Seattle 2

The Second Seattle Seminar (S2?) was a blast.

Jonas found a great venue, a small club in Georgetown with inside and outside areas, chain link, a stage, obstructions...even some spilled beer.

The crew was good. Three had to cancel at the last minute, but two slots were filled so 'sold-out' became 'one under capacity'. 24 bodies, if my math is correct. Nine had not attended the first Seattle seminar and I was a little worried about their ability to keep up with some of the new information. They were great people and did well, but there were elements of law and violence dynamics that I'm sure they missed.

Still: Violence. Brawling. Manhandling. Fighting to the goal. Power generation. Blindfolded defense and targeting. Environmental fighting. Ground-level brawling. Frisk fighting. And the important new information, an expansion of the self-defense law information focused on articulation. A good decision is only half the battle. A brilliant explanation to an inexperienced jury might be needed to close the deal. Making good decisions is sometimes far easier than explaining good decisions.

Then scenarios. Carjacking variations: alone, with child, with special knowledge. Active shooter. Rude people. Predators. I was assisted by two wonderful role-players, Tim Bown of Bulletman fame and Guro Amy Koeniger in her RedMan suit. Good guys, bad guys, victims and predators, they played them all with a lot of intensity.

I suspect a few people saw some new things.

Good, good day.

Scenario Training

There are different types of scenario training and there are different levels.

Like any training, scenario training must serve a purpose. The purpose has to be something that helps the student as well-- if you are setting the rules, telling the story and controlling all the parts, you can always "teach" a student that they will fail. That's for your ego. A student subjected to that only learns to never try.

Some scenarios can be for testing, and one of the best aspects of armored opponent scenario training for martial artists is that they learn a little about the huge gap between dealing with a training partner and dealing with an attacker. It's never a complete exposure, but skills degenerate so universally that all but the most self-deluded take a second to wonder about the difference between training and life.

That's learning a negative, however. Understanding that you aren't prepared is a step... but it doesn't help you to be prepared. It motivates you.

So in scenario training, you start with what you want the student to learn. You wanted the student to learn how to tap into her inner beast and let go? You can set up scenarios for that. You want to get a student over some deep personal conditioning? You can inoculate for that with scenarios. You want them to take sterile skills and apply them to a dynamic, messy environment? Scenarios were made for that.

Most often I use them to help the student develop judgment in tandem with skills. They know how to take someone down... do they have any idea when it is appropriate? They know how to defend themselves, do they know what constitutes self-defense legally? Can they explain their actions to a jury of their peers?

Can they tell when a situations is developing? Do they know when to leave? Do they recognize the point of no return? Knowledge of violence dynamics (how bad guys attack) and force law are integral parts of self-defense. Every so often, these elements have to be practiced together.

The other thing about scenario training is that you find glitches. When the student doesn't run; or uses a martial skill instead of a survival skill (fighting to win instead of fighting to escape) or plays to the scenario instead of the problem (decides not to use the mirrors or doors, ignoring truth for an image in the head) it tells you something. The same student is vulnerable to his or her own mind games and assumptions in real life. That's a glitch, and a dangerous one. The best survivors are cheaters. If you want to encourage survival skills, you have to make it safe to cheat.

It takes good role-players and a good coach. A role-player who wants to can turn everything into a fight...and the student learns that only fighting (never leaving, never talking) is what works. A role-player who can play a convincing criminal (not an unstoppable monster or a cartoon character) is solid gold.

The coach has to let the students run and not micromanage or microcritique. There are lots of ways to be right, ways to survive. the goal is for the student to learn and so, whenever possible, the student, not the instructor, should be pointing out mistakes and areas of improvement.

You also have to watch the 'weirdness creep.' Most bad things that happen are pretty basic. There aren't a lot of variations on the Monkey Dance. Armed robberies follow pretty simple patterns. Good scenarios that reflect reality will blow away beginners and teach them tons. Unfortunately, what the student does once, the crew (facilitator and role-players) will do many times. The crew starts to get bored. The crew decides to make things more interesting and challenging. the scenarios start to get a little weirder, a little less like real life...

This is where we plan to finish up tomorrow. Sold out show. Life is good.

Handshake

The thing I like about playing with good people is that you don't need to dummy it down. Some situations suck and if you pretty them up too much, or try to 'program your students for success' when they hit the suckage in real life, they are screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.

With good people, you can work the bad scenarios and fail and brainstorm and fail and brainstorm and eventually come up with some things that work. That kind of honest play can save your life. The candy-coated bullshit just makes you feel better, right up until you choke on it and die.

Kasey is good people and has surrounded himself with good people. Marc is extremely questionable people and has spent his entire life around questionable people... which is a perfect environment for acquiring and testing skills. I, of course, have always been an angel: kind, sweet, gentle and innocent...

The particular form of a bad day we were playing with and against was the close range knife assassination. The threat would approach, weapon out of sight, and seize with the free hand (arm, neck, collar, head, hair) while simultaneously giving a bunch of sewing-machine style thrusts to the bladder, kidneys or whatever he thought would be most satisfying. ("How many lethal blows does it take?" "How many to be lethal? Or how many to get the emotions out of your system?' "Good point.")

Coming from different backgrounds (martially: judo/jujutsu; aikido; and indonesian/kung fu. Otherwise: Jail officer/CERT, road officer/SWAT and criminal) our basic idea of what would and had kept us alive turned out to be pretty similar. It became a matter of drilling and nuances. How would a criminal vary his technique? What were the indicators of an assault?

(When you are working variations it is incredibly important and difficult to stay realistic. I think one of the reasons martial arts systems become so complicated is a form of inbreeding: You counter technique A with B, so they start working on a way around B and come up with C, which makes one vulnerable for D but E prevents that and... all of which predicates on a bad guy being trained in your system, countering based on your system and attacking with your system in the first place. The 'what if' chain usually breaks on one of the first two links. Not recognizing this, systems inbreed to inefficient complexity. But it works in-house.)

There's a variation of the knife assassination that has bothered me- the sucker thrust from the handshake. It's actually easier to deal with than the close range grip: there's more time and you have a mutual grip with the hand that is trying to immobilize you. But that's the thing. Intellectually, I know that the right thing to do is to use the handshake grip to control his thrust ( a core-fighting strategy, manipulating his shoulders/hips/spine through his hand to control his other hand). But I was pretty sure that the instinct to focus on the immediate threat would take over, and would be ineffective.

I wasn't prepared when Kasey pulled it. I was distracted, watching other people play. No effort, I pulled the handshake grip in front of the knife and the tip tapped his forearm. Then I was behind him.

The second time, the weapon wound up tied up in the elbow of the handshake hand.

Not something I'd actively trained for in years, but something I'd thought about. My instincts had changed over time and I'm trusting more subtle (still efficient, just not as obvious) techniques. More importantly, my body/hindbrain appears to be taking over just fine and learning in new ways. Not bad.

The Weekend Thus Far

It's been a big weekend, and it's not over yet.

The Fan Boy moment: Taking off from PDX, it occurred to me that I was flying out to team-teach with Marc "Animal" MacYoung the guy who actually raised his hand and said, "Real life isn't exactly like that" and started a lot of people thinking. It was like going to meet a trail blazer in your field of interest...as a colleague.

Some times life demands balance, and the childish fun of the Fan Boy moment got balanced with discovering another character flaw. We were practicing defenses against close-range knife assassinations, and Marc pointed out that I wasn't treating it as a lethal threat. It wasn't because of training habit. Or lack of understanding about what kind of threat someone grabbing you and pulling you into a knife was. Or even inclination-- I have a pretty good idea what it takes for me to turn people into meat.

It was simply arrogance. A bone-deep visceral belief that I had handled so many level five and level six situations at level four* or lower that no ordinary person would require higher; That the person attacking me with lethal intent wasn't worthy of a commensurate response.

A flaw, and a potentially suicidal flaw. More work.

The training has been intense and wonderful.

One day of Conflict Communications. It went well, but in after action there are many things we could do better-- a little time management, some videos-- but most of it is simply polish and practice. The reviews were nice. It rocked. There was one negative review, and I kind of reveled in it: the people who could get the most will have the most resistance. We need to open future classes by asking who was ordered to there and talking about why that happens and how to use the dynamic.

One day, seven hours on the mat, teaching in series with new friend Kasey and Marc. Kasey is the complete package- traditional martial artist, history with competitive martial sports, enforcement and tactical officer. And a hell of a nice guy, who surrounds himself with extraordinary people. We played their basics (so long since I have been in a traditional dojo environment, it felt like coming home after being away for years, wonderful and a little weird) then the visitors (us) worked our stuff, our priorities.

Later today, a short class with the SWAT operators.

Commo, brawling, tactics... hard to get a better three days. Good friends, good new friends and a solid kick-off to the new business...

Sore, tired happy. Three things that often come together.

* Level four: Physical control-- pain compliance, locks, takedowns and control moves.

Level Five: Serious physical control-- Impact and impact weapons.

Level six: Deadly force.

Studying Problems

Sleep deprived, sipping a Velvet Hammer in PDX, getting ready for another wonderful experience...

Minnesota. We'll be teaching the new communications program. We've each done some test-runs separately and one together, but those were rehearsals. This is opening night.

Everyone has default ways to solve problems. If you only have a hammer, as the saying goes, you try to solve all problems by pounding. The scientific method is one of the most efficient:

Ask the question.

Study the situation until you get a feel for some possible answers. (This stage is intuitive.)

Design an experiment to disprove your guess

Repeat as necessary

Martial arts, self-defense, de-escalation... a lot of the high-risk practical stuff work from a different paradigm: What worked before? If it didn't get you killed, don't change anything unless you have no choice. That's a decent paradigm when the stakes are high. It also works well with the way our natural instincts run-- what our bodies tend to do when scared hasn't changed much since the days of cave bears.

It tends to corrupt quickly if not tested, however. People remember what their great-granddaddy did, but maybe don't remember why. Or even if that was a one-time freak occurrence and he had a better way that worked often enough he never told stories about it.

So even in modern police stuff-- patrol, DTs and communications, the current high-speed programs are collections of stuff that worked. Experiences. And there is no way to know how many times those same tactics failed, because there may be no one to tell that story. Or the weight of tradition may be so great that disagreements are treated as heresies instead of potentially life-saving innovations.

I realized that the way I've been teaching lately, as well as designing training, is to spend a lot of time on that second step of the scientific method. Studying the problem. And it has had huge payoffs. Just recognizing the difference between social and asocial violence makes articulating force decisions easier, and also prevents costly mistakes in self-defense.

My primary teaching has shifted from telling students what to do to having them look at the situation they need to fix. An efficient answer is almost always inherent in the question/problem, if you understand the question. If you don't the best solution or technique has a random chance of working entirely dependent on you stumbling across the right problem.

It turns out that this was the big break-through in Conflict Communications. It's not a list of techniques that we have used to talk people down. There's an element of that and we won't toss out practical experience... but the whole system is based far more on analyzing what went wrong. Realizing that failed de-escalations followed very similar, very predictable patterns. Then taking a look at what and who those patterns served.

In that was the key. Not just to calming people down but to recognizing that there are different dynamics to the calming, that they have a pattern and are predictable. If you understand that, you don't need to memorize techniques because you have principles. With principles, you can improvise. With enough practice to ingrain the principles, you can improvise on the fly.

Good stuff.

Done Been

I find myself spending time with a new demographic, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

For most of my life, I had few friends and those friendships were based on a shared intensity. We didn't always do the same kind of thing (I was cautioned early to keep as many friends as possible who didn't deal with the world of crime) but whatever they did it was intense. Usually dangerous. it allowed us to share a frame of reference that was rare with my other circles, largely people I met at the behest of my wife.

One circle seemed more real, more alive than the other. You can guess which.

Lately, though, a big percentage of the people I am connecting with are former bad guys. Some former good guys, too... but that word 'former' is popping up a lot.

They all talk about a moment when they realize that they will die if something doesn't change. In words it is so pale to say that. I've never felt that waking up in my own puke with another friend in the ground or locked up... but I have felt it in a short second when my tactics were failing and I was outmatched in strength. The taste of mortality doesn't really make it into such weak words: "I will die if something doesn't change." Maybe it's something you can never read or hear, but have to taste.

The realization and the decision aren't easy, but they aren't enough, either. You actually have to change. Move away from what and who you know, give up something you were good at (and that means a lot in places where good and bad is measured by breathing) and move to a world where you don't know the rules. Basic rules. How do you get angry like a civilized person? When force is not allowed (and you choose to follow that silly, arbitrary, civilized rule) what do you use instead? How do people negotiate when there are no guns involved?

At the VPPG the other day we were talking about students and instructors who romanticize this life. In the fullness of their pristine manhood they choose to believe that they are in full command of themselves and would dispatch that assassin with one of the "ten best techniques as taught to elite military units across the world" or make that swaggering bravo back down with the steely glance they taught in the "Fear No Man!" pamphlet.

I pencilled a note to write about this, about the differences between the wannabes and the ones who have already done been and don't wannabe no more. Not sure what else to write, except:

Thanks. To those of you who got out and kept breathing so you could share a little-- thanks. Just thanks.

Skies

I love the sky. A week ago, flying out of JFK there was a rainbow, except it wan't a bow. Short and straight, a blur of striated colors hanging in the air. I wonder if, before the advent of flying machines, any human anywhere had ever seen such a thing. Or seen the rays of golden light striking the sea in exactly such a way, or flew between layers of cloud, catching the sunshine just at that angle with glowing white above and below, flying at such a speed to extend the sunset for hours.

Today, there was a brief blue hole in the distance. Shattering turquoise blue with so many different clouds visible on the sides and above. Some rolling cumulus, some jagged, the filmy cirrus probably far beyond the blue hole but looking like part of the cosmic architecture of it. Beautiful and unreal. Need to start carrying my camera. Without a picture all that I can say is that in a painting it would have looked too dramatic, intense and beautiful to be real.

And one phenomenon I have only seen here and only at this time of year: If you are driving eastbound on a highway at exactly the right time of day after a hard rain, the cars kick up spray, and each car and truck appears to be floating on an individual rainbow.

Were someone to come forward from a hundred years in the past and see that one thing, they would be certain that they walked among the gods.

--------------------

Guest post on Kenton Sefcik's blog.

Looks like San Francisco, Montreal and Rochester (two repeats) in September.

Conflict Communications in Minnesota in nine days.

A level two (environmental fighting and force law scenarios) in Seattle in three weeks. Three slots left.

A Women's Self-Defense event with Kimberly Kelly at John Darby's club July 10.

George Mattson's Uechi-ryu summer camp last weekend of July

Boston August eighth.

The book broke 10k sales, which I guess is a big thing for a niche market.

Kris Wilder has an idea for a video. I'm in if it happens.

Epic Stalk

The tale must be told...

Somehow, over the course of Tread Lightly/Toby Cowern's survival class I somehow shifted from "Extra guy planning on swimming and laying on warm rocks all weekend" to some kind of assistant. Which was very cool. It gave me more time to hang with some extraordinary people and a chance to talk far into the night.

The last night, the students had been dispersed to their separate sleeping accommodations. One had made a swamp bed and was literally sleeping on a latticework of branches and leaves suspended over the river. Several were sleeping on the beach, heated by fires they had buried. Toby and I were sipping coffee by the fire at the main camp.

"I should go mess with them," he said. "They expect it." Several students were returning and had harrowing tales of winter courses (Toby's specialty is cold weather survival, which skill he hones in Sweden) where misplaced bits of gear would disappear on Toby's incessant nightly patrols.

I was neutral. People often lose more sleep worrying about being messed with than they do over being messed with. On the other hand, we had checked in and at least observed each student each night, just to be safe. So we decided to check things out.

It was pitch dark. I turned on a light and kept it in my pocket, intermittently covering and uncovering the glow to imitate a firefly. We followed trails, quietly. One student was sleeping quietly in a stripped down shelter. We could hear four talking by a fire through the trees. That's when we got the idea. I got the idea, rather. Toby is far too intelligent. It occurred to me that it would be fun to stalk into camp through the trees.

We had no camouflage. Toby had a white bandage on one hand and his big glowing wrist watch on the other. I was wearing beige pants that had faded to near white. And a bald spot that I'm sure reflects in the moonlight. All against the darkness of a temperate deciduous forest. What the hell.

I took point and the first yards were easy. After that, we realized that two were looking across the fire directly at us. There was enough cover to be noisy and to push around and give tell-tale wobble, but not enough to block vision.

It turned into a slow, measured belly crawl. No profile. One hand creeps forward, slowly moving twigs, if necessary, to the side. Then the other hand. Then the toes press forward, one, two, three, four times to catch up with hands. Eyes stay down, since reflections from eyes and teeth are the shiniest and trigger a very primitive part of the brain.

Toby stayed off my right flank. A former Royal Marine, he was ready to give covering fire had it been that kind of stalk. He matched me silence for silence and slow advance for slow advance.

One stretch of crawl was fingertip and toes for almost a body length without chest, belly or thighs touching to cross a dry stick too big to move. At one point I chewed a big jewelweed down so that my body wouldn't keep it swaying.

Twice, the people at the fire started and played lights over us, looking for the 'raccoons' that had made the leaves rustle. We held still, not looking. Weird that, had this been a different environment and not a game, not looking would have been the best survival strategy and yet would have made us helpless if it failed.

We continued. Torturous twisty crawl under a net of dry twigs on a fallen branch. It was almost completely open right there, no plant cover to speak of, just the twigs, silver and barkless when two of the people at the fire decided to go for a walk. They headed this way, passing no more than two yards to my left. I couldn't look, it would give away the eyes. I wondered, if one stopped to urinate if I would have the discipline to stay still just for a game. Sure.

They passed on. We waited a long time, expecting the two to return, but they had gone to their own camps. We continued the crawl. The last stretch was eight feet of dry leaves with no cover whatsoever. I motioned Toby ahead. These were his students.

The student had his back to us and was laying on his side, occasionally throwing wood in the fire, staring at the embers. Toby inched forward, slowly, until he was just behind the prey's head. Then he motioned me forward. That was pushing our luck, but it was too good a challenge to resist. At one point the target did hear me rustle the leaves and quickly looked around. His head almost slammed into Toby's...and he never saw a thing.

When I was in position we counted off by fingers and Toby grabbed his neck as I grabbed his legs...

It was a good stalk.

No Passing Grade

One of the long talks last week was about testing versus training.

A group of four people who only knew me from writing hired me for three days of private lessons.  They weren't sure what they would get.  Possibly a complete waste of time. Possibly new skills or new insights.  Possibly to be tested to the edge of the envelope.

That needed a talk.  Most of us have done the grueling physical tests.  Most have worked out in extreme pain or through injury.  Everyone has been tested or at least feel that they've been tested... but in this field there is something wrong with that paradigm.  It is not the way this particular world works.

Psychologically and physically, everyone breaks.  There is no passing grade for a survival test, whether it is assault survival or combat or wilderness survival or natural disaster.  No matter what you have in terms of skill, will and equipment there is a level that will overwhelm you.

There is no such thing as a 'survival level of proficiency'.  Not in a world with a 100% mortality rate.

There is no test so grueling that passing it means you are unbreakable.  You are profoundly breakable.  All a test can tell you is if you have reached your limit.  You can only really learn by failing.  Passing, whatever that is, only means that this test on this day didn't break you.

And if you do break, if you find that edge of exhaustion where you can't force yourself to move or the psychological precipice where meekly submitting and obeying seem like good options... the edge you have found becomes invalid the second you find it.  And how it becomes invalid is hard to predict.  Some find the inspiration to be a little tougher the next time, some find it easier and safer to give up a little earlier.  Some become afraid to ever be tested again.

If all you can really learn is that you will break; if the best you can get is to understand that some days you are the bug and the situation is a windshield on a gut level (I hope no one is so delusional that they don't at least acknowledge this intellectually), how valuable is that insight, really?

Most will never approach the edge in their normal lives.  Of those few that do, it seems knowing and trying to expand that limit only really helps those who are going into situations again and again with others needing to rely on them and thus needing to predict a teammate's breaking strain.

How many things does this apply to?  Violence in all its forms.  Disaster survival.  Maybe things as subtle and common as peer pressure.  100% mortality.  Everyone dies.  No such thing as a passing grade.

Winning

There are things you have to phrase differently to reach different people.

What is the goal in a fight? To get out in one piece is a laudable goal, but that can mean a lot of different things depending on the situation, the strategy or the presumptions of the individual... and it is not always possible.

Some people lock on to winning. That's fine. But some definitions of a win are more useful than others. My definition is both flexible and rigid-- whatever it takes to get the job done and be healthy. Sometime those aren't very compatible, but there it is. That 'whatever' (and the job description) make the flexibility.

But there are things that aren't in there, things that never affect my definition of the win. I don't care if anyone knows. (Including the threat. He just needs to be in cuffs. I don't care if he knows how it happened or who did it. It would be counterproductive in the long run to punk him out.) I don't care if I get the statistic. The job got done. No injury. Move on to the next one.

I don't care how it looked.

Emotional state is irrelevant as well. I've been scared of course. Rarely angry. But emotion has never been a source of energy or motivation for me. I got a paycheck. It was a job. To require motivation beyond that would be starting to make things personal, and that's where mistakes happen.

When the little stuff gets in the way, when it isn't enough to put cuffs on the threat or knock him into the wall but you want to dominate him as well* you tend to lose some efficiency, holding on a little too long or extending a fist a little slow to make sure he sees it, sees you.

It's a hard glitch to explain to a student, especially since it is slightly more common in people who are driven to win. But it is a glitch. You bring it out. That's your job as an instructor.

So you explain to this student the difference between domination and aggression; and maybe you explain to another student about touching their emotional core to access permission to take someone down... and a third student needs to be calmed away from the emotional core because they fight stupid when they get emotional.

You wind up telling three people three contradictory things, but in the end it is all about maximizing efficiency. Mental, emotional, physical and the links between those three forged into a tight, efficient and flexible unit. Creating a winner.

*Sometimes domination IS the goal. If you do it right, you don't have to use force. the question is always is this serving the job? Or my feelings?

Survival and Survival

After three+ days of private lessons and brawling with the Rochester Crew (Official Motto: "It's your move.") Spent another four days in Sonyea State Forest on a survival course led by Toby Cowern of Tread Lightly (who I will link if he ever gets his own damn website.)

Struck, maybe slammed by the similarities in what we teach and how we teach it. I shouldn't be, I've known since I butchered my first deer that survival was survival. Toby teaches the mindset and skills for one set of problems, I teach for a slightly different set. But the mindsets are very similar. As they should be. The only big difference is the immediacy of time in my world, but both scenarios hang on a common thread: If you don't do something, you will die. (And if you do the wrong thing, you will die quicker.)

So Toby teaches that the first thing you must do is acknowledge the situation for what it is. You ARE lost. This IS a survival situation... and Peyton Quinn teaches that the first rule of surviving an assault is: Do not deny it is happening.

Because this is where we see people die. Peyton with victims freezing in denial, Toby with people who had the equipment and didn't want to break the seal on their emergency kit.

Toby teaches that if your primary problem is in the future, it may be a motivator but it is not a survival issue. I remind students that survival fighting is on the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy, and most in our society have no experience with the two lowest levels at all.

Toby teaches Stop and Think as his first two steps to recovery. I borrow from Gordon Graham and apply it to violence and tactical operations: If there is no immediate threat, you have discretionary time. Use it. Think. Plan. (And this is the biggest difference in mindsets- in a wilderness survival situation, discretionary time is common. In an assault it is a precious gift.)

Toby says, "As mammals, we're crap. We shouldn't be at the top of the food chain, except for our brains." He then adds that your brain will be your biggest help or it will hurt you a lot. Sound familiar?

The essence of survival when you are lost is to attract attention. One of the best tactics in survival fighting is to attract witnesses...

So who said these, do you think? The wilderness survival instructor or the guy who deals with thug stuff?

"Deal with the immediate threat first."

"Make your plan and then act on it. Do not change the plan unless you get new and relevant information."

"Will is more important than skill is more important than equipment."

"Do things as efficiently as possible with the minimum movement."

"Be prepared to do whatever it takes."

Survival is survival. To an extent.

I Was Wrong...

Looks like there's more than 24 hours worth of stuff.

I am enjoying the hell out of working with a tight group of experienced, talented people for three+ days. We've covered most (but not all) of the building blocks; the basic drills; sensitivity; counter-assault; force law; efficient movement; self-teaching; and touched on CQ combat shooting, the emotional elements of blade work and psychological first aid. Tomorrow: recap, environmental fighting; That Which Works When Things Are Hopeless; the initiative drill and just general banging and rolling for fun.

Good conversation as well, and good food (calazone thick with pepperoni; Lebanese chicken soup; BBQ). It's a happy time. Finally met LawDog Jon, and that was an honor. Sometimes New York's Finest isn't a cliche. Sometimes it's merely a description.

The Conflict Communication course has been approved by Minnesota POST (Police Officer Standards and Training) for continuing education credit. That's a huge step.

All in all, things are going very nicely...

Feeding Frenzy

Chris and Travis are having a little discussion on the last post and maybe I should post some background.

Beginners in a lot of Eastern striking arts are taught to deal with an incoming strike by blocking and then counterstriking. (Not just Eastern, fencing has the right-of-way rule, but it has it for a damn good reason.)

After they have practiced this, many (but not all, unfortunately) instructors show that the block and strike don't have to be sequential. They can be delivered at the same time. Gosh! Wow!

It seems like an amazing insight. Even fewer take the next logical step that the defense and attack should be inherent in the same move.

That progression isn't what I was hammering on. The problem is more insidious. The issue isn't about the response at all, but the original 'attack' because it wasn't an attack at all. It was a feed.

A feed is when you give your uke/partner/student something that looks like an attack but is designed so that they get practice working the technique. It is an attack designed to be defeated, to give practice at block and then strike or simultaneous block-and-strike.

But it is not an attack. It is a feed. It just occurred to me that it might not be obvious to everyone else. Training in this way, even sparring starts to be composed of feeds. Not good feeds, the person doesn't want to lose, after all, but not attacks either. Attacks are designed to hurt and damage and overwhelm. Offensive moves in sparring, as often as not, are designed to deceive, disconcert or 'score'... which are very different things.

An attack designed to injure, hurt and subdue you mentally and physically is completely different than a feed. It is delivered at a different range with a different intent, often at different targets. It is not a game, with the halfhearted commitment that makes for such great contests of skill and timing.

When it is an assault, you add the element of surprise and it becomes a flurry of damage with no thought of defense. As different from an attack as an attack is from a feed.

A feed, you can block and then strike. Simultaneous also requires a feed. If it was not a feed, the threat would be doing two or three things just like you.

More background: You can cover and strike against an attack. But covering is shielding and in some sense, a good sense, blind. You don't have to see the attack, choose an option and then cover. By being blind, the cover becomes part of your attack and protects against the most common counter-attacks.

If you try to make it respond separately to each attack (the concept of simultaneous block and strike) you will fail. No one is fast enough to deal three separate blocks and three separate counterstrikes as a response to a three-punch boxer's combination. Even if there was no thought time on the defensive end (and there is damn near none on the offensive end, that's why you drill combos so hard). To do so you would have to be physically (nerve and muscle) at least twice as fast as your opponent. Since you are reacting, you would have to be even faster.

So people practice on feeds. But some forget or maybe they never knew, that feeds are not attacks.

Duality of Truth

Thinking about dichotomies, things that are true and untrue.

For my son's school project we have shot a little video- core defense, one of the big questions from the SF seminar, and power generation.

In the segment on Power Generation I make the statement that the essence of combatives is to transmit kinetic energy into the other persons body.

It's undeniably true. The whole point of hitting is to transfer enough energy to damage. At the same time, I know perfectly well that almost all fights are lost mentally, not physically. That people give up, they are rarely 'beaten'.

There is a point that comes up in most of the seminars very early-- I give instruction for the students to respond with one motion. It takes awhile for some to get it, but most see the value very quickly, the idea becomes for each move to be efficient on multiple levels rather than have three moves to defend, attack and position. As I said, most get it. The math is obvious.

But a few don't. They insist that they have been trained 'simultaneous block and strike' so effectively that they will always do it to each incoming attack. It's a bullshit dueling artifact.

To demo, I bring someone up from the audience. Preferably someone with some skill who knows how to move on the mat. It's better if the subject doesn't panic and hurt himself. As we reach to shake hands, I attack. A flurry of strikes, usually three standing, a take down and another 2-4 strikes on the ground. The elapsed time is under two seconds.

The only possible way to 'simultaneous block and strike' against a flurry is to be both twice as fast as the other human and able to process information and make decisions faster than your brain works. As I said, a bullshit dueling artifact. When the focus shifts to assault survival, the things that work change.

For the seminar students, it is a reminder: We are not talking about fighting or martial arts or survival. We are talking about violence. The class is not about how to flurry, that is easy, but how to prevail against that flurry.

That's not germane to this post really. The next part is.

One cool detail is that the initial flurry makes the subject freeze, even though every strike is pulled and I never touch him.

That's the dichotomy. Fighting bodies, you need to get kinetic energy into the threat. Fighting minds, you just need to overwhelm the thinking process. Either works. Both together? That's what I train for...

The essence of striking is to get kinetic energy into the threat's body. A true statement, undeniably... and yet... not just in demos, a couple of times in real life I have achieved full effects without any kinetic transfer at all.

Undeniably true... except when you do something completely different that also works....

-------------------

Upcoming stuff:

Rochester NY Tuesday May 25th (Facebook)

Seattle Two course... Sunday june 27

Conflict Communications Minnesota June 18-19 (Facebook)

Boston August 8th

Tentatively two classes in SanFrancisco September 11-12

Montreal in late September

A Scattering

This will be scattered, like lots of life. Still, busy and fun.

The last two days I was asked to guest lecture at a private college here in town. The course was Critical Thinking as part of a criminal justice program. The instructor had wanted something basically from Meditations on Violence about social conflict.

I got permission to wing it a little and worked on premises from "7" and MoV with a healthy dose of the new Conflict Communications paradigm and filtered through the pilot class on violence prevention...

New connections, a real synergy in the material... but the thing that really hit hard was that the people with the most need to understand it-- the former soldier, the two former gang members and the domestic abuse survivors were blown away. Not only did their experiences validate almost every piece of the talk, but the talk gave them perspective and tools and left them with a way to understand and change things. It rocked.

The official unveiling of the course will be in Minnesota on June 18th, followed by a hands-on class the next day. All will be team taught with Marc MacYoung and, if the past predicts the future, we'll have plans for three more courses and two more books if we talk to each other for an hour.

Plans are running along for a second-level seminar in Seattle (officially over half-full, 48 hours after the announcement) and a seminar in Boston August 8th. Probable shows in Montreal and a repeat and/or second level in San Francisco in September.

Flying out Sunday for the Rochester NY area-- one evening workshop, three days of private lessons and then tagging along with a survival class. Definitely need to put a new handle on the tomahawk. I'm excited about this one. Three days of training and it should cover the basics from anthropology to shooting. The crew seems really enthusiastic and talented. This isn't just a hobby.

Rats. I have, at last, eradicated all the rats from the house. Except one died a little hard and dragged his little rat body and the trap deep, deep into the walls between the upstairs and downstairs bathroom. I'm trying to come up with some way to secure the maggoty corpse without tearing out yet another ceiling. Gag.

The rats outside the house are doing fine. They have discovered that the cats stay out of the dog yard, there's always some dogfood to be had and our beautiful Great Pyrenees crosses think it is beneath their dignity to chase rodents. I've killed one and injured one so far. Five to go that we can positively identify. A little archery practice, maybe.

All with the usual-- writing, getting a tiller running, BBQ when the weather is nice...

And the VPPG. Last one went to two-on-one blindfolded groundfighting. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

The Stack

Writing has been insane lately-- I just missed doing 10000 words in one day over the weekend and have been pushing at about half that all week.  Which means some other stuff is being neglected.

The books that I have almost finished, trying to buy time to kill the last few pages or chapters include:

"On the Wealth of Nations" by P.J. O'Rourke- I usually really enjoy P.J.  This one reads like he was writing for the paycheck and didn't really understand the material ( Smith's "The Wealth of Nations") or why he was writing it.

"The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout, PhD.  Good stories and occasional brilliant insights, but in a goo of non-standard definitions and what seem to be an idea to reject any definition of conscience that doesn't fall back on a divine spark.

"Guards, Guards" by Terry Pratchett.  This is the one book that I have been told (ad nauseam) will get me to enjoy fiction again.  So far, I appreciate Pratchett's way with words (though it is wearing thin now that I've read several others) and there are two concepts I think he has explained as well as anyone.  But as far as fiction telling deeper truths... not seeing it.

"Leadership and Training for the Fight" by MSG Paul R. Howe (ret).  Someone really needed to write this book as an antidote for all the books written by managers on the subject of leadership that don't know there's a difference.  It is raw, written for himself and those who want to follow in the Master Sergeant's footsteps.  There are almost as many lessons in how it is organized as there are in the stories or specific points.

Those are the books in progress.

The next one's from the library, so has to be read next:

"America's Secret War" by George Friedman.  Up close, the situation in Iraq looked completely different to me than it did from a distance.  More coherent, more positive.  It was also clear that our last president knew Arabic culture far more intimately than our current one (Arabic culture, not Muslim.  Know the difference.)  It's also abundantly clear that people with definite opinions are basing them on even less information than I have.  So Stratfor's take on it should be at least interesting and well-documented.  We'll see.

Then, and the point of this post, I received some very thoughtful gifts in San Francisco from Maija and Dale.  Almost everything above was my excuse that I won't be able to get to them for awhile:

"Values for a New Millennium" by Robert L. Humphrey, J.D.  Dale tells me this is the ethical underpinning of what he teaches his Bujinkan students.  People I respect speak highly of the late Mr. Humphrey, so I'm eager to get to it.

"Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matthew B. Crawford.  I like things (people, stuff and skills) that are useful.  This one should be cool.  And I just now noticed the card.  Thanks, Maija

"Dirt" by William Bryant Logan, subtitled "The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth"  I suspect that dirt, like walking and breathing is one of those basic things that most people don't look at very closely.

"Oak The Frame of Civilization" also by William Bryant Logan intrigues me, much like the books Cod and Salt-- little things of immense impact in history.

On top of writing.  Editing "7". Lectures at a private college tonight and tomorrow.  Prepping for the private lessons and seminar in NY next week.  Conflict Communications in Minnesota and a second-level seminar in Seattle in June...

Busy, but the kind of busy that I like.

Professor Emeritus

I wanted to title this with the name, which I remember as Dr. Frohlander, but it was before the internet age and when I went to check the spelling (or maybe I had the name wrong-- Frohlings?) I couldn't get the confirmation.

In 1981 or 82, I took an introductory Oceanography class. It was taught by a Professor Emeritus who came out of retirement once each year just to teach this particular undergrad class. What follows is from memory, and I'm sure over the decades it has altered, but I remember his first lecture starting like this:

"The sun rises in the East. It sets in the West. Warm air rises. Cold air falls. Your assignment for tomorrow is to use that information to draw a weather map of the world."

The class started to murmur in protest and several hands went up. Dr. Frohlander slammed his hand down, silencing the room.

"The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Warm air rises, cold air falls. THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO DRAW A BASIC WEATHER MAP.

"Some of you think you are here to be spoonfed facts. Anyone can do that. You are here to learn to think. Part of that is taking what you already know and learning what it means and how to use it."

Most of us got the basic maps right. Might not have been perfect on the latitude where the easterlies ended and the westerlies began... but the concept was close enough.

In my time at college, Dr. Frohlander was the only one who demanded that I think for myself. Some requested it or suggested it. (Some of those then punished the free thought if they disagreed with the conclusions.) But only Dr. Frohlander, an elderly, retired hard scientist demanded it.

I can never thank him enough,.

For Life

When I asked my jujutsu sensei, Dave Sumner about spiritual traditions associated with Sosuishitsu-ryu he told me not to read too much into practice. 'Dead people can't go to church.'

It was profound, and pointed out a deep difference in how different people see their practice. At the time, I studied MA because I wanted to be a "complete human being" without even realizing that we are, all of us, already complete. It was just words and an ideal. Nothing, really.

Everything has primary and secondary gains. The same thing can have different primary and secondary gains. And we can lie to ourselves about which we value.

Some people want a black belt. Some want to be champions. Some want to be 'masters'. None of those words mean anything. The blackbelt is a symbol. The primary gain behind the desire can be to amass skills or to gain prestige, to get entry into a world of competition or to understand yourself...and some of those, particularly understanding yourself, are nebulous ideas and maybe traps, but that's a thought for another time.

So someone can believe they want to be a champion, and the real primary gain is to win matches... but they can convince themselves this is the same thing as dropping an opponent. If that were true, ambushes in the locker room or parking lot would be an acceptable part of the entire tournament process. Getting the skill to drop people, or to escape are different gains.

So some martial artists proudly do their thing as a 'way of life'. It is part of their identity. It is who they are. It is a primary gain to be a martial artist.

My point of view is radically different. Unarmed arts are part of a subset of skills that may be necessary so that I can get back to my family and friends, so that I can look at sunrises and have a good burger. That is life. Anything I do in training is to serve that. Martial arts or combatives or whatever can never be a way of life for me, only a tool to ensure that I have a life to enjoy my way in.

It changes many thing. My primary gain in an altercation is to get out of the altercation with minimum problems later. My primary gain is going home. There is no internal desire to be a monk or a master or a samurai or a knight or any of the icons that people strive to emulate. The longer I can keep breathing, the longer I can be Rory, (which has rocked so far.)

The training still shapes me (or you, if you envision it like this). It has become a basic part of my movement. It colors how I see the world and how I plan. It has taught me that many things are not problems that may seem troubling at first.

But one of the big differences is that when we look at what works, I have to be more specific about what it works for. If you train martial arts as a way of life, as long as you are engaged and alive in training it is working and your primary gains are satisfied. Whether it works for anything else or in any other context is, at most, a secondary gain.

When you train for life, whether it works and what it works for are primary. Training spent for the sake of training alone is time spent away from that life.

Two Little Things

Long talks with Kris, Edwin and Maija about teaching methodology. Good, focused stuff. Kris talked about attaching the new information to the vehicle. You put on your gi, you get in front of the class, everyone bows in.

That's an icon or an archetype. There are a million little assumed things that go with it. You don't have to say what you are teaching. It's martial arts. As if the words defined anything. Kris rides the archetype, breaking little things down, changing patterns, bringing in information that rarely finds its way into a dojo. But never so much or so fast that the students lose touch with the pattern, the expectation.

He sneaks in the important lessons, and the students learn it without ever feeling they are on alien ground.

Maija quoted her late instructor: "No drills, no style. I am teaching you to see." It warmed my heart.

Edwin, with his expertise in system design ,asked the right questions, I think.

A student is/has three things.

1) Attributes. People differ in size and strength and speed. But they also differ mentally and emotionally. Aggressiveness and fear, tolerance for uncertainty, ability or inability to see things as they are. Many ways to be different.

2) Training. At some level everyone has been taught things. Even if they have no formal training, each student has an idea of what fighting is.

Ideally, the training would be based on the student's attributes. Knife fighting is a bad choice for a gentle soul who can't abide messiness and liquid spills.

3) Experience. Maybe a lot, maybe a little... and many take training as experience. It's not the same. Training falsely interpreted as experience can be a deadly trap.

In the end, I'm only trying to offer two things:

1) An analysis of the problem. This gets broad very quickly. Violence dynamics, how bad things really happen, is crucial. Knowing "how to defend yourself" if you have no idea what you are defending yourself from doesn't make any sense at all.

But there's more. Often, maybe usually, the battle isn't lost physically but mentally. The glitches and freezes and fears and the emotional and social context are just as important to making yourself act as what the threat does. The physical part is often simple. Making yourself do the simple thing in a frozen fog of doubt... that's less simple.

2) A way to evaluate yourself. Does this work? Is it set up to be applied to the real problem? Can it be more efficient? What about myself? What makes me hesitate? What could I not live with? Will this send me to prison? Am I okay with that? Under what circumstances? What is the price of admission on this ride?

So I have nothing to replace a martial system. Most systems work just fine if they are trained with respect to the real problem and the attributes of the students anyway. The body mechanics usually work better than the explanations some instructors come up with. There are some styles that work way better with real assaults than they will ever work with sparring, which shouldn't surprise anybody, since that's where they came from.

The physical skills are easy, and the principles are quickly and simply understood. Practicing and applying them takes considerably longer, but I'm not convinced that the constant presence of an instructor is really useful. At some point, if the sensei is there every day and the absolute authority on what is good or bad... it's basically a teat for the brain. No reason to learn to feed yourself.

That's addictive and counter-productive. Not something I want for my students or, for that matter, anybody.

Getting together every so often so that you can show me what you've discovered and I can show you what I see? We both grow then.

Some People Don't Care About Science!

You would think that my wife would understand the value of the scientific method. Especially when the need is so great, but no.

The theory struck me late at night: since 1) laughter is the best medicine and; 2) extremely low temperatures have kept people alive when they would normally die (particularly drowning children) it is entirely logical that tickling someone using icy cold fingers might be the ultimate therapeutic touch. It might cure a myriad of diseases.

Despite the unassailable logic, she resists letting me perform the necessary experiments in cold-finger tickling.

It's a damn shame.