working backwards

This is sort of an AAR from our Infighting weekend. Sort of because it's focusing only on one thing and the training weekend has half a dozen different trails that can be after-actioned.

Working backwards -

Teaching/training the physical skills of self-defense feels like a forward progression - learning new things is forward action. And working the body, the physical - this is the most base aspect of being human. Working forward, learning new skills, at some levels is also about working backward, rewinding the progression of domestication and rewinding the tape on how you become who and what you are (at the moment). A student - who is also an instructor - remarked that putting the blindfold on to run a training drill made him more primal.  When we dig in to our bodies we dig in deep to who/what we are and a lot of that lives below the domestication.

It can go deeper too. At the risk of sounding esoteric, who and what we are gets carried in the marks and scars held in bone and tissue. In the world of Mindbody medicine, we say there is a type of memory held in the body. It's easier to use that language than get into how the various processes we think are utilized for storing and retrieving memory so we use shorthand - body memory.

This isn't like what people call muscle memory (which isn't really), it's more about a pathway to stored experience tied to movement and position.

You know how you can smell something and instantly remember a clear and distinct event or feeling from the past? The body works the same way.

The more chaos that gets introduced into physical training the more raw it becomes and the more likely the student will stumble across little -or big- revelations. The more the body gets moved, the more that movement is not scripted or controlled, the more problems and meat puzzles that have to be solved, the more likely the training experience will anchor down into something profound.

Don't think profound means earth-shattering or life changing. It can mean that it just doesn't always. Example? Something small like "oh hey - on the ground my focus is on hurting the other person instead of getting to a better position" or "when I have the blindfold on I am more primal" and then...this is the cool part...get curious. Each discovery means something. What it means has a significant impact on the student/practitioner's understanding of how they show up inside physical chaos and maybe a bread crumb trail back to the why.

If the student touches something primal, what does that mean for him? Is it a cool thing? Is it unnerving? Is it cool because it's fun to get primal or cool because getting primal creates permission to hurt people for fun? If the student discovers the ground fight is about causing injury to the other person instead of protecting herself from injury or death, then what? Getting curious creates discovery.

Remember we teach or train ultimately because we love this stuff. Really, that's what it should be about. Love it enough to be curious and let being curious make life better.

damaging domestication

Access. The ability to gain entry - to reach for something. Been thinking about this for a few days because it is a hardcore requirement if you are ever going to go physical in a violent encounter.  Biologically we are predators, right? Deeply domesticated predators, albeit, but predators nonetheless.

What does it take to gain access to that native programming? Is there a point along the scale of domestication when it is bred completely out of us? House cats still have hunting programs. Even the uber-domesticated ones will still chase down a bug even if they aren't entirely sure what to do with it once they catch it.

I'm thinking about this (again) because I spent last weekend at a Krav Maga instructor update training camp. Working with another female instructor who is in her own right, a formidable practitioner - this question bubbled back up. Put a gun in her hands and ask her: will you have any problem pulling the trigger...ending someone if your life depends on it? Her answer is no, no problem.

Take the gun away and things change. Self-defense is about getting away. Get safe. It's not a fight. Fights are competitions and surviving violence should never be a freaking competition. There's an unfortunate reality though - in dire circumstances getting safe will require actions that may be as lethal as pulling a trigger. Working skills under that reality, she struggles. Half her body is trying to leave and the other half is trying to train the drill. Literally. Fascinating to watch and according to her - fascinating (and frustrating) to experience.

There's something wrong with having to teach someone to do something for which they are biologically programmed - instinctive programs are not acquired skills. So it has to be about access. Stripping away all those layers of domestication. I don't think we can teach that either.

We can create opportunity for it in training, sure. And hands on experience with violence can create a direct line to that instinct. Not talking about simulations here. The been-there-done-that-gave the t-shirt away- hands on experience. And there have to be other ways to open up that access. Partly because I have seen the opposite happen after a violent encounter. I have seen violence drive the person into a deeper abdication of instincts. Maybe because the last thing that feels right is to take on the characteristics of the attacker...

But at the moment, that's not really what bugs me. If the only way to strip off all that domestication is up close personal experience with violence then only people who have encountered it stand a chance of learning how to prevent it from breaking bad. Except this is an again conversation now and that's unacceptable.

There is a way to train that comes close. Scenario training for one. But it's still simulated and part of the brain knows that.

Shouldn't have to share those been-there t-shirts with people as the method for clearing paths back to our native programming. If you are in possession of one of those t-shirts you know exactly what I mean. There have to be other tools for clearing away all that domesticated overgrowth blocking access to our native predatory capacity. Otherwise, the only people who can find their way back are the people who have survived violent encounters. Not a fan of the implications...