legalities lecture

Part of JM's response to my positive-feedback e-mail about how she did a nice job against Alicia:

"Huh...okay. Thanks, but it didn't seem like I was doing anything at all. I mean, I thought you felt like solid muscle but Alicia....jeez it was difficult to do anything...."

LOL..... I'm just tickled pink by the "I thought you felt like solid muscle" part.... wow! Me= solid muscle. Coolness.

Today, SK and I went to the "legalities of self defense" lecture portion of Rory Miller's weekend seminar. It was pretty good, and I was happy that it was almost universally consistent with the material I've learned in Insights classes. Rory has a Presence, is well-spoken and occasionally funny.

The four aspects of justified self defense:

1)INTENT: you need to reasonably believe that the Bad Guy wants to harm you.
2)OPPORTUNITY: and
3)MEANS; The Bad Guy has to have the ability to harm you
4)PRECLUSION: There has to be no reasonable chance to escape, summon help, or otherwise avert the situation without violence.

This- along with the whole concept of needing to be able to articulate and justify to a jury why you felt the need to use the level of force you used- are the most important basic things EVERY martial artist needs to know very early on in their training, IMHO. There are lots of other useful things to know, but those are the bare bones.

One of the observations Rory made was (in response to questions about men's vs women's common styles of fighting) was that if the Bad Guy is dead, but the citizen is straddling the corpse and banging the crushed skull repeatedly on the pavement when the cops show up, the citizen is a woman. (Heh heh)

More interesting MA conversations in the car.... primarily regarding Dragon styles of various different martial arts, comparing and contrasting the physical/technique aspects of them. Interesting musing- how much (if any) parallel is there in the ENERGY of Dragon styles of various different martial arts? Would someone sensitive to that sort of thing be able to see/feel common threads, and of what sort?

After the seminar, we drove over to West Seattle to try to get the key to the dojo where we will be renting space for our Sunday class, but there was nobody at the school.