Quote:
Mary Malmros wrote:
I hear ya, Erick. ... It's a tough call -- do you risk letting someone languish for want of attention, or do you risk overwhelming them? My gut says you have to be careful not to be pushy.
|
Lessee, she hits me and
I'm verging on "pushy."
Got it.
More seriously, I think giving explicit permission to a person in a situation where she (or he) instinctively sees themselves as subordinate, to do something that is a quintessential act of physical dominance, helps to break preconceptions about the existence of dominance/subservience in training. To my mind, that is the first task of a cooperative training environment. Although there is hierarchy of skill as well as positional authority -- it is fundamentally an arena of respect defined by the art -- not dominance defined by the person. In dealing with training in physical conflict such permission seems helpful, in more ways than one.