2016 Women's Self Defense

Once upon a time, I took my first ever Women’s Self Defense Class. My perspective on personal safety got flipped-turned-upside-down, thus starting the process of moving me from the Potential Victim category over to the Might Actually Be Able To Take Care Of Self category. That class inspired me to start training in kung fu, and everything’s been coming up roses ever since. Sweaty, bruisey roses.

So now, nearly a year later, my fellow Women’s Program students and I get to help out with the 2016 Women’s Self Defense class.

(Minor tangent, here, but if I promise it’ll make sense in a paragraph or so will you bear with me? Okay, here goes …) I’m a bit of a lapsed theatre kid. Which is to say, I have a degree in theatre but haven’t actually been involved in a theatrical production in years. Enough years to forget just about everything but the magic.

See, there’s this thing that happens in live theatre, a kind of spell - woven of effort and skill and talent and energy - that can draw the audience out of their seats, out of reality, and into the world of the story. It’s not actors up here on the stage and distant observers down there in their seats; it’s just everyone learning and growing by living in this moment together. At the end, when the curtain closes and the house lights come up, the spell is broken as everyone just kinda looks around, out of breath and full of heart, wondering where the time went.

It’s a uniquely human kind of magic that feels like flying, and it’s exactly what is happening in the 2016 Women’s Self Defense Class.

For women, by women - that’s how this class works. Because those of us who move through this world as females often do so at our own peril, in a society that bends the full weight of its will to shape us into soft-handed non-confrontational people-pleasers, so if we’re going to grow into badasses we need to start from a safe place. A place where we can hone our awesome to a razor’s edge because we’re comfortable with looking silly or getting overwhelmed or failing a few times before we get it right.

That means no dudes. 

Sure, we have guys to help with the drills, really great guys full of that special kung fu blend of calm-helpful energy, but they wait patiently offstage until we need them. The majority of the class time is spent in a room full of women, every size and shape and age of us, all working together. Ladies teaching, lady kung fu students helping, ladies learning.

There's just a few women involved, is what I'm saying.

The first class started off about like one might expect from any self-defense course. A general discussion about avoiding dangerous situations and being aware of our surroundings, presenting ourselves with confident body language and Using Our Words. The kind of stuff that we all know we should do but mostly forget to do because it’s uncomfortable or exhausting or just, ya know, life. But this is not a school that talks when we could be doing, so the discussion quickly turned into pairing up and practicing.

It’s remarkably difficult to maintain eye contact with someone who is walking towards you aggressively; even more so to put your hands up and order that person to stay the hell out of your personal space. But if someone out there in the world is coming at you with bad intentions, this is exactly what needs to be done. And so we practiced this in the safe space of the class so that we’d be able to do it in the uncertain space of the world outside. It was awkward. The room was full of the shuffle and nervous laughter of comfort zones being tested. Gradually, over the course of the exercises, that chorus of awkwardness was replaced by the sure steps and quiet chatter of a group at work. Folks got comfortable with each other and the practical aspects of the class.

And then ...

“You will be hitting someone tonight,” says the instructor.

A collective flicker of surprise rippled through the students. A few of them flinched. This was not what they were expecting - it’s supposed to be a self-defense class, not a hitting-people class. And if they would be hitting, would they also be getting hit? No, of course not, but the question alone was intimidating. They were there to learn how to protect themselves, not how to hurt somebody else. Little did they know just how much of the kung fu defense is a good offense.

If you go to a kung fu school to learn self-defense, you’re going to learn how to throw a punch. And then another punch. So many punches, a chain of punches, one after the other, over and over and over again. Because if the first one doesn’t hit then the next one might, or the next; however many it takes to make an attacker back off while deeply regretting their life choices.

So, for a little while we were back to awkward, operating well outside of many comfort zones. The lesson was starting to look a lot more like actual violence than most folks were comfortable with, but nobody shied away from the punching. The class had proven itself to be honest and safe up to that point, so why not give it a try? All of the students stepped up to learning how to form a fist that’ll strike solid and true, then hurling those fists through the air along the centerline a few hundred times.

But, hitting the air is very different from hitting a person. 

And, you don’t want the first time that your fist feels impact to be when your life is on the line. 
Sooooo … that’s when the guys joined the class. 

All the ladies had the choice of either hitting a pad held by one of us women-students or punching one of our kung fu brothers in the chest. Hit whatever you’re comfortable with, was the general instruction, but do try hitting something. A lot. Over and over. Chain punch till your arms fall off.

Line up those knuckles and punch punch punch punch punch BREATHE punch punch.

Thus the first class ended. Smiles and fistbumps all around, we said our goodbyes and settled in to wait a whole week to find out if anyone would return for the second class. Like actors backstage during intermission wondering if the audience will bother to come back to their seats and yes, I’m still trying to make this theatre metaphor happen.

A week later, the second class convened and - to! our! delight! - damn near everybody came back. They trusted the safe learning space we had made for them, trusted our instructors to teach them, and we met that trust with an eagerness to deserve it. That’s when the magic happened.

From that class through to the next classes, all the way to the end of the month, we flew through the rhythm of training, the inexhaustible time-devouring stride of Instructor Demonstrates Technique/Students Practice Technique A Bajillion Times.

Demo how to get out of a chokehold ... practice getting out of a bajillion chokeholds

Demo how to get out of a sideways bearhug ... practice getting out of a bajillion sidways bearhugs

The repetition is crucial; gotta embed the technique into your muscle memory, because if an attack does happen the muscles will react to protect you while your brain is still trying to make sense of what’s going on. Every student in that class knew it, and were totally on board with doing the techniques over and over, and a few more times after that.

An absolutely vital component to this phase was having the men to partner with in class. Now, I’ve made quite the fuss about how great it is to have a women’s-only class for women run by women omg women, but this class would not have worked as well as it did without those guys. At no point in the class do we tell women to fear men, or to view only men as potential attackers. Everything is geared towards defending oneself against any attacker. It’s just that odds are good that, as women, if we’re going to be attacked it’ll be by someone who is bigger and stronger than we are. The easiest way to simulate that size and strength difference in the lovely safety of a class space is to work with a dude.

So the guys integrated with the class as we got into more confrontational drills, with the full-on grabs and the chokeholds and such. These were guys who we lady kung fu students know and trust; they’re our kung fu brothers. We’ve worked out with them, we know they’d never try to hurt us and we trust their skills to keep from hurting anyone accidentally. As the guys demonstrated techniques with the instructor, or paired with a few of us kung fu ladies, the women in the class could see how we trusted them and choose whether or not they wanted to work with them. By the end of the month, almost every woman had trained with one of the guys at some point.

I’m a semi-pro worrywart, though, so I checked in with some of the students after class to see how they felt about working out with the guys, just to make sure everybody was still comfortable and cool with the class and blah blah fussy fretful blah. One of them smacked my worries down with some good ol’ common sense:

Well. Alrighty then!

Mind you, it wasn’t all just the Women’s Self Defense Class students learning from us. Oh my dear sweet goodness, no! Training works both ways. We were all in this together. We all dealt with the very scary idea of a potential attack; for every time we grabbed a student to simulate an attack so that they could learn how to defend against it, we would also have a turn to get grabbed. Every one of us, regardless of how much kung fu we might have, had to confront not only the idea of what we might do if someone tried to hurt us, but also how easily we could be hurt. 

That’s some heavy baggage to lift, but it’s lighter when you’re all lifting together.

Personally, I could not have been more impressed with the ladies in this class. I met women half my size who, completely untrained, could throw punches hard enough to rock my stance. Some of these ladies had the most wily wrists I’ve ever had the misfortune to try and get a grip on. I worked with a few of the ladies who had flinched at the mention of punching in the first class, who were deeply uncomfortable with the physicality of the drills, but they gritted their teeth and powered through, and good lawd by the end of the month they were stone coldest bruisers in the bunch.

We all flew through that month of classes, swept along on our own little magic spell of strength and the evolution of each other’s courage, a little high on the breathless laughter of folks learning how to be badasses together. Just walking in the door on that first day of class took guts. And to then stick it out for a month of ever-increasing challenge? Well, let’s just say that it’s my hope that those ladies will go out and face the world every single day as brave and powerful as they were in that class. 

Because WOW, will they ever be a force to be a reckoned with.

Month 6: Pros & Cons

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12}

When I first started training in Kung Fu, I promised myself that I’d stick it out for at least six months. 

I know it doesn't seem like much of a commitment, but I honestly wasn't sure I would survive the first class, let alone forty-some-odd more classes after that. Considering my physical condition at the time that I started (poor-to-middling) and my own natural tendency to not do difficult things, six months felt like a pretty ambitious goal.

It also seemed like a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to an activity so far outside of my comfort zone that it would need to invent faster-than-light travel in order to reach my comfort zone while I was still young enough to participate. Two months to warm up to the training, two months to settle into a routine, two months to decide whether or not I hated it. And if it turned out that Kung Fu was not for me, that the benefits were outweighed by the costs to my family, my time, my poor beleaguered health, nobody would judge me for bowing out after half a year of honestly trying.

Sensible, right? So here I am, six months later. Time to evaluate. Continuing with the sensible approach, I shall attempt to list the pros and cons of my training experience.

PROS of Kung Fu training:

• Improved physical and emotional stamina. If I can slog through hours of sweat-soaked exertion and only dissolve into a puddle of scalding, frustrated tears once in half a year? Well, then there just ain’t much I can’t do.
• Symptoms of my forever-disease have never been so mild and manageable. Starting this training was a gamble, a wild toss of the dice that such a dramatic change to my exercise might do more good than harm. I had nothing but a vague hope that studying a martial art might be like couples’ counseling for my mind and body, giving them a project to work on together instead of fighting each other all the time. And it seems I may have been right: the inflammation in my joints is minimal, my mobility is hugely improved, and I’m just not so daggum tired all the time. Which is great, because I love being right.
• Now a part of a solid community of people who know that I have lupus and treat me like an adult about it. By which I mean they’ll scrub up with hand sanitizer before we work out, and they’ll respect my need to take breaks, but we are Gonna. Work. Out. And they generally don’t say any of the facepalm-worthy things that people can't seem to help saying to the chronically ill*, either because they’d never think to say them or because we’re all too busy training to talk. Either way, I’m happy.
• Greater confidence moving through a world that is suddenly much less full of insurmountable threats. Spend enough time imprinting your muscle memory with a variety of efficient ways to overcome physical confrontations, and the world is a less scary place. Especially for a lady.
• Greater humility to balance that confidence. I train with the kids’ class most of the time, see. Nothing keeps you humble about your kung fu, and about life in general, quite like getting your ass handed to you by a sihing who’s half your size and one-third your age. Speaking of which ...
• My kids and I have something in common besides the fact that we live in the same house. They’re training right along with me. We bond over the challenge of drills and our mutual post-workout stank.

CONS of Kung Fu training:

• Spangly dangly earrings no longer swing prettily over my shoulders. Because I have muscle there, now? Apparently? Weird.
• Newfound tendency to talk about Kung Fu. Like, a lot. Please stop me.
• No longer able to pawn heavy lifting tasks off onto my mighty husband. I am now perfectly capable of lifting rather heavy things. A solid tan sao can haul an awful lot of groceries, y’all. (note to self: move this one to the Pros list)
• Strangers seem to feel that I owe them an explanation for my forearm bruises. Dear Concerned World: I am not being abused. Promise.

Girls can play rough, too, ya know.

Well. That seems like a pretty clear balance far in the PROS favor. But what about the introspective overthinking about the philosophical impact of my choices? Haven’t done nearly enough of that.

How has my perspective changed over the past six months?, I wonder to myself. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, I had never thrown a punch in my life. Physical confrontation was something that I blithely pretended could never happen to me in this modern civilized world. Because ignorance is the best prevention. OBVIOUSLY.

Now, though? I’ve lost count of how many punches I’ve thrown and have been thrown at me. Thousands, maybe? No idea. Enough that a punch has ceased to be an astounding alien weapon, and has become a common tool, something that I use so often that it’s worn shiny and smooth, comfortable and efficient. All of the techniques that I’ve learned are tools. No more exotic than a hammer. There’s nothing mystical about them, just the simple physics of muscle and bone, plus a lot of practice.

It’s easy to forget that the vast majority of people are not familiar with hitting and being hit. That when such things happen, it can seem too fast to follow, mysterious and complex and a little scary. Recently, Sifu and I did a brief demonstration of basic self defense techniques on a morning news show. During the demo, I did a simple tan sao followed by a pak dar to escape Sifu’s grip. My punch happened to tap his microphone, which made it sound very impressive to the viewers at home. Ditto for our lovely hostess, apparently:

(click this link to view the video that would be embedded here if I was smarter)

It was just a twist of a tan, then a pak dar. Just a little something that I learned on maybe my second night at Women’s Self Defense, before my actual training even started, but to the nice lady on camera with us it was magic. And Six Months Ago Me would have been right there with her, all agog and what-sorcery-is-this. But after spending hours out of every week for the past half a year training, immersed in the small, quiet sea of Kung Fu, where force is not the rocks we crash against, but the tide with which we ebb and flow, I’m seeing a different kind of magic.

The kind of magic that inspires swooning waxy-poetic run-on sentences, apparently. Not even sorry.

What I see is the kind of magic that’s not magic at all. It’s just practice. Hard work. Sweat. Repetition of good technique, or at least repetition until the technique gets good. Learning all of the pieces and then mix-and-matching them to suit any situation. Hitting and getting hit, and conditioning the body’s reflexes to handle both ends of that equation.

Any ol’ fool who’s willing to work at it can do this stuff. You can tell, because I’m doing it. A lot has changed in the past six months, but the basic facts about me remain the same. Still thirty-five years old. Still clumsy. Still the stay-at-home mom of two. Still chronically ill. And also? Still training.

Seems I’ve gone and talked myself into not quitting. I’ll give that Six-Month Milestone Quit Option a jaunty wave as I cruise by, on my way out the door to class. Because this training is totally worth a little less dangly in my spangly earrings.

*I’ve heard every single one of these things, in some form or another. If you look closely in that video around the 3:15 mark, you’ll find me and my overly aggressive lipstick.

Month 3: One Of The Big Kids

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12}

Month Three is the best month of training. So far. I'll 'splain exactly why in a bit.

First, some real talk: I have a problem with authority. Always have.

See, I am the oldest of five children. The Biggest Sister. The playground defender, bedtime ignorer, and nutritionally inadvisable snack provider. The parental underboss: not exactly in charge, but I’d do in a pinch. The superhero who knew how to do All The Things (for no better reason than I had already learned how when they weren’t watching). The one who got the bumps and bruises and scars that taught four kids what not to do. The one who stress-tested The Rules so they’d be all comfy and broken in by the time my siblings got around to using them. The first of our generation to be given pieces of grown-up responsibility to handle, and the first to spectacularly screw those responsibilities right the hell up. The Example: good, bad, and very bad.

Now that all my sibs and I are grown, I’m the mother of two small children and the undisputed bossypants mamabear of my own little household. All of this, combined with the natural contrariness that seems writ upon my bones, and you’re dealing with someone who has all the willingness to cooperate with authority of your average scalded housecat.

I have an instinctual disregard for anyone who might wish to boss me around. If you could spare a moment’s sympathetic thought for my parents, teachers, and employers, I’m sure they would appreciate it.

To be clear: this is a character flaw. One that I have an on-again-off-again struggle with. It’s exactly the last thing in the world I would want to bring into Kung Fu training, but I could no more easily leave it behind than I could unzip my skin and check my contrary bones at the door. Dilemma.

Luckily, the Ving Tsun system is ready for punks like me.

There are many parts to this system, most of which I could probably list in under a minute but will spend the next many years of my life trying to fully comprehend. The one that’s most relevant to who I’ve been up to this point and where I am now in my training (and this blog post), is the concept of Kung Fu Family.

Kung Fu Family isn’t just a nice idea. It’s not some empty slogan, a set of words to be mouthed as needed, slapped on to a conversation to add the illusion of meaning, convenient and disposable as a post-it note. The concept of family permeates every aspect of this training, starting with the very basic structure of who’s who in the school.

We’ve got the school’s dad and mom: Sifu and Simo. All of the other students are siblings. Some are older because they’ve been training longer; we call them sihing. Some are younger because they’re newer to the school; they’re called sidai. It’s a hierarchy of sorts, but only for lack of a better word because it’s got nothing to do with skill or merit or some arbitrary measurement of each student’s worth, and everything to do with when we started training. We’re all equals, it’s just that some of us have been there longer than others. The first student to join the school would be the oldest sihing, and the most recent student to sign up would be the youngest sidai.

Which means that when I walked into that school for my first class, I suddenly became everybody’s baby sister.

I’ve never been baby anything to anybody who hadn’t given birth to me, much less to a small army of strangers trained in hand-to-hand combat. Nothing about my life experience thus far could have prepared me for this. When confronted with bizarro circumstances, my instinct is typically to puff up and bullrush my way through until things look familiar again. Which is exactly how you don’t learn Kung Fu.

So for the past three months, I’ve reined in that instinct and tried to keep myself on a simple three step program:

1 - show up for training
2 - keep my sassmouth closed and my ears open
3 - watch my sihings

If any of my new older brothers and sisters had ever tried to alpha dog me, had ever done any of the thousand little dominance displays we humans are too often capable of, had ever bossed or barked or demanded, I would have turned on my little heel, sashayed away, and never looked back. But that’s not what good sihing do, at least not at this school.

Being sidai does not come easily to me. I'm just too me for it to ever feel natural, and I’m going to slip up every now and again. Hell, just this past week I showed half an ounce of accidental disrespect to a sihing by thoughtlessly setting up my hands for a two-person drill as though I was the sihing. And you know what? Days later I’m still all squirmy inside about it, actually chagrined at myself for being the kind of pain in the ass I’ve always been. Weird.

See, when my sihings are all, for the most part, calm and skilled, friendly and willing to help a newbie along without being condescending, and (bless them, this above all) patient, well … it’s not so much a matter of having to suppress my attitude problems as it is not having to use them at all. The sihings are there to help their sidais, just as they are helped by their own sihings. Not just willing to work with the younger students, but happy to. Showing respect to people like that ain’t difficult.

Which isn’t to say that all sihings are the same. Oh, very far from it. Each offers their own lessons, just by being themselves.

Some sihings are extremely tuned in to a sidai’s fatigue level, and will call a halt to the exercise at the first over-large huff of tired breath. Which is a mixed blessing. I mean, I do get tired suddenly and often apropos of not much at all thanks to that whole chronic illness thing, but I’m also prone to melodrama. That gusty sigh in the middle of Pak Sao could be a surprise onrush of fatigue, or it could be that I just remembered that I have two loads of laundry waiting at home for me to sort and fold. I can either babble an apology and explain myself every time this happens, or just stay focused in the moment and stop being a drama queen. Huff only when I need to huff.

Some sihings are vocally encouraging, cheering you on even as they come at you with forearms like accelerating concrete pylons. It’s like trading blows with a very skilled, utterly merciless golden retriever. Pak’ing punches like theirs really helps me get over that whole fear reactivity thing. Because if I flinch away from that simple exercise I might as well keep on backing up out the door and go hide in my car until a real grown-up can come rescue me from my life choices.

Some sihings are so quiet, not just in voice but in personal energy, as though if you dropped them into a pond they’d slip peacefully through the water without leaving so much as a ripple, that I can almost forget that they’re even in the room, that anyone else is in the room, and the world can shrink down to nothing more than the play of hands and the lesson of the drills. Their focus is like an aura that moves with them, and when we work out together I get to borrow it for a little while.

Sometimes they’re all precision, the kind of sihings who make horse stance look graceful, with huen saos you could set your watch by. Sometimes they’re all power, the force behind their hands just enough to imply that there could be ever so much more. Sometimes they’re all control, calm limbs marking the drill, holding position quietly until the mistake is seen and corrected, helping the sidai to sculpt their muscle memory. Sometimes they’re all of those things at once.

Occasionally, I wonder what kind of sihing I am, but I’ll never have the cajones to ask one of my sidais. Because I do have sidais, now. I’ve been in the school, a part of the family, for long enough that new students have joined up behind me. Finally, someone upon whom to inflict my frustrated Big Sister-ness. As interpreted through the lens of all that my sihings have demonstrated, of course. Got to give back all the good that I’ve gotten.

It’s a relief, not being the baby any more. A big step, and one of many reasons why Month Three is The Best Month.

Up to this point, for the past dozen or so weeks, I’ve felt like the awkward puppy person trying to scamper along with the big dogs. Which, for a career Oldest Sibling like me, is pretty wretched. Not because anybody made me feel that way, mind you. Sifu, Simo, all of my sihings, they’ve all been, in their own ways, the very soul of patient encouragement. Any perceived awkwardness is coming from inside my own contrary skull.

They’ve hung in with me while I’ve tried to get all three stages of Siu Nim Tao out of my head and into my muscles while soaking up enough of a working Kung Fu vocabulary to know what to expect when new drills are introduced. When a sihing introduced me to Lop Sao, I knew by the name of the drill that there would be a curving of a monkey-paw hand over a wrist and a pulling of the limb. What I didn’t know, but would quickly learn, was that this would be the first drill that actually felt like I was doing some legit Kung Fu. Not just fumbling through the placement of limbs on an endless repetition until the muscles can do it on their own without my mental micromanagement, but actual practical application of what I’ve been learning.

Look at me, world! I can do Lop Sao. I'm Kung Fu’ing. I Kung Fu now.

Now, in marvelous Month Three, I can ask half-bright questions about the science behind the drills, rather than just going through the motions by rote. When we circle up for conditioning I can lead the group through an exercise and not feel like a goober. I may have to close my eyes when I do it, because seeing other folks’ limbs moving slightly out of step with mine throws off my groove like hearing my own voice echo back on a phone line, but I get it done. The first time I led a group of my sihings through Siu Nim Tao without any of those endless awkward moments where everybody’s holding still waiting for me to remember what the next move is? Felt like a miniature Christmas.

This is what a baby bird feels like when it perches on the edge of its nest. Totally gonna fly any day now.

And yes, I know that soon I’ll be learning even more new things and basically starting back over on that whole repeat-it-till-the-body-memorizes-it cycle, but I’m cool with that. Thanks to this whole huge family that I had no idea I would be gaining when I started this wacky training thing, I have the basic tools I need to make it work. They’re not handing me the keys to the Kung Fu Family car or anything, but at least I’m out of diapers. 

I’m one of the big kids, now.