ChironTraining Volume 6: 2010

By Rory Miller

After seventeen years of dealing with violent criminals and a year as a contractor in Iraq, what's the next step? Time to do something really scary: Start a business.
In 2010, Rory goes on the seminar circuit, writes and publishes and, as always, tries to write things out of his head. About teaching, about protection, about the emotional and psychological dimensions of conflict.
ChironTraining Volume 6 is the sixth collection of posts from the blog.
As always, most of the material is available for free at: chirontraining.blogspot.com
The e-book has added material and commentary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rory Miller
• Release date: May 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781370055869

Book preview

CHIRON TRAINING

Volume 6

2010

by

Rory Miller

Published by Rory Miller at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Rory Miller

http://chirontraining.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Warning

Nothing in this book constitutes a legal, medical or tactical opinion or advice. Intended for entertainment or academic study only. The author is not responsible for the content of any book, website or article referenced in this work that are not directly owned by the author.

Engage in any physical activities at your own risk. The author does not assume any responsibility for the use or misuse of the information presented in this book.

Cover design by Kamila Zeman Miller

http://wyrdgoat.com/Cover_Art.html

TABLE of CONTENTS

Introduction

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Volume 6. Just to be clear, most of the content is available for free at chirontraining.blogspot.com. I added some commentary, as always. Those will be at the end of entries and in italics.

2010 was a different year. The Chiron blog started as some jail guard getting stuff out of his head. The first three years of the blog (2005-2007) was mostly about how a veteran corrections officer saw the world and criminals and violence. There was other stuff, too. Martial arts, becoming a professional writer, and true love.

2008 was about transitioning from that world to being a contractor in Iraq and lessons learned in Rusafa Prison Complex in Baghdad and on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Shield.

2009 was about working at Ft. Suse Prison in the Kurdish Autonomous Region and the transition back home.

The years always had themes. Not conscious and not in the writing, but in life I was either doing a definite thing or transitioning from one definite thing to another. 2010 was a year of transition, but it was far less definite.

Did I want to go back to working for an agency? Could I make a living teaching? Who was I now that I was no longer a sergeant or a contractor, no longer in sworn service to something bigger than myself? Could I make a small business work and could my family handle the uncertainty?

From 2013, I know how it turned out. And the next few years (even now) are all about becoming a better teacher. But 2010 was my year without a plan, taking new kinds of risks. The world of accounting and business and taxes is far less familiar to me than the world of criminals and violence. For me it was deep water.

JANUARY

NEVER AND ALWAYS- THINKING SATURDAY, JANUARY 02, 2010

Training and application are context-specific. That’s not really news, or at least it shouldn’t be. Sometimes common sense is context-specific as well. We tend to forget that.

A friend, months ago, made the statement that …never and at no time and in no way have the major hip throws been used in combat. You will never find anyone in a combat zone who will voluntarily turn his back on the enemy. They are purely sport techniques.

He’s a smart man and not one to throw around words like ‘always’ and ‘never.’ He couldn’t find a record of someone having done a full-entry hip throw in combat and, combined with the common sense that it would be a bad idea, he felt comfortable making the pronouncement.

I wanted to argue- because the word ‘never’ pushes my buttons. I thought about it for some time and couldn’t recall a specific example. I’ve used a lot of sweeps and leverage take-downs at work, but can’t recall a true hip throw. I know a few guys who have used the wrestling version of o-goshi, but without seeing the specific incidents, I don’t know whether they turned their backs entirely or not.

Reviewed the older kata that I knew and half-entry hip throws are common, but not the full entry. I didn’t have anything to argue with. Maybe it was a ‘never’ and I just need to quit whining when my panties are in a twist.

Then last night I was brawling with my son. And I hip threw him, full entry. But I never turned my back on him.

The thing is, we forget stuff-- people don’t kill the way they spar. In any kind of close quarters battle, emphasis on the battle, I’ll do anything I can to get behind you. So will most people who have trained in a place where blindsiding is encouraged. It’s way easier to beat people up (or kill, or subdue) from behind.

My son has been training with me. He snaked past and got to my back. He wanted the facemask leading to the choke, I think, but he executed it a little too sloppy, so I threw him.

There are two, maybe four important thoughts here:

1) Gifts, one of the universal principles: The threat, by action or position, gives you the body you will be acting on. He supplies the openings, he supplies his own vulnerabilities. If you go in with a scripted plan it will only work if the threat, by pure chance, offers you the right position and momentum. One of the most important skills is the ability to see, recognize and exploit the gifts.

2) Bad guys don’t attack in the same way and for the same reasons you might be preparing for. There was a class long ago (I won’t name the style, but within the style they were very good competitors) where the contestants would deliberately turn their backs on their opponents because striking the back didn’t count and might even get the other guy disqualified. Maybe your training flaws don’t seem so extreme—but neither an enraged housewife in a domestic or an ex-con uses a knife anything like an arnisador does. Training for flowing cuts with full mobility is just as irrelevant to the problem at hand as training to turn your back.

3) Some of the things that don’t make sense start to make sense when dealing with assaults. Common sense informed by dojo training or armchair visualization is context-specific. Your conclusions (and hence your training methodologies) may be a complete mismatch for how a bad guy attacks.

4) Some of the hardest parts of training and competition are handed to you in real life—there is a serious art and science to making the 180 degree spin to a full hip throw in a judo tournament, but the bad guy may start in that position: close in, tight and from behind.

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The guest entry I wrote for Kris Wilder's Striking Post Blog is now up.

http://thestrikingpost.blogspot.com/2009/12/enter-dragon.html

(See below for the text)

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I lost contact with Jason Pittman a few years ago. He's a good friend and a good fighter. When we met, he was in charge of security at a very active trauma center. He was getting more fights in the Emergency Room than I was in a jail. He wandered off to pursue his dream of competing in Mixed Martial Arts and I went to Iraq and we kind of lost contact.

Jason’s back, and coaching at 503 West Coast Jiu Jitsu, a new facility. The space looks great, the crew (instructors and students both) have a great energy.

I’m really happy for you, JP! http://www.503wcjj.com/

ENTER THE DRAGON—First published at Kris Wilder’s Striking Post blog December 23rd, 2009.

You have three minds. Depending on how you look at it, you may have more and in the end you only have one brain… but for our purposes you have three.

Your human mind is thoughtful and aware, reasonable if not always purely logical. You are not in this mode nearly as often as you think you are. When you are, you weigh the costs and do the right thing regardless. You live up to your highest ideals.

Your animal mind, your lizard brain, is older. It is concerned with you as a physical animal- it deals with danger and hunger and movement. When you are in your animal mind, you move like an animal, like an athlete. It is pure. It can be vicious and it is ruthless. It is older than human concerns like justice or mercy…

In the middle is your monkey mind. We evolved from social primates- animals that lived in tight groups completely dependent on the group for survival. Our interdependence drove an evolution toward social skills and social strategies to deal with conflict. Your monkey mind is concerned, always and obsessively, with what other people will think about you.

You are rarely in just your lizard mind. When absolute terror kicks in and you break out of fight-flight-freeze and just act, it is an animal thing. Sometimes a few feel it when they have trained for a long time and hit the zone, a mushin where they can act with absolute grace and without conscious thought. Many, today, only hit this zone playing video games, where they have trained to reflex on the controls and can play without registering what exactly they are pretending to do or caring who might see.

It is just as rare to be in your human mind. When you have done the right thing even though people you care about will be angry; when you have stood by the facts even though everyone said it was wrong… When Galileo recanted the truth out of fear of the church, he gave up his human mind and did what a monkey would do.

As much as we are ever just in one of these minds, it is the monkey. Obsessed with the tribe, with others: Angsting over how other people really feel, worrying whether someone really likes you, following celebrity gossip (on what world is it important who Angelina and Brad even are?) concerns about whether you blend in enough or stand out too much… This is monkey stuff. The insecurity of an animal who needs a community because it knows it is too weak to survive in the wild on its own.

The monkey mind interacts with the other two obsessively. When a gunshot goes off and people start looking around to see what other people are doing, that’s the monkey mind. When you don’t duck or hit the dirt because you are afraid of what people will think, that’s the monkey mind. And when your first instinct is to slam the door in a stranger’s face and you don’t because ‘that would be rude’ that is the monkey mind. In all of those cases, people have died or been raped because they were worried about what others would think.

It interferes with the human mind as well. Writers struggle constantly with the ‘inner critic’- the voice constantly whispering to them to give up, that they aren’t good enough, don’t know enough. The monkey mind is just as concerned with being too special, too successful, as it is with being rude or looking silly. Being too good can also push you out of the tribe. Monkeys die if they are alone.

Same with every incident of hiding the truth or ass-covering or sucking up: the monkey wants to belong, and that need to belong is more important than the truth or, often, even survival.

And that is huge, because the monkey mind doesn’t distinguish between physical death and humiliation or isolation. Any profound change in you, even learning a new skill, might terrify the monkey. It sees change as what some call ego death. Your monkey mind constantly fights to keep you in your comfort zone, where nothing changes. No matter how much that comfort zone sucks to your human mind (when you don’t live up to your potential; when you feel the shame of taking the easy way instead of the right way) or your lizard mind (and so people die rather than take the chance that fighting might be rude or running might seem cowardly). Your own monkey brain will fight you if what you need to do to survive might impact social standing.

This impacts martial artists profoundly. When training becomes a hierarchical series of ritual it recreates the monkey tribe. Socially secure, everyone knows their places and what to do… but that’s not really what martial arts is about. Is it?

When students are afraid to ask why or how something works, or when students continue to practice flawed technique because even though they can’t make it work it looks right, then the monkey has won.

Martial arts should be about the human mind and the lizard mind. Developing an ethical understanding of force and violence and educating and training an animal body to new levels of efficiency. Martial arts should be, fundamentally, about empowering students.

When the training caters to the monkey mind, it robs the students of power. It cripples students who may, some day, need to do the right thing (human brain) with absolute efficiency (lizard brain) to survive. The monkey has no place here.

When you silence the chattering monkey (meditation works for some, simply recognizing it works for others) and get the human mind and lizard brain to work together*, you have something new. Something that uses the human abilities and virtues- thoughtfulness, righteousness, planning, goal setting and decision making- with the deep abilities of the ancient lizard- efficiency, ruthlessness and absolute focus.

Enter the Dragon.

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*Experience at high stakes works for this, but the best training I’ve found are scenarios difficult enough to require high efficiency- and then requiring the student to explain exactly what happened and why he or she did each thing. This allows the deep lizard mind and the human mind to play off each other, work together and hone each other into a very efficient package.

THE SACRED HUNT SUNDAY, JANUARY 03, 2010

Mac made me think this time, with one of his essays. Here's what he made me think:

The best of being human came out in the hunt. Hunting big, dangerous animals some humans taught themselves what comes so naturally to dogs: team work, loyalty, leading and following, self-sacrifice for the good of the pack.

It was also a place where some of the monkey stuff was revealed as untrue- your value as a hunter and a man depended on your heart and skill, not on your ancestors or connections or politics. And it was the place where some of the better primate stuff, the things that made us human, allowed us to dominate the world: tool use and communication and planning.

The hunt was violent and it appeals to certain people. The social bullshit of the normal monkey world is bullshit... and in violence or the hunt, it falls away. In that moment, everything is real and so much outside of that moment feels artificial. So, I think, violence is natural and important to those who are striving towards our learned, recent better nature... and terrifying and unnatural for those who live for the social monkey games.

The monkeys have always needed someone to protect them, but they think (and they may be right) that evolution is going to a purely human/monkey social world where all conflicts are handled by a Monkey Dance in boardrooms or negotiations. I think if it ever does we will lose the best of being human- the loyalty and self-sacrifice and stuff we learned in the hunt.

The thing about coming to love war is that if you value those virtues, war is where you will see them. It may be terrible-- what I saw of it over there was pretty mild, but the violence I have been exposed to had it's terrible aspects-- but it also brings out the absolute best in men. And it brings out the worst in monkeys.

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This got a lot of vitriolic response on the blog. I don’t want to rehash it here, largely because I don’t feel I have the rights to the comments themselves.

There are virtues in different lifestyles. Hunters, soldiers, farmers, social workers all require different personalities. They value different things and different things become virtues. Unpredictability is an incredible virtue for a duelist, but career suicide for a salesman or factory worker.

What I noticed is that everyone involved in the conversation, including me, were defending the virtues they valued—which were always the virtues of their own lifestyle.

At risk of pissing off more people, artists tend to value creativity as one of the highest virtues, beauty (or at least emotional impact) as a high-order value. From my point of view, artists feed no one. They protect no one. Keep no one warm. What they provide at the best is entertainment, at the worst distraction from those things I feel real.

I understand the idea of producing art for your own soul. I don’t buy into the belief that it has any intrinsic value beyond the individual. I am also aware that this is my perception. Not truth.

Some perceived my comments on the hunter virtues as attacks on all other virtues. And some were attacking the values of any group they weren’t members of.

But one thing about our culture (United States, early 21st century) is that all soldiers and cops have been citizens. We have all, every last one of us, done something else. Possible exception for a kid who goes into the military just out of highschool.

So arguments against how cops and soldiers think or what they know almost invariably come from inevitable ignorance.

MORE ON WAR AND THE HUNT TUESDAY, JANUARY 05, 2010

Telling comments on the last post. I apologize for bringing you all into a conversation in the middle.

Here’s the deal: certain forms of violence hit humans, particularly men, at a very deep level. When Robert E. Lee says, It is well that war is so terrible or we would grow to love it too much, or a French survivor of the German occupation after WWII says that it was horrible and she never wants anything like that to happen again BUT she has never felt really alive since…

We need to look at that. Not pretend it doesn’t happen. Not arbitrarily decide that since it sounds icky to us, anyone who says that kind of thing must be crazy or deluded or wrong. It’s an important data point. If peace is important to you, you will never do anything about it by ignoring the aspects of violence that you want to disbelieve.

If humans are important to you, you do a great disservice to yourself by ignoring or denigrating things that don’t fit your worldview. No matter who you are, your experience with the world is very limited. Approaching disagreements with curiosity almost always works better than doing so defensively.

Do I love war? No idea. The time I spent in a war zone was pretty mild. I dislike the idea of war, but have seen both good and bad results from it. I won’t pretend to have an opinion without a lot more input.

Now that that is out of the way-

Monkeys don’t hunt elephants. That’s important. Personally, I don’t see a lot that I like in chimp social dynamics, either. Those two thoughts are related.

It hasn’t been an exhaustive study for me, but almost everything negative in human society can be found in chimps- betrayal, punishing the different, bullies, even ritual murder. The chimp idea of altruism and self-sacrifice is to spend a few hours picking lice or share a bit of food. Monkeys don’t hunt elephants.

Humans do hunt elephants. With primitive stone tools we hunted a lot of big animals, some to extinction in North America. Canoes of men armed with stone tipped spears would go after whale in the Pacific Northwest, challenging some of the biggest animals alive in some of the cruelest conditions.

These are the things I see in humans that I don’t see in chimps and (don’t always see in humans, for that matter). But when I do see them, I see humans at their best.

Teamwork in dangerous conditions for the common good. Self-sacrifice up to and including death for people you are not even related to. The ability to set ego aside and follow someone else’s plan. Innovation towards a common goal. Team planning. Respect based on merit. Reward based on need (not all humans do this, but many do and did- children eat first from a hunt; potlatch; Sergeants eat last.)

There are other things too- the hunt and war drove technology, and tool use made human life what it is today. It is a straight line from the first obsidian or flint hide-scraper to the laptop I’m typing on now.

Hunting may have driven the development of language. Gathering doesn’t take a lot of words and farming only a little more and neither require speed and precision of information.

These are all very human things. These things we do better than chimps. These are things that got us to the moon and one day, hopefully, will take us to the stars.

Not many people hunt anymore and those that do have a huge technological advantage. It no longer requires the teamwork and careful planning of hunting a mastodon with spears. Few hunters are at risk except from each other.

Hunting is still important. You can talk all you want about the circle of life and man’s place in nature and ecology and Gaia but until and unless you have killed your own food (and