Our teaching

OPEN CIRCLE

 Our system of teaching builds community and organic leadership, it is an environment of support and laughter. We do our best to keep it light and with proper training gives us a very good idea of how to defend ourselves. But for the most part, we stimulate the mind body and spirit, to remind us how to sharpen and hone our skills, which can be applied to any given endeavour in our lives. 

We gather together in a circle and discuss our work, our insights, our successes and our failures. We circle to reinforce the concept that everyone in the group has equal value. It is a fundamental understanding in our community, that people with less experience and skill are very important to individuals who posses more of it. It is only through engaging with and helping others that we come fully into our skills, for this reason, no one is left feeling that they are holding back the group, because their role is significant to the circle. When the group breaks into pairs, the junior students work with seniors.  When you can continue the practice of an exercise with someone of equal or lower skill, you know that you have owned the practice. Seniors work from supporting coaching pairings toward pairings with equal or greater skill, in this way they slowly move up their intensity and difficulty to a point where they are challenged enough to improve their timing and understanding.

Ultimately we aim to create a team. The team aims to develop each individual to maximize their utility in the team and a team-mate seeks to be able to support the actions of the team members in real time scenarios. Our approach is delivered in a light and casual way, with the intention to pass on the philosophical realities of having martial skill and combat readiness in our lives.

We seek to create a cooperative classroom with an inclusive, community oriented environment. Our martial arts subject matter might be about conflict, but to study conflict we need to be open minded about people, history and culture. We need to see value in all that there is to learn from. We use active listening, clear body language and positive disposition towards ones self and others as a guiding principal.

Our self defence philosophy is that fighting is what happens when self defence and diplomacy fails. Self defence is the study of violent encounters, the people involved and their motivations, the act of defending oneself in this context is the application of signals and behaviours that negate the motivations, and calculations of a would be assailant, while triggering their fears and doubts about their precautions against repercussions.    When negotiated successfully, the actions of a person practising our philosophy will result in a non event.   But if it happens that they have no choice but to fight, their understanding, their mental and physical preparation would give them the upper hand in an altercation.