"HOLISTIC SELF-DEFENSE"

It took me twenty years to understand that I had been wrong about the subject itself. The street was not the only place a person could be assaulted. The doctor's office could assault you. The courtroom could assault you. The pulpit could assault you. The grocery store could assault you, slowly, over decades, with substances marketed as food. The well-water you drew from your own land could assault you because of what someone forty miles away had buried in the ground. And the institutions you had been raised to trust—the ones whose seals hung on the walls of your school and your town hall and your church—could assault you not by malice but by the quiet replacement of their original purpose with another one.

I knew this last point firsthand, because I had spent thirteen years inside one of those institutions. Beginning in the early 1970s, I worked in the medical profession. By the age of twenty-five I was the head of a cardio-pulmonary department at a medical center in Michigan. I was gung-ho. I aspired to become an MD. I believed the system I worked in was, fundamentally, a healing system, and I believed the white coat I wore in those corridors meant something close to what the public had been taught it meant. I was, in retrospect, very naïve.

What I watched, across those thirteen years, was patients coming back. Coming back, and coming back again, and never quite recovering. I watched them get worse on the medications they had been prescribed and worse still on the medications prescribed to manage the side effects of the first medications.

I watched the family members in the waiting rooms hope for outcomes the staff already knew were not going to come. I watched a substantial number of those patients eventually leave the hospital not through the front door but through the morgue, feet first. And I began, slowly, to notice something I had not been trained to notice—that the system I was inside was not, in any honest accounting, organized around the recovery of the patient. It was organized around something else.

It took me several more years to put a name to what the something else was, and a few more after that to walk away from it. The decision to let go of that trapeze, and to reach for the holistic one swinging next to it, was not a sudden decision. It was made one observation at a time, across a long apprenticeship inside a system that was teaching me, every day, exactly what was wrong with it. I have not been back. I have spent the last fifty years using what I learned there as the foundation for what Kerrie and I have done since, which is the subject of much of what follows.

This book is the curriculum I would teach if I had a student for life. I do not. None of us do. But I have students who have studied with me for thirty and forty years, and I owe them, and I owe their children, the courtesy of writing it down rather than counting on the body to deliver it forever.

A word about the form. This is not a textbook and it is not a memoir. It is a teaching, and a teaching has the shape it has because it follows the order in which a student must learn. We begin with the inner architecture—the body, the mind, the spirit—because nothing else holds without those. We move outward through the body's environment—the air, the water, the food, the medicines. We continue outward through the citizen's environment—the law, the institution, the corporate-governmental apparatus, and the supranational frameworks like the United Nations' Agenda 2030 that increasingly shape what governments do at every scale below them. We end at the home and the family, and beyond that, at the question of what a defended life looks like across decades.

A word about tone. I have tried to write the way I teach. I have tried to be specific where specificity helps and general where generality helps. I have tried not to frighten anyone. The world is not the end of the world. It has not been the end of the world for a long time, and many of the alarms now ringing in our ears are sold to us by the same people who profit from our panic. But neither have I pretended that the world is fine. Some things are not fine. A defended person sees clearly, names what they see, and lives well anyway. That is the goal of this book.

Finally, a word about you. If you are reading this preface, you have already done the hardest thing—you have decided that the matter is worth your time. The rest is study. Take it slowly. Talk about it with the people you love. Try the practices. Skip the chapters that do not apply to you and read twice the ones that do. A book is a stranger you have invited into your house; treat it with the courtesy you would extend to any stranger, and the courtesy of disagreement when disagreement is warranted. Now. Let us begin.