The Search for Connection in Jiu Jitsu

The Beginning of Fractal BJJ

Looking back at the moment I asked, I still wonder about what came over me when I asked the question. I had wanted to ask the question for a long time. I had been asking everyone I could about connection in Jiu Jitsu. But there was no one around capable of answering either question. Only stories in the process of becoming legend, the truth uncertain. Passed from one person to another and sometimes written about on forums on the internet. But in the moment, something happened. A rare confidence emerged, my body relaxed and I asked something bold. Even as the words came out of my mouth, doubt and shock arose in my mind. I had already set a course though, so I followed through. This was the very beginning of the journey to Fractal BJJ.

The Question Emerges

I had been training for about 3 years at this point and had become obsessed with learning Jiu Jitsu. Hours a day were dedicated to trying to find information online and I studied it all. Most of all though I wanted to learn about “connection.” I had seen Rickson Gracie talk about it in an interview and it had piqued my interest. In the videos I had watched of Rickson, it was very clear that he understood something unique about movement. Years of searching online had yielded zero results. But I did learn about Rolls Gracie in the search. There were several sources that claimed Rickson’s Jiu Jitsu improved drastically when he started training with Rolls. Rolls seemed to have a talent for producing many of the best in Jiu Jitsu. Asking questions about connection in Jiu Jitsu at the gym or of other people I had come across, always zero results.

Gracie Family Lore

We heard a lot of Gracie family lore from the owner of the gym. I was intrigued. This is how I had initially heard about Rickson Gracie. However, I had a difficult time learning from the instructor/owner of the academy. He was very strong, pro-performance enhancing drugs and came from a body building background prior to Jiu Jitsu. When I asked too many questions, which I frequently did, the conversation usually ended with one of two answers. “I don’t know, I just push harder here and it works.” Or “Just do what I teach.” There were many variations of the second answer. There seemed to be a large disconnection from what I heard about the Gracie family, what I saw Rickson do online and what was happening in the gym

Wallid Ismail

I made a really great friend at the gym, Dave. I learned almost all of my early Jiu Jitsu from him. He was self taught before coming to the gym. He had learned from a large set of VHS tapes produced by Wallid Ismail. Then spent years searching out people to drill the techniques before he had the chance to join a BJJ gym. As a white belt Dave gave the brown belt owner absolute fits training. And in stark contrast, what Dave taught me worked very well in training and in competition too. From Dave I also learned more and different Gracie lore. That there had been a division within the family. Wallid from one side of this division made many accusations that the other side was not teaching the real Jiu Jitsu. I wondered if he was talking about connection in Jiu Jitsu.

Finding the Path to Connection in Jiu Jitsu

I got to spend a significant amount of time hanging out with the legendary Helio “Soneca” Moreira during the course of a 3 day seminar at the BJJ gym I worked at. He knew the owners from the gym they had learned at, and he would come hang out at the gym in between seminar sessions. He was very kind and really loved Jiu Jitsu and also teaching. Watching Soneca teach and train with the students, it was clear he understood the missing pieces I had recognized but could not find. I soaked up as much as I could but it was difficult because I was not at a level where I was ready to work on the techniques he was teaching. Then the seminar ended and I assumed I wouldn’t see him again.

The morning after, however, he walked through the front door. He came to say goodbye, which was shocking to me in itself. And then he asked me if I had any questions for him before he left. I asked immediately asked about connection in Jiu Jitsu. I also asked why it seemed impossible to find information on it and if that was what Wallid’s accusations were referencing. He started laughing.

The Best Kind of Answer

Soneca responded by saying, “the way most people hip out from closed guard to open guard is wrong. Let me show you how to do it.” We put gis on and the trajectory of my entire life changed. In this moment Soneca also taught me what it is to be a great teacher. He gave me all the information I needed to know embedded in a single movement. If learned to succeed at the movement I would have to use all of the information. If I forgot something important, the movement wouldn’t work and I would naturally have to search for the thing I forgot. He set me on the path to find my own answer with all the tools I needed. I had no idea that I was on the way to finding the answers about Connection in Jiu Jitsu now.

Finding the Connection

I spent hours working on the movement hipping out from closed guard to open guard. My inner thighs got raw, then formed scabs and bled as the hours tuned to days then weeks. The scabs healed as the weeks became months and then years. The technique itself worked great. My whole Jiu Jitsu game developed around it.

Then one day, 7 years later, I was sitting behind the desk of my own Jiu Jitsu academy. I had an epiphany. 2 conceptual patterns contained in the movement Soneca showed me emerged at once. Suddenly I could see how they existed in everything a person would do in Jiu Jitsu. They are the second and third I wrote about on the “Our Philosophy” page. To be clear, the 1st concept I wrote about on that page is also included in what Soneca showed me. I just needed more prodding to figure it out. It came a year later in 2019, through the teachings of Murray Greene who came from a now defunct school of Yoga that went by the name Anusara.

Using Connection in Jiu Jitsu

The second half of 2019 training became incredibly fun. I already enjoyed it, but now movement was effortless. In fact, many times it seemed like I wasn’t moving myself, rather my opponents movement inputs rebounded off of the connection and moved me. Training with stronger athletic people was like riding a rollercoaster. Wild but safe. New and unexplored areas of Jiu Jitsu started emerging.

I was experiencing large amounts of success in positions I had never been in before by following the conceptual ideas. In my own training I completely abandoned the work of memorizing technical procedures. Instead, I worked on keeping my mind completely clear and open. The experiences that came from this, during training, lead to a new immersive study in life. Transcendental meditation or the many other names it masquerades under. Study is the wrong word, it is a practice of cultivating profoundly deep and sometimes wild internal experiences. This is what I believe Rickson’s famed breathwork practices were about.

Teaching

Back to just after the epiphany in 2018, I started applying the concepts to each position I found myself in regularly in training. It worked like a charm. Questions were solving themselves as if I were pulling information out of the ether. My Jiu Jitsu expanded rapidly. I started slowly introducing what I was experiencing into my teaching. My students started to excel and it was encouraging so I went deeper.

I got contacted several times by other academies to talk about various students that had traveled and trained there. It was shocking and I was encouraged to continue. The most impactful one was in 2019 when a blue belt of mine traveled to the North East and trained at Kevin Landry’s gym. When she returned, she gave me a phone number and said Kevin wants to talk to you. Kevin is a product of Renzo Gracie’s famed gym. Teammates and training partners with many modern day legends that emerged from that place.

Going All In – Teaching Connection in Jiu Jitsu

I called. He told me about how talented the student was. He asked me a rather vague question about what I was teaching. I was nervous, but described to him the three concepts and how they had evolved for me. I also told him I theorized that I would always be in a technically correct position or working toward a technically correct position if I followed all three concepts at the same time. Even if I had never studied that position before. He chuckled and said I was right.

Kevin said that what he really wanted to know from our call was if I had consciously taught my student what she was doing. He also said I had missed a detail about the second concept. That I should expand the idea of the body structure to the tips of my fingers and the tips of my toes. This was extremely useful. I was encouraged to go all in. I changed what I taught and started exclusively teaching Jiu Jitsu with the three concepts as the foundation and source of the information. It felt like freedom, for a short time…

Something is Missing

While I had a deep fundamental understanding of the first and second concepts, connection was just happening naturally for me. As much as my students were excelling, connection in Jiu Jitsu was not happening naturally for them consistently. They could feel it and describe it when I did it to them. When I talked about connection, they said they literally understood the words coming out of my mouth, but could not fathom how to create it in their bodies. I was missing something and I was about to learn, the hard way.

New Experiences

Keeping all three concepts at the forefront of my awareness while training consumed so much sensory awareness that I could enter the flow state easily and consistently. Spending so much time there, staying in the flow state became easy. Sometimes if I stayed there for extended periods of time, such as a 2-3 hour training session, a deeper state would emerge. Something similar to lucid dreaming, except awake and training Jiu Jitsu. Later I would learn this was a theta brainwave state.

In this state, I could feel the spirals of the first concept so profoundly that it was impossible not to follow them. If I would close my eyes visualizations of the inside of my body would appear, many times underlying fractal patterns would also be clearly visible. In this state connection became something concrete rather than abstract. Breathwork prior to training could bring me here too. Or close enough so that I would enter it quickly in training.

I tried to teach this to my students, but there was no interest. They came to learn Jiu Jitsu. I struggled to grasp a solid physical pathway into connection that I could teach the students. What was the foundation I wondered. How can it be built step by step?

Injury

December of 2019, I am in Bali on vacation and training Jiu Jitsu in Ubud. The gym is full of surfers, surfers have wonderfully connected bodies and fantastic movement. I was having so much fun, surfing on people as I would say when people asked me what style of BJJ I was doing. The ease and grace with which movement was coming now, the gentle power, and devastating strength of connection which I had wondered about in the past flowed through me effortlessly.

While Jiu Jitsu was coming easily, at this moment, breathing was not. I was not used to a hot humid environment. I pushed through it, deeper and deeper into the lucid experience while training. Watching the inside of my body as I moved, following the spirals. My breath however was becoming misaligned with the movement, something I continued to ignore.

Suddenly, what I was seeing on the inside of my body suddenly fractured as if I had dropped a piece of plate glass flat on the ground. And that was it. I could barely move, the structural integrity of my body was gone. My body was also trembling uncontrollably, and peed myself right there on the mat. I left hurriedly, embarrassed. Unsure. Following the concepts had never failed me before, but now, something had failed in spectacular fashion. Not in Jiu Jitsu but inside of myself.

The Foundations of Connection in Jiu Jitsu

I know now that it is because, the cooperation of the diaphragm and the pelvic floor that governs spinal stability. This cooperation will also drive breath when your breath and movement are perfectly aligned, it feels like the movement is breathing for you. This engagement spreads to the tips of your fingers and toes and the crown of your head so when you breathe you can feel tissues in these places fluctuate with the breath. Maintaining this level of internal connectedness inside your own body is necessary for connection. In Bali, my breath became so ragged and desperate that I lost spinal stability when my body was in a position it could not support with it. The fracture that exploded through my body was the fascia.

Recovery

I rested, returned home just before Christmas. When I tried to train, there was only clumsy movement and pain. I was lost. Looking for answers, I went to a well known gym in Denver that I trained at regularly. The head instructor had once been a student of Soneca. I asked him what I should be working on in Jiu Jitsu. He said that I was working on so many things that I should pick one thing I wanted to learn. As soon as he said this I knew the thing I needed to work on was healing my body. I wasn’t ready to accept it.

Covid happened, I rested some more. Every time I tried to train, there was only intense pain from a lack of structural integrity in my body. It felt like my joints were colliding with each other, in any movement. Walking, sitting down, putting a shoe on, joints crashing into each other. I had two other significant injuries in my body, left knee and right hip that existed prior to the injury in Bali. Before I could manage them without issue, but now that was not the case.

I still taught but I could barely train. I had surgery on my knee to remove a large part of my meniscus. It healed quickly, I still could not move well. I lingered on, continuing to teach and try to keep the gym going through Covid and I managed for a while. But Covid combined with the pain I was experiencing and the long term fallout of the business deal I had made with my friend, a verbal agreement that was not honored became too much. On December 31st, 2021 I gave my half of the gym to my business partner. That same day he sold it.

Searching

I wandered. I went to the southwest and stayed in the desert of New Mexico and Arizona. Then to the Pacific northwest and worked as a river guide, the sensations I could feel in the body made whitewater smooth. I moved back to be near my old academy, happily the new owners were keeping it alive, although most of my favorite students had quit and told me the atmosphere was very different. However, after showing up for class the first time one of my former students was asked to tell me I wasn’t welcome, it was devastating. I started working as a transit bus driver.

Return to Recovery

Finally I decided to take healing my body seriously and enrolled in massage therapy school. What I could feel in the body made body work easy and very profound for my clients. It gave me time to dive back into studying the body and into exploring shifting brain wave states, very useful while doing body work. I began to experience the body again and started to figure out how to do what seemed like melting the still fractured pieces back together. Progress was slow but there was progress.

Mostly I dreamed of teaching Jiu Jitsu again and wondered if I would ever be able to pass the knowledge on. For a while, I didn’t dare allow myself to dream of training. I did try periodically, but my body was not ready. Eventually in 2025 the dream of training again became persistent. I could feel that my body was close to being able to train. An idea emerged, if I am able to start training again I will put the process of how to develop connection in the body online. Step by step. Anyone who is interested can learn from the process.

New Beginnings

I also would need a place to train, and mats to film some content. After two and a half years of waiting to go back I decided to leave my old academy behind for good. I started wandering again, back to the Pacific northwest to work on the rivers. It’s a perfect place to listen to the heart and find the soul. I left the country and wandered across Vietnam. I found a Jiu Jitsu gym and tried training again. My body was finally ready.

It was really uncoordinated and awkward, but there was no pain. I was ready to start the journey again, six and a half years after the injury. After asking how long I had trained, they asked me to teach. I said I wasn’t ready, I needed some time to rebuild what I had lost. Two weeks later they asked me to teach again and I agreed.

So now I am here, starting a platform for sharing information. The beginning of FractalBJJ.com The process of creating connection in grappling, and so much more.

I am grateful to all those who were integral to this path. And a special thank you to Soneca for showing me what I was looking for. You can find his Jiu Jitsu association here. I would highly recommend seeking him out if you ever have the chance.