Rebuilding Confidence

I love Twitter. I love all the information and conversations flying around in phrases written in 140 characters or less. If you're open to a lot of different people and ideas,  and  you're willing "follow" them, you're going to be learning about things you never heard of before, maybe even try a few new things along the way.

I started following Stephanie over a year ago. We had never met. I added her when I signed up for twitter because she showed up in a "local" search. I was looking for new people and friends. Being fairly new to PA, it seemed like a good plan at the time. It proved to be an excellent plan in the end.

A number of months ago, she started tweeting about a new class she and her husband had been attending. At first, I thought it had something to do with yoga. I was interested because I used to practice Power Yoga daily before moving to PA. The class had an odd name, one I couldn't remember, but I rather envisioned it was the new yoga trend where people are doing difficult yoga positions in a very hot room. Then came the tweet she mentioned the practice that day left her with a fat lip. Somehow, yoga and a fat lip were beyond my imagination, but I didn't think to look any further into it until the invitation.

It wasn't a private invitation, but an open tweet to "anyone interested in trying a free class" kind of invitation. I thought to myself, why not? I love yoga, would love to get back into it and back into shape and I would also love to meet the lovely person behind all the interesting tweets.

Yoga, it was not. The class she and her husband are taking is self defense specialized hand to hand combat Marine Corp Martial Arts of the most intense degree. It was fascinating. Once the class began, they were doing exercises around the mats, running, pulling life sized dummies back and forth, and at one point, pummeling the snot out of them. I was impressed. Shortly after all that, she comes over and informs me this is just the warm up exercises.

After warming up, we then head to the next room where the instructions on actual self defense holds and moves are taught. I couldn't hear the training, but I saw enough to know I wanted to learn how to do this myself, especially when I saw Stephanie throw a man twice her size and weight to the floor like a rag doll.

Empowerment. That was the word Stephanie used when she came over shortly after this and explained I could learn to do this, too, and how she felt empowered. While watching all of this, I realized how these skills would allow me to be self sufficient if a potentially violent situation came up. I would be able to take care of myself. I would regain some of the confidence that disappeared when my hearing started fading.

I came home and told Fabulous Husband all about the classes, how the young woman could hold her own, and how the fellows in the class didn't give her an easy time of it, but they didn't make it beyond her capabilities to perform, either. As she said, it was a "safe" place to learn, and everyone was serious about what they were learning, but having fun and challenging each other as well. I'm signing up for the women's only self defense class.

The class Stephanie and her husband take is Krav Maga.
You can read what Stephanie wrote about her experience at Direct Action Tactical in this newsletter here: http://myemail.constantcontact.com/June-Newsletter-from--Direct-Action-Tactical.html?soid=1103795792944&aid=ZHCuBdUzxI4

And their website is located here: http://www.directactiontactical.com/