Bruce Lee. I idolized the man in my teens. I distinctly remember the first time I saw one of his movies; they were showing Fists of Fury on TV and I couldn't believe a human being could move that fast, that nimbly. He fought ferociously, gracefully.
I wanted to be Bruce Lee. I read everything I could about him, and even went to practice Wing Chun, the first martial art he was officially taught.
Not Just a Movie Star
What surprised me about Bruce Lee was discovering that the man wasn't just a gung-fu fighting superstar. Lee had an incredible depth and balanced his physical skills with Eastern and Western philosophy, he kept an extensive library and filled volumes of notebooks with his own writing.
Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human is the sincere and honest development of one's potential. I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help - doing one's best, dedicating one's self wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an on-going process. I have done a lot during these years of my process, I have changed from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc., to search internally for the cause of my ignorance.
A sign of a good book is how much it changes you. In 2008, when I read Rory Miller’s first book Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, it evolved the way I looked at martial arts and self-defense training so much that despite having trained in the martial arts for 15 years, I completely changed how I trained and what I trained in.
So I was definitely looking forward to Rory’s new book, Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, and seeing what more I could learn from the jiujitsu-trained ex-corrections officer. Having read it, my first impressions are how Facing Violence differs from Meditations on Violence; Meditations was focused on showing the differences between martial arts training and real-world violence. Facing Violence explains how to train for that violence.
Note: Quotes in the post are from Facing Violence.
7
The book is laid out into seven main chapters (hence, Rory’s original title ‘7’), addressing the seven elements needed for complete self-defense training:
- Legal and Ethical
- Violence Dynamics
- Avoidance
- Counter-Ambush
- The Freeze
- The Fight
- After
The seven chapters provide a solid framework for, as the cover subtitle says; “preparing for the unexpected – ethically, emotionally, physically and without going to prison.” Important goals which you think ought to be covered in most martial arts or self-defense training, but which may very well be missing.
In which I do my best to narrate my spotty 15-year martial art journey, inject some humor into a little learning, and explain why I’ve stopped training in the Bujinkan, hopefully without annoying any ninja assassins lurking in the shadows.
The Beginning; or How It All Started with a Bright Red Book
I wanted to be a ninja.
Never mind that it was as impossible to be a ninja today as it was to be a samurai. My 14-year old mind didn’t know and didn’t care. All it knew and was imploding over was the fact that this gnarly book in front of him called Ninja: Spirit of the Shadow Warrior actually existed. Never mind that the cover was a hideous brilliant red, and the hood on its ninja face looked like it had been clumsily filled in with a marker pen. It told the story of how an American had found the legendary ninja in Japan, circa 1970s, and been accepted into the black-clad, shuriken–throwing brotherhood. If he could be a modern-day ninja, then maybe I could too! And thus began my fascination with all things ninja.
Ninja: the cover which started it all.
Now, I don’t think I wanted to be a real modern-day ninja, otherwise I would have joined my country’s equivalent of MI6 or the Navy Seals. No, I wanted to be the ninja of my dreams; a deadly warrior who could disappear and reappear at will, a cunning sage with hypnotic power over people and mystical dominion over the five elements, an alpha male for whom nubile maidens would fall madly in lust with at first sight.
This originally started out as a response to a comment by Christa Herzog regarding my previous post Self-Defense & Dry-Land Scuba Diving, but it become so long it’d be better served as a post in itself. Christa said:
How right you are. I took Pencak Silat classes and as I have had fights with men, I aksed what to do if: a man comes from behind, if a man is much stronger – I got the answer to continue exercising. In some way the teacher was right, because if you exercise enough you will just react if you get into a fight.
I wouldn’t say that exercising more and becoming stronger is a wrong answer, but it is an incomplete answer. Yes, you want to react, but how effectively can you react, and how specifically do you want to react?
Another way of putting it: Exercising and becoming stronger will help some if you get thrown into the deep end of a pool. But it won’t help much if you don’t know how to swim. And even when you do know how to swim, getting thrown into ice-cold, stormy waters when you’re least expecting it is another situation altogether from a cool, calm pool.
There are a couple of points to make about training against an ambush by a stronger predator. One is adrenal stress, which will affect your effectiveness, the other is how training to solve one problem doesn’t automatically translate to solving other problems, which is your specific effectiveness.
You wouldn’t take scuba lessons from an instructor who’d never been in the water. It wouldn’t matter how many hours of instructions he’s logged, how many certificates he has framed, and how good he is demonstrating on land. If he’s never been in the water, you wouldn’t bet your life on him.
And yet, all across the world, hundreds of thousands of people take self-defense classes from instructors who have never been in a violent encounter. People tend to forget that, maybe because these self-defense skills aren’t as easily, regularly and vividly tested as going on a scuba dive.
You wouldn’t trust a scuba instructor who’s never been in the water — why would you trust a self-defense instructor who’s never been in combat?
We also tend to forget that for those of us lucky enough never to have been in combat, we also don’t have the experience to recognize what would work and what wouldn’t work among the skills taught in a self-defense class. You don’t know what you don’t know. It may look good and even sound right, but do you have the filters to determine what really works? We can make best guesses, but with an equally inexperienced instructor, the best case scenario is still taking a guess based on someone else’s guess about what to do in a high-risk, high-stakes situation.
The takeaway? Never take any instructor’s word for the unassailable truth, especially one who’s never been in the water. Including mine.