Poking Bears

This is going to be a little difficult to write, because there are no good guys in some of the stories. Not too long ago, a teenager decided to screw with a local driver.  For several miles he boxed the driver in against the rail, speeding up to prevent him from passing, slowing down when the driver tried to slow down.  He thought it was great fun... until the other drive pulled a gun.

Compared with a flag burner who was shocked, shocked and horrified, when a disabled Marine vet broke his nose.

Or (since I usually defend officers) an officer who challenges someone to hit him, expecting the fear of time in 'the hole' or additional charges to protect him, and is flabbergasted when the subject cleans his clock.

There's a stupid, self-centered, entitled mindset which believes that you have the right to fuck with anybody you want without consequences.  Grow up.  Doing this is playing with emotion and emotion in most societies leads to action.  Don't believe because our culture is extremely polite and forgiving (and it is, despite various political beliefs) that you can safely provoke emotion without getting emotion.

The kid who was cutting off the driver was getting off on the power of making someone else angry.  Drawing a gun was wrong, there will be consequences... but only a moron would be surprised that provoking anger led to- you guessed it- anger.

I don't mind killing a bear if it needs killing or you need meat, but if you torment an animal and get eaten, you had it coming.

Make and Let

Here's a big mystery for all of the martial arts instructors out there.  In every style, in every class, there are some things you need to make happen and there are others you need to let happen.  Sometimes the instructor will say, "Focus! That was slop! Concentrate!"  Other times he or she will say, "Relax.  You're trying too hard."

I've done it myself.  There are some things that require concentration and effort, and some things you just have to let flow.

It's not, as near as I can tell the class of technique.  Sometimes you focus punches and some times you just let them fly... but others, like dead hand technique, are ruined with a tight focus.  Maybe it is the student and some students need to relax and others need to focus.  Maybe it is the combination and student X needs to focus on his hip throws and relax on his sweeps and student Y needs to do the opposite.

Maybe it is something similar- in the 'make' techniques you focus on somatics, on the body and in the 'let' techniques the focus is on perception.  Maybe.

It's on my mind today because it applies to other things.  A new friend was asking about love- why it is so hard to find and so hard to keep.  It's a big mystery to many, but I have never felt that way. Listening today I got the impression that finding love was a 'let' technique  for this  person and keeping love was a 'make' technique.  That initial love was just supposed to happen and the work would come in keeping it from changing.

I approached it differently.  Loving for me was a decision; staying in love has been an act of gentle perception, like turning a flower over in my hand to see something new every day.

Comfort Level

As a former judoka and current jujutsuka, I've been choked a lot.  More correctly, I've been strangled: had a skilled opponent cut off the blood to my brain until I quietly went to sleep or surrendered.  I've used the techniques a lot, also.  It used to be something of a specialty, since I'm a relatively small guy with strong hands, bony forearms and no fear of being on the ground on my back.  Many an opponent who thought they were winning suddenly slumped to the side.

Sorry if that sounds like a brag.  I'm trying to set context.

Strangles- Vascular Neck Restraints (VNRs) in the jargon of law enforcement- are great tools.  They work regardless of size, psychosis or drugs in the system, something that can't be said for any other force options including handguns.  They are extremely safe, with recovery complete and total in under a minute. They are easy and, though strength helps, small bony arms help more.

However, there have been deaths.  Never in sport.  Only once in martial arts as far as I have been able to determine (funny story, too) but several times in law enforcement. In as many of the cases as I have seen, the cause of death was listed as "asphyxia".  Suffocation.  Hmmmm.  It would seem that if blood was cut off, the cause of death would be listed as "anoxia".  A little more research and I come across a technique in some old DT manuals- the 'bar-arm choke'.  The officers were taught to take a flashlight, a baton or their forearm across the adam's apple and pull back hard.  Yes people died.  Bad technique being taught as proper technique.

The fallout was that about fifteen years ago, maybe more now, the VNRs were forbidden by many agencies.  They dropped off the radar screen.  A few agencies kept them, but classified them as "Deadly Force" and I have had administrators in one such agency tell me that they would rather a threat be shot than strangled- there is more case law supporting shooting.

For the last few years we have been given cautious permission to teach these techniques.  The officers get an extra safety briefing, a policy briefing and probably more information on physiology than they want.  Then they practice them on the instructors.

This is where is gets weird. I will get, in a normal class, forty strangles, eight chokes and eight neck cranks (all lethal force, right?  So no need to exclude spine or tracheal attacks as long as the students know the differences, the consequences and can choose conscientiously).  This is just a day for me and I encourage the class to get close, watch my eyes and skin color changes, apply more power, experiment with hand placement...and their eyes are wide with fear.  Not all, but a significant number are extremely creeped out.

The instructors are safe.  We know what we are doing.  Further, we are the only ones with sufficient experience to say, "Yes, this is safe."

So where is the fear coming from?  Is it so natural to be afraid of something you know nothing about?  Isn't part of the purpose of teaching to take cues from others about safety and significance?

A friend recently commented that I am in a place in my personal exploration where I am off the map, out in the margins where it is written: "Here be Dragons." That doesn't bother me much, because until I touch one for myself I don't know that dragons are bad.  Maybe I can't understand the student's fear because 'the unknown', to me, is simply stuff I don't know yet.  In life, most of the unknown has turned out pretty cool once you get to know it.

Breakthrough

I've been letting the Citizen's Guide concept stew in the back of my head.  Yesterday, it came together.

The basic concept of the book is that many people with strong opinions on Law Enforcement matters don't actually have a strong background in understanding them.  I wussed there- many, if not most, have NO IDEA what they are talking about.  They rarely understand violence, and certainly not in the context of a "Duty to Act".  Most are unfamiliar with laws pertaining to force, much less with policy and procedure... but their opinions are no less strong for all of that.

The idea with the citizen's guide is to try to give a deep introduction to how officers think about force.  A solid introduction to how they are trained combined with how that training interacts with experience.  All the drafts of the intro (I usually write the intro first- it is my 'mission statement') have been unsatisfying.  Either argumentative or talking down or expressing how powerful the need is for some understanding...  That's okay, for me. I do think it is important and part of me does get argumentative- it seems natural when you deal with someone who is sure they are right but has very little knowledge of the subject.  It was okay for me, but not for the readers.

I decided yesterday to approach it as a gift.  I can't make anybody read it.  Certain people have so much personal stake in believing in a vast and powerful conspiracy or a sub-human violent subspecies that they might never be reached.  It has to be a gift.  An expensive gift: there are years and blood and fear-sweat all over that package.

But a gift, left in the clearing between two tribes.  It just might work.

Rambling About Amateurs

There is a subtle but powerful difference between professionals and amateurs.  People who play (or fight) for money don't think about it the same way as people who play (or fight) for fun.  People who put out cars on assembly lines don't think about it the same way as people who restore cars as a hobby.  Engineers don't think the same way as hobbiest/inventors.

I had the opportunity to work with a very skilled martial artist last weekend.  Yes he had decades of training, all the right credentials... but that really doesn't mean anything.  What mattered is the way he felt- his structure and movement- when we played.  He was good.  Not many people can hold structure while moving.  In the course of a few minutes I had finger locks fail, very reliable spine/face moves get slipped and was taken off balance (taken down if not for a convenient wall) in a more perfect and more controlled way than I have experienced in a couple of years.

Very nice, but like everyone there were glitches too.  You could feel his energy as he tried to think of the right thing; watch comfort level rise or fall based on interpretation instead of damage and control; feel the separation of mindsets between flow and staccato bursts.

This is hard to put into words.  As skilled as he was, he processed things through a filter. (We all do- don't get smug) He wanted to do the 'right' thing, apply his skill efficiently.  That had two effects- sometimes he would focus on moving right instead of moving well, he would try to maintain a sticky-hands control while striking instead of just unloading.  The second, and the probable basis of the subtle difference between someone who fights as a hobby and someone who fights professionally is that he tried to win, not to end it.  At any moment I could have frozen the action and asked: "If you had to kill me right now, right this second, how would you do it?"  He would have an answer, he had the skill... but it would not be what he was actually doing.  What he was actually doing was what he had trained.

So here's another difference: It is almost true that you fight the way you train, but never quite.  Simply in a real fight you want it over and the threat incapable of harming you.  In training, you want the experience without the uke ever actually being injured.  You need to train with the same people next class.

The good professionals, this is never far from their minds.  They don't use the table, maybe, but they know it is there...

And they are always cataloging, remembering, probing:  I know some of what this guy likes, what he avoids even when it isn't tactically necessary to do so; the opportunities that are invisible to him; what patterns he will fall into as familiar ground; what patterns will make him cautious; what patterns will take him a second to interpret...  It's just a way to think.  Fighting minds is separate from fighting bodies and even separate from fighting skills.

Another difference- everything in the last paragraph was tactical skill, a tactical game.  Time to make those judgments almost never exists in the real thing.  It becomes a habit, but when it is ON, it is OVER, with those niceties of thought and interpretation just things that the broken amateur was maybe planning on doing.

Yet another difference- the amateur always has a personal stake.  'This is about me'.  The questions are there- am I good enough?  Can I win?  Will I ever get laid if I lose?  Bullshit masculinity issues and esteem crowding in, messing with a brain that needs to get a job done.  Getting over this (and it is hard: personal violence pushes a huge amount of issues to the fore) frees up a great deal of brain power.  The hobbiest wonders if he can beat the reigning champion.  The professional just has to decide how.

So here is the question- on most of the levels we played at, I believe that my friend showed superior skill.  My advantages were mental and attitudinal.  Can this be taught separately?  Can I graft the professional experience, the way I think, onto his skill set?  Wouldn't that be cool.

Formication

I am so tired right now that my eyeballs are twitching. Vision doesn't blur or flicker, but it feels like my eyes are jumping and twitching in their sockets. It makes driving interesting. I've been this tired before. The next stage, it will feel like ants are crawling all over my skin. The medical term for that is formication, which is a really funny word. The stage after that (usually hits me about 46 hours in with no sleep) involves some minor hallucinations. Hopefully I'll get to sleep before then. (But in the past, occassionally, with burned and red eyes and the feeling of insects on skin I've been unable to sleep, the will that let me stay awake and do what needed to be done suddenly hard to turn off.)

It was a long weekend and I think a good one, but it will take me time to process. It will take some rest and fresh brains to look at what was done, what was learned and separate the positive from the layers of interference and duties and pseudo-emergencies that interferred with sleep.

Much done. Heard what I needed to hear on an issue that has troubled me for some time. Listened as a friend told me for the first time that it's possible that my skill at reframing questions and choosing how to process events are limited- powerful but limited- and toxic events and people have left a mark, visible to her. Spent time with dear friends, very relaxed time, more feeling talk than in many ages. Talked about my early spiritual training with a relative stranger. Invited to talk at a writer's training conference. Finally saw and was able to share what the book cover will be like. Crossed hands, lightly, with an old friend for the first time. Felt my Celtic predilection for being distracted by shiny objects and actually let myself be distracted. Played with a new computer.

Connections, sharing, learning, teaching. Very human stuff. But right now I am very tired. To sleep, perchance to dream...

Weak Reason

Steve, a local author and long-term martial artist (who gets the credits for one of the best insults I've ever heard) picked up on something in the post "Balancing Act" that is worth a look. The meat of it:

"Reason, as I understand the term, is hardly weak. Expecting other folks to act reasonably, in their own best interests, that's a different beast. People do stupid things.But one of the reasons you train is to be able to do the smart thing when necessary, and without a foundation in reason, you can't learn those things."- Steve Perry

Each piece is sensible. It just rarely works.

There is nothing wrong with the _process_ of reason. The scientific method is the best bullshit detector ever discovered. Deductive logic is a powerful tool; inductive logic probably more powerful if also more prone to sampling error.

The problem with martial artists or administrators or politicians trying to apply reason to violence is that reason is based on extrapolating from knowns to unknowns. Very few people have any idea how many of their "knowns" especially in violence, are actually "thunks" as in, "I thunk so...".

Peope try to reason from what they know of human movement and come up with good moves... but people don't move the same way under adrenaline load.

They come up with expectations of effects of impact and pain and damage... none of which are quite the same when the threat is enraged or drugged or psychotic or...

They base their defenses on reasonable attacks, defining a reasonable attack from their own experience, a balance of offense and defense designed to give you the best chance of winning a fight with the least chance of taking injury... and are totally unprepared for the speed, power, surprise or extremely close range of a sudden assault.

Even reason itself, the ability to make good decisions, is severely affected by fear and surprise, leaving the problem that the brain that learned what to do is chemically very different from the brain that has to pull it off.

Steve is right- it's not that reason is weak, not by itself. But the products of reason, the systems put together because they 'should' work fail very consistantly. They work really well when tested in laboratory (or dojo) experiments. They fall apart in chaos.

The problem is that the reasoners not only have no good valid basis for their extrapolation, they are unaware of that fact. Just like some people assume that the worst pain they have felt gives them a touchstone to the worst pain someone else has felt (never tell a mother who just lost her child that you understand because your goldfish died when you were five) they assume that the conflicts they have dealt with (schoolyard fights or boxing matches or family arguments) prepare them for an ambush or a gang stomping or an experienced killer.

It's not the same. A gold medal in fencing will teach you about as much about rape survival as getting raped will teach you about fencing.

In things we consider technical fields, this is obvious. Medics need to learn how physiology works to start guessing at solutions to problems. Reason without background led to medical beliefs like "any red flower must be good for the blood." Pure logic led to the obvious belief that heavy things fall faster than light things- and this is a good analogy, because to disprove that, Galileo had to drop some stuff off the tower of Pisa. Just like finding the holes in a self-defense system, somebody had to go out and try it in the real world.

Violence is special because very few people have enough experience to try to deduce and, for me, the more experience I have the more signifcant the weirdness and luck seem and the less likely I am to say "X is true, Y is false."
Yet every one, it seems, everyone feels that they have some instinctive understanding of it. They act as if the years of daydreaming about fighting the gang to win the girl are actual experience.

I think language is the closest analogy (which brings it back to Steve). Everyone speaks, has done so for most of their lives, and so many assume they can write. People who don't actually speak that well think that they do, and then decide that they can write well and then... they reason out what would be the next sure-fire block buster. How often does that work? How often was a classic written with classic in mind?

Violence and Language. Steve writes, and he writes well (I dimly remember some of his books from the days of yore when I read fiction- that's a high compliment) and it was a combination- he wrote a lot, he practiced and polished his craft BUT (and this is the difference between a best seller and a wannabe) he put it out there, sent it to magazines and publishers. The real world told him which of his bright ideas or clever wordings were actually good, solid or insightful. At this stage he probably doesn't remember how many of his worst early writing habits and assumptions about 'good writing' seemed reasonable and logical all those decades ago.

I've even seen him try to share his experience with budding writers.

Steve, thanks for making me think this out.

To sum up, reason must be based on a set of basic facts. If those basic facts are wrong, the reasoned solution is liable to be ineffective. Most people, dealing with violence are starting from a set of facts that range from myth to nonsense- and what they produce is ...less than optimal.

POWER!

Power generation is one of the big mysteries. It seems that every time I get a handle on it, feel confident that I can explain what makes a hard hit hard, how to wallop somebody good, some joker comes along and shows me an entirely new way to hit hard. Over the years I've worked on hip rotation; hip snap; whip action; dead hand; drop step; cresting wave; crashing wave; bone conduction... many others. Some blend, some don't. Some compound, and when you strike with a whip/rotation/snap/drop/wave it will break ribs through armor without effort.

There's a lot there and it just occured to me today that it may be simpler than I think.

What if there are three basic things that can effect power delivery and all this confusion has been seeing too many things and thinking it is one? This might be confusing. Try to keep up.

What if there is only Power Generation, Power Stealing and Power Conservation?

Power Generation is what you can do with your muscles- push, pull, lift, twist. That's it. You cannot generate any more power in a strike than you can press on a barbell. (Physics, of course, intrudes: smaller weight at faster speed can be more powerful, but...) These are the systems that emphasize hip action for a punch or fast whipping action in the hands. It's good to maximize, but by itself is limited.

Power Stealing is making use of energy in the universe that you are not supplying. The wave actions and drop steps use gravity to put far more power in a strike than muscle can alone. A physically weak specimen who knows how to use sudden changes in weight and elevation can put far more energy into a strike than a muscular man can produce. Muscle produces energy, the other steals it. You can also increase power in your punch with timing- using the threat's motion and momentum to add velocity to your attack. If you throw a good hook while he is stepping into it, he receives all the power you generated and adds the power inherent in his own movement... like a head-on collision versus a stationary object.

You could include environmental fighting in this- I've often said I'd rather make a Bad Guy flinch into a door jamb than hit him with my fist, but that's a little off topic. Damage, but not neccessarily an increase in your power.

Power Conservation is structure. If I hit you with a steak, it's a wet slap. If I hit you with a bone it might even penetrate flesh. Muscle is just meat. Left to it's own devices, it flops. Bone is rigid. Rigid things transmit force better (more efficiently, less waste) than floppy things. The human body is composed of lots of bones and those bones are connected by joints and those joints are controlled by muscle.

Remember that for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction? Every time you fist goes out, the same amount of energy goes into the earth through your base (we've actually tried fighting in deep water- without the grounding, force is bled away as each strike pushes you back or starts you spinning). If the body in between the striking fist and the ground is rigid (not the same as stiff) the power conservation approaches perfection. If the body in between (this is you, the striker, not the target that we are discussing) has poor structure, energy bleeds away through each of the joints and muscles that are improperly aligned. This is why some very strong men (bench press monsters) hit so weakly.

The styles that focus on Power Conservation get called "internal" and some of the good instructors will explain that you are using bone and tendon instead of muscle.

No style uses just one, and I'm not sure of anyone who has taken any of these as far as they can go. This may not even be a good model- but I think it will help me analyze new ways as they come up.

There's a vibrating contact strike that usually gets explained using very mystical language. You place your hand on the threat's ribs (usually floating ribs to injure, upper chest to demo) and, without moving your arm or tensing muscles, send a shock wave into him. What is going on physically is a slight rise in your center of gravity that is allowed to fall (the distance can be so small as to be almost imperceptible). The weight, the energy is allowed to fall and bounce up through the contact with the ground (which must be the heels) down the bones into the contact hand. It is essentially stealing a very small amount of power and then transmitting it through very good structure. With bad structure, you get nothing at all and wind up pushing with muscle. Different feel.

Thoughts?

Balancing Act

Reason is weak. Especially when dealing with chaotic and violent situations. Just because something makes sense has absolutely no bearing on whether it will work or not. For the theoreticians, that's a hard thing to accept. For the operators, that's just a simple fact.

It can become a problem when courses are designed or policies are written by theoreticians.

I helped teach a class a while ago. The head instructor was a very, very good teacher. The class itself was crap. It was designed by theoreticians, people with much training and little experience. I recognized it- an earlier version had been standard when I went through the Academy. This version was brought to our agency several years ago... and was immediately laughed out of existence by experienced staff. Even inexperienced (by our standards) staff were appalled. It was that bad.

Theoretically, everything should work... and it will in a training gym. Some of it. The footwork is good.

So the first question- how can a good instructor and a veteran officer not see the absurdity of some of this? The answer came partially in his lecture- he explained that these encounters were very rare, that in his twenty years he had only had to use them three times or so. He looked at me for conformation. I couldn't give it. I'd used them almost three times that much in a single night. (Eight is my personal high). I quit counting at about three hundred. Hence I didn't see the reason in the technique because I was too caught up in the fact that predators and meth freaks don't move or react like students. I don't see being able to switch or even reverse technique as advanced skills. They are basic, basic, basic.

Yet this is the curriculum that must be taught. It is what the students will be tested and graded on. Their success at this curriculum could have a powerful bearing on their success in their careers. This must be balanced- their careers versus their survival, because these are not the best skills for survival. It seems like an easy balance- SURVIVAL FIRST! but it's probable that many or most of the students will have career paths more like the other instructor than like mine. And if they resist the beauracracy by insisting on survival, they may never be permanantly hired in the first place.

The second point of balance: Survival is far more mental than physical. As bad as the techniques are if the students are confident they will survive and adapt. Giving them better, separate techniques can actually undermine their confidence. One voice in your head can be bad enough in a fight. Two voices telling you different things can be paralyzing.

He is a talented teacher. I would really like to see him teach something of his own design.

"Where Do We Go From Here..."

Many, many busy things in the world right now. Hired to teach classes at a local business college. Work. Training (really into throwing tomahawks and viking axes right now). Enough overtime in two weeks to buy a high end computer for K. Writing. Reading. A writer's convention coming up, where I'll talk about violence and hope the writer's incorporate some of it... and on top of everything I'm coughing up a lung with a raging fever- the gods' way of telling you to slow down.

And the book. Saw the catalog from the publishers and for the first time saw the official date. "Meditations on Violence" will be on the shelves in June 2008. Seeing that was strange and powerful. The bullet leaves the gun and things will never be the same again.

Haven't had much time to write- much time to sit, really.

One thing: I'm used to teaching cops. We share a common language and when we don't share common experiences we are at least in the ballpark. Teaching at this college for kids who want to BE cops is different. They are naive in ways I can't even remember. Part of me sees it as an opportunity: I'm still an idealist in a profession where idealists tend to burn out pretty quickly. Can I teach them to see the world the way that I do, to thrive on a thankless nobility? Can I make other Don Quixotes to carry the banner into the next generation? Should I? It seems sometimes that the ones who embrace the negative have an easier time, an easier life, a quieter career... but that's not true. It just seems that way.

The world is changing.

Words

De-escalation is the step when force is imminent (how's that for 'soft' language- more real: if you don't do something now the fight will be on in a few seconds). It is "talking 'em down". It ranges from sympathy to weird non-sequitors to treating a threat like a thoughtful question to pure intimidation. It is a skill, and a more varied and more versatile skill than anything physical. But it is a skill, not an answer.

Some memorable successes:

"Turn your head to the side."
"Why, mother fucker?" He glared hard.
"Cause you look like you're thinking about fighting and you seem like a nice guy, so if you do start to fight and I smash you into the wall right there, if you turn your face to the side you won't break any teeth."
His glare changed to something more puzzled.
"It's just a courtesy. You seem like a nice guy and you don't need any dental bills. Just turn your head to the side."
"I won't be any trouble."
"I appreciate that."

"Mr. N----, please hand me the weapon."
"No you piece of shit. come here and take it."
Hurt tone, "But... Mr. N---, I said 'please.'"
"Oh, all right."
"Thank you."

"What's your goal today, partner?" This is one of my universals. Most of the people who want to fight are unhappy, without really thinking about why, and want to do something, without really thinking about what. Once they put into words what they want , e.g."I wanna go home" they often clearly see how fighting is not a step in that direction.

The dude has already kicked the door off a squad car.
"What's his name?" I ask the arresting officer.
"Jimmy."
I shake my head, "What's his last name?"
"Uh, Jones." (Names changed)
"Mr. Jones, you ARE going to go through this process but you are in absolute control of two things: How long it will take and how much it will hurt. I'm for very fast with no pain. How about you?" This worked, but there are problems with it. People in altered states of consciousness (not just drugs or alcohol or mental illness, anger and fear and dehydration and injury can all have similar effects) usuall can't follow long sentences. Keep things simple.

"You're fine. I'm part gypsy and gypies can't be turned into vampires." Needless to say, that got a big "Huh?" which lasted long enough to get cuffs on. Also, needless to say, this is part of a much longer story. Use your imagination. This is also where I learned that things that freeze the threat's brains can also freeze your partner's. When I got the cuffs on, my partner was still looking at me with his mouth open.

Not just for de-escalation of a fight. There is a critical moment right after a very bad thing and sometimes you will have to deal with someone on the edge of shock. Not physical shock, just the information and the implications of that information (the violent death of a loved one, for instance) can smash the identity. Will smash the identity, more realistically. The words then need to be for growth and positive action.

"I know this hurts, but your children need you know more than ever. They need you to be the strong one." The implication that no matter how shattered you feel you are still stronger than someone is empowering. Taking the steps to help another helps process the woumd without wallowing in it.

When it is being transformed into a righteous anger, an honest, cold focus: "Bullshit. You need to take care of her. She needs you to be there. You run off and do something stupid, look for some vengeance and you know what will happen. THEN she'll be alone and then will be forced to deal with what happened to her AND what you did to yourelf. Don't you dare do something stupid and try to make this about you."

This is a good skill, one of the critical skills in critical situations.

Dog

Robert Anton Wilson (I think) once wrote that everything man deems to be good- loyalty, integrity, self-sacrifice, acting for the good of the community- the things we loosely gather under the label 'humanity' were things that we learned from dogs. That dogs, in the end, were domesticated wolves- intelligent, cooperative, loyal pack hunters. Humans were domesticated primates- intelligent, sneaky, self-involved, violent...

Mark Twain said that if you lift up a dog from the streets and make him prosperous he will not bite you, and that is the primary difference between a dog and a man.

Loyalty. Love, in many of it's forms. Intensity. The understanding that the pack/team/unit/agency/family/organization is more important than ME are the traits that make dogs what they are. A good dog will give his life without hesitation for any member of your family. He will not care and maybe not even realize that he is a different species. It doesn't matter. He exists to protect.

He will lie awake all night listening for intruders. He will live in the cold eating dry food. He will be ecstatic at some kind word or a good run or a little pet, but he doesn't need it.

And a healthy dog will never challenge you until there is no other choice. He understands that the pack works better with an older and wiser alpha. Unlike humans, dogs rarely overestimate themselves or their abilities to lead. They don't show ambition in the human sense.

But they are wolves also, and when pushed to the edge, abused or damaged through training- taught or forced- they can be very, very dangerous. The teeth are sharp and the teeth are in your service, unless you force it to be another way.

Some humans always see the wolf, and they fear dogs. Some always see the loyalty. Some see the loyalty and feel the power, that they can push and tease a wolf and he will take it, like a good pack animal will. This kind always acts surprised when they torment the dog until he bites... then they squeel to have the dog put down.

It makes me very tired.

Students

Good students are rare. They may not even exist by themselves. The good student is really a matter of "fit" between student and instructor. Dave, my sensei in jujutsu, was an extraordinary martial artist and an outstanding teacher... for me. Years after he retired I ran across another of Dave's old students who felt Dave was a terrible teacher: "I never understood a word he said."

Some of that was what made him such a great teacher for me. He never told me everything, just enough. He always left things for me to discover. He always set the bar right at the edge of my ability. Despite the fact that the other student felt Dave wasn't a great teacher, the student developed a lot of skill, which says something. Which may be a subtler distinction, that teaching students and teaching subjects are different and it is possible to be good at only one of those... except with some students.

Some instructors are extraordinary and can form a connection with almost any student. A small number of students are extraordinarily adaptable and can learn from many different styles of teacher. In that sense, being a good student might be a skill.

Poor students have a struggle. There are some students who have trouble in any study. Maybe uncoordinated in a physical skill or their brain doesn't process information the way the teacher transmits it. They may have difficulty learning by seeing, or hearing or touch. Maybe poor memory or poor cognition... they have a rough road. But occassionally you get a poor student who sticks with it and that long, slow road can produce a deep and durable practitioner. Moreover, the best teachers were often poor students: the extra practice, the extra explanations and ways to envision add up, and often leave someone who knows more ways to explain than anyone who struggled less. I, for one, most value the skills I learned in the subjects that didn't come easily.

The gifted student has a talent- speed or coordination or the right attitude for the study. They rarely last long. It's a cliche but what comes too easily is valued too lightly. If a student is too successful early, they often quit or decide that they know more than they do. It's a natural thing, people want to be 'good enough'. Training after all is tedious and hard work. It takes great inner discipline to try to improve and refine when you are already winning. Some confuse victory with skill. They may be successful for awhile and may even convince others- but all these talents fade, some with age, some with injury. When the talent fades the skill is shallow.

'Promising' is almost always a euphemism for lazy. The promising student has the coordination or the intelligence or the (insert attribute here) to be GOOD... if they would only get off their asses and practice. You shouldn't get these if you only teach people who want to be there.

If you teach martial arts, you will run into damaged students. Some are victims of violent crime or early abuse, and for them what goes on in class has extra inner dimensions. It is challenging and requires, from the teacher, discipline, compassion and insight. It is really not a job for amateurs. Other damaged students have been damaged by previous training. Sometimes it is physical- old injuries. Sometimes tactical, as in the student has been taught that a style based on dueling is exactly the same as self-defense. Sometimes it is more sinister. I've had instructors in other styles give a conspiratorial smile and say, "The secret is to hurt them the first day, dominate them early so that they never get up the balls to challenge you." Teaching the students to lose in a bullshit dominance game. More subtly, the student who can't stand to lose or can't stand to lose to a woman is a particularly dangerous form of damaged.

Bad students are thankfully rare. In the business world they are called "poisonous personalities". These are the ones that aren't satisfied to be unhappy themselves but must spread it. The ones who hurt other students or complain rather than train or try to set a personal agenda. Again, very rare unless they are attending unwillingly.

There are another category, too- the special students. Sometimes they fall into one of the other categories. One of my friends has alway had a "project student" a completely hopeless case that he would spend years and unlimited energy trying to bring up to an acceptable skill level. I assumed he was doing it for penance, but in retrospect he was probably simply paying back the instructors who never gave up on him when he felt hopeless. My special student was the Friday Student- who taught me about teaching.

Futures

Long talk today with Mac, sipping coffee in the autumn sun and talking and thinking. It's always a priveledge- his insight and experience are vast, but that's only a part of it. He looks at problems in different ways, ties them in with different phenomenon than other people might. Talking about an old subject with Mac is new. Talking about a new subject is extraordinary.

He wanted to explore the idea of creating a martial art specifically for and by law enforcement officers. It won't work. Every black belt with a badge has done it or tried to do it to some extent. Too much territory is staked, and it's not really that new anyway, and the very idea triggers scepticism... That said, there are some unique aspects to what we have been teaching our officers over the last years. Not new things, necessarily, but new ways to teach them and new ways to think about fighting, survival, and defensive tactics.

So we thought and talked today about what was critical, what was core, what is unique about our approach and how it could be presented.

The pages of notes I brought were soon over-written. Concepts. Advantages. Lesson plan design. Thoughts on teaching. Thoughts on ranking. Mac focused on core principles, one step deeper than I usually think, trying to get the concept of structure put into words. Structure, if you don't do it, is a way of moving (easiest seen in striking), where the bone and tendon, not the muscle, does the work. Start from structure. Utilizing yours. Disrupting the threat's. The handful of principles that apply universally, and only then moving on to technique... not individual technique, but intuitive classes of technique. You can learn over three hundred named wrist locks, but in the end, there are only three ways to do it, which can be combined into 3x3x3 and compounded... everything else is window dressing. (Or eight ways, if you want the simple version). People literally spend years on locks, but every real thing there is to know can be taught in an hour or less. Same with takedowns. Entries. Striking takes a little longer because there are so many ways to generate power and some compound and some contradict.

It might work. Not as a system or a style. That would be impossible to make unique and would run into ego problems. But we have proven a new way of looking at, thinking and teaching: one that works very well in the chaos of combat (and not just for us, relative rookies have used it with success). It might work.

Agencies are beauracracies- they can't help it. They are like organisms. I wonder sometimes if our agency realizes just how far out we are on the cutting edge of effective teaching, or what they did when they let a small group with probably a hundred years of martial arts training, a thousand+ actual encounters between them and some very unorthodox, practical ways of gaugung success and set them free to design.

What we've done is awesome (modesty check, but I've seen the standard and we are so far beyond that ball park that you can't see it). What we will do has the potential to change verything.

The Brotherhood

We trained today, the team. We have new members and they were getting a first introduction to some of our basic skills. Just a taste. There are a lot of obligations coming up and time is limited. They needed the basic skills for the most likely scenarios and they needed to feel the intensity, the speed and the chaos.

Everyone teaches on the team, everyone learns. I sat back at one point and just listened and I had to marvel at the skill and the insight and the experience of this small group of men and women.

"Raise it to here and all the force focuses on the shoulder."
"Spread them out and they lose their leverage."
"You don't need to worry about the hands if you take their legs."

Out of context the simple phrases won't mean much, but in action these are secrets and observations that martial arts masters dream of.

To be part of a team that no longer gets tunnel vision in an ugly fight; a group of people where it is just obvious that you will learn to control your sense of time and slow things so that the action seems to be in slow motion; that can see nuances of opportunity and shift gears as a team in action without a word spoken...made extra special by the fact that new members are coming into this arena and it might (probably will) change their lives and their ideas of possibility and impossibility forever.

There are other types of elites that share a different world. A LRRP veteran will get information from a smell that I will miss. A veteran paramedic will identify a problem that will be invisible to me. Each of these elites and each type of elite share a bond, a brotherhood.

Don't misunderstand- 'brotherhood' is used in broad ways by criminals. I mean it literally here, not as some kind of thuggish cult. Just as people raised together understand the subtext of family dinner conversation and share much of a world view, people who depend on each other in teams and share intense experience become a sort of family, sometimes stronger than the birth family.

We have a good family. A strong sense of mission, a strong sense of ethics, a strong sense of compassion, all aimed at solving sometimes unbelievably violent problems. The new ones will be good. Welcome to the team.
NPNBW!

Refinement and Nuance

Competence is quick, nuance is slow. Going from zero to sixty, metaphorically taking a completely new student from no skill to useable skill is relatively easy and relatively quick. Everyone makes huge gains when they start a new study- the learning curve is steep, and that can be addictive.

It takes a different kind of teacher and a different mindset on the part of the student to take that competency to a higher level. Perhaps yet a different one to increase the skill still more.

Some go into 'refinement' and that can be rewarding or a trap. You can look at anything through steadily increasing powers of magnification and find endless variation and information. The rock at normal sight is a rock with a given shape and substance. At ten times magnification there are previously unseen cracks, stresses and topography. At a hundred there are many different crystals in complex matrices.. and on and on until you are dealing with particals at the edge of comprehension, or dealing with things that can only be experienced indirectly (aside- this also happens in long-term relationships with spouses or coworkers: things too small to notice in the early months and years become glaring in the selective memory as the easy parts become unnoticed, taken for granted).

Refinement is rewarding in that it is a life-long endeavor of improvement and discipline; a trap in that these details can become more important than the basics and the original reason for studying at all can be forgotten.

I separate nuance from refinement. Refinement can be achieved merely by looking harder. Nuance requires looking in a new way. An example is 'fighting emptiness'. At close quarters it is usually instinctive to attempt tp match strength with strength and a lot of skill training goes into maximizing the use of leverage or exploiting subtle vagaries of momentum and balance. Fighting emptiness is learning to see where the opponent _isn't_, where he has NO strength and begin working in and from this space. It usually requires no new skill, but opens up a vast world of application. Nuances can jack up the learning curve (especially as measured by successful application) back to a beginner's learning speed.

In fighting and martial arts, your competence can be my nuance and vice-versa. If you have studied a system based on delivering crushing power, manipulating the threat's balance and momentum may be an advanced study for you, possibly almost mystical. It is right there and always has been but is invisible until you are taught to see it. Conversely, if my style centers on balance and momentum, the application of crushing power may be a mystery. Both competencies work, both nuances increase the effectiveness.

You will find advanced nuance in many things, some are the same with different names. The concept of fighting emptiness is familiar to me from judo, jujutsu, aikido (thanks SOL), Chen Taiji (thanks, Ted), Japanese swordsmanship and even once in a karate class long ago. Searching for nuance is one of the big advantages of cross-training. There are only so many ways to move a human body- but there are an infinite number of ways of understanding, explaining or teaching the ways. And there are a near-infinite number of ways of prioritizing them, often based on what the skills were dealing with: your village worries about being unarmed against a sword? Better not be there. Your tribe carries out duels with knives on sloping muddy hills? Better learn to slice while crawling. Your culture has hundreds of years of unarmed one on one duels? Gonna have lots of nuance and refinement in those systems... but the nuance will be different than the clans who have spent hundreds of years in a perpetual civil war.

The hard part, when you quest for nuance, is integration. Refinement can be hard too. When you are playing with atoms and crystals it is easy to forget that the problem is human sized. Nuance, though, must be integrated.

It can be hard. The most common example is teaching grappling to strikers. They immediately stop striking the second they hit the ground. They create an artificial separation of these skills: in this situation, these skills; in that situation, those skills. It happens with cops, too. They take a "tactical groundfighting course" and completely forget weapon retention, available force options, radios, the environment and sometimes the mission, going for the submission instead of either the escape or the cuff.

The skills must be played with, the insights allowed to play off of each other with gentle reminders from the teacher when an area of nuance is missed. In most arts, going from zero to sixty, the instructor is teaching you to move. At sixty to eighty, the instructor needs to teach you to see.

A Tradition Dies

We were too late for the early morning ferry, so we left Victoria very late, driving down through Washington State in the dark. It was late and everyone was hungry but we held off for an extra half hour to hit one of our traditional places.

The last couple of years have been very quiet in some ways. Obligations and on-call stuff at work have hugely eaten in to leisure time. Injuries make rough country hiking and caving and climbing and anything cold far less pleasant than it used to be. Shift work makes it hard to connect with old partners for long adventures. Most have matured into respectable jobs with very regular hours...but they don't have nearly as much fun! The people I do spend time with, family, for some strange reason like comfort and 'touristy' stuff- museums and shopping and cuisine.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, this one restaurant was our after-adventure stop for anything we did in northern or north central Washington. The death march to Cave Ridge? Oh yeah. Olympic Peninsula? Mt. Ranier?

It was a 24 hour prime rib joint. It looked like a dive- dimly lit with a questionable salad bar, cranky waitresses and a menu heavy on meat. Paradise. We had a lot of good meals there (ever had a cajun-blackened slab of prime rib? Too hot to eat, too good to stop.) A lot of good times. DGM threw caution to the winds and tasted alcohol. LG was slightly less vegetarian there.

I don't remember all the times we would walk in grubby from crawling in caves sometimes with tattered knee pads around our ankles, shredded jackets and occassionally bleeding; or still soaking wet and cold from rafting or diving at Hood canal. the waitresses wouldn't even blink. Sit us down, menus, coffee without asking. Honestly telling us what was good...

So with hungry kids and all, we put off eating a little longer.

There's a new owner. It used to look like the place a truck driver would go to get his heart broken. It's now a family restaurant, too bright, too much light. Smaller booths with lower backs. The salad bar still looks questionable, but it's no longer charming. The wait staff is all young. They don't argue and barely talk. Cajun-blackened steak and their in-house steak rub are no longer on the menu. The owner is there, too talkative to the (very few) patrons and mean, almost viciously insulting to his staff. And the foods not even good. I actually bent a fork holding down a rib eye steak.

It was a little sad. I could imagine ghosts of old conversations and laughter drifting by on their way into the past. Never again to be.

Maori

On the ferry from Victoria, by chance, we were treated to a dance troup from New Zealand- a demonstration of Maori dances and singing. It was a privelege and an education.

So much there and so few of the tourists (I feel) saw it.

Long ago, the Maori were one of the most sophisticated martial cultures in the world. Not technologically- their tools were of stone, wood and bone. Perhaps not even pragmatic- though they had missile weapons they eschewed them for combat with humans. But their children were taught to fight and to kill from an early age. They were a society without writing that had formal schools- not just for the military arts but for many things. One of the early European explorers stated categorically that no fencing master in all of Europe would stand a chance against a Maori graduate of their stick-fighting colleges. High praise from an enemy who considers you a savage.

So I watched the dance- beautiful fluidity of hula suddenly broken with staccato violent action and stamping and war faces. Defensive positions of arms and legs that would be familiar to any fighter. Breathing patterns that only a handful would recognize combined with strikes to their own bodies... for rhythm, of course. Far removed from the kote-kitae toughening exercises and the Sanchin testing they so strongly resembled (Sarcasm).

One dance, a challenge dance, was one of the few where dancers touched each other. Plain as day in this dance was a strangle and spine twist... with the short stabbing motions of a dagger from the off hand. It was from behind, swift and controlled. A pure killing technique preserved and taught in dance. So many little things- marching in step, with and without noise; war faces; exploding from peace to battle action; no separation- the fertility dances also had combat...

Unsure how the others in the audience saw it. Unsure if even the dancers really saw it (but I watched one move, later, separate from the dance and it's hard to believe that he didn't know he was a fighter). The elder who was escorting them was more concerned with their survival and future, I think, than their culture's past. He'd watched too many destroy lives in crime or drugs or stupidity (a too common thing in the aftermath of a colonial world) and was more preaching connection. In our culture it sounded like family value platitudes to many of the audience... but it was what a wise man saw as the best hope. Time spent with family. Connecting to something greater than one's self. Service. Discipline.

Did the audience feel, on some level, that they were watching a tradition of a truly fierce people? Of all the native cultures I have read of the Maori alone were not afraid of or even impressed by the muskets of the explorers. Had a Cortez or a Pizarro attempted a military victory over the Maori, their expeditions would have simply disappeared, footnotes in history. It was slower with the Maori. They were allowed to trade for tools and weapons. They liked the steel tools and the muskets. Like many colonized people they used them on each other to settle old feuds rather than standing together against the new threat.

And so their children's children's children dance for the amusement and donations of a crowd. It was a precious gift for those who looked.

Limited Time

Swamped right now. Barely been near a computer for the last week and will be heading off for vacation (anybody in Victoria BC?) for a week soon.

Have also been asked to condense an 8 hour DT class into a two hour class for the media. Sigh.

I'll try to post if I get access- already have some things on the back burner. Maybe talking about evil. Or why people poke bears and then get surprised when they are bitten. The difference between teaching good students and bad. The difference between a poor student and a bad one.

Stuff.

Be careful, all y'all.

More on Heart and Freezing

These are works in process, more questions than answers, so take them for what they are worth. In the last post I talked about heart or spirit as the ability to act and the fact that it is a quality easier detected in its absence than in its presence. We know when people run or freeze or frenzy... we rarely know why they didn't. If anywhere, heart is in those 'whys'.

But everyone freezes. Do a search for "Half-Second Freeze" and look at the post of that name (the new program doesn't seem to allow me to link to a single archived post). I still freeze sometimes. One of the things I teach is how to break out of a freeze 'cause I've done it so often in so many different circumstances. Everyone freezes if the circumstances are right and even the most hardened veteran still harbors a fear he will freeze again, and maybe next time just a little too long.

Maybe if we look at the ways we freeze?

The OO bounce. Search for the posts on the OODA loop, especially 'OODA Introduction' and 'OODA Insights'. If information/stimulus/action is coming too fast to grasp it, if you never finish Orienting before another action that is Observed happens, you brain freezes. This is reliable as hell... except through training, luck or conditioning I have a habit of shutting down stimulus that overwhelms me. The fact that you are in an OO freeze becomes an Observation itself with a programmed Decision and Action. It works but... there is no guarantee that multiple sources of stimulus or novel types of stimulus won't overwhelm it. So, in a limited way, you might be able to train this one.

Novelty. The inability to Orient at all. If you see something and can't tell what it is, you can't Orient so you can't Decide so you don't Act. This alone accounts for the reason why veterans freeze less than rookies and recover sooner... but there is no one who has 'seen it all', there's too much 'all' out there, so everyone is vulnerable. Combat non-sequitors are another level of this- present something so unusual that the Orient stage takes more time and you buy a little freeze. Feinting on another level does the same thing, the person must Orient to whether the attack is real or a distraction. Training and experience work for this one, but only to an extent. There are things so big and bad (or just weird) that you won't be ready for them. Boxing match does not equal soccer riot does not equal firefight.

Lack of Confidence. A big one but vague. If you don't believe you can prevail, you probably won't try. Losing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most insiduous are the people who were taught as children that failure was inevitable so trying was stupid. Many people are dealing with that lesson, and losing to it, well into their adult life. I almost wish this one wern't so easy to alter. There is almost no correlation between confidence and actual ability. I want to believe "train the skills and trust the skills" but I know damn well that a cult leader personality can turn a mouse into a fighter much faster than I can.. and much, much faster than they can learn the skills to be successful fighters. High confidence and low skills never ends well.

Permission. Read the post on "The Big Three". Simply, most people have never worked out what they are willing to do and when and why. They have glitches and inhibitions and issues that they are not aware of. Who ever says there are no rules in a street fight is an idiot. There are layers and layers of unconscious rules, some social and some genetic, that I am just beginning to unravel. Until you have identified and faced your unconscious rule sets you will have freezes that you are not aware of. Can this be trained? Perhaps in some deep psychological counseling way. A good instructor may notice some glitches in training and bring it out in to the light. That may be enough to fix them and it may not. Some permission glitches are ugly: the bank manager in the last post didn't want to be rude. Compare that to "Betrayed by the Angel" where the author was brutally raped ...partially because she didn't want to be rude. Experience again can break part of the permission freeze. For some people things like killing or fighting that were very hard the first time become easier the second, third fourth... time. NOT (IMO) because they have changed their internal rules. It just gets easier. I think the ones who suffer the most never address the rules (and it is the rules, again in my opinion, that are a big part of the pain). The ones who examine their rules and permissions- "this is normally bad but under these circumstances it was necessary, just and good." Recover better. Maybe.

The Looking Glass. This is related to Permission, probably a subset of it, but worth looking at. There's a post on this, too "Through the Looking Glass". Simply, we all have skills in conflict management that have worked for us all our lives. But there are situations and types of violence where those skills and rules don't apply. Nothing you learned about managing dinner table arguments with your fractious family will help you in an ambush. Nothing you learned about protesting corruption will help you in a gang stomping. Those are social skills that rely on something resembling a society. When those rules go out the window, almost all of those skills are counter productive. There is no win/win solution or teaming strategy in a torture/murder/rape- trying only identifies you as a compliant 'good' victim. The Looking Glass freeze comes from the inability to tell when you have crossed the line and are no longer working under the rules or even in the world that you are used to. This is the "Why is this happening to me?" freeze. The "What do they want" and "But I haven't done anything wrong!" freezes. Training? I think you can teach about this one. Once aware, it's not that hard to recognize. Permission to act then becomes a separate issue. How to act becomes a third.

These are off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

To the issue of 'heart' it seems more and more that is a fuzzy word, not an absolute and maybe not a quality at all. There are certainly limits to it.

More to think about.