MY SAFE SPACE – Garry Smith

Well safe spaces are certainly in the news these days, social media and old fashioned media, newspapers, TV and radio, are certainly making us aware that they exist. The whole issue around safe spaces is polarising rapidly, hell I have had to retreat into my room to get this out of my head. Yes I have a room that is just my own, my own little retreat at Smith Towers.

Currently I am sat at my desk typing, I have a really nice leather sofa my wife bought me as it is really cosy for me to take a nap on. I have an exercise bike, my weights and bench and a free standing punch bag. There are lots of books and a ton of training gear and weapons, I like my weapons, although I have moved all my swords and some of my sticks higher up the house.

Its a cool space, quite big with a large bay window overlooking the street. Most of my toys are in here and it has become a bit of a sanctuary. My wife is next door in the lounge listening to some David Bowie on vinyl, it is horrible outside, cold, wet and windy, so today the heating is on an we are tucked up in the warm. We are in our safe space, our home.

In the last week I have taken a lot of bookings for self defence training for next year. Some of the organisations I work for are booking into July and August and another organisation, a very large one, is booking me from January through to March with a hell of a lot more to come in September and October. Things are looking up, a few years back I was really struggling and could have easily given up, but as you can guess it is not in my nature, so onward and upward I hope. It is also fantastic that our self defence and Ju Jitsu training are starting to fill up too, we work damn hard to make it as good as we can then look to see how we can make it better and as I said last month, I have surrounded myself with some incredible people.

And here is the rub, these are people who can disagree, we are not a bunch of sycophants crawling up each others bums. I am pretty strong minded and determined, when I get my teeth into something I tend not to let go. I really can think of nothing worse than inaction. I like to do things, to drive things, to create things. I have a very active, and I like to think, creative mind. I love debates and discussions, I enjoy having my ideas challenged. Edward De Bono, the father of lateral thinking once said, β€œWhat is the point of having a mind if you cannot change it”.

That is one of my favourite quotes, but I was not always like this. I remember a discussion in a bar with a few friends and I was listening to them argue over something, what it was is lost, but one of them asked me what I thought. My explanation straddled the two opposing camps views. After I finished he said to me that since I had been to university I could no longer give my opinion on one side or the other as I always had before. You see when I went to college I was 28 years old, not a kid. I had children, I had worked for may years in different occupations, I had, in may ways, ‘been around’.

When I went from the career of an autodidact to entering formal education I was presented with the greatest riches in the world, vast caverns of knowledge were opened up to me, I went in as someone with very strong left wing views, I still had left wing views when I left but exposure to many other viewpoints had changed me. Previously I would have closed down people who spouted ideas or opinions I disliked, the sort of stuff that still goes on, mention immigration and you are a racist, disagree with gay marriage and you are homophobic, your ideas are foul pollutants to the mind of the right thinking people.

Now remember where we started, in my safe space. Well you are welcome to come into that space and to talk, discuss, debate. Threaten me and you may meet one of my toys before I role you unconscious ass out of the door, but my safe space is a space where ideas are welcomed, controversial or not. I have some wonderful friends and family but there is not one that I agree with on every subject. There are some things that are not discussed with certain people because those involved Know they disagree and we can agree to disagree. Where is the problem with that, its how we manage to co-exist. I the last Conflict Manager Marc introduced the work of Jonathan Haidt, he got me to read ‘The Rightous Mind’ earlier this year, I did and agreed with Marc that this was a profound piece of work. It took me right back to my days as a keen as mustard sociology student.

When I discovered sociology in all its complex and contradictory beauty that is when changes started in me that are still evolving today. I was like a sponge at first eager to absorb as much knowledge as possible and I did. The difference between autodidactism, where I grazed widely and freely in the pastures of my own mind, and the formal education I enjoyed at Northern College and the University of Warwick, was that I was now exposed and forced to consider things I would not have done had simply stayed with my own choices. The most wonderful experience of developing the ability to think critically is in my opinion, what separates us from the animals. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

I remember other students criticising sociobiology, it was the whipping boy of ideas, nonsense, racist sexist, its originator Wilson was pilloried, I felt guilty because I thought there was something in it. I wanted to like it, it was my guilty secret. Advances I understanding the human genome have largely validated most of what Wilson was saying. Haidt’s book on moral psychology is a must read if you want to know what makes us tick. Read it and you will begin to understand yourself more.

Its what I like to do in my safe space. These days I do not go to university or attend many formal learning events, like most people I can now access vast, infinite amounts of information on my laptop and even my phone. However, information is not knowledge. Information has no intrinsic value just by being, it is only of used when it is digested by the brain, turned around, mulled over, looked from different angles, reconstituted and applied. The brain is like any other part of the body, if you do not use it enough it will atrophy.

So when I hear stories of people needing safe spaces so that the can be protected from ideas they do not like, my heart starts to ache. When I hear this from students at universities it makes me really sad. I listened to a really interesting debate on the radio the other day between a feminist blogger and comedienne and a student union official. The former had had a booking to do a show at a prominent UK university cancelled because some students did not like her position on the sex trade. She supports the punters being arrested not the women, so the banned her, she was effectively declared a non person. Yes the thought police have arrived. I listened to much of what was discussed with disbelieve. WTF is wrong with people.

If you are so profoundly weak that the fact that somebody has an idea or political view you do not agree with, that you hide behind rhetorical name calling and censorship, then you surely must kill yourself now before the evil idea can get you. I shudder to think of a world where people like this end up in charge of things, and guess what, if you start to look around you they very often are.

Personally I like to call a spade a spade but am smart enough to know I can do more than just dig with it, go ask Rory about affordances. So for me a safe space is where we are challenged because without challenge we cannot develop as humans, a safe space is not hiding under the bed afraid of the bogeyman, its coming out and confronting the bogeyman. I have a safe space other than the one I am sat in, its behind my two fists and behind me is a safe space for hose I protect. They are the only safe spaces I want. Man up world.

Walking the Walk – Bob Davis

I have written a short article on the back of a Facebook post I made a while ago based on the idea of a MA/Self Protection instructor having had to have “walked the walk” to have anything valid to offer. To be honest I was only trying to rattle a few cages and see what popped out at the time but here goes.

Firstly (as no one will have any idea who I am) just a brief intro’ to myself, it is not just to talk about me Β but is to clarify the position I’m coming at this from.

I have been involved in MA since 1978 (with some breaks), mainly via Karate but with some short forays into traditional Jiu Jitsu and more recently the Gracie style JJ. Over the last 5 years or so I have also spent a significant part of my training time searching out instructors who have “Walked the walk” to expand my knowledge of the “real” world. Having said that I have succeeded in reaching the age of 57 (in my adult life, at least) without ever having been involved in a conflict that has turned physical. I am your typical bog standard karate instructor that you’ll find in any town with no pretentions to be anything more (I just happen to have an interest in the more pragmatic side of self-protection).

There seems to have been a move (at least in the UK) over the last 5-10 years towards practical martial arts, or perhaps I have just become more aware of it, and on the back of that there has been a big growth in schools offering “street lethal” martial arts. As a part of this there has been a lot of talk about having to have “been there” or “walked the walk” in order to be able to teach anything worthwhile. The general statements being that if you haven’t regularly faced violent confrontation then nothing you say can be in anyway valid and this is used as a stick to beat us (the non-fighters) with if we dare to teach martial arts with any sort of self-protection element. The upshot is that the picture that is being painted is that we are a complete waste of time and only they (the fighters) are worth training with.

Now I am not trying to be disparaging with the “fighter” label, I do understand that a lot of people have to face violence, or the threat of it at least, on a virtually daily basis as part of their work and I have a great deal of respect for those willing to do that. It is just a differentiator for the two classes of instructor.

It is commonly stated that “If you’ve never faced real violence you don’t know how you will react” which I fully appreciate, pressure testing (not matter how hard) will never fully replicate real violence, you always know that apart from a few bumps and bruises and maybe a few cracks and breaks (now I have been there and done that πŸ™‚ ) you are basically safe. You can go a long way towards replicating the physical but the mental side never really approaches the real thing (and if it did I very much suspect that students wouldn’t train for more than 5 minutes and that you’d never see them again).

We are also told that “everyone is different” in these situations which again I fully appreciate.

This, however, is where I start to struggle with the logic of the argument, if you “don’t know how you’ll react” and “everyone is different” then how can the experience of the fighter Β tell them anything other than how THEY THEMSELVES will react.

The logic appear to indicate that they can’t really pass on this knowledge and so are no better able to transmit this understanding than the rest of us. It also, if you follow the logic, means that training with them is of no value to the instructor who wants to pass on this knowledge to his own students as, even if he teaches exactly what he has learned in the same way as he (or she) has learned it, their lack of real world understanding makes it a “waste of time”. I don’t really believe this to be the case, if I did then I wouldn’t spend so much of my time seeking out these people and training with them, I’d much rather piggy back off of their experience and learn as much of the theory at least as I can. I’m quite happy to spend the rest of my life without ever having any real world experience if that is at all possible.

I am well aware that there are many schools, including those who profess to teach self-protection, who teach fanciful fairy tale self-defense (10 minutes on YouTube will provide all the evidence you need, in fact they seem to be in the majority there) but there are also many of us who take the subject seriously enough to do proper research so we can avoid passing on bad advice and comic book techniques.

I think it’s more a question of honesty (on either side of the argument) and just being open about who you are and what you teach. My promotional line on my website is:

“Does this mean I can turn anyone into a “lean, mean, fighting machine”? No, obviously not. The unfortunate truth (or fortunate, depending on your world view) is that not everybody has the nature or potential. Can I give you a set of physical skills which will much improve your chances in a physical confrontation? Almost certainly.”

Not the snappiest tag line and probably not really what potential students want to hear but it is what I do.

 

My final word (in as much as I’ll ever stop talking πŸ™‚ ) would be to question that, given that 90% of self-protection is in avoiding physical conflict and that a physical response is what you fall back on when all else has failed you, then would you rather learn your self-protection from someone who’s had hundreds of fights or from the guy who’s had none?

Just a thought πŸ˜‰

 

TAKING A STAB AT VIOLENCE! – Tim Boehlert

Violence. It’s all around us. Everyday. Everywhere we look. You may not see it, nor hear it, nor even experience it. But it’s there. In fact, we will never know of every instance, nor ever be able to stop it all. So, I ask, what will YOU do? Will you pretend it’s NOT your problem, or pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s alright, and it may be the norm. It likely is the norm. You can walk away, or walk by it, but you won’t be able to do that forever either.

I too turned a blind eye to it for a long time. It’s not that I chose to do nothing, or ignore it, I just wasn’t aware of what IT is. Simply put, I had no idea what it looked like – at least on so many other levels that I was never subjected to – up close and personal.

Violence is woven into the thread of our lives. Most of us are lucky enough to not have to deal with some of it, for long, long periods. Some of us may only have to deal with small parts of it, and then only now and again. Some of us choose to welcome it into our lives, via our lifestyle. Some of us choose to invite it in to better understand it. It’s strange to me that violence has so many faces that I have either been unaware of, OR, not been exposed to. Being white, middle-class, I’ve been buffered for much of my life.

Who’d have thought that you could go into a bookstore and BUY a book about violence? Who’d have thought that not only that would be possible, but that it would have it’s own β€˜section?’ Who would even KNOW enough about it to WRITE about it? Who’d have thought that any one man could not only write several books about it, but earn a living teaching others about it – through seminars, on-line blogging, e-books and in dojo training. Or several men? Or all over the world?

Yes, violence IS that big. It’s a money-maker now. In the same breath, it’s also a treasure trove of great information, and maybe NOT so great information. I guess it all depends on how familiar you are with the subject matter. Of course it’s also susceptible to the same problems that many subjects are subject to – opinions.

There’s some great information in the marketplace, and there’s also some very poor information out there. The problem here is HOW do you determine what’s good, and what’s not? I think that like many other subjects, context is important. Familiarity with the subject can be key, but how do you find the RIGHT answers? And again, it’s dependent on context. There are no right answers, because context is always changing, evolving. There are NO RIGHT ANSWERS. Maybe, maybe not. It’s debatable, like everything that involves opinions. Simply that.

Violence is something that I now pursue. For a living. As a course of what my job requires. To quote a very good source, “The only way to deal with violence, is to be better at it than THEY are.” Wow! That quote changed my life. Unfortunately, those that NEED to hear this, and to understand it, don’t and can’t – they don’t do what we do. Asking someone to watch you while you do your job makes them uncomfortable. And since you can’t schedule when someone chooses to use violence, you can’t ask them to watch, and maybe either comment or critique what just happened. One thing about it is that THEY will probably think you are LOOKING for violent outcomes. Yeah, it’s like that. They don’t understand, so they won’t understand. Simple. If they do happen to ‘see’ it, likely on a video (sans audio, as is most often the case), they can play monday-morning quarterback to affect their analysis, and justifications. They weren’t there, so they’ll never really know: what, why, how.

To experience physical violence, you usually have to be involved. You HAVE to be there. To understand it is a whole different thing. There are many factors and facets to a violent act. There are underlying issues, underlying emotions, and unknowns – those things that makes us who we are. Violence can never really been quantified or quantized. It’s a fluid thing, with no outline, no boundaries, and maybe no real beginning – or ending. It’s a slice of life. Complex doesn’t even cover it.

Violence does do one thing well – it sends a message. It conveys meaning, it defines an action, it makes progress happen – for one side or the other, or maybe even both. I’ve spent five years studying to deal with it. Scared? Yes. Indecisive? Yes. Reluctant? Yes. Willing to go there? Again, yes. Someone HAS to go there. It’s our way of being a stop-gap for those that would use this tool for their benefit, to your detriment. I’m an unlikely candidate to be here, now, but if I don’t, who will? And will they do it the way I’d do it? Not likely. Too many go there for the wrong reasons. It’s NOT about being a bigger man, but it is about being a better man. To stand up for what’s right, and to stand for those that can’t or won’t stand on their own. Because, they don’t feel they can, or should perhaps.

Too many ‘people’ use violence as a tool against us or those that we love, care for, care about, or are responsible for. That’s not to say it’s always on purpose, or willingly with bad intent. It’s a tool – and can be misused, used for the wrong purpose or for the right purpose, but wrong circumstance I suppose. Many know what they’re doing, many don’t, or may have underlying issues that change their perspective. Drugs, alcohol, mental health issues, emotional distress.

Violence as a tool – what a concept. It was hard for me to wrap my head around this one! But it now makes ‘perfect sense.’ Odd how five years of constant reading, viewing, and discussing this subject has changed my outlook, my mindset, and my humanity. I’m often sad about it, but also proud that I now possess some of the things I need to deal with violence. I have many sources that ALL have contributed in many special ways to getting me ‘here.’

Martial Arts has provided me with new insights and a different perspective on violence. I first tried MA when I was in my early teen years. Karate was what was available, so Karate it was. I got my White Belt, and that seemed like a lot of work to get there! The stretching required alone about broke me! What finalized my first brush with MA was not the work necessary, but the ability to get to it. Suffice to say that I and MA parted ways, too early for me. It was not until late in life that I re-discovered MA – this time with a purpose. I now had what I felt was a real need. In fact, it was a requirement as far as I was concerned, no two ways about it.

Five years in and I don’t consider myself a Martial Artist – I’m a believer in positive MA, and try to avoid all of the negative associated with it, and sadly there’s way too much negativity flowing through the arts – mostly due to ego, in my opinion. I’m not sure what I’d consider myself – I do practice, but not enough in a dojo, and certainly not with a partner most of the time. I do spend a lot of my income on educational materials – books, DVD’s, seminars however. I’m also of the belief that you CAN do some of it, even without practice, as I have clearly proven to myself. I don’t need to prove it to anyone else, despite their claims to the other viewpoint. I have experienced MUSHIN, once specifically that I can clearly recall, and likely many other times when I was too busy trying to effect a positive outcome to a violent outburst.

What I do consider myself is a voice to promote the positive in a new era of MA awareness. I specifically refer to my co-writing and experiences with my Sensei, Avi Nardia and my good friend, Hanshi Patrick McCarthy. The short story is this: in 2008, I took on a job that I had no idea about – well, not a very good understanding of, shall we agree on that? At that time I enrolled in a MA Dojo, Karate again, as that is what I ‘knew’, or thought of at that time, and with what I thought would be a good solution to an immediate problem. It wasn’t the right solution, but it did give me some grounding, and a lot of self-confidence – something I was lacking in, and won’t likely always fully acquire.

Before obtaining my Purple Belt, I’d determined that the training wasn’t what I needed. I didn’t know what I needed, but I knew this wasn’t it. That’s not to knock the style at all, as I did take away some very important pieces to MY puzzle. It’s just that I didn’t feel this was going to get me to where I needed, and specifically FAST enough! In doing some background searching, and after learning one joint lock combination, THEN I started to look for THAT! That piece fit my understanding of what I thought I needed – it made sense, and seemed to fit my needs. In doing Kata, which I love for the traditional aspects as well as the reasoning behind doing so, I was lost – the steps weren’t clear as to WHY they were performed. What was I doing making a series of moves, in a rough circle – who was the opponent, and HOW was he moving? I think if that had been explained UP FRONT, better, it would have made more sense, but that’s how I interpreted it. Motion without understanding, pointless to me at that point.

I checked out another school, and was determined NOT to start out from scratch again – I was determined NOT to be a cash cow for another school, simply so that they could make more money, and not really care about where I had been or gotten to. It seemed like I was just another income stream, with little to no interest in what I felt I needed even being considered. You were expected to follow THEIR program because that’s how THEY did it. Period. I call Bull Shido! McDojo reality, again.

I decided to try the DVD route – buy into some training materials that I found on the internet. I bought a ‘complete’ system that seemed to display MORE elements of what I thought fit my needs. Through that ‘set’, I found my Sensei, so it was worth the investment. Kapap is HIS art, and now my art of choice. Through Sensei Avi, and his circle of influence and friends, I have come to appreciate what MA can offer to a ‘student’ – positive growth, family values, compassion for other cultures – things I find lacking in what I know of some of the MA arena. Ego seems to rule the day, and with the rise of MMA, which I found brutal when I was first introduced to it, now has a different feeling. As does violence – I don’t view it the same, but I do view it as an opportunity. Kapap has introduced me to many new things, but mostly new ways to view my world, with an opportunity that many miss – to MAKE A DIFFERENCE.