What Is Truth has grown out of the battle its founding members fought to find contemporary mental training resources. When general advice, such as breathing and praying ran out, the real work started to uncover what the current scholarly knowledge has to offer to create personalised solutions.
What Is Truth (or WIT for short) aims to fill the gap in mental preparation for combat sports, creating a bridge between academic research and real-life needs to offer a modern tool for fighters. Beyond the one-size-fits-all approach that dominates the mainstream, this site strongly focuses on guiding fighters toward building their own personal mental practices. The materials offered are built on a multidisciplinary approach to merge relevant knowledge from neuropsychology, sport, and cognitive sciences.
The tools represent a cerebral and emphatic approach toward self-development, challenging the ‘push it harder’ culture and advocating combative arts as a means for personal growth.
Why combative arts?
What makes martial arts a special case for self-development is that when training regularly, fighters stretch their physical and mental skills simultaneously, stirring up their inner world to achieve change. There is no more challenging work in life than changing oneself. However, when starting from a well-defined angle with one highly specific goal, such as tournament success, the energy is so well-channelled that it can bring a profound result much faster than any other approach.
Fighters who are focused on winning a tournament work hard to increase their success in ways they usually wouldn’t or couldn’t do for themselves. Through this effort, they discover the quintessence of human dynamics first in the competitive environment, then this understanding will grow to other aspects of life. That is why martial arts provide a rich soil to grow in, even for the smallest seeds.
Why grappling arts?
We focus on grappling arts like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu because they are specifically relevant for building resilience. They induce many emotions during practice due to their close contact nature, challenging the internal status quo with each roll. At the same time, they provide small doses of disturbance, and the repetition of exposure offers many opportunities for an individual to build a coping mechanism gradually.
Why What is truth?
The name What Is Truth is a reference to Jesus Christ’s hearing before his crucifixion. In the classic religious interpretation, this scene speaks to the blindness of material rulers, as the Truth that Pontius Pilatus was asking about was Jesus himself, standing before his very eyes. The reference here, however, is used in the Jungian meaning, where Jesus Christ symbolises the self (‘I am the way and the truth and the life’). This is closely associated with the Greek meaning of truth (aletheia), the world as seen by the self. Referring to the process of realising our self and reaching the understanding that for all of us, truth is what the our self makes of it.
Read more about the symbols and concepts we use in the Glossary.