The Container and the Practice

This week I had the privilege to teach Modern Arnis to the beginner class at the School of Love. I was invited to teach a partner blocking and striking drill we call Trapping Hands Special. Like much of Modern Arnis, this drill can be desperately confusing. It is a complex, repeating pattern and as such it is as difficult and as simple as any other complex, repeating pattern. The exercise is just a little too long and has just a few too many elements to easily hold in one’s mind. Because it’s a pattern, as soon as one piece slips away from either partner, the whole exercise flounders. It’s a challenge similar to remembering the stitches in a long row of counted cross stitch or doing long division in your head. Odds or evens, right hand or left hand, what you did just before, what your partner’s doing, and what you’re about to do next all play a part in figuring out what your move should be.

The trick with Trapping Hands Special is to break the code, learn the pattern, and then allow your body memory to hold onto it. We often say to one another when practicing Arnis, “Don’t think about it; just do it.” This is what makes Trapping Hands Special especially difficult to teach: once we’re able to reproduce the pattern without thought, it is awfully hard to take it apart again.

I developed my (fairly crackpot) method of teaching it over an entire summer. I wanted to teach the pattern to my girls. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious was having a rough time with her joints that season, so she spent a lot of time on the sofa watching TV. I’d pose her right hand in one of the positions that my partner might feed to me and explore my various response options. Each evening’s practice was limited by the strength of Sweetie’s deltoids or the extent of her patience. I endured a fair amount of eye-rolling and she endured a fair amount of holding her arm up in the air. Eventually I developed a method of explaining the exercise that makes sense to me. Not the only way to teach it, by a long shot, but something I can reliably reproduce and something that it helpful to some number of students.

I thought I’d stop by the Tuesday class for about fifteen minutes to run through the pattern with folks, but of course it took forty-five minutes. I should have stayed another forty-five to do it properly, but Small was needing her dinner and bath.

In the midst of the practice one of the Senseis who regularly teaches this class asked me a question about the quality of the blocks we were using. Do we block with the hand or the forearm; is it a pinning type of block or a redirecting type of block, etc. And it came to me that my lesson for the evening really had no martial arts quality about it at all. I wasn’t asking students to attend to any of the things that develop their martial skills: targeting, or speed, or power, or technique, or foot-work, or posture, or breath.

The whole group of us—from a very first day karateka to a motley crew of karate, kung fu and tae kwon do black belts—were pouring enormous energy into memorizing where to put our hands when.

I was working really hard teaching and my students were working really hard learning. What we were working on was not the practice itself but the container into which the practice will enter. Next week, or next month, or next year when these students have confidence in the Trapping Hands Special pattern—when it enters their bodies and their minds let go—we’ll be able to fill that container with the qualities of our art.

Of course I know that this is a false dichotomy on some level—the room was fairly vibrating with kime (focus) and filled with camaraderie, laughter, peer leadership and beginner’s mind. So the practice was present as it always is in that sacred space. But it reminded me with a jolt that the container sometimes takes a tremendous amount of work, just to hold the space where our practice can commence.

For Unitarian Universalists, our container is made of committee and annual meetings, budget deliberations and ministerial searches. In family our container is house and home, childcare and lawn care, dishes and laundry. And as a woman the container of my life is right livelihood and service to my community which manifest as an endless “to-do” list of phone calls and emails.

I’m going to be pondering this for a while: the container and the practice. I often want to give the container short shrift—squeeze that pattern into fifteen minutes before dinner, so I can get to the heart of the work. But sometimes the container is the heart of the work—it gives us the opportunity for kime and connection, and what else is there? And sometimes it is just a to-do list—but it is a hard to-do list, full of worthy tasks.

Things don’t get easier—they don’t retreat to muscle memory, as it were—without the hard work up front. What if we were to admit when something was hard and give it its full due—a summer of independent inquiry, a whole long evening of practice?

I started showing Small Trapping Hands Special last night. She is delighted by the speed of my hands and dissolves into hopeless laughter, a balm to my black belt ego. Moreover, she is intrigued by the puzzle of the pattern. I see the martial arts hunger in her. “Mama,” she says, suddenly serious. “I want this form.” She doesn’t know if it’s hard or easy, confusing or simple. She knows her mama is fast like laughter and we are weaving a pattern together with our four hands.

Mind Body Mama: Practice

The other night, I ran Small a shallow bath so she could soak some of the filth off quickly before bed. I had my back turned to her when she asked, “Mama, can I have a meditation now?” I was taken aback, but I said, “Of course, Small, you can mediate any time you want.”

Small drew her thin legs up under herself criss-cross applesauce style. She bowed her head, and I was surprised to see how long her supple spine is now as it curled forward over the Buddha belly of childhood that she still carries. Six is such a tender mix of baby and girl: Small’s length and grace hint at the teenager, even the woman, that she will soon become, while her sticky hair, round cheeks and pudgy belly echo the sweet baby she was such a short time ago. Her left hand rested in her lap, palm up; her right hand nested in it and her thumbs touched gently, as we practice. As soon as she closed her eyes her breathing slowed and the room felt charged by her sudden, steady focus.

I’ll admit I was mesmerized. I had been walking out of the room to fold laundry when she caught me by this pose and I stood in the door, staring.

Small opened her eyes and looked up at me. “It’s easier to meditate when you’re not looking at me,” she said pointedly. I apologized and made to leave but she said, “No, it’s OK, I was done.” I asked her what made her think to mediate just then, and she said it was the warm water, it felt so good. “I don’t like to mediate at the dojo,” she said distastefully. “The floor is too hard!” And then, the bath, with all its silliness and ritual.

I’ve so long wondered if I was at all succeeding in showing Small the spiritual heart of my life. It is true that she gestated at the karate school, kicking me from the inside as my classmates kicked me on the outside. She was born in November and at Solstice I wore her on my chest as we punched a thousand times in the candle-lit darkness. We kept a Boppy at the dojo and I would lay her into it as if it were a throne so she could lay back and watch me prepare for my brown belt test. She was so small, to nestle into that pillow, and she gazed up at me with such enormous eyes. This year she became a Power Girl and began studying the art herself, with a lot of playfulness and exuberance and affection for her teachers.

But how could I know if she saw the heart of the practice, the stillness and compassion and peace that lies at the center of the work? How could I know if she would share the strength that I’ve drawn from sitting on that hard floor, or others like it, for twenty one years? We are not Christian. We do not pray. We do not name our practice as being connected to some movement bigger than ourselves—Buddhism, Islam, Judaism. We just breathe, and love each other, and hope that will be enough. And in the hardest times—birth, death—the practice of presence proves itself.

But I am a worrier, so I worried that I would not know how to convey the experience of calm and inner resources that comes from having a personal spiritual practice. Most of all I worried that Small’s daily life with me would be such an anti-thesis of mindfulness—To do lists! Timers! Schedules! Plans!— that she’d never know to go to that simple present breath to find peace.

Small is so much wiser than I am. I worry no more.

Publications: Run to the Hills

Subtitle: Self protection strategies for women who run.

This publication is both virtual and actual. (Click on the blog title to get to the virtual version.) The Springfield Republican's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun--The Magazine is a free women's supplement that appears in kiosks and waiting rooms throughout our valley.

This is my very first newsprint by-line!

Mind Body Mama: Abundant Underpants

I know, after last week’s post you really had your hopes up for more self defense success stories, replete with heartfelt introspection and good feminist politics. There’s more coming, I promise. But today, at the risk of sharing too much, I need to talk about underpants.

Small sings a song that goes like this:

Underwear, underwear
Always make sure that you’re wearing a pair.
Underwear, underwear,
Underwear is a must.
In these words you can trust.

That’s how the song went when MBA Mama gave us the CD (Bow-wow-wow by Dennis Caraher.) It’s decent as kids music goes, which is to say: Small likes it, and it doesn’t make my ears bleed. Parents give thanks for small things.

Small has made up alternate lyrics (pronounced, by her, “lie-ricks”) that celebrate an abundance of underpants:

Underwear, underwear
Always make sure that you’re wearing TEN pairs!
Underwear, underwear,
Underwear is a must.
In these words you can trust.

This, apparently, is hysterically funny. As in, snort your milk through your nose, giggle uncontrollably, funny. Six year old humor: love it or lose your mind trying.

Until recently, I would have had a hard time following the directive of the song because I didn’t have ten pairs of underwear to my name. Those I had were missing in action and/or in such a disreputable state they were in danger of self destruction.

Here’s a place where my tendency toward comedic hyperbole might work against my intention of confessing a deep psychological problem. My underpants were actually in danger of self destructing. One day I went to pull them up and my thumbs went through holes on both hips. I looked down as if I had never seen them before in my life and thought, these panties might fall off my body before the day is done.

You have to wonder what kind of person lets her underpants get to this state without taking any kind of corrective action. Is it not unlike a man who allows an enormous boil to overtake his face without visiting a physician? Or a woman who shows up in the emergency room with “indigestion” and an hour later pushes out a baby? One—and by one I mean, a middle aged married lesbian—does not shred one’s panties suddenly. It took years of washing and wearing to turn my entire collection of underpants into useless rags. And then it took another few years for me to notice, try to obtain replacements, and finally, eventually, meet with success.

It’s not like I didn’t try to upgrade my panties. I clearly remember visiting the underwear outlet in Brattleboro when we up for the Cow Parade two years ago in June. I didn’t find anything I liked. Just to be sure, I checked again after last year’s Cow Parade. Definitely nothing for me in Brattleboro.

Perhaps this is the moment to reveal my deep hatred for shopping—or perhaps it’s already transparent. It’s not just underpants that I fail to buy. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious is learning, thirteen years in, that purchases of sheets, towels or any other linens should not be a consensus decision. Because I will never agree that it’s time to buy new sheets—not even when Sweetie’s sleep is regularly disturbed by catching her toes in holes in the sheets. I have a huge and pathological blind spot to these things. It is not uncommon for me to hold up a piece of fabric while folding laundry and ask, “Rag or towel?” This is not an invitation to retire a worn out item—this is me asking for help telling the difference between our bath towels and our cleaning supplies. Sweetiebabylicious does a decent job of not throttling me at these moments, although she does engage in the dramatic eye roll.

I’m coming clean here: I have issues when it comes to linens. I hate to shop. But I did make a measly kind of effort. I checked Target for my preferred size and style of underwear when I visited that store every three or four months. (I hear that other people go to Target considerably more often than that, but I have to ask, why? There’s nothing to do there except buy things. What’s fun about that?) Through no fault of my own, I struck out.

Now, I want to say something about sizes of bottoms in our great United States. The average size of a woman in the U.S. is size 14. I am a size 8. I do not say that because I think there is anything superior about being a size 8. I like the zaftig girls myself, and if you averaged the adult bottoms in my household they’d come out to a size 14. I am thin. If I exercise and eat healthy food I am thin, energetic and strong. If I don’t exercise and eat crappy food I am thin, logey and bilious. I have committed my professional practice to the belief that all women’s bodies are perfect and beautiful just as they are, and that it’s time to overthrow the cult of thinness that oppresses us all.

So why even mention the differential between my bottom size and the average bottom size? Well, it brings us back to the panty wall. Every time I went to Target and perused the panty selection, I found nothing available in size 8. The larger sizes would be well stocked, available in every color and style, while the size 8 hooks remained empty and forelorn. So I had to wonder: if most women are size 14, where are all the size 8 panties going? Do skinny girls—myself excluded—buy more panties than everyone else? Or are the bigger girls squeezing themselves into size 8 panties? This would explain a lot of the crankiness in this world.

After my quarterly non-yielding trips to Target I would come home and ponder—perhaps even engage in a small rant—about the confusing shortage of size 8 panties. Then, exhausted from the mental effort of this conundrum, I would abandon my quest for another several months.

It’s possible that I was waiting for packages of new underpants to appear in my dresser drawer. I don’t know why that strategy didn’t work for me: my father’s dresser drawers manifested fresh packs of briefs, tee-shirts, and tube socks at regular intervals throughout my childhood. For all I know, they still do. Perhaps he has a different type of bureau than I do. Or a different type of wife.

But a few weeks ago, I suddenly experienced a panty paradigm shift. It was this: if I am devoting this year to a celebration of abundance and gratitude, I can’t be carrying on in tattered drawers. There is nothing abundant about underpants that tear as you pull them onto your body, nothing about that experience that honors and celebrates the possibility of getting all that I wish for out of life. I pulled myself together and visited a non-Target store, and lo-and-behold: the selection was thin for skinnies, but there were two packages for me to bring home. I can’t overstate the delight they bring me. It’s like having a collection of small, soft jewels nestled in my lingerie drawer. If I put them all on at one time, there would be way more than ten pairs. You heard it here: Underwear is a must. In these words you can trust.

Mind Body Mama: Teaching, Doing

I learned a long time ago that sometimes teaching self defense requires doing self defense. As when I hear the voices of my teen class carrying all the way down the hall: abrasive, strident, posturing. I can tell how many of them there are, and how their collective mood is today: aggravated by a crummy lunch; laughing over a bawdy article; broodingly morose about having to come to class. I can tell these things even when I don’t understand the words they say, because they are most often speaking in Spanish and my Spanish, after teaching and learning with them for seven years, is limited to the names of a few body parts and the ability to understand their names, how many kids they have and the babies’ ages, only if they speak very slowly and clearly. I am at a deficit with my useless, stupid English, and I am outnumbered, and their dark moods are huge and volatile and impossible to predict.

So I take a deep breath. The first of the Five Fingers of Self Defense, the way we teach it: Use your mind and breathe. When I started teaching this class I used my mind the way I use it in every other class: I created curricula and lesson plans. But when week after week I found that the students I’d taught basics to the previous class were absent for this week’s intermediate lesson—one at GED testing, another on maternity leave, a third at a court date, a fourth expelled from school—I realized that planning was not the sensible way to go. So now I practice relaxed readiness and I use my mind to notice what the girls are bringing me that I can use to teach today.

A few weeks ago I got a sullen group of stragglers with a handful of bright sparks thrown in the mix. Of more than a dozen young women, I had only met one before. Four students had the courage to enter the dojo. The rest hung back in the vestibule, cutting their flat eyes at me, refusing to come in. I know the training room is odd to them, with its bare wood floor and prohibition against street shoes, its broken down sofa, Chinese gong and double altar. I can’t imagine how much courage it takes for them to leave the comfort of what they know, to trust a strange, short-haired, blunt-spoken white woman and enter a weird and unfamiliar place. I know that much of their experience—much of their safety—is dependent upon saving face, not ever showing fear or ignorance or inability. But how do you learn something new if you have to act tough all the time? How can you be open to learning things if you have to act like you have it all together every second? I know these things, but I still lose patience when ten girls decide to sit in the dark, in the coat closet, losing credit for the afternoon’s school attendance, instead of coming into my class. So I take another deep breath and turn to the students who are with me.

On the day in question, these four girls dug deep to follow my lesson. I taught the Five Fingers. I taught the Four Danger/Damage Targets. I taught strikes to the nose and kicks to the knees. Through it all, the rumble of negativity carried from the hall into our sacred training space. I moved our circle further from the door way and called group huddles to give feedback. I noticed a few bright eyes that strayed from the closet floor to peek around the door frame and see what we were up to, but I didn’t pay them any mind. We practiced wrist grabs and releases. The four girls practiced, asked questions, and learned. They resisted the siren song of malaise and defeat and refusal rising up from the antechamber. And with twenty minutes before the end of class, I made a choice.

I taught one final technique—hammer fist—and we worked it over and over to striking pads until I felt confident in each woman’s power and technique. Then I settled my four students against the bank of windows where the black belt board sits for tests. I cleared the brochures and flyers from the card table and placed it square in the middle of the training floor. And I brusquely climbed over the bodies in the closet to pull out my last four breaking boards from the supply shelf.

Both rooms got quiet when I set up the first board on the sturdy wooden supports Dusty built at my request years ago. There was wild disbelief—“We’re gonna break those?” and surging confidence—“We’re gonna break those!”

As I approached the group to give my final instructions, I heard the one girl I knew telling the others, “She’s OK, I don’t know why they don’t just try it—if you do the class, she treats you right.” I turned to bow to her, one of the most heartfelt bows of my twenty-one years of practice.

I get so much wrong in this class, and fall short so often of what I want to offer. But I honor them, I try to give my best possible teaching and when everything else fails, I just try to love them. Here in my favorite, most sacred space with these poor, scared, angry, victimized, violent, brave, belligerent, smart, silly, vilified young women—Puerto Rican teen moms, high school drop-outs, welfare recipients—I see the brokenness of the world. I see how small I am against it, and how hard it is to correct injustice or even just reach out across our differences. How hard it is to trust and know one another. I offer the teaching that I know best, in the hopes that the next time a man puts his hand around one of these girl’s throats, she’ll know how to kick his knees and break the choke hold. In hopes that the next time a girl with a razor in her hair starts talking trash to one of these young women, my student will have the presence of mind to walk away instead of stirring it up and getting slashed.

But there are those times when I wonder, is it my student with the razor in her hair? Or, will she ever stop going back to the man who chokes her? Will she ever expect more of this world than violence against her or at her own hand? So I take another deep breath. And in that breath, I just try to love them, these beautiful girl moms with the odds stacked against them. It feels radical sometimes—I’m not supposed to love these girls—hell, I’m not supposed to even know girls like this, I’m supposed to stay on the white, middle class side of the line and let them live out their circumstances on the other side of the mountain, down in the 'hood, out of sight. And other times it feels it feels horribly inadequate, a finger in the dyke against an ocean of racism and sexism and classism, imperialism and injustice and oppression. But if I keep loving them, I’ll keep trying.

I asked my four students to love each other that day. I didn’t say that out loud; no way I’d get away with sappy crap like that. Whatever else their lives have handed them, they are teenagers first and foremost—caustic, mocking, irreverent. But I asked them to support each other as they stood before the group to break their boards and they did it. They stood up for one another.

“You can do it!” someone called. “Just picture your baby-daddy!”

The first three girls were high spirited and boisterous, rushing to take their turns and high-fiving their successes. But the last girl was quieter, had trouble looking me in the eye.

“What do you need so you can do this?” I asked her.

“I don’t like people watching me,” she said.

Until then, I’d ignored the peanut gallery that had gathered at the door. The ten women who had crowded the coat closet were now even more cramped trying to squeeze into the narrow doorway.

“Clear this space,” I announced, barring the inner door, pointing them out into the public hallway. They were aghast, incredulous. “Out!” I barked. I closed the front door in their stunned faces.

The quiet girl broke her board. We cheered.

I pulled out markers so they could sign and date their boards.

“Miss, miss, sign my board,” they asked. I signed in the clumsy marker, “Lynne Marie Sensei.”

We stood for our closing circle. I tried to find words to thank them for showing up for themselves, for taking a risk and trying something new. I begged them to come back to class again. I never know when I meet a girl if I’ll ever see her again.

“Oh, you’ll be seeing me again,” said the smallest, feistiest of the bunch. I hoped with all my heart it would be true.

They gathered shoes and boards and coats and purses. They thanked me for class and joined their cranky classmates to walk back to the van. The space stood empty but pulsing with their energy.

I took a deep breath.

The Five Fingers of Self Defense

THINK: Use your mind and breath.
YELL: Use your voice.
RUN: Create distance between yourself and danger.
FIGHT: Fight back if you have to and with appropriate force.
TELL: Tell someone you trust, and work for peace and justice.