“It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”
Miyamoto Musashi, The Art of War
These days, I find myself newly wrestling with questions of self defense and the uses of nonviolent—and even violent—resistance in the face of rising authoritarianism, aggression, and genocide.
Six years ago, I traveled to Thailand with my younger sister and brother (and my brother-in-law) for our annual siblings trip. We were sitting at the beach bar planning our evening when my sister, Jen, told me that she and my brother, Pat, wanted to go see a professional Muay Thai fight later that night. “Absolutely not!” I said. “I don’t support or condone violence.” Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, is the national, full-contact martial art that involves striking, sweeps, and clinching techniques. I went on to explain how horrific it was to watch two people beat and bloody each other. Jen and Pat listened patiently. And then they smiled, stood up, and said, “OK! See you later!” And off they went.
I spent the evening at the beach bar alone, wondering why I had reacted so strongly to the thought of witnessing a Muay Thai fight. Sure, at that point, I had been a Buddhist practitioner for over 20 years with a firm commitment to nonviolence. But my aversion felt deep-seated. What else was I reacting to? Was it not only my resistance to violence, but also my fear of it? Was I afraid of the potential for violence within me? Ashamed of the potential for violence within me? Afraid that witnessing violence might unleash the decades of stifled aggression within me as someone who witnessed and experienced violence in my community and my home?
These questions have stayed with me.
Fast forward two years from that night on the beach. I had just moved back to NYC (after a 15-year nomadic excursion) and found myself—for the first time—unsettled around people in New York. For context, I’m a city kid (I’m more afraid of the woods than the city, if you know what I mean). I grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, right outside of Manhattan, and moved to NYC at 18 years old for college. I have never been scared of the city (in any reasonable way). But something about people’s bodies, as public places were just beginning to open up again after the height of the COVID pandemic, seemed volatile. Potentially explosive. For the first time, I found myself eager to learn tools for self defense, so that at the very least I could de-escalate a situation, if necessary.
I came across an advertisement for a women’s self-defense class with a free week trial near my apartment in Brooklyn. I showed up for my first class which was attended by a small group of incredibly strong and kind 50-something-year-old women who referred to themselves as “The Moms”. Their presence put me at ease. Class was challenging and empowering, and, as it turns out, I really, really enjoyed kicking the bag. I learned that the main instructor was away and would return the following week. I left with a pair of new, free boxing gloves.
I trained several more days that week. On the last day of my free trial, the main instructor, Jesse, returned to class. I loved the energy with which he taught: it was passionate, precise, practical. I was hooked. After signing up for a monthly membership, I learned that Jesse, my new teacher, was, in fact, a semi-professional Muay Thai fighter. Oh, the universe!
Long story short, I began training almost five days a week, and about a year later, I picked up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I knew I was working with and through that aversion I’d felt on the beach a few years prior. The martial practices were pushing me physically, and also psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. I started to feel my relationship to what I had so narrowly considered “violence” begin to shift, and I started to appreciate martial practice as an art. I noticed more confidence in myself, more calmness within tension, and more ease with instability. In some ways, the martial training supported me in ways that my decades-long contemplative practice hadn’t. Seemingly paradoxically, the more I trained in what appeared to be physical forms of violence, the less violent I felt. Or maybe the less I feared the potential for violence within me.
Something Worth Defending
My journey with martial arts wasn’t—and still isn’t—easy. Over four dedicated years in, and I’m still working through layers of conditioning. I find it easier to receive punches than to throw them, and more often am comfortable being submitted than submitting someone else. There’s a constant protector energy alive in me, and maybe a bit of a martyr shadow, too, that makes it hard for me to defend myself (even when being aggressed) for fear of hurting my training partner. The truth is, it’s a sign of disrespect not to train hard with your partner; not only in the sense of not giving them good rounds, but in not seeing their potential and their capacity to hold and defend themselves. Being on the mat is one of the most dynamic and accelerated practice grounds for me: it is there that the lines between self and other, protection and harm, and survival and sport are constantly being negotiated in real time.
Something in me shifted one day when a training partner—who noticed I wasn’t hitting nearly as hard as she was—said to me, “You know, there’s something in you worth protecting, too.” I started to realize after that exchange that I had fused the concepts of self defense and violence. And I began to understand that when some people say that they are opposed to violence what they mean is that they are uncomfortable with people defending themselves.
In self defense training we learn methods of escaping and surviving attacks, and then submitting or subduing others when attacked if an escape isn’t possible. Techniques include sweeps, throws, chokes, and breaks, all of which may appear rather violent to a casual observer. In fact, some of my most beloved colleagues refuse to join me on the mat precisely because of their commitment to non-violence. For them, they understand any kind of martial training to be a pathway towards more violence. But are these methods justified in the context of self and community defense? Are they a form of skillful means, if grounded in a frame of care for both self and others? And how do we draw the line between violence and non-violence, especially when we are already living in a violently aggressive and oppressive world?
Bringing Back the Body
I have encountered a lot of folks in justice and movement spaces, who, like me from six years ago, vehemently reject violence and any martial practices associated with it. To be very clear, I am not pro-violence; I have a deep commitment to reducing harm. Certainly, there are reasons to be cautious in relation to martial practice: how do we exercise caution to not become that which we are working to transform? How do we ensure our teachers are deeply tied to spiritual lineages committed to care and awakening? These are extremely important questions. I personally don’t know of any martial teachers worth their salt who teach practices devoid of spirituality or separate from a relational care frame. Yet even though many spiritual traditions have a martial lineage, these physical and psycho-energetic practices are not often (or no longer?) taught together. Even the archetype of the spiritual warrior, so central in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (and especially the founding lineage of this very journal), has been largely psychologized in popular discourse. Rather than explicit linkages between physical and psychological training, these archetypes are (re)interpreted as psychic warriors adept at battling inner demons, like ignorance and ego, rather than external forces or “enemies”.
I wonder what would shift, and what might become possible, if our movements for justice and liberation were to take up lineage-based martial practice with fervor. Might we better learn to adapt, respond, flow, and maneuver in these times of uncertainty and terror? Certainly, many notable people are already doing this work (including Norma Wong and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook, both of whom contributed to our last special issue, Movement: Lineage-based Physical and Energetic Practices for Liberation). And yet, there are also many people teaching martial-like somatic practices divorced from lineage, and countless examples of martial practice being offered as sports training devoid of anything spiritual or community oriented, not to mention the notable uptake of martial training among members of the far right.
I also wonder what might open up for us strategically and spiritually if we were to (re)consider the ways in which we may have exaggerated the distinction between violence and nonviolence. How did we learn about violence and nonviolence? Whose rhetoric did we adopt? And who or what has benefitted from our orientation to these terms?
I’ve been studying the work of French sociologist Elsa Dorlin, who authored the incredible book, Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence. The book traces the politics and ethics of self defense through a survey of several liberation movements, including the women’s suffrage movement and the Black Panther Party. She argues that self defense should not be merely reduced to self protection or personal safety, but rather should be understood as a practice in which violent self defense is the only means for oppressed people to ensure their survival. This “martial ethics of self” refers not only to practices of survival, but also the ways in which oppressed people might build livable futures by overcoming oppressive structures. This stance, of course, is debated, but Dorlin shows throughout her work how certain bodies and peoples have been rendered “defenseless” within oppressive systems, and how the right to “self-defense” has been typically reserved for only those with power within those very systems.
One of Dorlin’s main points is that we are already “traversed by violence”: we are living in and through the forces of domination, like policing, surveillance, and ableism, to name a few—albeit in different ways—in all aspects of our daily life. Violence, or self defense, in her view, can’t and shouldn’t simply be reduced to a moment of overt political mobilization or the action of striking back against aggression. Violence is already evident in our shaping: it’s in our conditioned habits of pulling back, dissociating, freezing, and getting smaller in the service of self protection. Temporally, violence is not just a single moment or interaction, but, for many, a continuous experience. Without acknowledging the phenomenology of violence, we risk misunderstanding the difference between violence and nonviolence. From within the phenomenology of violence, self defense is not about teaching one how to fight, it is about helping people unlearn how “not to fight….It means engaging muscles already familiar with violence but that have fundamentally never been taught or socialized to train themselves for violence, for action.” Reframed in this way, might we understand self defense as an honoring of relationality, as a way of reclaiming our relational power?
Again, I am not a proponent of violence—and this is not a call to violence—but rather an invitation to consider how we might consider the art of “self” defense as an embodied spiritual practice that can help us strengthen and/or restore the relational fabric of our communities, our organizations, our movements, and our world, rather than undermine it.
I realize this is complicated terrain. Reflections on self defense may pull up our own experiences with harm and violence and the ways we are shaped by the rhetoric of violence and nonviolence. I’d like to leave us with a few questions to consider: 1) What is our relationship to violence and nonviolence? 2) What commitments do we have to abstain from violence, and/or what justifications do you use to employ violence (when necessary)? 3) Who or what benefits from those commitments, and 4) What do you fear would happen if you gave up those commitments or justifications?
Endnotes
1. See Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. Edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1984
2. “Mixed martial arts is on the rise in Britain, and on the right”, The Economist, 10/15/2020; https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/10/15/mixed-martialarts-is-on-the-rise-in-britain-and-on-the-right
3. Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, trans. Kieran Aarons (Brooklyn: Verso, 2022)
4. Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense, pg 87
5. See this essay for great reflection on Elsa Dorlin’s and also Judith Butler’s work on non violence: Lola Olufemi, “Non Violence” Extra Extra Magazine No 23: https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/non-violence/#:~:text=The%20tenets%20of%20such%20a,what%20makes%20a%20life%20grievable?
