Hapkidess

Earlier this year, my teacher Grandmaster Andrew Sands asked me to create a women's self defence course to be initially run at a local women's health centre, which will later be available at our dojang. With almost forty years of martial arts under his belt, Grandmaster Sands is obviously an expert in self defence; and he is also forward thinking. He realised that the women's self defence course he designed over thirty years ago whilst ahead of itself at the time, needed updating to meet the ever evolving needs of women. However, I would argue that Grandmaster Sands's original course is still ahead of most other women's self defence courses on offer. There is a lot more social data available now than there was thirty years ago and that information is now readily available. Furthermore, my teacher and I have had discussions over the last couple of years of some of the subjects my sociology studies, and these subjects address the very places where women's self def...

Trigger warning: child abuse, spousal abuse. My brother and I grew up in a household with parents who had no regard for personal boundaries. Personal boundaries are the rules we set for ourselves within our relationships and interactions with other people. Boundaries are the lines between the behaviours we are happy to accept from people and the behaviours that we are not happy to accept. Boundaries are also the line between what we are comfortable doing and what we are not. When someone says no, or stop, that is them drawing a line at a boundary. Some of my earliest memories are of my father tickling my brother and I to get cheap laughs for his own amusement. I hate being tickled; I really hated it then too. I only laughed as laughing the body’s reflex action in response to being tickled, not because I enjoyed being tickled. Depite my persistent “please stop Daddy,” he continued only to gaslight his small child with “well why are you laughing then,” and then he continued to tickle me,...