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.

24 Hours

Really re-thinking the seminars. Especially thanks to a lot of help and advice when I asked for it earlier. You guys rock.

Thinking out loud:

The physical stuff is the most entertaining but (except for the counter-ambush training) it is the least important. The things that make violence difficult to deal with are emotional and cognitive. Those are the things I try to hit hardest in a seminar. Instead of teaching a bunch of things to deal with violence, I try to give a glimpse of the violence they might have to deal with. In the end, that doesn't change or replace any previous training. All it does is put the training in perspective.

What putting it in perspective can do is ratchet up the efficiency by orders of magnitude. Not by showing new stuff, just by showing where the old stuff fits.

The talk-talk part is important. Visuals and demos are good, but long ago kids learned about hunting by hearing stories and getting advice. That hasn't changed. "The deer go to higher pasture in summer" is easy to get in words, hard to learn by trial and error. More so when part of the world, specifically the law, exists in words.

The physical stuff is important as well, but most of the people who show up already have good physical skills, and I extend the trust that they can improve themselves with just a little guidance. that said, beyond the basic safety drill and counter-assault, every seminar is different because I see different holes.

If I notice that some or most hit too light or won't hit at all, we have to cover power generation. If some or most act in discrete units (strike-pause-other strike-pause-kick) they need something to encourage them to flow into total initiative. Blindfolded infighting works great for that. Plus it is fun and gets people to use their senses in a way that is faster than sight. If people never consider weapons or running, never give a thought to why they are pretending to fight with strangers in a gym... then we have to talk about fighting to the goal and bring in the baby drill or breakout.

There is a subset of students I was told recently, that want completely non-physical self-defense. On one level, that's a pipe dream. If you are targeted at certain levels the only thing that will get your ass out is overwhelming force or, at minimum, the credible threat of overwhelming force.

But... that's at the very rare extreme. There are a handful of decisions that that can drop your danger almost to zero. There are a few habits that will prevent most of what slips through the cracks. There are some interpersonal skills that can clean up many things... but beyond that, there is a Hellstorm. If you train non-physical only you can't be prepared for that... and too many of the people that teach to these odds just quietly pretend that the Hellstorm doesn't really exist.

That said, I've been asked to put together a non-physical program. It would do a lot of good. But it's not complete.

So there is the talk-talk: about context and legalities and types of fights and what will happen to you physically, emotionally, internally. What to do right after an event and what you should do long before.

And there are the physical skills, broad and deep, but very, very simple if taught properly.

Basic skills, like striking, locking, entries and takedowns. Fundamentals like speed and power. Thee real stuff, like seeing opportunities and adapting. Stacking basic skills. Stacking fundamentals.

Experiential stuff, like finding your own glitches and creating your own strategies. Finding where your tactics fit.

Which goes into which seminar? What do I do with a three hour block? With four hours... or four days?

Someone asked yesterday if I taught a regular class. I said I didn't and made noises about that not being where my head is right now. That wasn't true, but what I really believe would seem like an insult to most martial arts instructors:

There's only about 24 hours of stuff-- mental, physical and spiritual-- that actually works. Everything beyond that, you will learn on your own. I might be able to show you, but it can't be taught. I would feel, if I had a regular class, two hours a night, two nights a week, that anything after six weeks would be spinning wheels. Cheating the students, feeding my own ego, trapping them in a worldview that isn't their own.

Romance! Adventure!

I'm not sure how it happened, but a chapter of the Romance Writers of America somehow heard about me, tracked me down, and asked if I'd do an on-line short course on violence for writers. The course will run a month, be handled on a BBS...

Should be fun. Or at least very strange. Part of me keeps saying, "Don't scare the customers" but isn't that really what it's all about?

The first two "lectures" are written and I'm thinking nine:

Base Line; Context; Bad Guys and Violence; Good Guys and Violence; Unarmed; Blades; Gunfighting; Less Lethal; Aftermath.

The class announcement is here.

Should be interesting.

BTW, anyone going to be in San Francisco May 8 and 9?

The Striking Deficit

I'm trying to brainstorm my way around a training artifact.

Proper striking can be effective. I've put people down and broken bones with techniques ranging from hook punches to slaps. On the other hand, they're really idiosyncratic. If anyone tells you that a specific strike will always have a specific effect, the person is lying. Or misinformed. In my personal experience, I've taken a crowbar to the back of the head with no injury whatsoever, and a slap to the back of the head that left me dizzy and puking for three days. I've been lifted in the air from a solid kick straight to the crotch and didn't feel it for well over a minute... and I've been flicked in the crotch and gone down.

Strikes are dangerous. Even if you don't notice that you have broken bones until after the fight, they are still broken and can take a long time to heal. That solid shot to the head might not hamper you at all, until a few hours later when the tissue swells and you pass out. Maybe die. Hours after you 'won.'

Because of all this, strikes require special safety restrictions in training. Maybe you put big pillows on your fist. Maybe you pull the strikes and practice missing. But something is done to make sure that the strikes in training don't do what strikes do...

Which has two bad effects. One is obvious, in that all the training to miss (whether you call it pulling or just use contact to a safe area like simulating hitting the groin by hitting the thigh) will influence you to miss in real life. Trust me-- you'll have other things to think about than trying to remember what you simulated in practice and substituting the 'reality' variation.

The other bad effect is that it increases the value of grappling techniques in sparring.

That's not in and of itself a bad thing. The ability to move, control, lock and strangle a human body are some of the most effective and reliable base skills. But when you are practicing, whether sparring or scenarios, and the strikes have to be controlled and the submissions can go to submission, you wind up with scenarios that always end with a lock or strangle.

Unless you stay alert, it can seem like locks and strangles work and strikes don't. The thing is that real strangles work far better than pretend strikes.

I haven't found a good solution for this. If you insist that people respond as if the strike was real... what the hell does that mean anyway? Not everyone folds when punched in the torso. To be truthful, not everyone even notices when they are punched in the gut. Headshots are notoriously idiosyncratic.

One of the cardinal rules is that you never train people to fail. Giving up should not be part of the drill. If you teach people that if they get hit in the head (or stabbed or shot or blinded) they are out of the fight, they tend to simply quit when the condition is reached. That's unacceptable.

At the same time, if you have trained to tactical advantage, you discard techniques that don't work. Consciously or subconsciously, students will tend to reject the strikes and focus on the submissions in an environment where only submissions seem to work. That creates a weakness as well.

Yet another problem is that because of the safety artifacts, a grappler will usually have a huge edge in applying techniques in a free-for-all. Many strikers, except with gloves, have never practiced getting kinetic energy into another moving, dodging, resisting body. Getting peak force in a strike requires control of motion and distance and those are things learned best hands on. The strikers who use gloves are almost required to use hand conformations that put their metacarpals at risk, so they can play harder, but what they play at often injures the striker more than the strikee once it ceases to be play.

This one's a poser.

VPPG

The Violence Prone Play Group was an idea that came from sitting too long in a CHU (Containerized Housing Unit) in Kurdistan. I like teaching, but it misses the exploration aspect that I love about learning. Guiding others is very different than learning for yourself. You also don't get nearly the workout.

So the idea was to get a small group, no more than six, together. I wanted high-end instructors. Not because the rank means anything but because I wanted people who had moved into territory where they were on their own. It was never intended to be a group that would get together and show off what they knew. I wanted a group that would get together and share what they were working on. If you have been doing martial arts or combatives or fighting for even a year, there should be a mystery that you are working on. How to get the power from the ground or how to use the energy of a rush, something basic like that.

Too many don't. They wait to be spoonfed what their instructor wants them to know on a schedule chosen and imposed by the instructor. I wanted people who had been in long enough that they had gotten to the questions the instructor didn't have answers for: How do you prioritize options when you are outnumbered? Defense or offense when your mobility is compromised? Why are the mechanically identical blocks and strikes processed differently? How fast can you read tells?

I wanted people who had got to that level and kept going.

I envisioned a small group, maybe drinking coffee, "What you working on?" And someone could spill out some weird thing about spine control for damage resistance and someone else would have experience in something similar and two others would wonder if you could apply it moving and fighting and the fifth would recognize that "if" wasn't the real question, but "how" was...

The group would brainstorm and then they would bang. When everyone was tired and had a headful of new data, they'd debrief. And then someone would ask another question and the group would brainstorm and then brawl...

The inaugural group was small. Just three of us. All skilled, all liking to play. There was a little blood and there were far more questions than answers... but it was great. A truly wonderful time.

Shoveling Peace

Yes. Ahem. I'm the world famous author and lecturer, Rory Miller. Yes. (Insert snotty noise and read this in a fake, wannabe New England/Princeton accent).

So guess what I did yesterday?

Shoveled shit. Thirty or so wheel-barrel loads of goat shit and straw. It's called "mucking out the barn." It was fun, in a "This is hard work and it really stinks and I will have to burn these shoes" sort of way. Only some of it in the rain.

My lovely wife was right there the whole time. Digging, mucking, pulling down the old hay feeder and building a new one. She is ecstatic about the high-quality fertilizer.

That's life now. Writing. Designing classes and teaching. Spending time with the kids. The occasional forays into flooding laundry rooms and rat nests in the walls and goat barns. Constant warfare with our acres of blackberries.

It is the most peaceful time that I can remember in my entire life.

New Business

"May I speak to Sharon Tring, please?"

I didn't recognize the voice on the phone. "I think you have the wrong number, " I said.

"Did you just start a business? You're doing business as Sharon Tring?" Sharon Tring? Chiron Training? Swift.

"Yes. Chiron Training. How can I help you?"

"I'm XXXX with XXXX and I'd like to help you get your new business off the ground."

"No thanks. I won't be needing your services."

He chuckled, as if he heard that from all of his cold calls, "We're a consulting company that specializes in helping start-ups. You just started your business correct?"

"Yes, and you can't help me, but thanks."

"Now hold on there, son..."

"No, you hold on. What do I do?"

"Excuse me?"

"What do I do?"

Silence.

"If you didn't do enough basic research to find out what I do, you can't help me do it. Thanks for calling.

"Err, thanks. Have a nice day."

Evidently, the state business license is public record. Second call like that so far. This one was just funnier.

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

Other stuff:

Martial University will be held June 19th at the Sumner High School in Sumner WA. Mark Hachey of YiLiQuan Kung Fu is setting it up. All proceeds will go to the families of the four Lakewood Police Officers who were murdered last November.

Seminar in Portland May 1st.

Seminar in San Francisco May 9th.

Remember the storytelling event? The recording is now available in BackFencePDX's archives.

The Expert

I got a weird question in Austin: "What's your advice on fighting in roller skates?"

The young lady wanted some advice on a serious question. She handled the security at a roller-rink. She'd been in a number of fights while wearing roller skates, usually with people much larger than herself. What she had learned in martial arts about foot work and power generation and base and other things just didn't apply when your feet were tied to wheels.

We brainstormed some stuff, but I had to say, "Why are you asking me? There's a very real possibility that you are the world's foremost authority on fighting in roller skates. I should be asking you."

It's probably a pretty small world, the roller skating security set. But she had clearly learned things that I couldn't imagine. And this is one of my peeves. Not really. It's not a peeve. It's something I see every day with a little wonder and a little sadness: The human ability to discount personal experience and seek validation. Often validation from someone with paper.

They may have more than paper, these experts. That's the idea behind certifications and stuff, if you see a five-year pin you can assume five-years of experience, but sometimes it doesn't fly so well.

Not the point of this post, the experience of others. The point is discounting your own experience. Sometimes to preserve an illusion. Often to preserve a relationship. Very often to defend identity.

Experience isn't absolute, either. In my analysis a single violent encounter almost always does more harm than several. With one, lucky illusions can be reinforced or, more commonly, things you were certain of can be destroyed. A single violent encounter shows some gaping holes, but gives nothing to fill them. You find out what was wrong, but it often takes more experience and some experimentation to figure out what is right.

You are all expert at something. At what? Where do you look for validation? Why do you look for validation?

Fifty-Seven or So...

Totally unrelated to the last two posts, Nick Guinn asked if I had a ranking sheet, a list of what I wanted students to know.

I used to, back when I thought there were more answers than I believe in now. Nick made me think, though, and the product is sitting in front of me. It fits on one page. Fifty-seven items in six categories. There should be one more-- I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of something that should be on the list but can't remember it now. It will bubble up.

Six categories:

The Seven Aspects will be a book all its own (contract out in the mail just today.)

Principles could be a book, just a list of what makes other things work. Mostly applied physics.

Awareness-Initiative-Permission, the Big Three are already treated in MoV, extensively enough for people to get a handle on them, I think. At least to get a sense of what might be missing.

The Building Blocks are how I approach technique, I guess. Targeting, power and timing. Delivering kinetic energy. How locks work and how to improvise them. Same with with getting someone off their feet or moving them on the ground. Some of those are still rough-- power generation is pretty universal in, say, long-range circular technique but hand conformation really affects both the damage delivered and whether your hand breaks.

The Four Elements (You, the Threat or Threats, the Environment and Luck) all have elements that can be taught and explored but in practice they wind up being a checklist of what is ignored: "When was the last time we did this with shitty footing and improvised weapons? Is this drill set up the way bad guys attack? Where are the points when things can get weird?"

The elements are a big piece of life and self-defense and possibly the source of all complication, but they are also simple in a way.

Miscellania are just thoughts or ways to think or things to remember. Nuances and special skills. Basics like fighting to the goal; big shifts like re-framing the situation. Little details like dead zones.

The list doesn't include drills. Those are fluid and I like the ones I use, but they are ways to get to the point, not the point itself.

There's nothing on the list that is incompatible with what anyone wants to teach. Sort of. Styles developed before modern legal systems may not wish to tack on the information or adapt methods to comply with modern law. The styles enamored of their thousands of discreet techniques might not be happy with unifying them under a handful of principles. Instructors who like their static bear-hug defense may be unhappy when reminded that someone is grabbed, generally to be moved, not immobilized and the technique might not work so well when the victim is lifted off her feet...

But there doesn't seem to be anything here that contradicts the fundamentals of any style. In a lot of ways it is a list of reminders about context. Context can be easy to forget in a big clean room, training with people you like.

I think I'll put some more work into this, shift from merely a list to explanations. Might be another book or two in it.

Something I Fear

I fear creating a system. Anything I do or teach is just the best I can do right now. All systems start that way, just the best of the person who started it. Ideally, if it caught on, it was better than most of what was available at the time and place. Often, new systems start driven by new paradigms.

When a system becomes a system, the stuff (techniques, strategies, principles, beliefs) intended to solve problems subtly become the things you use to identify yourself. That’s the danger.

Because once that shift happens improvement, especially paradigm shifting improvement, becomes a threat to identity. If you have good stuff, really excellent stuff, but I have a paradigm shifting idea that replaces 80 of your techniques with 1 concept… a system’s tendency will be to reject it. Even if it is in line with the systems principles. Because it would negate things that are already in the system.

There are only eight ways to lock a wrist (I can double that to sixteen + two, but it’s not really necessary). There are over three hundred named wristlocks, but there are only eight ways to do it. If you introduce that concept to a system that has 300 wristlocks they will either reject it… or add it. Then they will have 308 wristlocks. Instead of playing with the concepts and trimming, things accrete.

So I fear creating a system, because living (which is another way of saying “not dying”) is a thing of growth and change. Creativity and paradigm shifts are precious. Systems, in a way, create heresies. Fighting to stay alive shouldn’t be constrained by orthodoxy. The bad guys count on that, count on victims playing by the rules.

True Believers

Most martial arts students, on some level or other, are ‘true believers’. They believe that their chosen art or instructor is ‘IT’ whatever ‘it’ means to them. It must be the best, of course… otherwise, they would be doing something else.

Sometimes it is naïve—can a six-year-old in a “Little Tigers” class really evaluate how good his training is?

The question of best can never be objective anyway. Best for what? There are world champions teaching MMA, or people with deep ties to ancient schools who are available in the west, or people who have survived extensive levels of violence. There are also people with incredible fitness training regimens or philosophies or spiritual awareness. And there are teachers who just make you feel great to be training. Which of those is ‘best’?

There is a qualitative difference I’m trying to narrow down, because it seems that there are two different groups of ‘true believers’. By True Believer, I mean people with at least a little of the fanatic in them, the ones who don’t see it as just a hobby but part of their identity. Cross that with the belief that whatever they do is the ‘best’. That’s what I mean.

Most of the time when I see this I’m not impressed. It seems tribal and close-minded. When (what I consider) dysfunctional TBs get presented with something new, something outside their experience, they close their eyes and stick fingers in their ears. They put extensive effort into explaining why they don’t need to listen to that source.

That’s a big clue there—if you ever find yourself discounting the source instead of the arguments, you are in your emotional brain. That is primate tribal thinking.

Dysfunctional TB’s get defensive.

There are some extraordinarily cool schools that also are pure True Believers. Emerald City Judo up Seattle way comes to mind. Bob Wittauer runs a good dojo. They work hard and they play hard and it feels like a big family. When you are invited in as an outsider, it is with open arms. Even if what you do is not what they do, even if what you teach contradicts things that they believe in.

The last weekend spent with Fit and Fearless Krav Maga in Austin felt the same way. They train hard. Bruises are daily, bleeding is pretty common too, and my god they sweat. (Blood, sweat and tears makes for a perfect training session, IMO). They are unabashed that what they have is the best… and they can simultaneously work, with open minds and hearts, to make it better.

F&F had the same family feel as Emerald City, or that Mark Moy and Scott Dinger bring to their training. They all produce loyal students—who are fierce.

I made a comment about “lions that leave rabbit tracks” in an earlier post. I can think of some excellent practitioners who seem to be thoughtful and intelligent teachers, but who have never produced students that excelled them. And I can think of some who only produced people who were afraid to win, more timid than when they started.

Family feeling with hard work? Instructors who are not merely competent and demanding but also loving? An expectation that the next generation will be the evolution, that they are not only expected to carry the torch but to carry it higher and farther? Is that all the difference? Is there more? What?

Update

Even more tired, but also sore and happy. There have been some developments in the last week:

A seminar in Portland, OR with KJ is coming up on May Day. Information is here.

I've been invited down to do a seminar in San Francisco May 9th. San Francisco is a fun town. The seminar is on a Sunday and I should have that Saturday free for private lessons or just wandering around.

My first web-based class for writers starts June 7th. I started writing the first lesson and it is turning into a friggin' book. Which might not be a bad idea, actually.

Need Some Sleep

Played with some good people with good skills today. My biological clock says I've been up since 0300 and local time is almost 2300. Only 2200 back home, though. Still very tired.

Weird images today. Flying into Austin and looking out the window it looked like flat and scrub and swampy. I got flashes (maybe of refueling in Panama?) it looked familiar. Odd.

Lots of talking. This crew plays hard and they don't need a lot in the physical skills department. I could teach them stuff, maybe tons of stuff, but it likely would be different stuff and not better stuff. Some of the precepts from "7" are pretty new to many of them. Not sure how I feel about that. Things that seem obvious now, essential, were unknown and unexplored quantities to me not that long ago.

With luck, I'll be able to keep saying that for the rest of my life.

The head instructor is good. Saw him move but even without that, the skill and intensity of the students spoke well for him. Students are like footprints. If you see a lion print, you can be pretty sure that a lion made it.

(Which brings up a huge aside to play with-- if someone who should be a lion, judging by skill and knowledge and personality, is leaving rabbit tracks, what does that mean?)

Advanced the blindfolded training. Defensive movement is relatively easy, being able to read what the threat is about to do by shifts in center of gravity and movement of the shoulder and pelvic girdle. These men and women (all instructor ranks) were able to take it to static targeting (hit her rear ankle with your left foot; now touch his nose with your fist) often without the movement clues. In only half an hour. Really impressive.

Long day tomorrow.

Reading

Fiction

Some friends have put unfair pressure on me to give fiction another stab. Grrrr. There are some authors I can tolerate- George MacDonald Fraser, for instance. But he's done so much research it might as well be a textbook. Only more fun. The series my friends have recommended (read, "insisted on") are classics in the speculative literature field.

It's been a hard plow. One of my gripes about fiction in general and the fantasy/SF subgenre in particular is that the things that should make fiction fun boil down to sex and violence... and most write as if they have never been in a fight. And only had sex with a partner once.

If someone is going to have sex with a multi-breasted ancient shape-shifting undead demoness of seduction it should be at least as good as the sex I'm used to. C'mon writers, it's called imagination. The best sex you can imagine should not fall so far below the real thing.

And, generally, they write sex far better than they write violence. 'Nuff said.

Still, the man has a way with language. Unexpected turns of phrase or strange references made me chuckle a couple of times. In a way it reminded me of Nelson Algren. Not to the same level, of course. Algren did things with the language in his writing that could be so powerful and be completely unnoticed (some of the paragraphs work perfectly as metered poetry and it doesn't distract or draw attention).

Classics

Gave a challenge to some students to read a book they wouldn't normally pick up, something from a section of the library or bookstore that is unfamiliar to them. If they do it, I kind of have to, right? So I'm 3/4 of the way through "The Picture of Dorian Gray". Sigh. Heavy sigh. What evidently passed for cynical wit in the day just seems snide and self-involved now. The things intimated as horribly corrupt and evil wouldn't shock a tenth-grader. There was a murder, finally. Maybe it will distract the point of view character from describing brocades and clothing, but I doubt it.

Non-Fiction

"Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life" is a constant challenge. It's the kind of thing I've been writing about lately from an entirely different point of view. It's really hard for me to stay on point with this. There is good stuff here and the basic formula is workable... but it hits so many of my buttons. The rich, privileged and wiser-than-thou preaching to the unwashed heathens... and I can't help but believe that if the author had ever met one of the people in my list of unwashed heathens he would run. But his idea of unwashed heathens appears to start at anyone who works for a living. You know, sweats and gets hands dirty. What an Arab would call a fellahin.

This voice and attitude seem very common with the professional mediators and peace-makers for hire (so many of them and it seems that they account for about 0% of what little peace actually gets made). I think it might be time for a blue-collar, version of peace and understanding, coming from some people with scars on their knuckles...

Some Teaching Thoughts...

I've had time to read, re-read and somewhat digest the comments (both here and e-mail) on Toning Down. Time for some philosophy.

I have no evidence that I'm better than any of you. There is nothing to say that I'm stronger or smarter or quicker or tougher or wiser or more sensitive or any of a hundred of the things that people sometimes use to differentiate themselves. Any difference that exists is that I have done things that many people think about. People who firewalk are no different than people who don't... except that they firewalk. I have learned some things in my own personal firewalk, but there is nothing that leads me to believe that each and every one of you wouldn't have learned even more than I. Would not have discovered more and spoken of it better. Would not have excelled me in every way.

I like to think I am special. I can be downright vain. There is just no evidence to support that.

So when I am faced with a group of students, they aren't students. They are bundles of potential and insight and skill and power. The same as I was, the same as I still am. Each has the capacity to be better than me. They are, each of them, already better than me at many things.

Further, and this is a hard leap for many people who teach martial arts and self-defense, I'm not interesting in teaching them what to do or even what I did that worked. Because even in the hairiest situation, whatever I did wasn't the key to getting out of it. The key was always in what I saw. (Then, of course giving myself permission to do what I saw needed to be done.)

And all of the students, in every class, already know how to sense the world around them. They can drive. They can identify friends and tell when something is wrong. They can feel a cold draft of a window that shouldn't be open or feel the body warmth of someone who shouldn't be there.

They see stuff and they know stuff, if the blinders aren't on.

If the blinders are on they will trample each other at a door to get out of a burning building and not think to throw a chair through a window. They will hide from gunfire behind a gypsum drywall that won't stop a bullet. They will follow their social conditioning even when they know in their gut and their brains that something is wrong.

There's some teaching in here-- few people have enough contact with predators to understand how predators manipulate, but actually it's not that different than the way that car salesmen or even some parents work.

My ideal for teaching is to give the students permission to see, and then teach them how to teach themselves. People can constantly improve. They can get better, smarter and more efficient each day. Especially if they are working on themselves, in their own way, to become the smartest, strongest most efficient version of themselves that they can grow into.

My gut feeling is that this can only be hampered by a traditional teaching model. If you decide someone is the ideal and your goal is to imitate him, you have set a bar and you will get there through successive approximation. Not only will you never quite achieve your goal (because even a perfect imitation is an imitation) you take the worthier goal, to be better than the best you have ever seen, right out of your mind.

There is nothing stopping you from this worthier goal... and if you glitch on it, that is one of the first things I would look at.

This post has really rambled. Let me try to sum it up:

You have the potential to be extraordinary. You might need help to see how, but it is right in front of you. You might need permission, so here it is: It's okay to be extraordinary. If you are my student, extraordinary is my minimum expectation. You will get there by teaching yourself. Teaching yourself is simply practice at seeing things as they are, doing something to make them better and then putting some thought into whether you could do it a better, more efficient way.

Connections

At the risk of inundating myself with e-mails:

There are seminars or potential seminars coming up in Austin TX, Rochester NY, and Portland, OR. I'm also going to try to arrange something for Boston and/or Montreal in early August.

If you are interested in being on a regional-specific contact list, e-mail me rory@easystreet.net and be sure to include what areas/states you would be willing to travel to. If you're thinking about hosting something, let me know that as well.

It's All About Power

Sounds harsh, but there it is. In a predator/prey dynamic the ideal, for the predator, is for the prey to be powerless. Helpless. If the power shifts too far in any relationship it only avoids being abusive by the choice of the powerful. There is nothing the weak can do, no level of reason or pleading that can prevent those in power abusing the weak. Influence, maybe. Prevent? No.

From that perspective martial arts and self-defense training is all about pushing the power to the students. On every level. Physical fitness, of course. Technical skill, surely. But "Knowledge is power" as well, and so is awareness and understanding. If the goal is really self-defense, then the goal of instruction is to increase each and every student's power until they can not be pushed to the prey side of the predator prey dynamic. So that they are strong enough to have a choice. Always.

It's a fantasy. There is no "always." Regardless of who you are or how you train, there are levels of violence that can squash you like a bug on a windshield. There are confluences of timing and incidents and threats that can negate whatever advantages you bring to the table. there is no "safe", only safer. And that is knowledge, and in that knowledge is some power, if you can understand and use it.

It is only a fantasy of degree, though. I can't make you invincible. I can make you a harder target.

This is the way things should be... if the training is about the student. If you are not, as a student, getting stronger, smarter, faster and more aware each and every practice the training may not be about you. It might be about the style, if the emphasis is on rigid ideals of perfection. It might also be about the instructor, about he or she maintaining power. That will not serve you well.

In a vain attempt not to hurt anyone's feelings, I'm going to talk about myself here. Martially, I'm pretty competent. Ask around with people who have crossed hands with me to get an idea of what that means, since I'm too close to judge. But anyone I have trained for a year should present a serious physical threat to me. If we were to close without safety rules, I would be in serious danger.

If I can't get someone to that point in a year or at most two, I'm either 1) a shitty teacher; 2) don't understand what I know well enough to teach it or; 3) I'm holding the student back, denying them power (which they may need in the real world to keep breathing) to maintain my own power in the little bullshit world of the training hall.

That's a little different for sports-based arts. Competition allows for a very narrow but deep game. Something like chess. It's even somewhat different for traditional arts, in that the progression of teaching is set, and so there are some things that you gain in steps (necessary or not).

But if someone claims to be teaching you to fight or teaching you to defend yourself and you are helpless after 3 or five or ten years, there is something wrong. Something serious. If the tactics that so impressed you when you were young and naive still work (or, worse, you can't pull them off yourself yet)... give it some thought. If the rules get tighter as you get better, or if you are forbidden to win by any method than the ones you have been shown, it is not about empowering you. It is about something else.

Am I saying you should be as good as your instructor after two years? No. Insight, connections, integration and other things all increase with experience. I don't expect my students to be able to beat me after a year. But I would be ashamed if they could not hurt me. If they didn't have at minimum the power to make me pay for a victory. If I could still beat them easily.

Perfect Karma

If I were going to invent a religion...

Okay, huge caveat here: I am extremely enamored of my concept of free will and absolutely reject the idea that the world is pre-ordained. If there were no such thing as free will, I would create it if heaven and earth were to fall by the action. Enough hyperbole.

Imagine that the universe is not only preordained, but it is already a finished object. That time appears to flow from our dimension, but is solid and finished from the next one up. It could be a finished object or a giant computerized simulation. Doesn't matter.

What if there was a 'being' (spirit, essence, soul, whatever) for each thing in this simulation (would beings include only the sentient? Only the living? Only the discrete objects? Or each and every particle and quanta of energy? don't know.)?

What if destiny was that each and every essence would inhabit each and every thing. They could not change or influence the lives, but only experience them. So everyone would be the first human and the last human, a shark and a Yersina pestis germ. Everyone of us would be killers... and every one of us would also be victims. But not just any victims, our own victims.

It would make an interesting faith. A world of perfect justice, because everyone would experience everything. It has an ethical system built in because even though we can't change the scripts (and who is to say that the program can't be shifted?) the incentive for being good to others is that you will eventually, be those others.

Just a thought. I like my free will and I've known too many victims to be comfortable with an idea of abstract justice (though justice is a pretty abstract concept...) so if this new faith arose, I wouldn't be among the converts. But I think it could garner some.

Toning Down

I received an e-mail from someone I really respect as a friend, a martial artist, and a mentor. He advised me to teach less material at seminars. The e-mail was sparse, he is one of those people who often teaches with a single word, but he seemed to imply that trying to cover it all every time would hurt my longevity (business-wise, I assume) and it made it hard to describe what the seminar was about.

So I'm kicking it out to get some more thoughts. My gut feeling is that I don't teach enough, that nothing should be deliberately withheld. My feelings after teaching a seminar (as opposed to a workshop) is always a sense of frustration at all the important things we didn't have time for.

With some time on a plane and a notebook, I made a couple of lists and it's likely that my friend is right. The list are the things I have covered in different trainings, things that I think are useful and important. They all blend, as well and it's not so much the pieces as the combinations between the pieces that really matter. Take a look...

DRILLS LECTURES

1-Count Seven Facets

Take-outs Ethics

Operant Conditioning Training Legal

3-way OC training Violence Dynamics

Woofing (light and heavy) Avoidance/E&E

Tony Blauer's Manson Drill De-Escalation

Tony's Night of the Living Dead Counter-ambush

Reception Line Recognize and break the freeze

Hood drill The Fight

Break Through Aftermath: Med, legal, psych

Clothespin Game Effects- 1 or many incidents

Roll-over (4 levels) 4 Elements

Targeting Drill SSR effects

Roleplay Environment

ConSim Force Law/Policy (cop version)

Frisk Fighting Big 3

Environmental Fighting Adrenaline loops (video)

Weapon Retention Nightmare opponents

Manhandling Types of Assaults (+video)

Leverage and leverage points Fighting to the goal

Lock flow Male and Female Adrenaline

Articulation Layered ranging

Initiative Pain

Baby Drill Chaos management

2 on 1 one-count 4 Basic truths

Pass-parry Flaw in the Drill

Core fighting Go Buttons

Crashing Perfect move

Spine controls Effects and Actions (MPDS)

Blindfold drills Social and Asocial violence

Face masking Safety Briefing

Shrugging/ Core defense

There are more, I'm sure. And it seems like a lot, but it all connects and sometimes the lecture is just a single sentence attached to a drill. There really isn't a lot to remember, a whole day seminar really usually only has 3-4 techniques. The rest is stuff that people just forget to see or avoid thinking about, but already know.

Any thoughts? I especially want to hear if you have been to one of the seminars. I'm still trying to learn how to do them better.

Record Snow

The locals tell me that the snow last night broke the annual record for Missouri. It's a cold, biting snow: like dry sleet crystals on your neck, wet on the ground. Eric says, "This feels like a winter Storm.

It's the first day of Spring. It has been snowing all day. Yesterday, I got taken for a ride in a buckboard wagon through an historic area. The buildings, the dates, the stories were interesting. More interesting was the emotion. Historical figures that I had always been taught were villains are often heroes in their home towns, and sometimes the stories that preceded their villainy were very dark. Listening to the stories from a man who learned them on his parent's knee, as "this is what happened to your grandmother, this is how your grandpappy died..." The stories will never be the same for him as for those educated by the victors.

Yesterday, up until mid afternoon, it was a warm, sunny day. Today, snow and ice. Tomorrow, Insh'allah, a flight home without any delays...

The seminar seemed to go well. I joke about this sometimes: after the South Coast Writer's Conference a few years ago, Jayel showed me the reviews of my classes. They were really good. My first reaction is that no one says anything critical to the only armed instructor... It's a joke, but the insecurity behind it is real. That's something for me to get over.

So, amend that, the seminar went very well. Lots and lots of concepts. Several skipped lunch to keep talking. The eight hour class stretched a bit over. After class, when I asked each student for the one thing they would take home the answers ranged hugely, which is good. Sometimes too many people just recall the last thing done. Different people were touched by different things, from early and late in the day; from the mental and physical aspects; things that were new and things that resonated with or vindicated their own training.

Still, as always, there was plenty left. I did half of the power generation this time, and that feels really unfinished. No groundwork. The space was actually too nice for real environmental fighting. No specific classes on pain, jointlocks or takedowns. Little on targeting.

One player came from Iowa, maybe eight hours away. In a snowstorm. Crazy. (Safe trip home, Matt. You're a good man.) A small group came in from Tulsa. Eric Parsons arranged a great seminar.

It was good people. And Kansas City Barbecue is pretty damn outstanding. People around here really know what to do with a dead animal.

So, other than stupidly slipping on the ice and somehow rebreaking an old injury in my foot, it's been a great day. Time to go home, though.

Echoes and Emotion

Echoes, today. I have an e-mail I haven’t answered in several months on the dark consequences of understanding things. This morning, writing about the roots of conflict, I felt one of my own emotional denials— using Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, even as I wrote that a serial predator could be working from the highest level of self-actualization, just expressing his true self—I wanted it to NOT be true. I wanted progress and growth to always imply nobility. I wanted to believe that becoming truer of necessity meant becoming better.

I’m a big boy. This isn’t a children’s story. Eventually, I’ll get over all the things I want to believe. As Avi Nardia says, I’d rather be a student of Reality than a master of Illusion.

Still… more echoes. Someone sent me an essay by Richard Grannon on Intent. I’ve run across Richard’s name before and like the way he thinks. In this essay he talks about modeling the behavior of some very bad people. Not modeling what made them bad, but modeling what makes them effective.

Most nice, generally good people are ineffective in extreme circumstances. People adapt to their environments. Being a good person is a good adaptation for a good environment. That’s cool. But when the environment becomes bad or dangerous, that’s a hard switch to throw sometimes.

Grannon advocates not only dissecting the very bad, the predators for clues on how to recognize them or how to prevent creating them, but also for studying and stealing effectiveness. Good guys generally do poorly in prisons, very bad people adapt pretty well. What are the differences in personality, thinking style, behavior? Can you put those in your toolbox? Not become bad, mind you. Just use the strengths.

There’s a knee-jerk reaction here, too. I want to be all good and believe that bad people are all bad, though I know more than enough hardened criminals to know this is not true. I want there to be a qualitative difference between the effectiveness of a good person and the effectiveness of an evil person. I know it’s not true—there are many ways to be effective, many tools and how those tools are used and to what ends determines good and evil. A surgeon is just as ruthless and skilled with his knife as any Rio slum assassin.

So it echoes, a little reverberation between what I know and what I want to believe, and I see it all around in little denials. Peace activists who refuse to see that violence works for many of the people who use it; martial artists who ignore even their own experience when it contradicts some ‘master’; anti-drug crusaders who ignore the advantages that each layer of the illegal industry brings to those who play… on and on.

It’s an act of will not to respond emotionally when your emotions are triggered. It is an act of trained sensitivity to recognize when that has happened. Intelligent people can bring huge resources to defend their delusions, enough that they can convince themselves that their delusions are purely logical.

More to work on.

Connections

The seminar in Chehalis had an entirely different feel. Instead of a wide mix of different unarmed styles, the students were for the most part gun people with jujutsu backgrounds. It was a lot like being home.

Because of that, we were able to get to some stuff that I had to skip in Seattle-- blindfolded infighting, conceptual groundwork and power generation. Even a very short, sketchy class on how to design scenarios. On the other hand, they didn't get to see the ugly movies. It's always a balancing act.

It was a pleasure. Everyone moved well, a few moved extremely well. No one was afraid of contact. No one was completely blindsided by how bad bad could be.

I also found some things in my teaching I need to work on. Part of it is the seminar format, but the job is to work in the format, so I can't let it be my excuse. The first is the big emotional glitches. If someone is reluctant to hurt a person, it's hard to deal with in a few hours. With a long-term student relationship you can build up the trust so that they unload. That's harder to do in a seminar. It's also really strange in a way, that you have to get someone to trust you so that they can unload to hurt you. You have to convince them that you can take it, which, functionally, is the same as convincing them that it doesn't work, before they can apply force...

It makes my head spin. There are ways to evoke something visceral, but they are dangerous. Especially with a class composed of gun guys.

The second hard part is teaching people to relax, let go, and trust. It comes out with almost everybody when talking about the drop-step. Most martial artists have spent their careers treating balance as something sacred, something you never voluntarily forsake.

Once you get adept at it though, this falling on purpose, it is an un-telegraphed speed and power multiplier with very few equals. You just have to be willing to fall. And even people who enjoy being thrown aren't eager to fall. Maybe it's the loss of control.

Like many things, though, it can be incredibly effective if done on purpose and disastrous if done accidentally.

Afterwards, good talk with (dare I say?) a new friend. Plus a little knife sparring, which always makes me happy. No, nothing like real life (knife fighting is crazy-stupid-- there's killing and running, not fighting in the smart/sane world) but fun as an election year Saturday night in hell.

Good learning, good connections.

Emotion

Emotion came up on the post about Fight To and Fighting From. It comes up a lot. In a duel or a sparring match we are not just fighting a practitioner or a style, but a mass of tactics and subconscious rules and emotions. We fight angry people and fearful people- cold rage to resigned terror; timidity to thrashing panic to rage. You can't separate the emotion from the person from the conflict. You can, I suppose. Tell me how it works for you.

We all get emotional about different things, to different degrees. We are comfortable with our level of emotion. What we feel and what we do with those feelings is natural and understandable. Someone feels a little more and they are a worrier or a whiner or a hater. Feel a little less and they are a robot, a cold fish, something alien. Not to be trusted. Cold blooded. Act out more and you're out of control, irrational. Act out less and you are repressed.

We are all our own gold standards for what is acceptable emotion.

So in a normal office, there will be a group of good people who get along... and one slimy, rumor-mongering deceptive manipulator. The manipulator will run roughshod over the nice people. His victims see him as evil. He sees nothing wrong with what he does. Then one day someone will step up and actually be assertive: "I know what you're doing. Knock it off." The manipulator deflates and walks away mumbling, "What an asshole." You see, in the manipulator's mind he never directly confronted anybody, so what he did wasn't aggressive or bad...

One level higher than you are willing to use strikes you as wrong. In the Conflict Communications course, we've identified six levels of this (hmmm, and six levels in the force continuum I usually use-- subtle influence, maybe?). For those who have spent time at the highest levels, where conflict is resolved with force, the conflicts that arise at the lower levels seem petty, almost unreal.

So it is easy for us to say, "Honey, just stand up to him. You'll be fine." And we don't appreciate that for people used to being good and getting along, stepping up just to the assertive level can feel like crossing boundaries, like doing something bad.

And when we say, with all sincerity, "I'm negotiating, son, right up until it is time to knock you on your ass," we don't understand how the casual acceptance of higher levels of force (that to us seem prudent and justified) sometimes horrify people who think that yelling or even standing up for yourself might be going too far.

"I understand that you are trying to hurt my feelings, young man. But no one has tried to kill me today, so I'm in a pretty good mood."

You know that stereotypical dream where you go to work or school and realize you are naked? Those quit happening the first time I thought, "Well, if it bothers anybody, that's their problem," and went about my day. There's nothing to be embarrassed about if you are still breathing and others had tried to stop that.

So for writers: angst is not terror.

This is for me, I know I'm not your target audience... but damn, people. Please. If your protagonist is in fear for her life, if she is looking into the eyes of a man who wants to beat, destroy, kill and humiliate her it is a different animal than dealing with a broken heart. Do not try to extrapolate from the embarrassing pimple you had in eighth grade to the terror of imminent annihilation. Do not try to recall your childhood heartbreak of flushing you goldfish down the toilet to write touchingly of a couple who just lost their baby. Please.

I know some will anyway. It might be okay for the readers who also have never been to the deep places. But the rest of us can tell.

Things Are Moving

First off, in five days (sorry for the late notice, if interested) there will be another seminar, Chehalis area this time. Information is here. Don of the FAS is taking head counts and giving directions.

MoV broke 70 reviews on Amazon and got my first bad one. That's cool. His argument appears to be that experience isn't transferrable so trying was inherently heretical... sigh.

Invited to fly out for three days to teach some private lessons in upstate New York. Didn't see that one coming.

Got to play with some people in Denver, as well as working on the new program. I think the thing that blows me away about this program (like describing the Monkey Dance in the book) is how obvious it is. Peter Hathaway Capstick once said that it is hard for people to grasp that sometimes when a wild elephant is too close, you can't see it. Your brain simply won't accept something that big as an animal. The students all said, at one point, "That explains..." everything that has been going on in a particular office for years; why no one gets along with a particular person; why good ideas get rejected; why management and the line don't trust each other...

And it is all useful.

Got the official (though verbal) offer on "7". Looking at a spring release next year. Wondering if I should have an agent negotiate this one. Anyone know a really good NF agent? Steve?

Over 30,000 words in on one of the collaborations, about 4,000 on the other. The plan is to have both rough drafts done in four months. Piece of cake.

Thanks for sifting through the trivia.

Playing From Versus Playing To...

A long time ago I wrote about Mac tricking me into a weapons tournament. Been thinking about that, as well as a conversation between acquaintances on the efficiency or superiority of jo versus katana.

I stayed out of the conversation, but it was quickly apparent that I didn’t see the problem the way the people arguing did. It ties back to that tournament. In the tournament (and it wasn’t any big thing, just a small round robin among friends), I stuck with a shinai the whole time. I’m used to katana or boken. The shinai itself is something I never practice with. It is too straight, too long and too light. The other competitors were very skilled and everyone had their pick of weapons- sticks, spears, staffs, shinai, daggers, sword and shield.

The choice of weapon wasn’t the reason I made it through undefeated, though I over-heard one of the other contenders comment that “the katana is a superior weapon.” It isn’t really-- I’d rather use a spear any time I have range, or a pair of short swords if I don’t-- and I wasn’t using a katana anyway.

The thing the others players were doing (speculation alert) and the genesis of the argument about katana and jo, is that everyone was trying to figure out what they could do with what they had. They were playing from their resources, trying to maximize their skill base to win.

The stickfighters were fighting with their sticks with all they had, for instance.

I was looking at what my opponent had. How do you defeat a pair of sticks? Sword and shield? Spear? Another shinai.? Strategizing to the opponent instead of from myself.

The katana/jo thing. You don’t use a stick against a sword the way you use a stick against a stick.

There are people who will tell you that blade and stick are interchangeable, but they haven’t thought about it much. Both are longer than they are wide, but they do damage in very different ways and do their most serious damage to different tissues. Orientation (is it edge on?) isn’t a problem with a club. Things that bleed off power from blunt strikes will still leave you bleeding badly if you try them on blades.

One of the conversants in the great debate, impressed with the might of steel, offered to stand with his katana against anyone who would face him with a jo. He explained that steel was inherently superior to wood, stronger, more dangerous.

But it’s not, really. Wood and steel are strong in different ways. For that matter different types of wood are different. Part of the problem is how to use one against the other. The bigger problem is how to use a staff against a swordsman or a sword against a jodoka.

Jo against jo might be a matter of skill.

Jo against sword? In the first second you will see if he is afraid or not. If he is not afraid, he will come to you. You shorten your grip and the jo has nearly a foot of extra reach and you beat at his hands until he can no longer hold his weapon, circling and angling as he tries to close.

If you see the glimmer of fear, you close, pressing the center of the jo into the blade, hoping it bites, making sure it does because that will buy you the instant to get into the dead space behind his hands, where you can use elbows, the staff and your hands to punish or strip away his weapon…

Sword against jo? The only thing you have to fear is the thrust, and that only at specific range. If the point of the jo strays outside of the triangle, launch an attack pressing the blade, hips and feet all closing. He cannot retreat as fast as you advance. If he angles press on.

If the point never strays, circle (blade high) until you catch his feet slightly impeded, then circle your sword down, gliding his tip to the side as you step in. Use the sword as a pressing blade and do not forget the hilt, your elbows, knees and head.

Breakthrough

I like PDX, as much as it is possible to like an airport. Free wifi and they have the last Coffee People in the state. Which is sad, 'cause Coffee People do some great stuff.

On the way to Colorado to hammer out the basic course for Conflict Communications, get the website off its knees and get this thing rolling. We want to keep things quiet (a little) until the test run. A lot of that is my insecurity. My honest assessment of what we have created is that we have found the skeleton, something that explains the sources of almost all conflict and identifies opportunities and gives skills to handle it. That seems too big, too effective and I want some test runs to see if this really is as huge and important and dead simple as I think it is.

If it is...

It's hard to stay on the basics with this. We started with cop conflict, because good guys and bad guys are what we know. Then realized that it also explained almost every damn instance of line staff and administration hating each other. Then realized that it would give more effective tools for anger management than anything currently taught to prisoners. Then realized it also worked on raising children...

It's like a really good tracking class. The world opens up and is full of useful information that was invisible until you were taught to see.

It's just like the old riddle, "What do you get if you introduce an ADHD former bad guy to a mildly Asperger's former jail guard?"*

Breakthrough. That's what you get.

*Not a real riddle. Artistic license. No need to google for the answer.

Permission

Thanks for the kind words about the seminar, everybody. Be careful, though... what you say in public may find its way into promos.

Read Jim's comment re "Permission" on the last post. Everything he said was right on, but it still needs to go further.

We are, all of us, masses of potential. No matter how unathletic or weak or uncoordinated we feel, we can still do amazing things with our bodies. We can run and climb and dance and if you don't feel like that, you can touch your thumb to each of your fingers, or at least wiggle your eyebrows.

No matter how dumb we feel, or tired, we can still learn new things. Every day. The difference between the guys who spent three years on the mission in Iraq and my first three months was that I worked at the language. No smarter, no gift-- I just spent a little time each night writing out the letters, the time that so many others spent watching TV.

Along with this mass of potential, we are also little bundles of rules. Stuff we have been fed since childhood. Some of it is good. You need to put curbs on temper tantrums because things that are cute at thirty pounds are deadly at 200. But some of it is outdated. Some of it was always wrong. Some of these rules not only limit what we do, but even what we think and what we can see.

So yes, when we talk about permission in self-defense it is permission to break the rules against hurting. Permission to let go of our normal, civilized, peaceful self-image. Permission to decide that this shit isn't working and maybe the boss will freak and IAU will get involved and go for the higher level of force... (and this is huge, because a lot of the really bad decisions are a way of protecting the rules themselves. Think about that.)

But it is soooo much bigger than that. What could you be? What could you do right now? Why not? Wouldn't it be fun to laugh and run like a kid? Why don't you? Wouldn't it be useful to learn new things like a child? Do it.

"I can't, the brain doesn't grow dendrites as fast as an adult." Maybe, but try it and see how much faster they DO grow. What are you protecting, what are the rules that say that adults can't laugh and play like children? Because it is the same set of rules that sometimes keep a women from defending herself or make an officer freeze when he needs to fight for his life.

I hate going off on these rants. They start sounding not only touchy-feely, but like every self-help guru out there.

Here's the deal:

• Get off your ass and do stuff
• Challenge your own assumptions
• Have fun

You've spent your whole life trying to be a good person. You're also a perfectly good animal.

Go play.

Seminar Last Saturday

Serendipity, and good friends. Finding out the seminar was sold-out and possibly over-booked was like a splash of cold water. Turning people away violated all my Irish hospitality genes, yet doing serious brawling, even at the low level necessary when you don’t know everyone’s background can get really dangerous when crowded…

Kris came through. Like a hero. One of his students manages a club. Phone calls were made. E-mails sent. And Saturday morning we got busy in a nightclub with two bars and chicken wire separating the sections. It felt more than appropriate.

If you were there, you know if you liked it or not. The feedback at the end was good. The lawyer said I didn’t mess up anything. The karate instructor with 30+ years of teaching said he was stealing some drills. Bobbe said I wasn’t nearly the asshole he was expecting (paraphrased, very paraphrased)… I was happy and tired and my voice was shot.

But… but… and this is a very good bad thing-- there was so much more to cover. K had wanted me to at least mention the little weapon awareness drills that I do at home. We talked only briefly about some of the Principles*. Discussed the legalities of self-defense but ran out of time before the nuances, like factors and circumstances or even levels of threat and force. Mentioned Permission briefly but didn’t touch on Awareness or Initiative as training paradigms. Never got to power generation at all, much less the short range power I love (and we even had the taped-up telephone books).

The only thing that came up about groundfighting was tossing a brick to those who wound up there anyway. Realized that to really do justice to avoidance/evasion/de-escalation would take a day all by itself.

It’s all good. The stuff we missed seems important, but the stuff we covered was important as well. There wasn’t a lot of dead time. Even the water breaks were times to watch videos or listen to lectures (seven stages, legalities, types of attacks, stuff like that).

It was organic as well. I knew where I had to start and had a few things that were on a checklist, but for the rest, without knowing it, the class supplied the clues. Timing in a real fight came up because a few were unconsciously working sparring and not assault. Not only is the difference important, but sparring timing in a drill is actually a form of compliance, and it allows things to work that don’t. Range and negative space came up because of the people who were attacking arms without attacking structure. The talk on stacking damage doesn’t come up very often, but it did here. That’s a sign that there were some pretty skilled practitioners.

There’s more. So much more to play with and learn. Core fighting. Power chains. Negative space. Agreements. There is always more.

But, highest compliment of all, the students got permission to (safely) play with environmental fighting. Water bottles aren’t just impact weapons, they can penetrate as well. Some chairs are too heavy to lift and use as weapons but can be angled into a threat. The bungee cord blocking off the bar back isn’t quite long enough to strangle someone on the ground. That was all stuff that they showed me, thinks that the attendees discovered by playing.

It was a very good day.

*Principles in the sense of my big list of what makes other things work.

Sold Out

Just a quick note- the Seattle seminar February 20th is at capacity. Kris says we can't fit anymore people into the space.

Wow.

In the Dry East Rain

A domestic house cat can bite entirely through your thumbnail. I tell you this in case you are curious. No need to go out and experiment for yourself.

A long drive from one end of the state to another. Lots of not being asleep. There is a place in Pasco, Washington where the remains of irradiated humans are evaluated. Seeking knowledge in a warehouse with an autopsy room, I am struck once again by the huge gap between an expert's knowledge and the public's ill-informed fears.

Also struck by how much human remains, parted and tagged and vacuum-sealed and frozen, look like pork chops.

The science fiction fans out here (for I am at Radcon) are very different from PDX. They are younger, more enthusiastic, and gloriously, openly armed. If I had known it was a weapon-friendly event I would certainly have brought some toys, probably Unimpeded and a tomahawk. Or maybe the Criswell.

Good talks with good friends, as always. Some disturbing panels, where it becomes almost surreal how differently I see the world. In a panel on evil, Sarah Palin comes up as an example. I am thinking of mutilated babies; predation and murder and torture. Others think of political opinions with which they disagree. Once again, and I still struggle with articulating this: I am amazed at the human ability to confuse the worst they have experienced with the worst that could happen; the ability to decide that the perceived enemy is somehow the enemy of all that is good. So petty, and so sad.

Watched a demo of armor and weapons and was antsy with frustration-- "Now!" There would be an opportunity and instead of taking it, the person would then prepare to take it, giving the opponent plenty of time to defend. Only once did I see a participant exploit this. Not once did I see one just bypass it and strike.

It was clear how much of the local martial arts training has been influenced by movie choreography. It was also clear how different training to spar or fight was from training to kill. I wonder if I would have been impressed twenty years ago. Probably.

Long talking in the rain in a usually dry country. Warm for this place, this time.

Bouncing for the first time in years, checking ID at a private party. No issues, which I am told is the exception here.

Experimenting, last night, with consciously unconsciously firing muscles. Hard to describe and very much not a word thing. I decide I want my back muscles to jump, but when it happens my conscious mind is completely surprised. The same principle as firing a gun without anticipation, so that the report comes as a surprise. How do I think of this stuff? And , damn, it works. Conscious decision with unconscious execution. Can I apply it in a fight? How many times have I already?

All good.

Stuff 'n' Things

The Seattle seminar is a 'go'. Here's the information. Should be fun.

Also check this out. KJ and I are toying with starting a VPPG in the Portland area.

Upcoming seminars in Kansas City and Austin.

I'll post some more if the damn phone quits ringing.

Ronin

It makes my teeth ache when martial artists try to be “modern samurai” or “American samurai.” Samurai is a really specific thing, a specific class of warrior. In order to be a samurai, one must be born into the buke, the warrior caste. Not possible in modern America unless, I suppose, you descended from one of the recognized buke families of Japan.

The second element is that you were a bushi, a professional warrior. Making war, peace-keeping, policing, guarding—the bushi did them all, so for modern shorthand, you would have to be under a ‘profession of arms’ or what Van Canna calls a “Force Professional.”

And the third element is that you must be in sworn service to a lord.

Born into the right family, doing the job and working for someone else…

Obviously, I wasn’t born into any ancient Japanese families, neither bushi nor heimin nor the other caste (which I can’t remember right now…)

I was talking to K, being introspective. Both relishing the freedom and wrestling with the uncertainty. “I always knew who and what I was. I had my tribe and my status and duties within the tribe. I’m not a part any more.”

“You’re ronin,” she said.

I winced at the word, thinking of some long ago wannabe martial artists.

But, as usual, she hit a piece of the truth. For the first time in my adult life I am not in service. From a sworn officer in my old agency to a representative of a program in Iraq I’ve always been in service to a cause. In sworn service, which is something else. I always took the duties seriously, internalized them. Became, to the best of my abilities, the perfect retainer/representative/operator for the agency that I worked for.

And now…

I don’t miss it, the world is wide open in a way that it hasn’t been for twenty-three years. Yet I do feel something. Not quite an emptiness. A drift. A change in my identity. Things are new. Things are different.

A world to wander. Like a wave.

Common Ground

One of the tricks to dealing with schizophrenics is to work from the common ground. You can't hear the voices or see the images that they might see. Simultaneously, they can't NOT see or hear them. If it was a choice, it wouldn't be a mental illness. You can waste endless energy and just infuriate people by arguing about what is real and what isn't.

So you work from the common ground: "You probably know I can't see the blue people, but I can see that you're bleeding. Can I help you with that?"

It works, more often than not. Not just here, either.

Talking to a friend recently about cultural sensitivity instruction. Many do it backwards, to my mind. They try to give you a list of all the ways that all of the world's different cultures differ from yours. Sometimes without even knowing what your culture is.

It backfires, sometimes. There is nothing quite as annoying as someone who watched a television special on a part of the world and feels a need to tell a native what that native believes and why. The whole time, the speaker feels 'sensitive.'

Work from the common ground. Respect is actually pretty universal. So is truth. I've never insulted anyone by saying, "I know absolutely nothing about your country. How do I say, 'Hello'?" There is no disrespectful way to ask for instruction, as long as you are sincere, and follow it up with actually listening and learning.

Cultural differences, mental health, even politics and religion. All easier to understand starting from the common ground.