The "Threat Paradox"

I was fortunate enough to attend the (free!) "Intro to Personal Safety" event in San Francisco I mentioned in a previous post put on by the non-profit group Impact Bay Area. It was awesome. Yeah, it was only a brief one hour introduction to the organization, their curriculum and a few self-defense/awareness tips, techniques and pointers. But it was awesome. It was exactly what I needed and was looking for. And I'm glad it was what I had hoped to expect (I've been too damn disappointed visiting all these dojo and taking their trail classes and just recognizing that they weren't giving me what I was looking for). It was actually the executive director of the org, "Lisa" that facilitated the intro class. She was great. Very engaging and clear in what she had to say. One interesting note is that, besides being attended by all females, the majority were Asian. I thought to myself, "hmmm. That's interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of Asians in Frisco but they aren't the majority...." Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. (Okay just fact checked the US Census Bureau and "Asians" make up 33.9% of the population as of 2011. Never mind. Thought I was on to something interesting there. Turns out that's probably the result of numbers). Okay. Blah blah bluh. As I was saying the introduction event/class thing was great. I told Lisa that I learned more in one hour about self-defense than I did in 5 years of training at my dojo. Sounds exaggerated but it's true. I'm hoping now to check out more of this group and see if the instructor training is something I'd like to undergo.

But onto why I titled this post "the Threat Paradox"...

If I heard and remembered correctly, this was something Lisa said in reference to the fact that the more a person knows how to defend themselves physically and verbally, the less they will find themselves having to employ those skills. As I reflected on that, something Shoshin Nagamine said in The Essence of Okinawan Karate-Do came to mind:

The ultimate goal of all martial arts is to defeat the enemy without fighting back. (pg. 82)

It's funny because what Nagamine Sensei is saying can come off sounding a bit mystical; like, "how the hell does a martial artist defeat someone by not fighting back? Like is there some magical secret technique that allows me to win without touching the person?" But how then do we defeat the so-called "enemy" without fighting back? I think the answer to that lies with what Lisa said; you need to train yourself to deal with these acts of physical violence and in doing so you'll find that because your inner world is improving with regards to confidence about self-protection the outer-world around you becomes less of a Threat. In other words, you overcome fear. And you find that you project yourself with confidence which is not how you might project yourself if you had a sort of "victim-mentality". Let me be redundant and say it like this (and of course this is only theoretical): If you have a martial pedagogy that develops confidence in the practitioner through the development of functional self-defensive skill, then that person will carry themselves in such a way so as to not come across as being an easy target for predators and thus having less of a need to deploy their martial tools because they are not being targeted as frequently. But I think this is also different for women as opposed to men. Women may be targeted simply because of the fact that they are female. But the essence of not being an easy target lies in that "inner-confidence aura" that one gives off either way...I think anyway. It's probably a bit more involved than I can explain at the moment. But what an interesting phrase, the "Threat Paradox"; it speaks directly to what the Okinawan karate masters were saying. It is ironic that a group like Impact, who distinguish themselves apart from "martial arts" are in fact more closely aligned with the origins of karate and its main philosophical proponents than they think. 

Elbow SMASH!
- Hiji Até