I want to believe...

So before I begin my random musings about instinctive archery, let me first say a bit about myself. I am a professional musician and full-time school teacher. I have three degrees in music, including a doctorate. Learning to shoot the bow intrigues me because it's like learning to play an instrument. You put your finger here, do this with your arm, stand on one leg, and it makes the sound you want. You put the arrow on the string, do this with your arm, stand on one leg and the arrow goes exactly where you want it to go. Might have exaggerated on the whole standing on one leg thing, but I digress.

The two are very similar in that form is everything. My main instrument is the double bass. It's basically a six foot tall tree with four strings. Without proper form, it is nearly impossible to make a good and consistent sound. Making a good sound consistently is the most important thing. I'm a pretty big guy and can sometimes get away with bad form or technique by just "muscling" through something. This is ok (maybe) sometime but is not good in the long run.

Muscling through a passage or piece on the bass is not the most ideal practice. I would equate muscling it through in archery to pulling back the string on the bow and just letting the arrow fly with no regards to your posture, alignment, form, or even where the arrow will go. Although I'm very analytical with my ever changing concept of archery form, I sometimes feel like I'm just muscling through the shot.

I take a shot, see where it goes, and try to assess what I did (whether correctly or incorrectly). If I did something different on the previous shot, I try to add it to my shot routine. If the different thing in the cycle was detrimental to the shot, I try to never, ever do it again (yeah, I would it was that easy to stop). This constant change in routine/shot sequence makes it hard to ever feel comfortable and wonder if instinctive archery really exists.

So the previous sentence leads me to the title of this post (and more than likely that fancy sign off I was trying to find in my previous post), which is "I want to believe." I really want to believe that if my form is always the same and if I focus on that tiny scrap of bird crap (hey, that rhymes) on the target, that it will always go exactly where I want it to go. There are times when I get a pretty good grouping and I totally believe in instinctive archery and other times where I think instinctive archery is a much bigger pile of bird crap than what I was just shooting at on the target.

The purpose of this blog is to write about my quest to believe in instinctive archery and to hopefully improve my shooting simply by discussing it. Not sure either of those will ever actually happen, but I want to believe they will. See, that was it. That was the witty sign off. Just put it before the end. Dang it! Oh well, I'll try to do better next time.

Introduction

This will be the first of many posts as I delve into the world of instinctive archery. I started shooting a recurve bow in December of 2014 and was gung-ho for a few months. I was also in the middle of a massive weight loss (around 80 pounds since September 2014) and archery took a backseat to that/life/job until May when I stumbled upon a Bear Kodiak Magnum compound bow in a thrift store. I learned that these bows could be converted into traditional bows and the interest in archery was rekindled. I sent that riser off to someone to covert it to take ILF (international limb fitting) limbs, which means that the same riser can be used with many sets of limbs to adjust poundage and the length of the limbs. Since then, I've been shooting nearly everyday and trying to remember everything I forgot about traditional/instinctive archery. I have many topics I'd like to talk about from my experience with instinctive archery so far and have many posts planned. I'll try to pace myself and make this blog as interesting as possible (if that's possible). I'll try to come up with a creative sign off, but for now, I'll just end this right here.