Kintsugi Company
Given the stats, you’ve either had your butt handed to you or sooner or later you’ll face a situation where you’ll need trained-in skills to overcome a potential attacker. What will you do today to be safe? How are you going to train, what’s your plan? What if you joined us? What if you developed your own toolkit, skill by skill, and trained and trained, too?
Right. I’m standing on the mats. It’s time for Women’s Self-Defense and the teacher just said something but I don’t know what… I really need to focus. Seriously. I’m here but not really here.
If we can look past the absurdity of what we’re doing and understand its importance,we can begin retraining our minds in ways we may not have believed possible. Retraining our minds for something better and more productive is difficult, but not impossible. Eventually it no longer feels so absurd. It begins to feel the like the right thing. It begins to feel like second nature. Honestly, it seems more absurd to do nothing and make ourselves vulnerable to a potential attack. Training to defend and protect ourselves is far more valuable as it keeps us safe from potential harm.
I’ve recently decided to considered myself built like a female sumo wrestler and to use that to my advantage in my martial arts training and teaching women’s self-defense. Why not? My training helps me to control my body weight and use it to my advantage. I can do things now that I couldn’t do a year ago. I’ve accomplished so much in a year’s time. I’m on my way to healing for terrifying traumas, ready to test for black belt, and getting stronger every week. My heart rate is great, my moods are generally better, my abilities are better and lifting 155 lbs. off the floor seems like a miracle –but it isn’t; it’s payoff.
Almost every time I walk into Women’s Self-Defense class, I’m dealing emotionally with whatever the day served me — usually a cocktail of fear, disappointment, maybe some grief or mental or physical pain, often a racing mind that just doesn’t want to calm down. Sometimes I don’t want to face whatever will be served up in class — but what can I say? I kind of have to be there. So unless I’m contagious or injured I show up and start preparing. I decide to set aside everything that doesn’t have to do with class for the next hour or so.
I really think this can be a metaphor for our lives. There’s so much we think we can control. But there really is so little we actually do control. All we can do is relax into things and let them happen. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight when we need to. I’m certainly not saying we should be passive. But when things are going out of control and there’s nothing we can do about it, instead of freaking out, getting upset, or throwing a fit, we should relax into it and let things happen as they will.