Now that I have your attention…
This post is about the moment it all changed for you, the moment you realized you needed to know how to hurt people. The moment when the puzzle that is your personality, your social network and the world beyond your driveway all fell into place with a kind of awful clarity and made you sit back, winded, with a newfound unease in the pit of your gut. An unease that could only be quelled by knowing how to beat a man to unconsciousness or death with your bare hands.
The moment you realized that knowing how to use violence was the only thing that was going to get you back to enjoying life like you did in your prior state of blissful ignorance.
I’ll tell you about mine.
Lucky for me, it was one of those easy-to-miss two-paragraph news items on page A21, stuffed down as filler between all those ads for tire alignments and mattress stores. And yet, it must have been the perfect time for me to see it, because it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here’s the gist of it:
A local San Diego college student went down to Tijuana for some bar-hopping with his buddies. At some point during the night he became separated from the group and vanished. A couple of weeks later he was found in central Mexico, all splayed out on a voodoo altar, having been ‘used up’ in some hideous ritual. Bled out and eviscerated.
I was a college student in San Diego at the time, and had, on occasion, been to TJ. My first thought was, “That could have been me.” My second thought was, “No matter what, I am NOT going out like that.”
Up until those two small paragraphs I had been training — but casually, and with some ‘funny’ ideas about how violence worked. I found the idea of taking a man’s eye or breaking his spine (or otherwise permanently crippling him) to be morally reprehensible. I devised an elaborate system of target selection based upon the intent of the other man. In other words, if he just wanted to duke it out, then I’d only stun or knock the wind out of him. If he wanted to kill me, well, then it was on. But still, that whole eye thing bothered me.
‘Used up in a voodoo ritual’ burned all that crap out of my system in a searing flash — the world was not what I imagined it to be. If I wanted to continue living in it I would have to get deadly serious about the staying alive part. And that meant doing ANYTHING.
If things went to violence, no matter who chose it, I was going to be the one doing all the ugly, awful things — not the other way around. Period.
Whenever I talk about ongoing training, I like to bring up the idea of such work as being a lifelong process. Now, I often say this with a dreamy, faraway look in my eyes, as it’s one of the top three best things about doing this work — the idea that I can continue to learn, refine, and build the skill for as long as I draw breath.
Not everyone hears it this way. Some people think I mean that it actually takes a lifetime to master — and I’m the first to admit that’s not such a hot idea. Who’s got the time, right? (Well, by definition, you do — you got the rest of your life coming to you… but I digress.) You are right to be suspicious of anything that takes a lifetime — outside of growing a family & accumulating wisdom.
The use of violence is the very definition of a NOW tool. It’s silly to have something that you could very well need for survival in the next half-hour require a lifetime to be of any use to you. Good luck surviving long enough to master that!
When I say ‘lifelong,’ I mean that you could potentially spend the rest of your life working on it, constantly increasing and never get bored. How many avocations can you say that about? Music… maybe. This simple fact gets me excited about hitting the mats — in fact, just thinking about it makes me wish I was there right now in a good, solid tussle with high throws and contorted limbs, everything pushed to the edge in a rush of blood and total domination.
Back in the days of my martial arts training, I was resigned to having to spend the rest of my life studying as many arts as I could cram into my lifetime — not to mention having to manufacture my own coupling devices to get them to work together. What I really wanted to know is what you all have at your disposal, but it didn’t exist in a format like this. So, as I neared my Tae Kwon Do black belt test, I was getting my head screwed on at the right angle to put on a white belt again and study Aikido… Judo… Jiu-Jitsu… Kung Fu… Chin Na… Muy Thai… and on and on and on. Because, quite frankly, I wanted to know it all. And it was obviously going to take me the rest of my life to get there.
I wasn’t happy about it — it didn’t feel like opportunity, just a whole hell of a lot of work, much of it spent slogging through hierarchies and physical fitness challenges. And making Aikido work with Karate is tougher than you think — especially when the instructors find out you’re not just attending another school, but (gasp!) another system!
What I really needed were the base principles that underlie all violence — the common elements between striking, joint breaking and throwing; multiman and knife, stick, and gun; and a way to tie all those elements together between the pendulum swing of structure and motion.
This is why I get the Homer-drool look in my eyes. I don’t have to spend a lifetime to learn all of those things, one at a time, and then try to stitch them together through trial and (possibly fatal) error. I have the base principles, and like knowing the rules of chess I can play every game that’s ever been — or every will be — played. I can spend my life running as many permutations as I like, confident in the knowledge that it’ll never be the same twice.
And if every iteration is novel, that means I get to learn something new every time.
The principles of violence are easily grasped in less than three days of training. Everything after that is just rearrangement & recombination. It’s you, training your mind to wield your body. Sharpening that sword. But really, you’re done after that first live training. In that seminar we teach everyone how to:
- Seriously injure a man
- Drop him to the ground
- And kill him, should that prove necessary.
So don’t sweat that bit. Lifelong training isn’t a ‘have-to’ — it’s a ‘get-to.’ It doesn’t take a lifetime to master; you don’t have to be a Trained Fighter, or an Instructor, or a Master to be able to use the skill to shut off another human being.
BUT
If this information lights a fire in you, like it did in me, well, we got plenty for you to work on. To play with. No matter how good you get, we can give you material to challenge your abilities, to push your farther, to make you that much better. Better than you can imagine.
So relax, absorb, enjoy. I’m not going anywhere.
