Introduction to LMA at UCI (Patreon)

We recently ran an introduction to Liberation Martial Arts (LMA) for academic workers on strike at UC Irvine

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

[Special thanks to one of the organizers for providing most of the footage. While the video and sound quality may not be perfect since it comes from a live stream, I have edited and enhanced the sound as much as possible to share with our readers.]

I recently ran an introduction to Liberation Martial Arts (LMA) for academic workers on strike at UC Irvine.

First takeaway: One of the academics, a neuroscientist who studies the brain, memory, and learning, asked me what discipline I teach. I explained that LMA is less a discipline and more an approach to learning. When I explained our approach, his eyes lit up, and he kept nodding his head. At the end, he said, "That's exactly how the brain learns!"

Second takeaway: After the class, a group of participants approached me to express their gratitude. They were pleasantly surprised that the class defied their expectations in the best way. As educators and knowledge seekers, they had taken many classes, including movement classes, and noted that none were like this. They said the fact that LMA was radically different is what made it good. They also recognized how LMA concepts could apply beyond martial arts to movement practices, education, and organizing, emphasizing that they hadn't just memorized but deeply learned.

Third takeaway: All the participants who approached me afterward were Black and people of color, and mostly non-men. They shared that LMA felt like it was speaking directly to them. This was the highlight for me because LMA is designed first and foremost for them.

Transcript

[Note: Transcript has been edited and modified for clarity.]

You teach yourself. The movements emerge. So, ultimately, I'm just trying to make better learners, better movers. So, for you to be a better mover, the best way to do it is through play. So, our whole pedagogy is based on play, like little kids. But little kids can play right away.

For adults, we've gone through more stuff. We've gone through more oppression. So, for people who've gone through oppression to play, you can't just put them in play. Because even though it's play, and I frame it that way, it's going to cause fight or flight. So, for adults, people who have gone through a lot of oppression, people who aren't getting paid right, people who have grievances, we have to go through a lot of breathing. We have to go through a lot of eye training.

Some of you might know about breathing—a little bit. But the eyes are a part of your autonomic nervous system that you might not think about, like your breathing. So we're going to do a lot of eye work and breath work. We're going to work a lot today on ease—creating ease in your body and your mind.

The first thing we're going to do to create ease is breathing. I want you to take a deep breath in, a deep breath out. You can keep your eyes open or closed; it's up to you. But breathe in as slowly as you can, and exhale as slowly as you can.

I invite you to breathe through your nose if you can. If breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth feels more natural, do that, too. Whatever feels natural for you.

I invite you to breathe through your nose to stay in an easy disposition. Because once you start breathing through the mouth, you start panting, which could cause a cascade of other effects. But if you have any obstructions in the nose, then maybe you can't breathe through the nose, right? So do whatever's natural for you.

Breathe in as slow as you can. Breathe out as slow as you can. And in between, add pauses. There's going to be four sides to this. We try to create architecture for everything. Shapes so that it's less vague. So, this is called box breathing. There are four sides.

Breathe in. Pause. Breathe out. Pause.

So that's what we're going to do.

Let's do it.

Go through the motion. It's not an intellectual exercise where you're like, "Oh, I get that concept. Okay, move on to the next thing." No, the ritual is the point. Doing the thing is the point.

Breathe. Exhale. And as you breathe in, I want you to bring attention to your body and see where you carry any tension or pain. See where you carry emotions because you also carry emotions in the body.

The reason why I say you have to go through it is because English is a very clunky, disembodied language. I will never have the right words for you. You just have to go through it and feel it. Find tension in your body and then exhale.

When you breathe in and out, try not to use your neck and shoulder muscles if you can. Try to breathe here in this empty space. Because the more you use your neck and shoulder muscles, you're going to burn them out, you're going to create more tension. And especially as academic workers, I'm sure the neck and shoulders are already tense. So don't use them. We're trying to break that habit. Try to breathe down here where there's empty space.

That's also important for literal and philosophical reasons. We often wear clothes that encumber us, so we can't breathe into our diaphragm, right? We're restrained, so we often learn to breathe around it. So, unrestrain yourself and breathe right here. Breathe in, find tension in your body, and release it.

Breathing is something we're going to do regardless, right? So it's automatic. By taking manual override over something you do automatically, you're creating a sense of control. You're also taking literal control over something. That all helps to create more ease.

Now, I want you to open your eyes if they are closed. And now we're going to work on our vision. Just like we stretched and put our lungs at ease, we'll do the same for our eyes. We're going to stretch and warm our eyes and put them at ease because that's also something that works automatically. Our eyes will move automatically, so by taking control of them, we create a sense of ease.

The more you can take in, the less things feel like they're going to come out of left field. The whole point of this is to try to minimize that startle response because we always feel on edge, startled. But if you could literally see more, you're less startled, less fixated, less out of focus. And if you're already on edge, you kind of have tunnel vision anyway. Fixated. So, it just creates this loop. We're trying to break out of that loop.

So you're going to use me as your visual anchor. Just look at me, right? I'm your visual anchor. And then, from here, without moving your gaze anywhere else, try to take in as much as you can. We're not cyclopes; we have our eyes set apart. So that means we can actually take in so much information from our sides and also up and down.

Just use me as your anchor. Then, try not to move and try to take in as much as you can. Stretch your eyes.

If you think about your eyes like a camera, if something's moving fast and you try to track it, you'll never be able to track it fast enough. And in fact, because you can't track it, it'll seem faster than it is. Causing that nervous reaction, right? You'll get frenetic. But it doesn't matter how fast it moves if you just zoom out and take the whole scape in. It doesn't matter how fast things happen; you'll just take it all in.

Anybody who knows a little bit about how cameras work, it's like a master shot. You zoom out. So we're just going to stretch it out. Take as much in as you can. You'd be surprised how much you can take in. You can almost see behind you.

Now, breathe, breathe normal, breathe naturalistically, whatever's natural for you.

Now, we're going to stretch our eyes in a different direction. I want you to hold your finger in front of you, pretty close to your face. So you're going to look at your finger, then you're going to look at me. You're going to look at your finger, then you're going to look at me.

You're going to go back and forth. Now we're stretching your eyes front to back. Depth perception. Three dimensions.

So we don't think about stretching our eyes. It's very important. Going back to martial arts, your eyes, your perception is going to be the most important thing. When you have a night terror or sleep paralysis, you have to start with the smallest movement and use that to start to retake control of your body. Same thing. The eyes are an easy way to start taking control of your body.

So now there's a lot of cliches about martial arts, right? Like "Be like water." Instead, I want you to think of yourself like a tree. Be like a tree, especially a sapling, a tree sapling. So, we're going to start with our roots.

We're going to bring attention to our roots. And we're just going to rock back and forth like this. But within your shoes, try to spread your toes. You're going to connect to the ground using your roots. Lengthening our roots up and down. Connecting in a different way. Using the entirety of your roots. This is especially important because if you think about how you move, your feet are your base of support. Your area of support.

Your area of support isn't the outline of your feet. It's actually the space between your feet. So, like a sapling, you want to be rooted but flexible. So trees, in a strong storm, if they're old and rigid, they fall, right? Tree saplings, baby saplings, they're rooted but flexible.

They don't fall. That's how we want to be.

Now, think about the outline of your feet. And we're going to draw circles with the outline of our feet. So now we're engaging with the ground in a different way. We're engaging with the ground with different parts of our feet. Because when you're moving, it's not only idiosyncratic, it's also culturally informed. So that's often our first introduction as little kids into politics, body politics. And being regulated and policed on how we move. We're not supposed to move big. We're supposed to move small. We're not supposed to move at all. "Why do you move like that?" "Why do you stand like that?" Right? And then we think about movement in these Western hegemonic colonial ways, right? So move however feels natural for you.

So now we're going to think about our feet again, our roots, and our base of support, and we're going to stand staggered. Doesn't matter which leg is in front.

What happens when I stand staggered? My area of support here is just left to right. That's it. Why do you take a staggered stance in anything you do, whether sports or martial arts? It's because now my area of support is left to right, front to back. It's a big square. Right? That gives us support in every direction. That's why we take this stance. So now, in relation to the idea of tree sapling and base of support, we're going to think about alignment. So we're going to partner up if y'all feel comfortable with it. And we're going to give each other information. We're going to be each other's guides. We're going to guide each other's movements.

You can stand however you want, but we're going to push each other at our shoulders. And when we get pushed, we're going to create alignment. What does alignment mean? It means your joints all have to face the same direction. What is the opposite of alignment? Shear force. So what I mean by that is, if your joints go the same way, everything is good. If they don't, shear force. Things rip. Right? You're not strong. You're off balance. Everything has to go the same way.

So, if Jessica pushes me right here, I go with her. If she pushes me right here, I turn my entire body with it. I'm flexible and rooted. I'm creating alignment.

So push me here, push me here. So now we're going to move and do it while we're moving. We're feeding each other information. We're each other's guides. So we're not going to just touch. We're going to push all the way through consistently and soft. Because we don't want to rely on the eyes for this one. We want to feel the movement. Sometimes, your eyes think that things are moving in a different direction. So you want to give your partner enough information so they know which way to go. If you feel comfortable, partner up.

Think about the base of support and stand staggered. And we're not hitting, we're not shoving, right? We're just consistently pushing through, creating alignment. So don't shove. How do you not shove? You have to stand a little bit closer to each other. Right?

It's okay to laugh. And also, you have freedom of movement. If you want to walk around and do this as you're moving, feel free to. If you want to do it while staying still, that's okay, too. If you feel comfortable doing it in one spot, challenge yourself and try to do it while moving.

Be gentle. You're each other's guides. You're not pretending to be an attacker. You're guiding each other's movements. So, learn to rotate, create alignment, and feel that haptic sense.

We learn through play. When you think about some of the real-life things that have happened in the last several weeks and several months, right? And you think about our responses. And when you get shoved, you want to be rooted but pliable.

Why are we doing this through play? Because everybody's like, "Oh, you need self-defense" now. Everybody needs to know all this stuff. I actually think that's the worst way to teach it. Because now I'm scared, right?

If any of you teach anything, you know a stressed-out mind, a scared mind, cannot learn anything. Fear is also a terrible motivator. It's like, "I'm scared to die; I'm going to hit the gym." No you're not. That's like the worst motivation. "I hate myself" or "All these bad things will happen to me." "What will people say about me?" Okay, you're not going to go. You're not going.

What you want to do is you want to play. Because how do people get good? They get good through competency. They have to practice a lot. How do people do that? It has to be fun, and they have to fall in love with it. That's the only way. You can't rely on motivation. You can't rely on all that other stuff. It's unreliable. Right?

Fun. Falling in love with the thing. That's reliable. Then you don't even have to ask them. You don't even have to make competency a goal. They will just show up and keep doing the thing.

So, related to some of the situations y'all have been in, now we're going to take this, and we're going to do a different game.

So, we had access to each other's shoulders to create alignment, right? Now, I want you to think about, "Can I touch both shoulders if I reach straight out?"

Think about that. Can I touch? Can you touch me? Good. So now, this is a movement exercise. And it relies now on your eyes. I want you to move around with each other so that neither of you can access both shoulders. Maybe just one. But not both.

Shove me. I can be shoved. Stay where you are. Now shove me as hard as you can. Why? Access to only one shoulder. So when people fight, it's not rocket science or brain surgery. They make it way too complicated. Just don't give them access to both shoulders.

So, to test each other, you're not going to shove each other; you're going to see if you can touch each other. You're going to test each other.

So we're moving, and we're going to both go. Simultaneous play. Instead of turn-based, try to just go, and see if the person can get away from you. Don't give your partner access to both shoulders. This isn't trying to score points through shoving. This is just to see and test if I can access both shoulders. For the person doing this, you get to see how good your perception is. Can I see when I have that access or not? So, instead of thinking about the best way to prevent getting shoved, first, just don't give them access to both shoulders.

So, let's find that same partner again and try it again. This time, we're not pushing; we're not creating alignment. It's more about movement. Also, this is not serious, right? The stakes are low. This is not life or death. So, enjoy yourself. Have fun. It's okay to laugh.

It's all about movement.

So, all of you are developing your movements. I didn't teach you any technique, right? What happened? Techniques naturally emerged just from the goal. We're not trying to do a move. Nobody told you how to slip a punch. Nobody told you how to do a pull-counter. But all of you are naturally emerging actual movements, right?

That's the best way to learn, because you emerged knowledge from yourself. You taught yourself. You always had it in you. I provided an environment where you could access that part of yourself.

A lot of this is having faith in the learner that they can teach themselves. And not to think of you as empty vessels that I just info dump stuff into. You will figure out your own information; I just give you a goal. Right?

So, going back to alignment and base of support, we're going to think about something I call the L stance. So you're going to stand, and when you look down at your feet, your feet should look like an L. It doesn't have to be perfectly lined up like this, maybe a little bit wider apart. There's no idealized movement. Just stand staggered and spread apart. Everything's a ballpark. So be in the ballpark of an L.

Going back to boxes, right? And an L are shapes. Why are shapes so important?

Can I use you again? Now, let's say I'm standing in the back of the L. Instead of this way, I'm standing this way. Pretend you're leaning against a door, stopping someone from coming in.

So we talked about getting shoved, right? The best way to avoid being shoved is to not give them access to both shoulders. Well, what if you can't do that? What if I want to stand with a bunch of us? And we want to hold a line? This is where this is important. Because now, if you're going to shove me, push me here, I create a strong shape. So push me.

This isn't a game where we're challenging each other. I just want you to physically feel what that feels like—how strong you feel when you stand in the back of the L and lean. It doesn't matter which leg is in front. If it's the other leg, it's like a J; it doesn't matter.

Feel.

Have somebody push you and see how strong you are. Not using strength but just the architecture of your body, your structure, and your weight. Shove me as hard as you can. And even notice her feet. She also has to stand staggered anyway just to shove. So this is why this is important. Right? Big area of support.

I lean here. Try that. Take turns for this one. This one's more about feeling it. So, one person is just giving a steady push, and the other person is resisting, standing in the back of the L.

You think, historically, this is automatically the shape you would take to hold a shield. I want you to just understand the power of shape. When I teach this to preschoolers, I talk about how we shouldn't judge each other based on our size or shape because that assumes we're fixed shapes when we can constantly change our shape and size to make new shapes, right?

Now L stance again. Grab me. And then she's going to pull me, and I'm going go the other way. So if somebody wants to pull you away, it's the same shape, the other way. Imagine you're still holding that door, and someone is trying to pull you away from that door. Lean away from the puller into the door.

Try to stand in any other configuration and see what happens. Pull me. I'm pulled. This is the only one that'll work. Try that. Same shape.

Kids will naturally do this. We just forgot how to do it. You want an area of support. If they're really strong, you just gotta get lower. There you go. Using shapes. If you actually get pulled, reclaim your feet right away. This isn't about infinite resistance or infinitely not being shoved.

Let's say I'm leaning this way, and if I get shoved, okay. I gotta reclaim. Okay, I gotta reclaim. If I'm getting pulled, I get pulled. Okay. I gotta reclaim. Why? Ultimately, I just want to make it a hard time.

How you do one thing is how you do all things.

It's not about doing anything infinitely. You just want to give them a hard time. You do an encampment. What are you trying to do? You're trying to give them a hard time because they have to spend a lot of money. You know you're not going to be able to do an infinite encampment, but you will make them spend a lot of money trying to do something about it. You're giving them material consequences.

You know you can't fight this forever. It's like, "Okay, what if I get pulled for 10 hours?" Yeah! But you just want to make it as costly as possible. They have to exert a lot of energy. Right? That's the ultimate point. You're wearing them out where it's not worth it.

You yourself are not a fixed point in time. You yourself are not infinitely the same thing. So, ultimately, it's all about adapting. It's about the context. And you just keep fighting, and you just keep going. Right? And you try to endure. If you can't endure anymore, then give someone else a turn.

Now, let's finish up with something I call recovery breathing. How do we do this? Two inhales through the nose and an exhale through the mouth. But you'll want to breathe through your neck and shoulders. Don't. Still, breathe here. To help you do that, use your thumbs and put them on your rib cage. I want you to expand that every time you breathe.

You're noticing the sound; that's great because that's the context of how we're training. Nothing's ever going to be perfect. If you want to be consistent, you have to be willing to be imperfect. If you want to drink water every day, you can't think about drinking the same amount of water every day. Sometimes you drink this much, sometimes you drink this much. This, this, sometimes you don't drink at all, then the next day you pick it up again. That's what consistency is. That's what consistency is.

If you ever have a hard time doing something live, like let's say I'm competing and I'm fighting somebody. Maybe I can do much better at my home gym than at a public venue. Why? It's not that the person is coming at me so much harder. I'm going to interpret it that way, but really, it's everything else. All the noise. All the noise is what makes everything seem more intense. So having noise, having distraction is a gift.

Because that's real. That's what we gotta get used to. When there's noise and distraction, everything feels more intense. Your body will have a hard time figuring out what's the signal. It seems like all of it is signal. So that's when we go back to our breath and steady ourselves. And try to find that signal, try to figure out what's important.

That's it. Thank you.

Related:

Liberation Martial Arts Preschool

– Sam