Wholistic Self-Defense

I started teaching in 1965. I was a young man with a hard body and a soft head, and I believed self-defense was a subject with a bottom to it. You learned the techniques, you learned the timing, and one day you would know enough. 

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.