Mind Body Mama: This I Believe

In January, the phenomenal Lee Sinclair made her first demand upon the twelve feminist self defense experts she’s calling her national Comet Group.

I’m a little star-struck to even be counted among this group, which includes Nadia Telsey (who founded the school where I was first trained as a self defense instructor), Ellen Snortland (the writer/actor/activist/writing coach whose name I drop as frequently as I can) and Shihan Linda “Ramzy” Ranson (an eighth degree black belt who has intimidated me since I first met her twenty years—and several degrees—ago.)

The Comets—whose name was inspired by Miss Maria Mitchell, the first American woman to discover a comet—are a group of advisors to Lee’s No Means No Worldwide project. As Lee says, “It gives me a good feeling to think of this group’s exchange of ideas as lights streaking across the sky from one woman to another.”

Lee boiled her first question down to this:

“What do you feel are the absolute essentials that a Self Defense class needs to provide for students? These may be strategies or beliefs or a philosophy upon which many other fundamental behaviors rely."

What an amazing opportunity this was for me to name my core beliefs about the work I’ve been doing and thinking about for the past two decades.

This is what I know:

• Self defense is everything you do to take care of yourself: mind, body, spirit. It is acting as if you have value. Self defense considers both short term and long term consequences of your actions in terms of what will be best for you.

• As the instructor, I am not the only expert in the room. Women practice self defense—take steps to protect themselves and their children—all the time. Women are the best experts about what strategies and techniques will work to reduce or respond to violence in their own lives. In my classes we always learn from one another.

• Self defense is about increasing women’s choices. There is no “right answer” in self defense, no silver bullet technique that will work in all situations. No two women will respond to a given situation with the same choice.

• Self defense is a right and not a privilege. Everyone has the right to autonomy of his/her own body.

• It is easy to hurt another person’s body. The techniques we teach work. You can learn them. You can use them if you need them.

• It is never your fault if someone chooses to attack you. If someone makes the choice to hurt you, they are responsible for that choice. You might have compassion for your attacker; you might even understand what compelled him to make that choice. You can take steps to keep yourself safer and learn self defense techniques. But taking responsibility for your own safety is not the same as taking responsibility for having been attacked. It is always the attacker’s responsibility for having made that bad choice.

• It is my deepest hope that my students will never have to use physical techniques to defend themselves. These principles guide my understanding of physical self defense:

o Do the least amount of harm necessary to neutralize the situation.
o Understand that any physical engagement includes a risk of harm to the defender.
o Reserve the most damaging techniques for the most dangerous situations.
o Select techniques that will do the least amount of harm to your own body while striking vulnerable targets on the attacker’s body.

• Like many others in our movement, I use the Five Fingers of Self Defense as a pneumonic for the steps of avoidance/de-escalation/response:

1. Use your mind and breathe.
2. Use your voice.
3. Create distance.
4. Fight back if you have to and with appropriate force.
5. Tell someone you trust.