boundaries. “

So, we will touch on homeostasis and autopoiesis next, but first, talking about living systems, let’s focus on the phrase “I try to maintain my stability. I try to maintain my boundaries.” This is a reference to a list of properties of living systems.

If you study biology, something like this usually comes up in an introductory lecture on the origins and definitions of life. And when we think about this stuff, we usually imagine not complex organisms like humans, but simple cells. The earliest forms of life were just these cells floating in the ocean. And a cell is essentially a bag of water separated from the other water by a membrane.

Jozef lists the following properties of living systems. I am not sure what the source of this particular list is exactly, but overall it makes sense. Living systems are characterized by the following properties:

1. They have a Boundary
2. They are capable of Movement
3. The are Responsive — they can react to the changes in the environment
4. They are capable of Digestion and Assimilation – taking stuff they need from the external environment
5. They have Metabolism
6. They Excrete stuff they don’t need
7. They Grow
8. They Reproduce

Of course, these properties of living systems are applicable to single celled organisms, they are equally applicable to humans. And when Jozef says that a life-supporting practice is supposed to support all these features of life, he is obviously not talking about it literally.

Jozef uses this list more metaphorically. And while the original list talks more about material stuff – like taking in nutrients to grow — in this exchange between the living system and the environment, Jozef focuses more on information and modes of interaction. And, as mentioned above, he refers to it as communication.

Jozef didn’t go into the details of this list in the podcast, so I am taking this from the lecture. And since it wasn’t in the podcast, I won’t go into details, but for example, in a more metaphorical sense, your boundaries are not just your skin, but who you are and how you distinguish yourself from the world. And Talking about Movement, Jozef highlights that the movement should fit your phenotype.

What I found the most interesting in Jozef’s interpretation of this list is that Growth means Innovation and Reproduction means communication and sharing. I am going to return to this particular point later when I talk about Jozef’s pedagogical stance.

Homeostasis – 14:41

Now, going back to the question about the basketball rules, where Jozef switched to talking about biological rules, of course, he mentions homeostasis.

He says

“There is this rule that cannot be ignored. We are trying to maintain our homeostasis, our very narrow range of viability. And then within that very narrow range of viability, within this very constrained phenotype, the body type that we have or our phenotypical construct, we try to create a maximum of freedom. And one of the freedoms would be maybe to express it, let’s say, through basketball”

So Jozef has this evolutionary perspective, where he sees human culture and civilization as the extended phenotype of our species. Birds make nests. And humans play basketball, but ultimately it is driven by the same forces, following the same natural laws.

Obviously, when he says “We are trying to maintain our homeostasis” we are not having it as our explicit goal. We have no direct conscious control over our homeostasis. But we can sense the effects of disrupted homeostasis. Things like pain, exhaustion, fatigue, thirst, hunger, inflammation, bleeding, calcifications around the joints, even boredom, and ultimately, death, are all visceral signs of disrupted homeostasis that push us to do something to restore it, in a way, constraining us.

So, there are 2 types of constraints that Jozef talks about that ultimately drive our behavior. – internal, maintaining homeostasis, And external constraints — coping with the environment and minimizing the amount of surprise. And then he poses the question that he is trying to answer for himself and in Fighting Monkey practice:

“We need to maintain the homeostasis. We need to stay alive. And then within the cultural life that we live, we try to excel in different types of rules that are imposed on us. And the question is, are you an animal that is capable of bringing more understanding into the principles and then be more flexible in your behavior? or is your behavior more rigid and creates more conflict with the world?”

So, this questions of flexibility and adaptability seem to be one of the central questions that determine your success in the Fighting Monkey practice.
And then, if we will loop back a bit, when he contextualizes the Zero Forms and Movement SItuations practices, he says:

“When we say that adaptive systems try to maintain their viability to stay within the range of certain homeostasis, what they are doing basically is that they try to engage with the world through some kind of perception-action loop. That’s how we control the environment. The Better you control the environment, the better you are able to reduce the complexity of the environment, the higher are the chances of your survival. The Better you can play with what surrounds you, basically.”

And from there he goes to talk about inserting Zero Forms and Movement SItuations into the Friston’s model.
I will talk about perception-action loops later, specifically in relation to our approach in Baseworks, but here I’d like to finish the summary of the conceptual framework behind the Fighting Monkey practice by returning to Autopoiesis.

Autopoiesis – 18:01

So the concept of autopoiesis is the last thing I’d like to cover in that response to Patrick’s question about Basketball rules. So I’ll repeat that part:

“We are autopoietic systems. Self-creating systems. An autopoietic system has a certain autonomy from the external environment and tries to keep its function and its structure intact for at least a certain amount of time in order to persist in a fluctuating external environment.”

So the concept of autopoiesis was developed by biologists Maturana and Varela. From Greek, autopoiesis means “self-creation.” And this concept describes the nature of living systems to continuously produce themselves as a result of ongoing dynamic processes. For example, the processes of breathing, digestion and elimination let chemicals flow through the body. If you google or ask AI about “molecular turnover”, you will discover that “almost all the molecules in our bodies, with the exception of our DNA, turn over in a matter of days, weeks or at the most a few months.” Which means that at any point in time we consist of molecules largely different from a month ago, but there is still a continuity of ourselves.

But again, Jozef focuses on a more metaphorical and information-oriented interpretation of autopoiesis.

It’s not super unique to talk about autopoiesis in the context of movement. For example, I will link in the show notes to an article which uses the concept of autopoiesis to discuss creativity in dance.

But what is interesting in how Jozef uses this concept, is that for him, it’s not just dance that is creative. I mean, dance is traditionally seen as a form of activity that requires a certain amount of creativity. But for Jozef, Self-creation is about how you function in the world in a much broader sense. How you express and create yourself in the world. And this interpretation again resonates with Carl Friston’s model where we have “Me” against the “World”

So, from all these frameworks that Jozef uses and creatively reinterprets, we can get the sense that Fighting Monkey doesn’t just look at the organism in isolation, but instead looks at how an organism exists and tries to persist in the world, how it acts in it, adapts to it, responds to it, and takes the best out of it.

The Grammar of Life-Supporting Practice – 20:34

Therefore, positioning Fighting Monkey against other practices, Jozef is constructing this category of life-supporting practice.
This is how he talks about it. And keep in mind what I said earlier about how he uses the word communication. So he says.

“I’m interested in creating a life supporting practice. That’s my main interest. Life supporting practice is a practice that allows you to communicate better in the world and in the context in which you operate. So the main theme is a quest for better communication. Can you communicate better? Can you be better at exchanging information with the environment that surrounds you on which your autonomy depends?”

And then he talks about how this compares with other practices, and why not every practice is a life supporting practice.

“Any system that supports life needs to be capable of giving you feedback on where you are. If it cannot give you feedback, it’s not a good system. Now the question would be not yoga, not Tai Chi, not Pilates, not Feldenkrais, not Alexander Technique, not stretching this or that. But do you have the grammar? Do you have the understanding of how to sample your internal states? Can you understand what kind of physiological state you are in? Are you capable of understanding what kind of autobiography you create? What is your territory?”

So, although Fighting Monkey is a movement practice, and the majority of people who participate in Fighting Monkey events or become long-time Fighting Monkey practitioners, they are movers of some kind. We see that Jozef choses to focus on such topics as understanding yourself, positioning yourself in time and in relation to everything else in the world, and creating narratives. And To this, I’d like to add that in the lecture he mentions that the ultimate aim of the Fighting Monkey practice is to become what he refers to as the Actor of Many Roles (AMR)—someone who can seamlessly switch roles and adapt to an ever-changing world.

Although he is not using this particular acronym in the Conversation, which was filmed months earlier than thelecture, he still talks about the concept. He talks about someone who doesn’t become loyal to one system.

So, while the part I just quoted about “not yoga, not tai chi, not Feldenkrais”, may sound like a critique of these practice systems, I believe that what Jozef critiques is not the systems themselves, but the approach to engaging with them, seeing them as the ultimate answer to everything. If we look at it from the perspective of the extended Friston’s model, becoming too loyal to one system would mean getting stuck in the system, when your model becomes too rigid. And then not only do you stop developing, but you might also get physically hurt.

There is an interesting segment in the conversation where Joseph talks about Working with athletes. To summarize, he says that professional athletes usually have teams who support them anyway. And also, being young, Jozef says,

“they do not have the time to sense themselves. They are young enough to overcome whatever obstacles. They will be dealing with the troubles when they finish their careers, and that’s the time to come to us.”

This sounds very spot-on, at the same time this is just fascinating that this is the way it is. This topic also came up in the Conversation with Maria Lucia, and of course we hear it over and over – that people like athletes and dancers often have to learn to slow down and adapt the practice as they grow older and this is not something that is part of their curriculum. But then again, maybe it is really not the responsibility of their training institutions to teach them that. Right? It may be too early to teach 10 year-olds about arthritis and retirement plans.

So in this sense, there seems to be utility in this Fighting Monkey philosophical framework in a way that it can be abstracted from Fighting Monkey tasks specifically and applied to other practices. As Jozef says, if it doesn’t give you feedback, it is not a good life-supporting practice. But we know that many people learn to derive feedback from their tai-chi, yoga, martial arts and so on practices, and in Baseworks we also certainly constantly emphasize that aspect, and the entire logic of progression in Baseworks Practice is a non-stop ongoing feedback loop. On a micro-level, the micromovements are all about feedback, and on a macro-level, We don’t tell you what to do, you have to decide what’s appropriate for you at any given moment/

Also, looking at how people express the significance of Fighting Monkey for them personally beyond strictly movement-specific outcomes, a common pattern you see is that people say that Fighting Monkey has taught them to be more comfortable with uncertainty, discomfort and frustration.

Now, in some ways, Fighting Monkey is not unique in offering that. There are so many environments where you can expose yourself to uncertainty and discomfort — basically by trying to do something new. Or, you know, when I read about how people get frustrated with Fighting Monkey coordinations – this is also not unique to Fighting Monkey. You could go to a dance class taught by a detail-oriented teacher and try to learn choreography that is unfamiliar to you, and you’ll experience something very similar.

But what Fighting Monkey does, is that it offers tasks with no clear goals. So you have to formulate your own goals, and this is essentially the modification of existing models.

In Baseworks, we do have certain ideas which parallel this approach. We do use the term “movement task” where we are very explicit about the motor goals — like what you need to move and where, but the meaning of the movement is something that you have to figure out on your own, and people tend to find different meanings in movements based on the context of their lives and other activities.

Also, the quality of frustration in Fighting Monkey may be different from what you might experience in Baseworks. In Fighting Monkey, the frustration would more typically come from not being able to cope with the task. In Baseworks, on the other hand, we always moderate the intensity of any physical and cognitive process to make it more manageable. However, some people may experience frustration from not being allowed to do things in the way they are used to.

Sounding Yourself – 27:06

Talking about his younger years Jozef says’

“I always wanted to be an actor because I was fascinated that I could create a world that does not exist. I can create a world that I like, and I don’t have to just sit, be passive, and receive the world that someone dictates for me. I can create new text. I can create new ideas that haven’t been there before.”

Then he speaks about how he was aware of 2 different streams that complemented each other: on one hand he wants to create his own world, but on the other hand, he wants to have the capacity to understand the rules and excel in the environment that is governed by those rules.

So, he leaves sports, he goes to art school where he wants to study everything — acting, script-writing, design, cinematography, and he says:

“I wanted to learn absolutely everything. I wanted to know how to act. So that I can be anyone in the world. I wanted to be skilled in how to pretend.”

But then, he meets his mentor, who is a voice trainer, or communication trainer, and she tells him:

“You really only need to learn one thing.That is how to sound as yourself.”

And when Jozef explains what communication is, he expresses it in the following question:

“Are you able to express yourself with a voice that belongs to you, so that you do not pretend or assume you have a certain role in life, but you are more you. You are more authentic to yourself.”

And he also adds that this whole line of thinking was a major

“contribution to development of the entire Fighting Monkey practice or research.”

Right? So we arrived at this question about authenticity, that comes up a lot in Transmission Conversations. We had Ryan Hurst who who talked about how he had to give up who he was in order to really learn martial arts, and then we just released another conversation with Maria Lucia Agon Ramirez, where she is being very articulate about how one of the most important aspects of her activities is to provide spaces for other people to be authentic.

And so here, we have Jozef Frucek’s take on authenticity.

The Art of Fluctuation Together with the World and Writing Your Own Script – 29:17

When Patrick asks Jozef what he means exactly when he says that he’s learned to sound himself, Jozef explains that Sounding yourself or being yourself is

“When you coordinate, when you move, when you play basketball, when you do boxing, wrestling, if you do it right, it looks right, it sounds right. If you speak and you do not lie. It has beautiful tonality. It has beautiful music. It has beautiful variations. As soon as you start to lie to yourself, there is rigidity being introduced.”

So it’s interesting how he transforms from “I want to learn to pretend” to “I want to express myself in a way that I don’t lie.” And it’s not necessarily a contradiction. Because, changing your behavior according to your environment is not necessarily a lie, but it may be adaptation, or flexibility. And someone who can do that, can be called AMR, the actor of many roles.

So then, he continues:

“So, being authentic to yourself is to have the capacity to intelligently change the hypothesis about the world or slightly change the action about the world in order to minimize the errors that you are creating.”

Right? So he explains authenticity through Friston’s model. But then he continues like this:

“So someone who sounds as himself is someone who doesn’t become loyal to one idea, doesn’t become loyal to one system, doesn’t become loyal to, “oh, this is what I stand for and I’m never gonna change it”, or “this is how I’m gonna act in a world and this is the right way. Sounding well is being humble and understanding that the world is fluctuating, you are fluctuating. You cannot have one answer to the world. Whatever that would be, maybe yoga, Tai Chi, boxing, jujitsu, wrestling, it doesn’t matter. You need to really interact with the world, and the world itself is our feedback. And from every single encounter in the world, we have the opportunity to learn. World is for us and the greatest playground to learn and improve our hypothesis of the world or our actions in the world.”

Jozef connects the idea of being authentic or sounding as yourself with the goal of Fighting Monkey — to be able to intelligently update your model of the world and adjust actions accordingly.
So, from this, it seems to logically follow that either Fighting Monkey practice should teach you to be more authentic. Or, that Fighting Monkey is Jozef’s practice of being authentic.

I think Jozef is aware of this tension, because he explicitly says that it would be horrible if his students simply imitated what he did. I quote:

“What I’m interested in, what is really becoming my personal motivation is that can I share knowledge with my students in such a way that they can become independent from me. That once they learned those principles, that they will be able to create their own poetry because they understand the grammar. If they understand the grammar, they can create their own writing. They do not have to rewrite the same book that I wrote.”

And then, in another segment he says a similar thing:

“That’s what I was interested in, being able to inspire you, to move you. Maybe inspire you to do something else or look at the world in a different way. My PhD in communication and the Fighting Monkey is basically about how we can communicate better.”

So, it seems clear that Jozef finds it important to be authentic, to communicate better with the world, to write his own script, to become the actor of many roles, and it also seems clear that he wants his students to be able to also achieve that.

And I know that it is Jozef’s position that he has no intention to convince unconvinced people about what he is doing, because he has enough people coming to him to work with him. He mentioned in the conversation:

“What I’m sharing with you is my creative thinking and my thought process in trying to understand how I analyze science or how I apply certain information from science or how I apply creativity into life, etcetera, but not repeating what I’m doing.”

And then he also shares that among pragmatic and epistemic actions, he is personally more interested in epistemic actions. He is interested in exploration for the sake of exploration. If he has a good solution, he wants to find a better one. And when people come to him asking whether he can help increase their performance, he says

“we can play together and try to find out if there would be any value in what we are doing to your life. And if not, then it’s fine”

So, what I’d like to point out here is that epistemic concerns and drives are not necessarily a part of Friston’s model. It predicts that if the environment is optimal, and there is no surprise, no discrepancy, there is no need to change perception or attempt to change the environment. So, while creativity and flexibility may aid adaptation, I am not sure if becoming more in sync with the environment will automatically make you more creative, within the context of Friston’s model. It sounds like Fighting Monkey is not about handling the mismatch, but about seeking mismatch. Not about minimizing it, but first trying to maximize it, at least at first.

Constructing and Sharing Categories – 34:33

Fighting Monkey is a very unique entity. And as I said, we see great value in generating philosophical frameworks and narratives around movement practices and their role in the broader context of life. Because there must be pre-formulated goals for people to engage with movement practices beyond physical gains, rehabilitation, and relaxation.

So, we looked at how Jozef constructs a new category of a life-supporting practice. This is interesting for us because we also construct a lot of new categories to talk about Baseworks. Because existing categories don’t quite capture the essence of what we want people to understand. So, for us, constructing new categories is a part of our educational process.

I don’t know how important it is for Jozef to be understood by his audience at this point in time. In Baseworks, we definitely want to be understood when we talk about movement experiences and outcomes, and doing these transmission conversations and reflections is part of refining this process — we are trying to see which categories people use or construct to describe the result of commitment to their practices.

Jozef has mentioned that he is writing a book, so I am assuming that he is working on clarifying his ideas to the point where they can be effectively shared with others, as this is the 8th feature of life: a life-supporting practice should be shareable. On the other hand, maybe there is no goal to make it fully transferable, and maybe Jozef is satisfied with it being something that inspires people to be more creative, curious, resilient, flexible, adablate and so on. Like art.

Aligning with Baseworks – 36:21

And as usual, we will try to draw parallels with Baseworks. The common points would include the outlook that any practice or activity should be seen in the context of everything else we do in life, and that it is important to tune it and see how what we do affects how we feel. And in general, we would recommend anyone who is open to challenging their boundaries to attend a Fighting Monkey event, to try it. We participated in Fighting Monkey events, and we invited Jozef to Japan. So there is really a lot of affinity between our approaches.

We obviously work with different types of movements. So I am obviously not going to compare the techniques themselves, but rather the frameworks that we use to conceptualize human behavior and how movement practice can be used as a medium to introduce changes beyond the domain of physical movement

Linear vs Nonlinear learning – 37:21

The first point would be about the balance and importance of structured learning. And this is related to a long-standing discussion between Patrick and Jozef over the years about the relative importance of linear and non-linear learning at different stages of skill acquisition.

There is a lot of emphasis in Fighting Monkey practice on behavioral flexibility and adaptability. And if you go to a Fighting Monkey event, you will likely be doing very visceral things that you’ve never done before, which will leave you in a very stimulated and exhilarated state, and you may be sore for a few days. But, if someone were to actually stick with Fighting Monkey practice, there would be drills and repetition. And drills and repetition are generally needed to develop skills.

So, in the conversation, Patrick raises the point about linear and non-linear learning again, saying that

“There’s a certain fundamental approach that you have to building the structure in coordination, which is very linear,”

To which Jozef replies,

“ I don’t know what you mean by linear structure”

So, Patrick then stresses out that there are repetitive drills in Fighting Monkey practice that are linear,

And then Jozef points out that if you look at an athlete,

“if they are not well coordinated according to their constitution, <…> there is no performance. And, [Jozef says] This is often pushed aside. When the athlete has a problem and the athlete gets injured, he is sent to a strength conditioning trainer or some kind of rehabilitation. But no one is really looking, and no one has time to look at how we coordinate in life. — at his circadian rhythms, actions in relation to other people, speech, body coordination when running or body coordination when working with an opponent on an athletic field.”

Then Patrick interrupts Jozef and says, wait a minute, but before that, the athletes go through drills and skill training. There is a lot of repetitive training to be done before one can innovate (and for context, in this long standing discussion between Patrick and Jozef over the years, Patricks position is that one needs drills and repetition for innovation and creativity to eventually stem from that foundation) This is well captured in the martial arts concept of Suhari. And a different angle on it is the Fits and Posner model of stages of learning that posits that before the Autonomous phase there naturally must be Associative, and prior to that – Cognitive phase.

So, when Patrick says that athletes always go through tons of drills and training, Jozef responds, and I am gonna quote:

“Basically, we need to obey physics and biological rules. And we have a certain phenotype, a certain structure that we need to understand. Even within our phenotype as human beings, there are differences that we need to incorporate in our training, and they have to be understood and nourished in some way. Once we understand the basics, we can harness what was given to us, the degrees of freedom that our body has, how we can harness energy, how we can transfer that energy through our bodies. It’s like understanding grammar or understanding technique on piano. Once you get that, you can play whatever music in the world you like. “

I think this quote is very good for discussing the differences between Fighting Monkey and Baseworks approaches.

The word “basics” sounds a little deceiving next to mentioning grammar and piano especially if we talk about high level performance.

Yes, there are basic biological rules such as trying to survive, and being a slave to your homeostasis. And Yes, at some point, we have to consider holistic perspectives, and sometimes small adjustments to complex systems can result in big changes. But in between, we have shit load of skill building. And, again, when we use the word “skill” in baseworks, we don’t only refer to highly specialized athletic skills, but any action that we can perform without much thought, planning or effort.

Grammar and Piano technique is not something that you understand. It’s something that you acquire. Through drills and practice. And also, if you know grammar, you cannot necessarily freely express yourself without sufficient vocabulary

So, What we hear is that Jozef wants to work with people who already have the vocabulary, that is certain skills. Or, maybe if he works with non-athletes, he’s going to work with the movement vocabulary they have, and if he works with athletes, he will be working with a different movement of vocabulary.

In Baseworks we put significant emphasis on investigating one’s movement vocabulary, and breaking down complex movements into smaller more controllable chunks that can later be reassembled to perform more complex coordinations. We often work with people who can perform coordinated movements but often fail to perform simpler isolated movements.

Obviously, the application is very different, so again, I am not comparing the methods. I am only focusing on the importance of skill building in the framework. Both our methods use linguistic analogies, but the Fighting Monkey highlights the grammar, while we tend to focus on vocabulary.

Changing Perception – 42:47

Moving to the next thing, Talking about Zero forms Jozef says that Zero forms practice

“makes you understand what information is missing. Once you know what information is missing, once you understand it better through sampling your internal state through Zero forms, you can better understand then what the World is and what is the quality of your communication. Once you know what information is missing, then, you can change your perception. And by changing your perception, you are moving in the world in a different way.”

From a purely practical point of view, we actually interpreted this part similar to how we think about it in Baseworks. Sometimes you are not aware of what is missing. And you can use various practices to increase the sensory resolution. That allows you to become more perceptive of the discrepancies and outcomes that you might not have noticed otherwise.

Perception-Action Loops – 43:46

And then finally, talking about the differences between our conceptual worldviews, what stood out to me the most was Perception-Action Loops.

So I am not 100% sure whether Jozef is using the term “perception-action loop” in only one sense, or in more than one sense. But I’d like to bring the attention of our audience to the distinction between at least the two senses because it is very important in Baseworks.

What exactly is meant by “perception-action loop” depends on the theoretical framework.

In Friston’s work, particularly in the context of the Free Energy Principle and Predictive Coding, the perception-action loop is part of a broader framework about how cognitive systems, like the brain, maintain a model of the environment to make sense of incoming sensory information. The “perception-action loop” here is described through the lens of minimizing prediction error.
In fact, if you really think about this diagram, the word Perception here appears strictly speaking after the act of actual biological perception has occurred and resulted in discrepancy. So rather than just resonating with the environment, Friston’s model emphasizes an active modification of either internal states (models) or external states (actions) to reduce the mismatch.

When I think about “perception-action loops” in the context relevant in Baseworks, I think about Motor Function and Learning and Radical Embodied Cognition. In this context, the perception-action loop is the direct interaction between sensory input and motor output. So, it’s about real-time processing, where perception informs action, and subsequent actions modify perception in an ongoing, dynamic cycle. It’s like resonance or real-time decision-making.

Conclusions – 45:49

So, if someone asked, how can we insert Baseworks into Friston’s model, and believe it or not, no one ever asked this question, although it was actually very interesting to think about it, and this is why it is so interesting to do these Transmission Conversations and Reflections.
So, if someone asked, how can we insert Baseworks into Friston’s model, I’d say, it would be very difficult, because we focus on the more immediate real-time experiences.

To coordinate something you need separated [coordinateable items], some elementary actions. We work on increasing the [number of] and [awareness of] coordinateable items, hoping that people will find context for coordination. For example by doing other movement practice. That’s in the movement domain. And in the more abstract decision-making domain, BW increases one’s awareness of the feedback from one’s actions. And also develops a stance that is okay to personalize actions irrespective of what people around are doing.

So, if Fighting Monkey is a quest for better communication, Baseworks is a quest for better perception. But, because perception and action are seamlessly interconnected, better perception automatically leads to outcomes in action as well.

When Jozef says that “if a practice doesn’t give you feedback, it’s not a good practice,” we agree with him with 2 clarifications. 1) If the practice doesn’t give you feedback, you can change this by changing how you approach the practice, And this is where Fighting Monkey philosophy may be very useful outside the Fighting Monkey. And 2) Sometimes there is no feedback because there is not enough sensitivity, and this can be addressed through various practices, and Baseworks has this as its specific focus.