The Partner/Opponent: Paradox in Push Hands

My friend Katja and I demonstrate my favorite beginning push hands posture

I’ve liked fighting since I was a kid. Not real fighting, and not watching sport fighting, but wrestling with my little brother. I loved the energy of it— getting mad at each other, getting riled up, then yelling at each other, the grappling, the slapping each other, but not so hard that we’d actually hurt the other person or they’d tell our parents. If our parents found out, we might get in trouble, so we’d try to keep our play fighting mostly civil. 

I teach push hands now, which is martial arts play fighting. I realized after class last week that a big piece of push hands is teaching people how to fight civilly. In push hands, two people touch in with each other, usually forearm to forearm, and feel into each other’s body and energy. The goal in push hands is usually to uproot your partner/opponent, but depending on how your play push hands, it could also be to hit them and avoid getting hit.

When we first begin learning push hands, there’s no martial intent, no hitting. We just practice holding our body in the proper posture, touching in with our partner, sticking to our partner, then moving around while stuck. One person leads, one follows, then they switch roles. Once students are comfortable with that, then both people lead and follow at the same time. Or you could think of it as no one is leading or following. When I first suggest to students that they try this, their heads kind of explode. It’s delightful to witness.

And it’s one of the many paradoxes that push hands invites us to explore: how do we lead and follow at the same time? How do we move if no one is leading or following? 

The answer, as I see it, is that in the beginning, someone is kind of leading. If it’s you, try to stop leading for a while. Follow the movement, let the movement lead the next movement. If you and your partner can do this together harmoniously, it will feel as though no one is leading or following. It will feel like a flow state. That flow state is embodying paradox: no one is leading the movement and yet we are still moving. And it feels so lovely, there’s a lightness and joy to it. It’s what I hope to experience every time I touch in with someone.

Keep in mind, though, that martial push hands isn’t dancing, so while it is harmonious, it is also combative. We are pitted against our partner; we are trying to uproot them and hit them. And yet we are also aiming for harmony with them. Another paradox, hooray!

In my own push hands practice, I’ve recently been playing with letting my martial intention lead me. My intention is that I will strike or uproot my partner when the opportunity arises. “Intention without attachment,” is one of my teacher Master Shanti’s catchphrases. To me this means that my martial intention doesn’t have any moves or timeframe attached to it—I’m not intending to punch my partner in the gut right now, that’s attachment to a particular timing and technique. Rather, I’m simply intending to strike or uproot them at some point in our time together. If the opening arises, my martial intention might invite me to punch my partner in the gut. But in this case I don’t “do” the punch, the punch moves me. Often, when a technique “moves me” and it lands on my partner successfully, I feel a sense of surprise and delight and having been moved. This feeling of letting go, of non-doing, is the heart of what I’m aiming for in my push hands practice. It’s allowing the art to be expressed through me rather than by me.

But to do this, I seem to need a partner/opponent who I can flow with, who will go along with the give and take and is open to experiencing non-doing. I like thinking about the complexity of the partner/opponent relationship. The partner aspect of the relationship calls us to establish trust, understanding, and to make agreements about how we will engage martially (contact level, what targets are on/off limits, what injuries we might be dealing with.) The opponent aspect of the relationship calls for us to strike or uproot our partner if the opportunity arises. It asks us to take the shot on the other person, to take the opportunity to “win” the round if we can.

The ego can get very attached to winning. I’ve experienced plenty of push hands rounds where our egos have been fired up and we’re trying to smash each other. Sometimes the smashing is consensual and very fun, sometimes it’s full of anger and very triggering. Understanding where my partner and I are emotionally is an important aspect of the engagement. I can’t be so nice that I’m not trying to hit them at all, but I can’t be so ruthless that I want to hurt them. They are my partner, after all, and I want to take care of them so we can practice together another day. Still, if I don’t take my shots, I’m not being the best opponent I can be, and my partner doesn’t get the chance to learn how to deal with my strikes. As my former teacher Sifu Kyle would say about our push hands opponents, “You’ve gotta love ’em enough to hit ’em.”

One aspect that can add civility to a push hands engagement is calling out our partner’s points. Calling out the opponent’s points is something I learned in my Mo Duk Pai training. If my partner scores on me, I can say, “good job,” or make a gesture that shows I know they scored. This adds a level of humility to the engagement, and turns my partner’s success into our success. Maybe I’m not the one who scored the point, but as a team, we created a situation where someone scored successfully. That’s a win for both of us and for our relationship.

To me this is the magic of the partner/opponent relationship: when we have our agreements in place and our flow established, we can create lovely martial moments that surprise and delight us both. We can allow the art to move us instead of “doing” the art. We can create a space where we can both grow and deepen our art, and, in a larger sense, a space in which we can understand more about ourselves, the other person, and how we are in relationship.

What a gift it is to have good partner/opponents in our lives.

MLK/My Dad/Work

Today is my dad’s birthday, and today is also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. When people would point out to my dad that he shared his birthday with MLK, he would say, “Yup! Good people were born on this day!” He would smile, and this would elicit a smile from the person who brought it up.

I’m wondering how to honor my dad today, and how to honor MLK Day. The answer that comes to me is “Work.” Work was my dad’s favorite. As a kid, I often felt like my dad liked his work more than he liked me, his daughter. My dad died of Alzheimer’s in 2020, but ten years before his death, I started a business partnership with a friend, and my dad and I bonded over business talk. He had been a quality control consultant for machine shops throughout the midwest, and he loved working with the employees of those companies to come up with ways to make their businesses more efficient.

Work was also at the core of Dr. King’s ethic. In school growing up, we would learn about Dr. King’s work each year around this time. We would watch films about the Civil Rights movement, read books, create art, talk about the bus boycotts, sing “We Shall Overcome” at school assembles, listen to recordings or recitations of the “I Have a Dream Speech.” Dr. King’s life was one of marching, protesting, preaching, leading, boycotting, working.

These days my work is mothering, practicing, writing and teaching. Mothering my kids and teaching them about the ways the world is unjust, and encouraging them to make it more just. Writing my experiences, my heart, my thoughts, my dreams. Teaching martial arts and self-defense. Teaching how to stand up for ourselves, how to protect ourselves, how to express ourselves, how to fight for ourselves. At the core of that is learning how to value ourselves enough to fight for ourselves in the first place. And then, how to fight as peacefully as possible.

Many of the best martial artists I know are pacifists, and that is because we know how much fighting hurts. Fighting is glamorized in the movies: people fight, fall down, and get back up. But anyone who has really been punched in the face knows, it hurts. It takes you out for a while. It rings your bell. After getting punched in the face you don’t continue forward as though nothing happened.

My previous kung fu teacher would say, “Contact changes everything.” That phrase encapsulates the reality of violence. Violence, war, can seem courageous and righteous, but at its core, it is pain. Hurt. Destruction. Death.

So how do we keep fighting peacefully? Here is where we look to the example of Dr. Martin Luther King. We illuminate the problems in our culture. Then we call them out, we resist, we fight. We protest. We strike. We make art. We share. We sing. We speak. We write. We dance. We imagine. We dream.

Self-Defense Success!

On Sunday I taught in a martial arts school for the first time in ten years. Holy cow! I’m so glad to be back. I have a great feeling about teaching at North Portland Martial Arts & Movement-– Sifu Michael is making me feel very welcome and appreciated.

Sunday’s class was self-defense, and I started by letting my students know the difference between they physical aspects of martial arts and self-defense. The quick breakdown: in martial arts we often learn many technical and beautiful moves that may or may not be applicable in an actual fight. In self-defense we focus only on easy-to-apply moves that would cause major damage to a potential attacker.

While the fighting aspect of self-defense is important, I would argue that the pieces that come before fighting are more important. Fighting is dangerous, and in self-defense we are focused on keeping ourselves safe. So we first learn to use all of our other self-defense tools. These include our posture, body language, awareness (most important!), our voices, and evasive action. Here are my outline notes from what we covered in class:

Before we got too far into the physical practice of class, I took a moment to acknowledge the nature of what we were practicing.

We are women living in a culture where violence against women is normalized. Violence is gendered: men commit more violence than women.* Women are often on the receiving end of violence, and the violence we experience is often sexualized. Harassment. Assault. Rape. This is what we are learning to protect ourselves against.

There is weight to this, and it’s a weight I always want to notice and acknowledge.

The people in class on Sunday acknowledged the truth of this with me, and we commiserated for a moment about all of the BS we’ve had to put up with, largely from men, over the courses of our lives. I said, “I think the good men in my life don’t understand how awful the bad men can be.” I saw nods all around. Then it was as if we each paused for a moment and recounted our own negative experiences.

I pulled us out of that thought and back into our bodies. I talked about our lower dantian, the energetic center in our lower abdomens. “This is the place we feel fear, this is the place to trust, and this is also our center of power. This is the place our self-defense comes from.” I asked the class to say “No!” with their energy in their heads, and their chests–the places we think power comes from. These “No’s” were wavery, uncertain.

Then I asked them to drop the energy into their lower dantian and say “No” from there. It was really amazing to hear the difference. From the lower dantian their “No’s” came out resolute, grounded, deep, and clear. This was my favorite moment from class: hearing and feeling that energetic difference. Feeling how powerful we were when we all stood together in our centers.

After class the students were happy and grateful. I felt so fortunate and humbled to be able to share this information with them. Teaching the class felt like deeply good work. And I felt such a lovely connection with my students.

After they left I locked the door and mopped the floor feeling happy and satisfied. It was good to feel at home in a school again.

*searching for citations, I’ll fill them in as I find them -mj 12/6/23

Self-Defense at NPMAAM

Starting in December I will be leading self-defense classes for women and nonbinary folks at my friend Sifu Michael’s school, North Portland Martial Arts & Movement. We have two December dates scheduled with the intention to continue the series as a weekly class starting in January. Yay!

Dates: Sunday, December 3rd & Sunday December 10th from 3:00 – 4:30 pm

Cost: $20 each or $35 for both.

Location: North Portland Martial Arts & Movement, 728 North Alberta Street

To register, visit the NPMAAM membership page, change the amount shown from $100 to $20 or $35, select “Women’s Class,” and continue checkout.

Each class will begin with introductions, a warm up, and standing meditation. We will connect to our gut area, and practice noticing when we feel good in our bodies and when we feel threatened. From there we will practice spatial awareness and evasive movement exercises (they’re fun!) We will then learn ways to use our voice and body language to set boundaries. Finally, we will learn and practice the best blocks and strikes to use should fighting become a necessity. We will wrap up with a cool down and time for questions, concerns, comments, and feedback.

Wear comfortable clothes you can sweat in and bring a water bottle. And please note: street shoes cannot be worn on the training floor.

My self-defense teaching is largely based on the five fingers of self defense: think, yell, run, fight, tell. Self-defense has very few hard and fast rules, and what is appropriate depends on the situation. Therefore, there is always more self-defense to learn, study, and practice. My intention for the future of these classes moving into 2024 is that the focus be student-led. Students will be invited to bring potential self-defense concerns to the class and we will work through possible ways to handle the scenarios together. In future classes, we could also dive deeper into topics like ground fighting, getting out of grabs and hold, dealing with creeps, and defense against weapons.

For more about my martial arts background, see my Portland Martial Arts & Crafts page.

For other questions about the class, please email NPMAAM directly through their website.

Thank you, and I hope to see you in class!

Self-Defense Mindset?

Self-defense can be a mindset, a way of life. It’s a way of life I’ve been living since I first took martial arts classes as a young teenager. But is it a healthy mindset, a healthy way of life?

As a student in my first tae kwon do school in the 90’s, the focus of our youth program was on building confidence, self-esteem, and discipline. We did the endless drilling of kicks, punches, and forms, but we also learned ways to avoid fighting. We were taught to always use our words before our fists. Fighting was a last resort.

I remember with great clarity in one class I took as I was training for my black belt, our teacher, Master Hafner said to us, “I don’t want you to get in a fight, but if you do get in a fight, I want you to win.” I was a bit rattled by this sentiment–the thought of him wanting us to beat someone up. But I was also inspired– our teacher cared about us, and wanted us to care about ourselves enough to fight for ourselves.

Perhaps this is the primary positive mindset of self-defense: I am worth defending, and I will defend myself. I’m grateful that I learned that mindset early on. It can be a mindset of self-love. Years later in my training, as a kung fu student in Portland, another teacher gave me a self-defense golden nugget. Professor Barbara Bones said at a women’s training camp, “Defending yourself is not only your right. It is your responsibility.”

That one still shakes me up inside. To me it means that even if I don’t want to fight for myself, if I’ve lost my sense of self-worth and don’t care if I get beaten up, it is still my responsibility to defend myself to my best ability. There are others in the world that love me, and I owe it to them to be responsible for my own wellbeing. I also owe it to my future self.

Self-defense training has been threaded through all of the martial arts I’ve studied since tae kwon do. Notably, while studying karate at Thousand Waves in Chicago in the early 2000’s, I took the requisite self-defense courses to get my green belt. The self-defense training there was excellent–some of the teachers at Thousand Waves had been involved in the feminist self-defense movement of the 1970’s. Many were from the generation who had to break the gender barrier to be allowed to train in traditional martial arts schools. Training at Thousand Waves gave me a new understanding of the history of women in the martial arts in the United States, and how that history was connected to the feminist movement. I also gained a much deeper understanding of what it meant and what it took to defend myself.

When I moved to Portland in 2005 and started training in Mo Duk Pai kung fu, I got more practical fighting experience than I’d ever had before. Mo Duk Pai is a mash-up of a bunch of different styles, but ultimately a brutal street-fighting art. Once I was training in the higher levels of Mo Duk Pai, we practiced full-contact, full-speed multi-person self-defense drills. I learned the importance of keeping my guard up because I got punched in the head if I didn’t. I learned never to cross my feet when fighting because it’s too easy to get tripped with crossed feet. I learned to make myself big, scary, and loud to intimidate the students who were my attackers.

All of this training was fantastic for my fighting mindset and my confidence, but at one point I started feeling paranoid. I was so used to fighting in class multiple times a week that I almost expected to be jumped in public at some point. I never was jumped, but my stress and paranoia level was certainly elevated during that time. After weeks or months of feeling this stress and paranoia, I realized it wasn’t helping me. I wasn’t any more ready for a fight because I was worried about it. This was the first time in my life that I realized a self-defense mindset could be harmful.

I still think a self-defense mindset can be harmful, and I’ve only come to question it more as I’ve matured in my practice. As a woman, my number one self-defense concern has always been sexual violence. I’m scared of getting groped, assaulted, or raped by a man. The mindset of self-defense assumes there is or will be an offense occurring. And though the offense is happening to me, and the offender is in the wrong, the wrong becomes my responsibility (and some would believe my fault) when it is done to me.

This is an unfair emotional burden that I bear for men’s potential misdoings. I realize I’m being gendered here, because certainly people of any gender can commit violence against me. However, in at least 90% of the self-defense encounters I’ve experienced, the perpetrator was a man (in none of these instances did I have to physically fight). This makes me angry–I see it as just one more way our patriarchal culture tries to keep me small and scared.

That’s a victim-y place for me to come from, and maybe that’s why I don’t like the self-defense mindset–it can be that of a victim. I don’t want to be a victim. I want to be Michelle.

I’m getting back into teaching self-defense in a formal setting this fall, and that’s why I’m thinking about the paradigm of self-defense so much. I don’t want to teach my students to be victims, I want to teach them to be more fully themselves. If something inappropriate is happening to them, I want them to loudly declare that the perpetrator is in the wrong. I want them to know what their boundaries are and to enforce them.

It’s self-protection that I want to teach more than self-defense. Protecting ourselves doesn’t assume offense or defense, it is just protecting what is ours. I want to teach and learn with my students that protecting ourselves is an extension of self-love. Self protection can come from inside of us and radiate outward from us– it is simply us claiming and owning what is ours.

I’m looking forward to what my students and I will discover as I lead classes from this place of loving protection. I’ll let you know what happens.