Castles and Cornerstones: Level Up

True self-protection is a castle with layered battlements and buildings. The castle’s individual structures represent unique and essential subject matter areas, contributing individually while reinforcing the whole. A cornerstone is the first set stone around and upon which the rest of a building’s foundation forms and, for our purposes, Cornerstones are central concepts or themes upon which areas of self-protection rest. 

Four central areas form the most important structures in our self-protection castle, each with its own cornerstone. These areas are Bad Guys 101, Becoming, Level Up, and Beyond Power.
This Cornerstone is central to understanding physical approaches to solving the Bad Guy problem: Level Up.

Preface

The crowd murmured in anticipation as the instructor positioned his students for the next demo. Suddenly, he exploded into motion, striking his prey with blinding speed. His hapless victims regained their composure as the instructor stared intensely at the crowd around him, basking in their adulation.

Rolling my eyes any harder would have flung them out of my head.

The instructor’s demo ingrained two things: ineffective striking and standing, unresponsive, when attacked suddenly. Seems dumb, right? But self-defense and martial arts (SD/MA) are rife with these suboptimal practices. "Level Up" is about building the best physical training for developing stronger individuals rather than serfs or zombies.

Roll Your Own

“In the real world, these are just people with ideas. They’re just like me and you when smoke and cameras disappear.”

-Dead Prez

I've learned early to be an active, skeptical, agentic participant in my learning. My eminently quotable father had it right: "you don't buy these; you have to roll your own.” Functional growth requires individual engineering; nothing worthwhile comes ready-made. SD/MA training is no different.

All training should focus on building students’ power. Instructors should be physically, mentally, and emotionally engineering growth in their charges while students must actively, intentionally participate in strengthening themselves. Unfortunately, many instructors hoard power, pushing students to be passengers in their own journeys. I’ve walked away from such toxic environments; the epistemologies made my teeth itch. Even among solid instructors, there are limitations to playing practically, ethically, or safely and students must be active participants if they're to overcome the limitations. 

My varied experience and search for cool ideas has adjusted my training to keep me in the driver’s seat, even under suboptimal conditions. When I became an instructor, I invited my students to find their own ways.

The “Level Up” series examines said adjustments, both those I’ve practiced for years and ones I’m still pondering. I’ve borrowed from friends, training partners, and teachers. Use it all or none of it. Students and instructors growing, on their own terms, is all that matters.

It’s your life.

-M