Human Conflict an Martial Arts (cont)
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Human
Conflict - Webster Doyle Interview [continued
from Part 1 ]
Well, peace is frightening because it means letting down defenses. It reminds me of the novel, 1984. There is a deep negative conditioning at work in that novel. One has to think in stereotypical ways in the society described in the novel. There’s a seeming safety in that kind of thinking — a tribal notion. But, in fact, this reverting to tribalism just compounds the problem and creates more conflict.
Understanding conflict and the role of conditioning sounds rather complex. How difficult is it to teach children about these concepts? The greatest myth is that only the authority on a subject can understand it. The average person can understand the concepts I’m dealing with. We created conflict, so we can understand it. It’s not so difficult as we’ve made it. I know that a young person ten to fourteen years of age can understand the basic concept of conflict. And it’s not that difficult to understand conditioning. It’s quite straight forward, as I explained with the example of tribalism. If we begin to understand the foundation, the nature and structure of conflict, of conditioned thinking and action, we can ed it there. It is when it gets to the level of politics and the like that it gets complicated.
Is there any place where your ideas are being taught to children? Yes. Dr. Mike Foley, an expert martial artist, someone who understand what I’m doing, has used the “Bully Program” at private and public schools in Phoenix, Arizona. And my ideas are being used at our Martial Arts for Peace School in the same area, which is being operated temporarily out of a local center by a family of martial artists, the Contreras family.
What is the “Bully Program”? It involves role playing. It defines what a bully is, what a victim is, how they portray those characteristics in their body language, how to understand and avoid being a bully or a victim at what I call the primary level that I spoke of earlier when I explained A.R.M. The primary or avoidance level is prevention. The program uses “The Twelve Ways To Walk Away With Confidence,” and it employs lots of games, stories, and role-plays for young people. The program has also been used in elementary grades in junior high schools in the public school system through the U.S. and internationally. Many martial arts schools use this program successfully, too. I should add that the “Bully Program” talks about many different types of bullies, such as the whiner bully as well as the aggressive bullies. Also, the bullies who are accepted by society–the patriotic bullies and the business bullies, for example. The same basic structure underlies all bullies, however. The program also teaches relationship skills, not only how to protect oneself form bullies but how to get what one wants without becoming a bully. These are social skills.
What was the outcome of the “bully Program” where it was used in Arizona? You did a study in one of the private schools there, did you not? The results was that kids become more assertive and less aggressive, but I want to do the program in a martial arts school and do a study there. I’ve seen kids change, even radically change, in just a summer. The physical aspect of the martial art gets the young people in the door. Then the mental aspect changes them. Some of these kids had been on the edge of getting into real trouble. Now they do beautiful katas. They have good manners now.
What happens when only the physical aspect of the martial art is taught? It actually compounds the problem of violence. Teaching the physical only reinforces the cod that ‘might is right.” Recently I did a workshop at a large martial arts school in Massachusetts, and one of the children said, “Show me your martial arts,” meaning, show my the physical. I said, “I’ve been doing it all the time,” which meant that I had been showing the students the mental martial arts. In teaching only the physical, you are teaching no other line of defense. In my teaching, for instance with the “Twelve Ways To Walk Away With Confidence,” the first line of defense is avoid. I am lessening the odds of a physical confrontation. But there are no guarantees. I am increasing the alternatives, however. If students are taught only the physical, the children will only know that. Then there are no other options.
I have heard you use the term “holistic approach” in regard to your concepts. What do you mean when you say this? Martial Arts for Peace, as I call it, does work in the sense of lessening the odds of violent conflict because it is holistic. It includes three levels of dealing with conflict that I term the primary, secondary and tertiary. Tertiary (physical) skills help you not to go into a fight or flight state, so there is a state of abeyance, and then the individual can think. This thinking comes form the primary and secondary levels, how to avoid or resolve conflict nonviolently. As a whole, the techniques I use work, but they have to be taught. The instruction has to be balanced. We have to spend much more time, not just ten minutes of a class, teaching theses skills. This is so very important to understand!
Is it practical to spend a larger portion of time than ten minutes per class on nonphysical techniques and strategies? It’s not only practical but necessary. Children have to be able to cope with conflict. It has to be a priority, because we see the importance of it for ourselves. I don’t want to just talk about conflict. I care about really understanding it and dealing with it. International conflict and conflict on the playground have the same structure. We must see that participating in the martial art is a potential way to understand human conflict. With young people I do a lesson using a model plastic human head. We pretend we are developing a human being and we are going to put things into the head. The human needs to know how to get home–practical knowledge. We put that information in the head. What about hurt feelings? Pain and anger? The children say “No, don’t put those in.” They don’t want them. Do you have those things in your brain, I ask them. “Yes,” they say. “How did they get there,” I ask. Someone tells me that they get there by someone putting them there. The fears that are there, everything that’s there was put there. That’s conditioning, inappropriate unquestioned information. With this example we show them the difference between necessary and useful knowledge and knowledge that creates conflict. So, how do we get the negative conditioning out that we don’t’ want? Thinking is the creator of the problem. Can thinking solve the problem that it created? I use awareness exercises to enhance observation. I walk toward them. I ask them to tell me to stop when they are uncomfortable. This is awareness. Then we turn it inward after a while to be aware of our brain, to observe our thinking, in action. It’s simple but profound.
In some of your books, you use familiar Asian stories. Why have you turned to these odl tales? The old Asian stores are in the books because they’re really good. I took them and made them modern for young people and adults in The Eye of the Hurricane and the other Martial Arts for Peace books. These stories have good insights into human nature, and we must preserve them, but students must see the practical in them. That’s what Europeans and Americans haven’t done. Those stories were all reflections of a state of mind–the real basics–and they have to come back. Then the physical art will have a proper context within which to be practiced.
You’ve also begun writing a column for children on a regular basis in Karate/Kung Fu Illustrated. What are you goals for the column? I’ve been writing in “Blakc Belt for Kids” for more than a year now. The column appears every other month as an insert in the magazine. Many of the stories question whether knowledge alone can solve problems of conflict or whether it compounds it. I use an example form my children’s book Breaking the chains of the Ancient Warrior. I ask the children to tell me what they think order is, knowing that whatever they say will not be order. I say to them that whatever their answer is, it cannot be true. This a real story. They all gave me explanations except for a seven-year-old boy, Oliver, who pointed to all of my books lined upon the shelves but said nothing. I said, “that’s right.” He had given an example of order. When I asked them again to tell me what they knew about order, they then ran around the room and straightened it up. But when I suddenly called, “Line up,” they all pushed and shoved to get in line. They said that they had forgotten about order when I confronted them at this point as to why they had reverted back to disorder. So, I asked them if only knowing about order brings about order, and they said, “No, Sensei.” They lined up again. “Be aware,” I told them. “look right, look left. Do it, don’t tell me!” Most intellectuals think that learning about peace creates it, but it creates conflicts. We each get our own idea of it, and then we’re in conflict. Knowledge about peace compounds the problems, but insight doesn’t So, certain forms of knowledge are destructive.
To whom do you think your ideas have the most appeal? I don’t appeal to the intellectuals because they want to make this a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice or something like that, and I don’t appeal to some others because they don’t want to look at themselves; they think that the martial arts are only physical. So I appeal to children.
I’m not inventing something new. When Funakoshi said, “empty-self,” he was really saying something. It is this “empty-self,” kara-te, that is the foundation of all martial arts. It is a universal insight, revealing the roots of conflict. Karate is not just a physical self-defense.
What do you see as necessary skills in a Martial Arts for Peace instructor? Teachers must have patience and a good sense of humor. I feel like we’re pioneers. With so many children studying martial arts, we need to have comprehensive understanding of conflict as well as excellent physical skills. Some instructors with good intentions talk to students about not fighting, but there is not much depth to it. We can stop this human butchering. It is resolvable, but to do it, we must understand what is in us, and not create an ideal of peace.
I know that your martial arts background includes your Gensei-Ryu training up to a Nidan under Shigeru Numano, who acme to America in 1966, and that you’ve studied several other styles as well, dating back to the 1950’s. I understand that you also founded a style that you named Take Nami-Do, The Way of the Bamboo and Wave. Why did you decide to start your own style? I founded it, not that I wanted to found a style, but it came about because in Gensei-ryu there wasn’t an emphasis on the mental. I asked myself, “dare I,” and I did. But then I dropped it. I thought I wanted to have an intention, not teach another style. So my patch says Martial Arts for Peace. I just want to be a teacher of the martial arts, the art of kara-te, of empty-self. By karate, I don’t just mean the physical art but rather the practical philosophy of “empty-self,” of understanding what prevents peace, what creates conflict.
What is your background in the field of education, outside of the martial arts? I have a Masters degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in health and human resources and have taught philosophy, education, and psychology at the university level, and I’ve worked in juvenile delinquency prevention. My wife Jean and I founded the Atrium School in California, where the focus of the high school curriculum was on understanding and resolving conflict. Someday we both want to start a martial arts high school, just like a traditional school b ut with martial arts as a basis for self-understanding.
And the curriculum guides that you’ve developed include one specifically for use in martial arts schools, and the other for use in public and private schools? Yes, that’s right.
Can you briefly describe yoru role in the Martial Arts for Peace Association and the Shuhari Institute? I’m the founder and director of the Martial Arts for Peace Association, which is headquartered in Middlebury, V Vermont, and I established the Shuhari Institute, which is dedicated to achieving peace by understanding conflict through the study of the martial arts. It is the research and development branch of the association.
What is your vision of martial arts education in the future? Id like to see the martial arts for the twenty-first century be martial arts as education. There’s the martial arts self-defense instructor, the coach for tournaments, and that’s fine. I have nothing against tournaments, but there is also the martial arts educator. What I’d like to see develop is how martial arts can teach healthy values, healthy social behavior. I’d like to see four years of a martial arts high school and then a marital arts college with an instructor’s college, too.
You mentioned a martial arts code of conduct. You already have published a curriculum for martial arts schools to use in teaching this code, I believe. Yes, it has a wide variety of activities to use with children and includes topics like the manner of the week, respect and the like. It is not a “code” in the strict sense of the word but rather like Shu of Shu-ha-ri, a foundation by which young people can explore traditional values in an intelligent, questioning manner. Through this inquiry, young people can come to an understanding of ethics, of values through their own exploration. Then v values will not be imposed upon them, condition into them, without question. Of course, it depends on the age of the child. I’m not advocating license to do anything they want. Neither am I advocating a strict, unbending “code” that they are supposed to follow obediently just because we adults say they should. It’s really just a mixture of good common sense and democratic thinking.
Most of what we’ve discussed today has focused on children. Do you work with adults? Yes, I provide workshops for children and adults, but I’m particularly committed to working with young people and those who deal with young people to help them understand conflict and find ways to resolve conflict peacefully.
What would you say is your ultimate goal? I’m bound and determined as a human being to understand human conflict, and I see that the martial arts have a potential to help people understand and resolve conflict peacefully. I’m reaching out to the children of the world. I have promises to keep. |
Do
you believe there are martial arts instructors and
parents of martial arts students who would resist
your focus on nonviolent resolution of conflict?